Page 149 - HandbookMarch1

Story of cities #12: Haussmann rips up

Paris – and divides France to this day

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/31/story-cities-12-paris-baron-haussmann-france-
urban-planner-napoleon
The story of cities
Cities
Georges-Eugène Haussmann is feted internationally for transforming the
French capital with an audacious programme of urban planning. Yet 125
years after his death, his legacy at home remains much more controversial.
Why?

The long, straight avenues that continue to dominate Paris (pictured here around 1870) were a
key feature of Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding plans. Photograph: Alamy

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 bullshit from beginning to end,” De Moncan says. “But it’s
a view many people still hold in France.