“Everything I have achieved I owe to the Emperor
and my own hard work.” 1
—GEORGES HAUSSMANN
“Yes, gentlemen, Long Live the Emperor, who wishes to make of Paris the first city of the world, and a capital truly worthy of France.” 2
—PREFECT HAUSSMANN’S ADDRESS TO HIS OFFICIALS, JUNE 1853
“At eight o’clock on the morning following my installation [as prefect at St. Cloud on June 29, 1853], the government carriage arrived at my hotel to take me to the Hôtel de Ville [the headquarters of the prefecture of the Seine].”3 While showing him his special map of Paris the previous evening, Louis Napoléon had outlined his general plans for completely transforming the French capital, plans for which Haussmann was to be soley responsible.
The key to everything, he explained, would be communication: straight, wide, new avenues and boulevards had to be driven through narrow, winding medieval passageways and thousands of ancient crowded tenements and shops, in order to allow all parts of the city to communicate easily and directly with one another. Thousands of properties would have to be condemned and razed to the ground. The entire process, including the seizure of private property based on the right of eminent domain, would ultimately have to be confirmed by the newly installed Legislative Body. As its new president, Auguste de Morny would soon be able to ensure the execution of Louis Napoléon’s plans for the modernization of Paris.4 Street after street, entire neighborhoods of four-and five-story tenements, teeming with hundreds of thousands of the capital’s most impoverished inhabitants, were to be demolished. These buildings, thrown up over the centuries one against another and left in a state of disrepair, saw entire families of two and three generations crammed into one or two squalid rooms, while lacking running water and the most elementary forms of sanitation.
Human waste, rotting food, and debris were simply thrown into the streets reeking of urine, much of it ultimately reaching the Seine. There were horses on every street, however poor the quarter, they being the engine of all transport, leaving their uncollected manure in steaming heaps, and eventually their fly-and maggot-infested carcasses. These tenements were in turn the thriving source of debilitating illness, disease, and periodic epidemics. Cholera alone was responsible for more than 30,000 deaths between the 1830s and 1860s. More than 32,000 burials officially took place each year in the city’s three principal cemeteries—Père Lachaise, Montparnasse, and Montmartre—and another untold few thousands of nameless corpses were thrown into a communal fosse, or pit, left to be eaten by crows, rats, and dogs.5
After centuries of neglect, large portions of these swelling slums were now to be cleared and replaced by new structures, with access to fresh air, running water, and underground sewers, all ensured by the prefect’s plans generated around the wide new municipal highways. On the other hand, no provision was made for rehousing most of those displaced, who were destined “to disappear” into the outlying suburbs. Nor did even Napoléon III’s most severe political opponents criticize him for this failure. On the other hand, however, he was personally to buy out of his own pocket some of the condemned properties near the Gare de Lyon and build a new Saint-Simon-style housing project for a few thousand people.
The funding for these vast schemes was periodically provided by the parliament, the prefecture, and the municipality of Paris. Construction companies awarded contracts by Haussmann would be obliged to complete their work within a specified period of time or risk forfeiting the very substantial bonds (cautions) they were required to deposit with the city, something the prefect enforced rigorously. Nevertheless, nothing could alleviate the inevitable problems resulting from these multiple construction projects, including the “temporary disruptions” to life in local neighborhoods, the unrelenting snarled traffic, and the pall of dust clouds hanging over the city, not to mention the unabated racket faced by Paris’s one million inhabitants over the next two decades.6
The very density in numbers of these largely illiterate working-class families had also proven a very real political threat in the past whenever they had rallied en masse in violent protest against the state, troops, and police, as Louis Napoléon had personally witnessed during his December 1851 coup d’état. Time and again the Hôtel de Ville, for instance, surrounded as it was by the working-class St.-Antoine quarter, had itself been besieged. It was expected that by moving more than one hundred thousand families—up to six hundred thousand people—out of the city and into the suburbs, the possibility of such a threat in the future would be reduced immeasurably.7
Napoléon III therefore had many complex motives for wishing to see this sweeping transformation of the French capital, and all were genuine, including his ever present, if sometimes elusive, Saint-Simon idealism. Perhaps even to his surprise he was soon to appreciate just how very fortunate he had indeed been in naming the ideal prefect to execute this vision.
