Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870

By Esther da Costa Meyer

A groundbreaking work of scholarship that sheds critical new light on the urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III

In the mid-nineteenth century, Napoleon III and his prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, adapted Paris to the requirements of industrial capitalism, endowing the old city with elegant boulevards, an enhanced water supply, modern sewers, and public greenery. Esther da Costa Meyer provides a major reassessment of this ambitious project, which resulted in widespread destruction in the historic center, displacing thousands of poor residents and polarizing the urban fabric.

Drawing on newspapers, memoirs, and other archival materials, da Costa Meyer explores how people from different social strata—both women and men—experienced the urban reforms implemented by the Second Empire. As hundreds of tenements were destroyed to make way for upscale apartment buildings, thousands of impoverished residents were forced to the periphery, which lacked the services enjoyed by wealthier parts of the city. Challenging the idea of Paris as the capital of modernity, da Costa Meyer shows how the city was the hub of a sprawling colonial empire extending from the Caribbean to Asia, and exposes the underlying violence that enriched it at the expense of overseas territories.

This marvelously illustrated book brings to light the contributions of those who actually built and maintained the impressive infrastructure of Paris, and reveals the consequences of colonial practices for the city's cultural, economic, and political life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691223537

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Cover: Dividing Paris by Esther da Costa Meyer

Dividing Paris

Dividing Paris

Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870

ESTHER DA COSTA MEYER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press

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Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

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Front cover: (top) Eugène Moreau, the new Boulevard de la Reine Hortense above the canal Saint-Martin, embellished with gardens and fountains (detail). Musée Carnavalet. © Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet; (bottom) Félix Thorigny, demolitions on the Left Bank, during the cutting of the Rue des Écoles (detail). L’Illustration, June 26, 1858. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-162-80-5

ISBN (ebook) 978-0-691-22353-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945054

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

In Memory of Vincent Scully

Contents

Acknowledgmentsviii

Abbreviationsx

IntroductionI

ONE The President, the Emperor, and the PrefectII

TWO Requiem46

THREE Streets and Boulevards95

FOUR Water139

FIVE De Profundis176

SIX Disenchanted Nature223

SEVEN The Periphery280

Conclusion324

Notes329

Index381

Photography and Copyright Credits399

Acknowledgments

Every author incurs debts that cannot be repaid: to mentors, colleagues, students, friends, and family. This book owes its greatest debt to Vincent Scully, who once described the urban fabric as one of our most precious and fragile legacies, a conviction that hovers over this study of nineteenth-century Paris. His passion and integrity, as a teacher and scholar, guided me through graduate studies and have served as continuing inspiration in my own career as a scholar and a teacher. He lives on in the loving memory of friends, students, and scholars. I also wish to express my deep gratitude to his widow, Catherine Lynn (Tappy), for her friendship and support.

All scholars stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, and I am keenly aware that any book is always but a contribution to an ongoing conversation. I hope that I have discharged some measure of this debt through acknowledgments both in my text and in annotations. I am most particularly indebted to feedback from friends and fellow architectural historians throughout the gestation of the manuscript. I am grateful above all to Professors Mary McLeod (Columbia University) and Jean-Louis Cohen (Institute of Fine Arts), whose critical reading and insights resulted in numerous crucial corrections and improvements. Kenneth Silver, Jonathan Weinberg, and John Goodman also played a fundamental role in providing advice and encouragement.

A number of colleagues were kind enough to read selected chapters, including my very dear friend Jim Clark, former director of the University of California Press. Alan Mann, professor of anthropology at Princeton, offered much-appreciated corrections and suggestions in my discussion of Parisian prehistory; Joseph Disponzio, director of the landscape design program at Columbia University, contributed insights to the chapter on gardens; and Peter Barberie, curator of photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was instrumental in advising me on technical aspects of nineteenth-century photographic images. I also wish to thank Professor Catherine Bruant from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles for allowing me to read an electronic version of her excellent book on the Cité Napoléon unavailable at the time.

At Princeton University, I was fortunate to profit from the wise council of Giles Constable, Arno Mayer, Carl Schorske, Eva and Lionel Gossmann, Walter Lippincott, Walter Hinderer, Mary Harper, and Carol and François Rigolot. Over the years, students in several seminars enriched my ideas with their comments and questions. I thank them collectively for being such attentive and critical interlocutors. The generosity of both the Spears Fund and the Barr Ferree Fund of the Department of Art and Archaeology merits my grateful thanks. I profited enormously from the enviable organizational skills and resourcefulness of Susan Lehre, for many years the department’s manager, and her successor, Maureen Killeen. Julia Gearhart, director of visual resources, spared no effort in providing access to photographs. Stacey Bonette was of invaluable assistance in securing photographs. Jessica Dagci, Rebecca Friedman, and David Platt from Marquand Library worked tirelessly to help locate important sources. Warm thanks to John Blazejewski for his photographs executed in trying circumstances in the midst of the pandemic. Korin Kazmierski, from Firestone Library’s Interlibrary Loan, cheerfully made mountains of digitized articles available to me. At Yale, Helen Chillman accompanied this work from its inception and advised me on images. I will never repay my debt to Julie Angarone for her digital support.

In Paris, Paul and Mimi Horne provided hospitality in their beautiful apartment in the early stages of this project. The late Pierre Casselle and Madame Christine Huvé from the Bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville did everything they could to aid me in locating manuscripts and plans. The department of reproductions of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France patiently guided me in navigating their rich database of photographs. Francine Allard and David Henry, also in Paris, were extremely generous in allowing me to publish their photographs. Scott Bukatman graciously allowed me to use one of his witty aphorisms as an epigraph.

The unwavering support and encouragement of the editors at Princeton University Press have helped sustain this project, beginning with Hanne Tidnam, who shepherded this manuscript in its earliest stages. Kenneth Guay answered every question, calmed every fear, and found solutions to last-minute problems. Kathleen Kageff did a terrific job copyediting the manuscript, catching errors and inconsistencies with morale-saving lightness of touch. Michelle Komie’s patience and understanding, and ability to coax this book into fruition, deserve my gratitude. Karen Carter's editorial help was indispensable.

