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Baron Haussmann. Illustration: Alamy

“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.

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. Illustration: Alamy