August 27, 2018
Christiansen (Prima Donna: A History), a writer on the arts for the British Daily Telegraph, describes how, during the Second Empire period (1851–1871), Paris became a modern city known for its broad boulevards lined with five- or six-story apartment buildings, parks, and monuments. The city’s population had grown rapidly, and “its oases of splendor, such as the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by a fetid wilderness of filth, stench, and crime.” Almost single-handedly responsible for the city’s transformation was Georges Eugène Haussmann, a kind of mid-19th-century French Robert Moses. Christiansen portrays Haussmann as an arrogant but incorruptible workaholic who incorporated 12 surrounding villages into Paris, instantly increasing its population by a third, and he impressively tackled the herculean task of supplying the burgeoning city with an adequate water supply and sewage system. As with Moses, Haussmann’s urban engineering often had a pernicious effect on the poor, who were “badly hit by the rise in rents and crowded... into the attics, basements, hallways, and stairways of buildings that Haussmann had yet to condemn.” Yet for the middle and upper classes, the city became more spacious and beautiful, boasting such new, captivating structures as Charles Garnier’s Opéra. This very readable volume is a valuable contribution to modern French and urban history.