Behind many—perhaps most—books stand an inner circle of friends whose warm interest and encouragement are woven into the experiences that accompany the joys and agonies of research and writing. Among the dearest I wish to thank Mallica Kumbera Landrus, Matthew Landrus, Nadhra Naeem Khan, Anne Howells, June and Shed Behar, Thurmond Smithgall, Jonathan Weinberg, Nicholas Boshnack, and Amalia Contursi. I owe special thanks to the late Charlotte Hyde, that consummate Parisian-in-exile, whose discerning insights inevitably cast new perspectives on every question. Avrum Blumin heard early versions the chapters, alerted me to new publications, and offered continuous support. With her long experience in publishing, Rosalie Wolarsky was a fountain of strength.

Finally, my deepest gratitude is owed to my long-suffering spouse, Christopher, my dearest and toughest critic, for his encouragement, humor, and sound editorial advice.

Abbreviations

Dividing Paris

Introduction

There are many Parises in Paris, wrote the architect César Daly in 1862.¹ An important authority on urban issues, Daly was referring to city’s archaeological remains, but his observation can be applied more broadly. A layering of buildings of different ages, erected by different peoples, nineteenth-century Paris was never a clear, graspable entity, not even to its own inhabitants. Its population was a bracing mélange of locally born citizens and a large influx of provincials and foreigners whose divergent incomes, cultural backgrounds, and views of the city changed constantly over the years as they adjusted to an ever-shifting urban kaleidoscope. Their relationship to Paris was not the same in 1848 or 1868, nor before or after the Commune.

In Paris as elsewhere, the Industrial Revolution shattered the form of the classic Western city, placing great stress on the urban environment. Mass production, reliant on consumption, required a network of broad streets and boulevards that allowed crowds and merchandise to circulate. At the same time, rapid demographic growth called for improved water supply, sewerage, systems of transportation, and public greenery. In their search for new models of urban space, cities around the globe opted for a variety of solutions, depending on the economic and social price they were prepared to pay. In the case of Paris, there have been excellent studies documenting the radical reconfiguration of the city during the second half of the nineteenth century under Napoleon III and his strong-willed prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann.² Together with a team of first-rate engineers and thousands of workers, they overhauled the capital, endowing it with all the amenities of a modern metropolis.

For the financial elites, urban renewal became a matter of urgency. Industrialization enriched and empowered the nation’s powerful bankers and mercantile classes. Representatives of an aggressive industrial capitalism eager to promote its products, they helped fund the agenda pursued by the municipality and spared no effort to make their institutions visible throughout Paris, with their own grand displays of architectural self-representation. Banks, department stores, theaters, and railway stations, designed with an eye to monumentality and aimed at facilitating circulation and consumption, were the perfect complement to Haussmann’s networks of broad streets and public squares. Paris had to be remade into a showcase for the regime that also served the dictates of new hegemonic groups.

At the same time, a rising middle class, flush with money from industry and commerce, clamored for elegant housing in attractive neighborhoods in keeping with their new social station. It became increasingly clear that urban space would have to be manufactured like other industrialized goods, and this called for bold and unprecedented measures. Speculation—one of the chief motors of urban change and the great machinery of revenue—ruled. There was a great deal of money to be made. Parcels were bought; equipped with sidewalks, water mains, sewers, gaslight; and sold again at great profit. If Second Empire Paris differed from other cities in the throes of modernization, it was largely in the scale of its ambitious project of urban renovation, the systematic way with which it was carried out by Haussmann and his large circle of experts, and, not least, the burden that this transformation placed on the laboring classes.

Such momentous urban changes relied on a massive influx of workers whose arrival overwhelmed the existing housing stock just when the modernization of Paris, as envisaged by the moneyed classes, called for upgrading vast parts of the city. This brought about a conflict between the goals of the municipality and its supporters, and the needs of those who actually built and maintained the new infrastructure. In a city racked by revolutions since 1789, the ruling elites saw the old labyrinthine warrens in the center, inhabited mainly by the poor, as a threat to political stability. In their eyes, urban governance was rooted in a clear, intelligible fabric, shorn of slums and dilapidated tenements. Thousands lost their homes when Haussmann razed huge swaths of the center to make way for buildings of higher quality. Redevelopment, to call the process by its present name, brought about a widening gap between the affluent sectors and the urban poor, the social group most adversely affected by the radical makeover of Paris. And it entailed a spatial division of labor that consigned workers to interstitial spaces throughout the city or banished them to the amorphous sprawl of the periphery, which lacked the services so lavishly doled out to richer parts of Paris.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, architects, urbanists, and scholars have followed the rebuilding of the French capital passionately, siding either with the Second Empire or with its republican critics, some praising, some excoriating the prefect, others conceding the value of his undertakings while emphasizing his innumerable debts to previous administrators. Critiques of the empire’s spatial politics have been directed chiefly at widespread demolitions in the historic center, the consequent eviction of workers, and the ensuing polarization of the urban fabric. Attacked by opponents of the regime in his own day, Haussmann went on to receive a stream of exuberant accolades in the first half of the twentieth century. From Daniel Burnham to Robert Moses, city planners and administrators held him in the highest esteem as the epitome of visionary boldness.³ Looking at Paris through the reductive lens of high modernism, Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion wrote enthusiastically of Haussmann’s sweeping plans for slum clearance that made large stretches of land available for circulation.⁴ Adopting a top-down approach, they had little to say about how the new capital’s new urban spaces were used and perceived by a diverse and deeply divided population. Preferring to study the city in vitro, Haussmann’s admirers painted the picture of a disembodied world of streets and squares, monuments and buildings as complete entities, basing themselves exclusively on plans, photographs, and documentary sources.