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To begin with, the network required the modern new “Gates of the City,” the railway stations, to link with one another as well as with the center of the city. The various government and administrative buildings were also to be connected by a good road grid, and they in turn with the very nerve centers of the empire—the Tuileries, the Élysée Palace, and the Palace of St. Cloud. As Haussmann related, “The emperor evidently believed that in a country like France where centralization of government was pushed to the extreme, that it was the duty of the Chief of State to have the reins of the capital’s administration at his fingertips, at his official residence.”8 This included police and army barracks, the various ministries, as well as the National Assembly (the Legislative Body) and the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace. As part of this plan, the Ministry of the Interior—responsible for the country’s prefectures and police—would be moved immediately to a building directly across from the entrance of the Élysée Palace, where Louis Napoléon more and more frequently sought refuge from the constant bustle, pressures, intrusions, and court activities of the Tuileries.
The broad new avenues of this grid were to fan out in all directions, permitting the easy flow of all traffic, while enabling the government to dispatch police and troops to hotspots in the event of a revolt or emergency. These new thoroughfares were also intended to divide the very breeding grounds of those neighborhoods, rendering it more difficult in time of revolt for large crowds to congregate in any one place. The expansion of trade and the economy and the creation of new jobs for the large number of unemployed also remained a fundamental part of Louis Napoléon’s new Paris, and these wide new corridors would greatly facilitate local commerce and industry.
Now at his new office in the Hôtel de Ville, where he and his wife and daughters would also be housed in the almost palatial apartments reserved for the prefect, he was greeted by the inner circle of his immediate personal staff, several of them brought with him from Bordeaux, and whose numbers were due to increase with the creation of some new departments, such as architecture, engineering, public transportation, park and city planning, etc. Once installed, Haussmann assembled the heads of the various departments, including those of the mayor’s office. As prefect he was in effect also de jure the mayor of Paris and as such equally responsible for the administration of all traditional municipal services. Unlike his predecessor, the cautious and unimaginative Jean Jacques Berger, however, the new prefect was no courtier or charmer. Haussmann’s no-nonsense Lutheran Germanic roots still governed his way of thinking, demeanor, and relentless drive. His was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as he clearly grasped, and the more formidable the task, the better, for if anyone in the administration of the Second Empire liked a real challenge, it was this dynamic Baron Haussmann.
* * *
“I am an old civil servant,” he began, addressing the assembly, “and as such I intend to judge each of you personally on your merits.” He wanted to know who precisely was working for him and what in consequence to expect. “Therefore do not bother having your friends dropping me a private word praising your merits. Your good work alone will provide all the proof I need, and for which I shall personally see to it that you are properly rewarded.” And then after outlining their future objectives, he concluded, “Now, gentlemen, that the purpose of this meeting has been revealed, you know what I aim to achieve and what in turn I expect of each of you.” He closed, reminding them of the great project the emperor had just entrusted to them, “to make Paris the most beautiful city in the world.”9
Many found him authoritarian and intimidating, others inspiring, for his reputation as a most remarkable administrator had preceded him. During an early reception at the Hôtel de Ville, a socially prominent lady teased him about his “bad character.” “‘Madam,’ I responded, ‘far from being displeased about it I am delighted.’” Elaborating, he pointed out that he was “quiet and peaceful by nature, and under normal circumstances always courteous, but life has taught me that in order to be left alone to be able to get on with one’s work, one must have quite a different reputation.” A loud bark could be most efficacious in keeping fools and troublemakers at bay. If at the end of the day he would take up his faithful cello and play Handel and Haydn, this side of his character was the last thing he wanted the public to know. Indeed, it was as a result of his public no-nonsense attitude, of his rigorous integrity, of his reputation as a serious man with his nose to the grindstone and a remarkable record for getting things done, that Louis Napoléon had appointed him to this the most demanding office, not only in Paris, but in the entire country. The building of Paris, Haussmann later concluded, “was the greatest event of my public life.”10
