Europe - 19th Century Architecture, Individual Architects, Designers, & Planners, General & Miscellaneous Architectural History & Criticism, Historical Biography - Royalty & Nobility, Urban Renewal, City Planning & Urban Design, Europe - French Architectu

Transforming Paris

Name: Transforming Paris
Author: David P. Jordan
ISBN: 9780029165317

by David P. Jordan

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Overview

The Paris we know today, with its grand boulevards, its bridges and parks, its monumental beauty, was essentially built in only seventeen years, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this brief period, whole neighborhoods of medieval and revolutionary Pais - overcrowded, dangerous, and filthy - were razed, and from the rubble a modern city of light and air emerged. This triumphant rebuilding was chiefly the work of one man, Baron Georges Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine. It was Haussmann's task to assert, in stone, the power and permanence of Paris, to show the world that it was the seat of an empire of mythic proportions. To this end, he imposed grand visual perspectives, as when he transformed Napoleon I's Arc de Triomphe into a magnificent twelve-armed star from which radiated the broadest boulevards of Europe. Below ground, his modern sewer system became one of the wonders of the civilized world, eagerly toured by royalty and commoners alike. Haussmann's mandate was not only to create an impression of grandeur, but to secure the city for better control by government. By creating formal spaces where there had previously been a maze of chaotic streets, Haussmann opened Paris to effective police control and thwarted the recurrent demonstration of its well-known revolutionary fervor. The determined and autocratic Haussmann imprinted rational order and bourgeois civility on the unruly city which had for so long simmered with riot and insurrection.

Built in only 17 years in the middle of the 19th century, the Paris we know today was chiefly the work of one man, Baron Georges Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine. Jordan shows how the single-minded and autocratic Haussmann imprinted rational order and bourgeois civility on the unruly city that had for so long simmered with riot and insurrection. Photos; maps.

About the Author, David P. Jordan

David P. Jordan is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He lives in Chicago.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Prefect of the Seine under Emperor Louis Napolon, overbearing, enormously energetic, authoritarian urban planner Georges-Eugene Haussmann (1809-91) left an indelible imprint on Paris. Razing much of the congested, decaying old city, in demolitions that left tens of thousands homeless, he built broad boulevards, parks, squares and bridges, created neighborhoods and imposed a harmonious, rational design on the imperial capital. To Jordan (The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre), Haussmann was a new breed of bureaucrat, a technocrat, who for all his aloofness and administrative rigidity expressed the ideals of his age-rational order, incessant movement, progress, an urban life lived in public-in the modernized City of Light. Professor of history at the University of Illinois, Jordan surmises that Haussmann's frail, sickly childhood influenced his adult obsession with cleanliness, manifested in the Paris sewer system he built. This is a wonderfully evocative biography, rich in architectural and political history. Illustrations. (Jan.)

Library Journal

The flavor and shape of modern metropolitan Paris is attributed to Baron Haussmann, the city's prefect and planner from 1853 to 1869. Haussmann is responsible for the creation of the boulevards and the reorganization of streets, city landscaping, and such modern conveniences as sewers. To accomplish his aim, he destroyed portions of medieval Paris and many of its slums. Jordan (Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) has written an engaging biography, both of Haussmann and of the city; he presents Haussmann not only as a modern bureaucrat and city planner but also as an arrogant bully. Jordan weaves the person of Haussmann into the redesign of the city in ways that previous works do not (e.g., Howard Saalman's Haussmann: Paris Transformed, 1971). Jordan enhances his work with the wealth of photographs that exist from mid-19th-century Paris and includes instructive maps. Recommended purchase for all academic and large public libraries with an interest in European urban planning and Paris.-Jenny Presnell, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio

Brian McCombie

Jordan's study of Baron Georges Haussmann, Napoleon III's prefect of the Seine, is also the story of how Paris came to be the city it is today. "It was Haussmann's good fortune to preside over the greatest urban renewal project in history," the shaping and building of a truly modern Paris. After Haussmann finished, he had created a city containing "patterns . . . [which] had not previously existed" by combining the newest technologies with the "imperatives of capitalism and centralized imperial power." Haussmann's means to achieving his objectives were often brutal, though, as when he evicted thousands of poor people and razed their dwellings to make way for new construction. Though Haussmann was firmly committed to the imperial concept of power and governance, Jordan reveals Haussmann as more than a bureaucrat for the imperium. In a sense, Haussmann is among the first technocrats, an expert who relied on pragmatism and science to get the job done, and though he clearly had Napoleon III's favor, he seemed to have been at the service of some higher aspiration.