By reading Paris exclusively from the point of view of its administrators, architects, and politicians, in keeping with the scholarly traditions of their time, these latter-day enthusiasts contented themselves with seeing like a state, according to James Scott’s brilliant formulation, producing works premised on essentialist conceptions of architecture and urban space that left untouched the interested nature of representations.⁵ Such positive appraisals overlooked both the enormous contribution of the working class, which laid the infrastructure, opened roads, and erected hundreds of buildings, and the deliberate neglect with which it was treated. In subsequent years, as a more tolerant age sought other models, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction, and the prefect’s stock declined. Haussmann’s Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, exclaimed Guy Debord scornfully in 1967.⁶

It was largely in the 1970s that scholarship began to reassess Haussmann’s role as author of the largest project of urban renewal in Western Europe.⁷ Anthony Sutcliffe wrote a tightly argued analysis of city planning under Haussmann, followed by David Pinkney and Pierre Lavedan, who gave much of the credit for the renovation of the capital to Napoleon III.⁸ Since then, others have stressed the continuity between the Second Empire’s urban practices and those of previous regimes. David Van Zanten and Nicholas Papayanis, among others, have shifted the focus from Haussmann to the July Monarchy, rightly credited with some of the innovative initiatives put into practice by the Second Empire.⁹ François Loyer carefully studied the architecture of the period, broadening the scope of the debate to include typology, ordinances, and equipment. Pierre Pinon conducted research in several Parisian archives, demystifying many assumptions concerning the prefect.¹⁰ David Jordan, meanwhile, produced an exemplary and much-needed monograph on Haussmann, drawing principled conclusions from a prodigious amount of research.¹¹

In 1997, the discovery of the Siméon papers by Pierre Casselle led to a far-reaching reevaluation of the part played by Haussmann, the emperor, and several advisers in overhauling Paris. Nominated by Napoleon III as chair of a committee tasked with producing general outlines that would help renovate the capital, Count Henri Siméon and his colleagues produced exhaustive documentation outlining a multifaceted agenda for the renewal of the city.¹² Their impressive dossier shows unequivocally that the essential features of the Second Empire’s reconfiguration of Paris, long associated with Haussmann, had already been advanced by the Siméon committee, even though their original conception went through many iterations in its implementation.

Casselle’s articles led several specialists to attribute all progressive changes to the July Monarchy or Napoleon III, exonerating the emperor from all blame in the destruction of the historical center and the callous treatment of the working class.¹³ Emphasizing Haussmann’s coercive urban politics, they passed over in silence his achievements as well as the complicity of the emperor, his ministers, and the ruling classes who sustained and bankrolled the regime. Haussmann is the easiest of targets: heavy of eye and tread, stiff, coarse, demanding, humourless, and vain, in the words of John Russell.¹⁴ Of the prefect’s dismissive attitude toward the poor there can be no doubt. After stepping down as prefect he declared that the overthrow of the empire in 1871 drove home the impressionable and turbulent nature of Paris’s popular masses that had to be contained by every possible means.¹⁵ Yet one cannot disregard the responsibility of the emperor in the final product. Haussmann’s unliberal city could not have been built without the assent and assistance of his more liberal master, who ratified all the latter’s decisions with imperial decrees. And the emperor’s plan could hardly have been executed without Haussmann, who did so with considerable skill, determination, and utter ruthlessness.

Surprisingly, after Casselle’s pathbreaking research, three biographies appeared in print, only one of which, by Nicolas Chaudun, took the new discoveries into consideration. Those of Michel Carmona and Georges Valance mentioned it but did not dwell on the conclusions drawn from Casselle’s discoveries, contenting themselves with conservative accounts that left deeper issues unexplored.¹⁶ The same year, Haussmann’s memoirs were republished with a long introduction by Françoise Choay, whose apologia of the prefect glosses over his shameful cruelty toward the laboring poor and heedless destruction of countless landmarks of historical and art-historical importance. Such glowing narratives of Haussmann’s work reveal the tenacity of traditional historiographic models at the expense of historic context and critical thinking.

A purely voluntarist approach can hardly explain the enormous pressures brought to bear on city planning, an ongoing process contingent on national and transnational trends, political and economic concerns, and municipal practices and discourses that were not always in agreement. Nor can it account for the heterogeneity of actors and the complex concatenation of causes that produce the urban. In an attempt to address these lacunae, historians such as Jeanne Gaillard dwelt at length on economic and political factors, without demonizing the prefect as some scholars continue to do.¹⁷ Art historian T. J. Clark and urban sociologist David Harvey had already underscored the ideological dimensions of the Second Empire’s urban plans with penetrating insight, stressing the centrality of capitalism in the reconfiguration of Paris.¹⁸ Urbanism, a word that did not yet exist in Haussmann’s day, is the expression of vested interests, finely calibrated to preserve and consolidate the status quo. Nevertheless, urbanism is also shaped by a slow, gradualist undertow made up of conflicting and overlapping agendas, mostly planned, but often the result of contingency.¹⁹ In their zeal to modernize the city, the forms of renewal favored by the Second Empire brought with them the expulsion and ghettoization of the urban poor, which followed on the heels of what we now call gentrification. Haussmann’s draconian measures expressed not only his own authoritarian goals, but also the strategy of an entire class that stood to benefit the most from this kind of imperially mandated form of urban renovation. The capital’s new geopolitical configuration as a historic core encircled by distant working-class faubourgs, and the partitioning of the city into areas that were increasingly (though never entirely) class specific, expressed clearly and unapologetically the prevailing attitude of the privileged toward the disenfranchised. A surrounding belt of villages inhabited by workers horrified the upper and middle classes, who, both desiring and fearing insulation, no longer wanted to coexist with the poor in the city’s residential areas. Urban space was part of the Second Empire’s apparatus of power.

The importance of the most theoretically sophisticated of these scholarly works can hardly be overestimated: together, they have mapped out the sequence of crucial events; analyzed works and writings by architects, engineers, and administrators; established chronologies; unearthed crucial precedents; and examined the political foundations that gave shape to Second Empire Paris. Taken as a whole, these publications allow a far more nuanced view of Haussmann, Napoleon III, and their sociopolitical context. But these two approaches, broadly speaking, of apprehending Paris—the biographical and the socioeconomic—are no longer sufficient.

