He was the Parisian who ripped up his home city; one of the most famous and controversial urban planners in history. Even now, 125 years after the death of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, France remains divided over whether the man who transformed Paris into the City of Light was truly a master planner – or an imperialist megalomaniac.
Internationally, Haussmann is celebrated for much that is loved about the French capital; notably those wide avenues flanked with imposing buildings of neatly dressed ashlar and intricate wrought iron balconies.
To his republican compatriots, however, Haussmann was an arrogant, autocratic vandal who ripped the historic heart out of Paris, driving his boulevards through the city’s slums to help the French army crush popular uprisings.
Historian and Haussmann expert Patrice de Moncan is exasperated by the century’s worth of criticism that has been levelled at this hugely influential figure. “Sometimes I don’t know where to start; it’s bs from beginning to end,” De Moncan says. “But it’s a view many people still hold in France.
“Haussmann has been portrayed as this almost sinister figure, only out to enrich himself and with his fingers in the till. His critics accused him of filling Paris with cobbled streets, bland buildings with stone facades, and wide, dead straight avenues so the army could repress the masses.”
De Moncan, who is writing a new biography of Haussmann, smarts with the injustice of what he sees as the ongoing maligning of his hero. “Some said he was austere, but from what I have discovered he liked a good party and threw great ones. Others accused him of chasing the girls – it’s true he had a mistress [the opera star Francine Cellier] with whom he had a child, but unlike others at that time, he accepted, recognised and educated the girl.”
In 1848, Haussmann was an ambitious civil servant determinedly climbing the ranks when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte – nephew and heir of Napoléon I – returned to Paris after 12 years’ exile in London to become president of the French Second Republic.
Bonaparte, later elected Emperor Napoléon III, hated what he saw. In his absence, the population of Paris had exploded from 759,000 in 1831 to more than a million in 1846 – despite regular outbreaks of cholera and typhoid that killed tens of thousands.
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The French capital was overcrowded, dingy, dirty and riddled with disease. Why, Bonaparte pondered, was it not more like London, with its grand parks and gardens, its tree-lined avenues and modern sewage system? Paris, he declared, needed light, air, clean water and good sanitation.
A drawing of the rebuilding of Paris under Haussmann’s command, from around 1860.
Haussmann was an imposing figure both physically – at 6ft 3in – and intellectually. Born into a bourgeois military family with strong Lutheran ties, he had been a brilliant student at elite Paris colleges, and personified the Protestant work ethic. Portraits show a tall, solid, often studious figure with a not unkind face, often sporting a chin-strap beard and, in later years, thinning hair.
France’s interior minister, Victor de Persigny, believed Haussmann to be the ideal candidate for the job of Prefect of the Seine and overseer of Napoléon III’s plan to transform the city. “He is one of the most extraordinary men of our time; big, strong, vigorous, energetic and at the same time clever and devious,” wrote De Persigny to the emperor. “He told me all of his accomplishments during his administrative career, leaving out nothing: he could have talked for six hours without a break, since it was his favourite subject, himself.”
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