UNHEARD VOICES

It is time to trouble the focus on major monuments that has so far dogged architectural histories of nineteenth-century Paris. Insofar as extant documentation allows, we must seek out the divergent ways in which the empire’s networked infrastructure was received by a heterogeneous population to grasp what urban philosopher Henri Lefebvre called l’espace vécu—not the abstract space of planners and architects but the affect-charged space experienced by a plurality of subjects.²⁰ To fully understand how different social groups accepted, rejected, transgressed, and interpreted the new Paris involves taking into account both the production and the perception of urban space––this last, a highly volatile construct, inflected by class, age, gender, occupation, and province or country of origin, as well as language or patois. Whatever the motivations of the imperial and municipal governments, the infrastructure they put in place could not in and of itself determine social practices.²¹ Transportation systems, water supply and sewage disposal, public parks, gas lighting, and modern institutions of commerce and culture had many and often contradictory social implications. Workers who built new boulevards, laid sewers and water mains, erected buildings, and installed urban technologies subjected such forms of urban modernity to their own interpretations. Women, who crisscrossed the city for either work or leisure, were also profoundly affected by urban change. Rather than taking networks for granted, it is crucial to understand how they were socialized. Far from seeing citizens as autonomous and transcendental beings, wrote Michel Foucault, we must try to achieve an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework.²²

Yet the staggering majority of books and articles written during the nineteenth century, authored by middle- or upper-class men, gives a distorted picture of how the city was perceived by other social groups. Whereas primary sources written by workers are still being discovered, we are far from a comprehensive view of the urban lives of those who constituted the larger part of the population. Even when they did leave a record, these do not necessarily mention the city’s new streets and networks. Nor could they speak for their entire constituencies: like other social groups, they did not have unmediated access to truth. As Jacques Rancière has pointed out, workers who left memoirs, often years after the fact, usually adopted the language of the bourgeoisie to make their points understood, thereby opening up a gulf between themselves and their peers.²³ We cannot escape the elusiveness of the peuple, known through the viewpoint of the elites, in Miriam Simon’s incisive words.²⁴ At present, recovering their voices remains an aspiration, perhaps an impossible one. Where archives are silent, scholars have no alternative to representing—with principled caution—those whom they know only through representations.²⁵

The working classes of Paris have received a great deal of attention, primarily from labor historians, social scientists, and literary scholars. French museums have also devoted important exhibitions to the topic.²⁶ Architectural historians, by contrast, have continued to analyze the city in terms of buildings of aesthetic worth, but only the center, politically coded as Paris, has been worthy of attention. Mistaking a part for the whole, they write as if the belt of working-class villages surrounding Paris, incorporated into the city in 1860, did not exist. In consequence, we know very little about the architecture that defined the lives of the laboring poor, which varied greatly in terms of quality, location, and typology. What did urban renewal mean to the hundreds of thousands of workers who resided in the anomic outskirts, and swept in and out of the historic center every day, on their way to and from work? What measures did they adopt to cope with their needs such as housing and infrastructure? Urban environments are co-constitutive of citizens and of social cleavages by means of space, distance, and services (or lack thereof), as well as the aesthetic quality of buildings, streets, and neighborhoods. Those who were so brutally displaced were active participants in the transformation of the capital; their expertise laying and maintaining pipes and sewers, building roads and bridges, clearly revealed their ability to master difficult technologies on a daily basis. Loss of their homes, followed by forced relocation to the fringes, sparked feelings of anger and revanchism that would explode with greater force during the Commune.

Working-class women constitute another major gap in our knowledge, which can only partly be attributed to the paucity of sources. For several decades, feminist art historians have shed light on the inequality with which women were treated in their day, and on their continued marginalization in scholarship. Architectural history has been slower to react. By leaving issues of gender unexplored, it has unconsciously universalized the experience of men, reproducing the asymmetries of power that shaped the lives of men and women in the city. Without accounts by the protagonists themselves we cannot understand how Haussmannization affected women of different social classes, nor the impact it had on the conquest and constitution of public space by all women. From impressionist painters to writers, photographers, and early film directors, countless images of Parisian women have come down to us, in boulevards and brothels, gardens, and cabarets. Not being authored by women, these representations do not reflect their subjectivities any more than they address issues of difference. Those who did write about the city came mostly from a well-heeled minority, wealthy bluestockings such as George Sand, Delphine Gay, Frances Trollope, or Countess Marie d’Agoult, who could not understand the problems and preoccupations of their working-class counterparts. Redevelopment signified one thing for ladies who frequented banks and department stores, rode through parks in fashionable landaus, and visited museums and exhibitions. Poor women, equally visible in the public realm, were far less likely to leave a record of their struggles. Echoes of their voices can be found in the writings of others, refracted unwittingly by those who did not share their experience.

CAPITAL OF THE METROPOLE

All cities see themselves through the prism of myth, but if research on Paris is to yield fresh insights, it must make greater efforts to resist the pervasive myth of Paris, an enduring staple of the humanities, which naturalizes exclusionary views of the capital. This is not to assume a fixed, incontrovertible reality behind the myth but to acknowledge that Paris does not and did not exist outside the social relations that bound its residents to an urban space in the throes of radical reconfiguration.²⁷ That something dramatically new happened to the city during the Second Empire is beyond dispute: the sheer scale of new construction, modern boulevards, and infrastructure aroused the admiration of contemporaries. That said, shopworn clichés such as Capital of the Nineteenth Century or Capital of Modernity are unacceptable to a growing number of scholars for whom these two overlapping—indeed, inseparable—terms are characteristic of unquestioned and unconfessed Eurocentric assumptions.²⁸

Paris was not the capital of modernity—that long-drawn, transnational, diverse, and open-ended process that was never autochthonous.²⁹ What Michael Geyer and Charles Bright said of the end of the twentieth century was equally true of the second half of the nineteenth: what we are faced with is not a universalizing and single modernity but an integrated world of multiple and multiplying modernities.³⁰ To claim Paris as capital of modernity is to erase the contributions of other nations and cities that, often under the yoke of colonialism, contributed richly to the beauty of the French capital. Europe’s arrogation of the notion of modernity to itself, wrote historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, is an integral part of European imperialism. Colonized nations were equal partners in this modernizing ideology.³¹ Architectural historians have to chart a difficult course, investigating the numerous urban innovations that made this extraordinary city a much-imitated model worldwide, while avoiding unexamined explanations premised on exceptionalism. Furthermore, we must challenge the tendency to see urban modernity in a purely affirmative light—a story of resplendent boulevards, water and sewerage systems, and beautiful parks and gardens. It is time to consider the many ways in which this definition-defying entanglement of practices, technologies, and political ideas embodied enduring strategies that enabled the privatization of public space, the creation of profit-driven partnerships between municipalities and the private sector, and the legal and economic mechanisms that allowed the poor to be dispossessed of their homes and territory.³² These, too, are part and parcel of modernity.³³

Nor was Paris the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, a long-held article of faith that has only recently begun to be questioned.³⁴ For scholars from the Global South or those involved with postcolonial theory, the world was too large and too diverse even then to have had a single capital of the nineteenth century or of modernity––except as a persistent ideology suggestive of Europe’s sense of centrality and superiority. Both these tags pass over in silence the fact that Paris was the capital of an imperial and imperialist France whose domains overseas stretched from territories or footholds in China, Cochinchina, India, New Caledonia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Napoleon III tried aggressively, and at times disastrously, to expand the regime’s geo-imperial reach. After taking part in the Second Opium War in China (1856–60), France gained the right to trade in lucrative treaty ports and began to secure control of southern Vietnam in 1858; created a protectorate in Cambodia in 1863; launched an abortive campaign against Korea in 1866; and sent a military mission to Japan (1867–68) to train the troops of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun, in Western-style warfare before they were overthrown by the imperial forces. In Mexico, French intervention ended in disaster, when Napoleon III tried to establish the Hapsburg prince Ferdinand Maximilian as emperor in 1867. Despite these failures, the emperor’s expansionist drive succeeded in doubling the empire’s territories.

Colonialism was not a static backcloth but helped mold French culture and politics in a variety of ways. Empire building exerted a strong influence on discourse, print culture, and the visual arts in the metropole. With its steady stream of imported products and technologies, colonial modernity was responsible for many aspects of the newly refurbished capital, many visible to this day, in buildings, statues, art collections, and street names.³⁵ Spoils from these campaigns found their way into the city. Museums were filled with works of art plundered from conquered peoples. In 1863, Empress Eugénie created a Musée Chinois at Fontainebleau with objects seized by French troops during the sack of Yuanmingyuan, the Summer Palace in Beijing, during the Second Opium War, and with gifts from the ambassadors of Siam.³⁶ Before hostilities were even over, French auction houses began selling art looted from China.³⁷

The triumphalist iconography deployed in public space during important holidays promoted France’s colonial exploits with nocturnal illumination evoking Chinese, Egyptian, and Mexican buildings linked to specific overseas conquests or expeditions. International expositions, particularly that of 1867, foregrounded products and artifacts from the colonies. Landscape architecture likewise flaunted the empire’s territorial possessions, disseminating exotic shrubs, flowers, and trees across the city’s new parks and gardens. The systems of knowledge involved in different disciplines and practices was not solely French: science, culture, and technology traveled in both directions along trade routes taken by soldiers, officials, commercial entrepreneurs, or missionaries.³⁸ Although the exchange was rooted in the military, social, and cultural violence inherent in imperialism, colonies and metropole were deeply interconnected, disavowing reductive binaries.

Nineteenth-century Paris cannot thus be understood in terms of Paris or even France alone but was a porous part of this larger constituency. Nation and empire, of course, had distinctly different contours and powers, and tensions between them played themselves out in the capital, particularly when the army was unleashed against those the regime saw as its enemies. It was the laboring classes who felt the brutal impact of colonial warfare. French generals trained in warfare in North Africa (the généraux africains) were repeatedly brought to Paris to quell insurrection, which they did with unrestrained ferocity.³⁹ Workers, their main targets, and political opponents were shot, imprisoned, or deported to the overseas territories. To understand this broader colonial context requires that architectural history break out of the closed circuit of Western theory within which the discipline has entrapped itself.

Finally, we must learn from our own age how to ask new questions of nineteenth-century Paris, a time of extraordinary political, social, and urban upheaval, although this, too, carries its own dangers. From the perspective of the longue durée, the greatly admired city is not irrevocably cut off from our day. Its mistreatment of the laboring classes and the distant banlieues where they were warehoused, throws into relief our own forms of spatial segregation today. Likewise, the slums that now house the majority of the world’s urban population shed light on the everyday living conditions of vast agglomerations of people who lack decent housing, running water, or sanitation. Far from accepting their lot passively, today’s shantytown residents are always learning how to cope, adapting their know-how and meager resources to produce a fragile and ephemeral infrastructure, fighting to improve their surroundings, both like—and unlike—their nineteenth-century counterparts. Although their motivations for resettling may differ, the innumerable legal and illegal immigrants who undertake the most menial jobs in our societies prompt us to probe Second Empire Paris, where thousands of workers from the provinces or from other countries such as Hessia, Switzerland, and Russia were engaged in jobs that gave them little self-esteem or decent financial compensation.

Globalization itself, with its flows and networks, its layered interactions between powerful international forces and entrenched local communities, can suggest new approaches to a topic—nineteenth-century Paris—that is both highly popular and tenaciously elusive. It can do so, however, only if it does not magically displace colonialism, which was transnational in a very different way. Furthermore, none of these trends follows automatically from the days of the Second Empire to ours, according to a seamless trajectory from cause to effect. The question, wrote Rancière, is always to subvert the order of time prescribed by domination, to interrupt its continuities and transform the pauses it imposes into regained freedom.⁴⁰ It is important to dwell on ruptures as well as continuities, avoiding the pitfalls of teleology and remembering the historical specificities that undergird urban development around the globe. Contemporary problems can offer insights and suggest heuristic tools that help illuminate aspects of this period that would otherwise be hard to access, provided we remain mindful of the enormous difference that separates us from the past, and acknowledge that our own views are no less disinterested.

Cities are not transparent signifiers but transient entities in constant flux, generating ambiguities and contradictions. Their diverse inhabitant-interpreters—workers and aristocrats, native born and foreigners, in the case of nineteenth-century Paris—never coalesced around identical points of view but offer a flood of changing opinions, insights, and misreadings contingent on their affiliations. Urban space has no intrinsic meaning but is always burdened with an excess of signification. Data itself falls into a slippery, nonobjective category: none of the documents with which we study cities is value-free. Photographs, architectural drawings, etchings, paintings, novels, and newspapers do not adhere to facts in a tightly sealed covenant. The unquestioned authority given to urban plans presupposes an epistemological realism that naively accords such documents the validity of truth. Whether we are dealing with maps or photographs, we are inevitably looking at Paris through representations and seeing it through several subjectivities at once.⁴¹

How, then, can one do justice to the terrifying complexity of the urban transformation of Second Empire Paris—a city that, like all others, does not exist outside representations and thus exceeds any single author or methodology? This book hopes to give an idea of the multiplicity of Parises mentioned by Daly, though not according to the terms that he envisaged. Its overview of the overwhelming modernization of Paris during two decades of imperial rule follows the complicated process of Haussmannization, that is, urbanism, rather than architecture. Broadening architectural history’s scope beyond the more traditional, narrowly defined focus on monuments, it seeks to include the counterhistories of diverse groups of actors and the spaces where they lived and toiled, insofar as available sources permit. Our discipline must not limit itself to the visual, that is, to architecture and urbanism that have been severed from social relations. To understand this sprawling, viscous metropolis requires problematizing and pluralizing authorship, and interpellating the varied forms of subject formation within the new urban framework informed by modern networks. Cities can be neither reduced to their material traces, nor sublimated into superstructures that evict place and materiality.⁴² Any book on such a protean referent must remain provisional. We need a new nineteenth-century Paris for our own day, even if it, too, will go the way of all others, when the evolving present uncovers in the past a different narrative. The past needs changing almost as much as the present.

FIG. 1.1. Gustave Le Gray, Portrait of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Prince-President, 1852. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

CHAPTER ONE

The President, the Emperor, and the Prefect

In the space of power, power does not appear as such; it hides under the organization of space.

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was a man torn by deep contradictions. Born in 1808 to Napoleon’s brother Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais (Josephine’s daughter), he wanted to reestablish the Bonaparte dynasty and ensure political continuity through unelected power. Transforming Paris into a splendid modern capital was part of this goal. At the same time, he was deeply preoccupied with the plight of the poor—insofar as they did not threaten his political ambitions. His publications had met with some success, particularly his tract Extinction du paupérisme, written in 1844 when he was imprisoned in the fortress of Ham in northern France.¹ Influenced by French and British social reformers, Louis Napoleon dreamed of working for the public good, albeit within an authoritarian framework. These two antithetical goals shaped his career in office. Elected president in December 1848, with almost 75 percent of the votes, he embarked on an ambitious plan to transform Paris into a modern metropolis (fig. 1.1). Improving circulation, providing low-income housing, and alleviating poverty ranked high on his list of priorities. Let us make every effort to embellish this great city, and improve the lot of its inhabitants, he announced in a stirring speech laced with Republican ideals. Let us open new streets, sanitize populous districts that lack air and sunlight, and may the beneficial radiance of the sun penetrate our walls and the flame of truth our hearts.²

Having left the capital at the age of seven, after the fall of his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte, he had spent most of his life in exile. Before his election to the presidency, Paris was a city he knew largely from books, and he undoubtedly read more about its urban problems than any French ruler before him. There was a lot to read. In the preceding years, numerous architects, engineers, and political thinkers had published various agendas for change that had a pronounced influence on a succession of municipal planners.³

Since the French Revolution, the city had had a virtually uninterrupted series of great administrators who maintained the same general directives despite changing political regimes.⁴ Nicolas Frochot (1761–1828), prefect of the Seine under Napoleon I from 1800 to 1812, was succeeded by Gilbert-Joseph-Gaspard Chabrol de Volvic (1773–1843), who served in that capacity from 1812 to 1830 under Napoleon I and later, the Restoration. Claude-Philibert Barthelot, Comte de Rambuteau (1781–1869), held the office from 1833 to 1848, under Louis-Philippe. Jean-Jacques Berger had served the Second Republic and Napoleon III between 1848 and 1853. All had tried, with varying degrees of success, to address circulation problems by cutting new streets and clearing areas in the congested city center. Nevertheless, their best projects, scattered across the urban territory, were carried out piecemeal, without an overarching plan for the entire city: I have often been reproached, wrote Rambuteau, as has Monsieur de Chabrol, for not having prepared or followed a great plan d’ensemble.⁵ Many were clamoring for a different approach, and in 1839, the municipal council officially asked Rambuteau to draw up a comprehensive plan for the embellishment of the capital.⁶ Fearful of undertaking costly projects that would draw large numbers of workers to Paris, he refused.⁷ The Second Republic could no longer afford this cautious strategy. After the revolutions of 1830, 1834 and 1848, a plan d’ensemble had become mandatory.

Heir to decidedly postrevolutionary politics, Louis Napoleon may have studied the Republican Plan des Artistes of 1795 that had left its mark on the urban projects of the First Empire, the July Monarchy and, less improbably, the short-lived Second Republic.⁸ Conceived by a group of artists, architects, and engineers working in concert with the Convention, it represented one of the very first attempts to envisage a profound transformation of the city. Their mandate was to propose urban solutions—new streets and squares—that would valorize large properties confiscated by the state and yield public revenue when sold. Endowing Paris with public spaces and perspectives was one of their priorities, but they were also concerned with slum clearance, hygiene, and circulation. The committee, wrote the authors in 1795, has thus considered Paris as a whole from different points of view, and was particularly struck by the incoherence and irregularity of all its communications and their insufficiency for commerce and circulation; by the lack of squares and public markets, by quays obstructed by a tangle of narrow and sinuous streets where air flows with difficulty, and finally, by the foci of infection and unhealthiness that one finds there; for years, a suffering humanity has called for their destruction.⁹

Some streets of the Artists’ Plan were arguably designed as embellishments rather than solutions to existing problems, according to the classic traditions of the past.¹⁰ But the plan was extraordinarily prescient, establishing clear, feasible goals, and envisaging new projects for east and west, Left Bank and Right Bank. Like previous regimes, the Second Empire saw the wisdom of its views and implemented part of its proposals. The plan did not survive the destructions of the Siege and the Commune and was poorly reconstructed in 1889 (fig. 1.2). Since that time, however, family memoirs and personal papers of the main protagonists have been steadily coming to light, allowing us to reconstruct the document with some degree of accuracy.¹¹

Louis Napoleon found a different and more modern strand of ideas in the work of the followers of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who believed in the betterment of society through industrial development, and the greater mobility of capital and merchandise. Many high-ranking members of Louis Napoleon’s entourage were Saint-Simonians, including the economist and engineer Michel Chevalier and the brothers Émile and Isaac Péreire, whose Société Générale du Crédit Mobilier helped provide the financial backing for the city’s urban renewal. Chevalier, one of the emperor’s most important economic advisers, had written in 1838 that everything was in place to unify the nation by bringing highways, waterways, and railroads into a single system: We lack only a plan d’ensemble.¹² Utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier (1772–1837), deeply concerned with social issues, also influenced Louis Napoleon and the administrators involved in urban planning.

FIG. 1.2. The Plan des Artistes, reconstructed by Alphand in 1889. Alphand, Les travaux de Paris, 1789–1889. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

Fourierist and Saint-Simonian ideas resonated strongly in the Grandes Écoles, the great breeding-ground of French architects and engineers.¹³ Since the 1840s, polytechniciens such as Considerant and Perreymond had published extensively on urban issues. Imbued with utopian ideals characteristic of the 1840s, and equipped with a solid technical education, they based their analysis on a detailed knowledge of the economy and topography of Paris. At a time when city planning did not yet exist as a discipline, they brought new standards of professionalism to urban studies, and a less empirical approach.¹⁴ For years they had clamored for a global strategy for Paris. We believe, wrote Considerant and Perreymond, that the department of the Seine should be considered as […] a systematic ensemble, and that the projects that are currently executed piecemeal by the communes, the department itself and the very State, should be combined, centralized, and brought into line, each in its own way and location, with a general plan encompassing the unity of the department in its entirety.¹⁵

An early opponent of Louis Napoleon, Considerant went into exile in 1848 but remained in touch with friends and supporters who followed his attempts to create a utopian community in Texas. Perreymond, whose true identity has only recently been discovered, was the pseudonym of Edmond Perrey, a polytechnicien who frequented the circles of Fourier and Saint-Simon.¹⁶ Between 1842 and 1843, he published a series of articles in César Daly’s Revue générale de l’architecture and, in collaboration with Considerant, in the Fourierist newspaper La Démocratie pacifique. Although Perreymond did not offer specific proposals in terms of new streets and squares, his articles on Paris constitute some of the most lucid analyses of the city written at the time.¹⁷

Perreymond was chiefly preoccupied with the deterioration of the urban core. The ensuing flight of capital to the west and north of the city entailed a drastic loss of revenues for the center. Uncontrolled growth in the communes around Paris also contributed to the economic stagnation of the historic kernel: Politically and morally speaking, the Government […] loses its strength of action since it no longer finds, in the center of the capital, a point of resistance on which to exert its powerful leverage. Paris becomes an ungraspable and floating entity, which was here yesterday, is there today, and will be God knows where tomorrow.¹⁸ In his view, there were only two options: either to reclaim the center or to rebuild it elsewhere, following the westward drift of finance capital. Perreymond strongly believed that the centrifugal forces that threatened the old historic core had to be resisted.

Saint-Simonian interest in improving urban infrastructure had a profound impact on the July Monarchy, whose approach to planning had been predicated on networks then being developed for the entire country.¹⁹ But piecemeal solutions could not solve the pressing problems that beset the city. A global approach was long overdue, and Considerant and Perreymond called for "the adoption of a general plan of broad circulation that would link the different neighborhoods of each bank with those of the center, thus connecting the capital’s two divided halves."²⁰ They also foresaw the need to annex the periphery: it was only a question of time till a ruler cracked the old carapace and allowed the city to ooze into the surroundings, incorporating them within its administration. The longer they waited, the more expensive the land in the outlying suburbs would be, and the greater the damage to be undone.²¹

For Perreymond, the old Île de la Cité was to be razed to make way for an administrative center (the Nouvelle Lutèce); a commercial one (the Bazar National) would spill over into the Île Saint-Louis. Both islands would be attached to the Left Bank: if the left arm of the Seine were filled, a sizeable portion of prime real estate would be available for new construction. Anticipating traits that would reappear under the Second Empire, Perreymond thought that Paris should be transformed into a spectacle fit for consumption, a place more and more desirable, more and more attractive;—a panorama that one would contemplate for its pleasures;—a great source of light open to the entire world;—a stock exchange, a commercial center where, thanks to the railroad and the telegraph, information arriving by night and by day from all corners of the globe, would permit one to follow the course of the market.²² Grounded on a detailed knowledge of Paris and faith in a perfectible society typical of Saint-Simon and Fourier, Perreymond’s ideas contributed powerfully to lift the level of debate concerning the future of the city, but his surgical response to the problem of circulation would have led to the destruction of the historic center.

Yet Perreymond never lost sight of the anthropological dimension—what he called, perhaps influenced by Adam Smith, the social wealth of the nation.²³ Like all followers of Fourier, he believed ardently in a more equitable society, and Perreymond’s pages bristle with indignation at the blatant urban inequalities that consigned the poor to miserable areas unfit for human habitation. Dark and humid neighborhoods had to be sanitized according to standards of modern hygiene, and houses designed in proportion to the width of streets.²⁴ Equally passionate in its defense of the underprivileged was Perreymond’s book of 1849, Paris monarchique et Paris républicain, which Louis Napoleon may have read.²⁵

Perreymond espoused the opinions typical of the entrepreneurial Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, the liberal wing of the French bourgeoisie, who saw in urban renewal a deterrent to popular insurrection. Slum clearance would dissolve the city’s impoverished enclaves that constituted, in his view, a permanent threat to social order: The breakup of the dangerous, depraved or miserable population of the quartiers of the Cité, Les Halles, Arcis, Saint-Victor, etc., will produce great improvements in the morality and well-being of the Parisian population.²⁶ Perreymond, concludes the historian Frédéric Moret, suggests solutions often similar to Haussmannization (the destruction and reconstruction of the center, an administrative space in the Île de la Cité, east-west and north-south axes structuring the city, the primacy of commerce over production …) but the fundamental principles are very different, as are the methods he proposes.²⁷

From Saint-Simon and his followers, Louis Napoleon derived both progressive and regressive urban ideals. Circulation, exchange, and enhanced productivity were seen in terms of the needs of the industry-dependent middle classes rather than those of the industrious proletariat. "The concept of working-class cities, the enclosure of ouvriers in huge barracks, the myth of the rectilinear street, surrender of the city to circulation, apologia of green spaces, and demolitions in the name of hygiene and order, all this Napoleon III found in the writings of Saint-Simon, Considerant, and Cabet," observed Michel Ragon.²⁸

Hippolyte Meynadier, another important writer on urban issues, also influenced Louis Napoleon and his circle of experts. In Paris sous le point de vue pittoresque et monumental, published in 1843, the author offers a remarkable analysis of the state of the city. Empirical rather than analytical, his suggestions were practical and based on specific locations. Since Paris lacked a network of broad thoroughfares linking different parts of the city to the center, he advocated the creation of a north-south axis, which he called the grande rue du centre.²⁹ Situated between the Boulevards Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, it would go all the way to the Châtelet. This, as Victor Fournel realized two decades later, was the model for the Boulevard de Strasbourg and its prolongation, the Boulevard de Sébastopol, initially known as the Boulevard du Centre, a clear reference to Meynadier. By proposing that the artery continue across the river, Meynadier laid the template for the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Yet in marked contrast to the brutal way in which this street was later executed, Meynadier wanted to ensure that the opening of the new boulevard displaced neither the inhabitants of the area nor their means of livelihood: One would not violently dislodge any of the industries rooted in these old quartiers that are opposed to any thought of emigration.³⁰ Furthermore, this new street would violate no architectural landmark, an observation taken to heart by Louis Napoleon, but disregarded by Napoleon III and his prefect.³¹

Meynadier believed firmly in the benefits of slum clearance, though on a more moderate scale than Perreymond. His interest in the urban fabric was inseparable from its social dimension. Old houses should not be destroyed, else the poor would no longer be able to find refuge in the city. May Paris, in the midst of all its grandeur, continue to preserve these obscure retreats for the undeserved misfortunes which wealth does not always understand, and sometimes crushes, because it is more convenient to forget their cause.³² Like Perreymond and Considerant, Meynadier called for a comprehensive city plan years before Louis Napoleon embarked on a similar project: But where is the general plan d’ensemble, formulated by the municipal authority and the government, to correlate all these works of art and of public utility in the city of Paris?³³ We do not know how much Louis Napoleon knew of all these texts; his advisers certainly did and were often acquainted with their authors.

As someone who planned to seize absolute power to achieve his political aims, the prince-président was deeply preoccupied with the strategic aspect of urban planning, and the need to defend Paris from any attempt at insurgency. In this respect, the articles written by Frederic Engels on the Paris revolution of 1848 may well have influenced Louis Napoleon, a different man in 1848 than he was in 1853, when the realities of empire began to harden his political arteries. The publications had received a great deal of attention in England, where Engels and Louis Napoleon had resided. The future emperor—who spent his youth in Switzerland, studied in Germany, and spoke French with a slight German accent—would have had no problem understanding Engels’s original dispatches to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which read like a blueprint for any politician hoping to master the unruly potential of Paris’s urban masses. Engels noted that the faubourg du Temple and the faubourg Saint-Antoine were already inhabited almost exclusively by ouvriers who were protected by the Canal Saint-Martin.³⁴ These, he wrote, immediately began to separate their territory, the Paris of the workers, from the Paris of the bourgeoisie. Their barricades defined a line leading south from the porte Saint-Denis through the Cité (fig. 1.3).³⁵ This clear-cut separation would be strengthened in Louis Napoleon’s reconfiguration of Paris.

FIG. 1.3. Plan of the barricades erected in Paris in June 1848 in the eastern part of the city. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

AFTER THE COUP

But magnanimous as always, the people thought they had destroyed their enemy when they had overthrown the enemy of their enemies.

—Karl Marx, The June Revolution

On December 2, 1851, Louis Napoleon’s forces arrested members of the opposition, dissolved the National Assembly, and abolished the Constitution. Over twenty-six thousand people were detained, and several hundred opponents killed. Thousands more were deported to Algeria.

A year later, on December 2, 1852—forty-seven years after Napoleon I was crowned emperor—Louis Napoleon abolished the Second Republic and proclaimed the empire, his overriding goal all along. Napoleon I cast a long shadow over his nephew’s reign. Haunted by the mystique of his uncle’s fame, Napoleon III no doubt read the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène carefully: eager to associate himself to Bonaparte’s enduring popularity, while stressing his own different personality and pursuits, he completed a few projects planned or begun by his uncle.³⁶ The influence, programmatic rather than stylistic, had to do with the need to build monumental architectural prospects without neglecting services. Brushing aside the cumbersome machinery of parliamentary rule, Napoleon III decided that henceforth all public works within the capital would be decided by imperial decree.³⁷ Like his uncle before him, he eliminated the position of mayor of Paris instituted by the First and Second Republics and split municipal authority between a prefect of police and a prefect of the Seine.

Inevitably, the transition from constitutional prince-président to emperor entailed major differences in the approach to city planning (fig. 1.4). The freshly minted emperor rejected many of the president-elect’s ideals. Henceforth, the possibility of counteruprisings would haunt both Napoleon III and the municipality. An early memorandum by Count Henri Siméon, one of his advisers on urban matters, bluntly states the emperor wanted to clean up the old quartiers where the population is crammed and circulation impossible, to facilitate access to the vicinity of railroads, cut great roads in all directions in order to abridge distances and, in case of insurrection, ensure an immediate repression of attacks on public order.³⁸

As the emperor became inured to power, his ambitions grew, but so did the need to accept compromises in order to carry out his gigantic enterprise. His allegiance to Saint-Simon’s progressive agenda now had to coexist with the requirements of political stability and the cult of monumentality central to his goal of rejuvenating the capital. No master plan could account beforehand for the scale and complexity of the Second Empire’s makeover of the city. Hundreds of decisions, particularly regarding infrastructure, had to be taken daily by innumerable specialists: some were planned from the outset; others were ad hoc improvisations in response to unforeseen problems or new urban technologies. The empire’s actual accomplishments and the financial means used to achieve them, no less than the scorched-earth policy unleashed on large areas of the city, also required the complicity of government ministers.³⁹ Urbanism, Maurice Halbwachs would write in 1920, is always the result of shared aspirations: The layout of the streets, and the transformations of the infrastructure of Paris cannot be explained by the concerted intentions of one or more persons, nor by individual wishes, but by the tendencies or collective needs followed by builders, architects, prefects, municipal councilors, heads of state, who did not have a very clear picture of these social forces and sometimes had the illusion that they were inspired by their own conceptions.⁴⁰