In his Mémoires, written many years after the demise of Napoléon III and the Second Empire, Baron Haussmann frankly confided what his career and his final achievement in Paris had meant to him, and surprisingly, just how tense and trying it had in fact been, even for him. “Constantly on the alert, I could never relax, indeed I was overly anxious about anything and everything, down to the last detail … No aspect of this immense task was neglected by me, for I found myself on slippery ground where everything, all my work [and career], could be jeopardized by the least expected mishap, by a single wrong step, and my chief concern was to prevent just this sort of slip from occurring.… And with the eyes of Europe and indeed the whole world upon me, I most ardently wished to succeed in my work, for the glory of my Master, and for the very honour of my Country.” He was literally charged with nothing less than the greatest organized construction project in the entire two-thousand-year history of Paris.11
Even before getting to work in 1853, however, Haussmann was faced with a humanitarian problem, starvation, for that year the normally plentiful wheat crop of the nearby Beauce had failed, as it did again the following year. For hundreds of thousands of the poorest of Paris, bread was the one basic daily staple of existence, and the market price shot up overnight from 40 to 80 centimes per kilo. Profiteering middlemen were raking in fortunes while children starved. Fathers could not provide money they did not possess, and crime soared out of control. An outraged Haussmann took matters into his own hands, acquiring wheat from elsewhere in the country while creating a municipal “Bread Treasury.” By providing subsidies as Bons, or script, to the city’s bakers drawn on this new fund, the price of bread fell back to its old price. As for the profiteers, Haussmann prosecuted them with his usual zeal. This was the first of several unauthorized “authoritarian acts” committed by the new prefect.12 Meanwhile, he had to get on with the plans Louis Napoléon had presented to him, the reason for his appointment.
* * *
Apart from previously funded projects prepared by Jean Jacques Berger, including the initial stage of construction of the Rue de Rivoli, and the clearing of private structures around the original, still isolated, rectangular Louvre, the Pavillion de l’Horloge, the city’s large new central food markets, Les Halles, based by Louis Napoléon on London’s Covent Garden, and the enlarged Rue des Écoles, all future construction projects would depend upon the availability of funding authorized by the Legislative Body, the municipal government, and the department. The first two such funding programs, finally awarded in 1855 and 1858, posed no serious problem. Thereafter, obtaining future approval for even larger amounts from an increasingly obstructive Assembly was quite another matter.
Prefect Haussmann’s first task was to divide the city into four sectors by completing the Rue de Rivoli from east to west, from the Place de la Concorde eastward to the Place de la Bastille, and then beyond as the Rue du Faubourg St.-Antoine on to the Place du Trône—today’s Place de la Nation.13 On the other side of the Concorde, the Champs-Élysées would continue from where Rivoli ended, westward to the then current city limits at the Rond Point—the Arc de Triomphe—and eventually beyond to the Seine at the Pont de Neuilly. The north-south axis cut through the Rue du Rivoli at the Place du Châtelet, the new Avenue du Centre—soon to be renamed the Boulevard de Sebastopol—driving in a straight northerly line as far as the Porte de St.-Denis, from which it would then continue as the Boulevard de Strasbourg right up to the Gare de l’Est. Its southerly line, the new Boulevard St.-Michel, would extend from the Pont de St.-Michel, right through the densely cluttered Latin Quarter, as far as the present-day Denfert-Rocherau.
Several large junctions would be formed in the city, from which major avenues and boulevards would emerge, linking other parts of the city. From the Place de la Nation, today’s Boulevard Voltaire would eventually drive up to the recently cleared Place de la République (Château-d’Eau), which met with the Boulevards St.-Martin and St.-Denis, and to the west ultimately joined the future Grands Boulevards—Haussmann, the Italiens, the Capucines, 4 Septembre, etc. Meanwhile, Voltaire would emerge on the north side of the Place de la République as the Boulevard de Magenta, providing access to the Gares de l’Est and du Nord, and finally reaching as far north as the Boulevard de Rochechouart.
Apart from the junction forming at the Opéra (several years into the future), the only other major junction in Paris, and by far the biggest and most impressive, was L’Étoile, personally designed by Haussmann, including the twelve thoroughfares shooting out from it in all directions like elegant spokes of a wheel. The Champs-Élysées ended here and continued westerly on the other side eventually as the Avenue de la Grande Armée. From the north side, the Avenues Carnot, MacMahon, Wagram, and Friedland. From the southern side of the Rond Point would branch out the spacious Avenues de l’Impératrice—today’s Foch, and Victor Hugo, the Avenue du Roi du Rome—today’s Kléber, Iéna, and Marceau. “This beautiful ensemble [L’Étoile] I certainly consider to be one of the finest achievements of my entire administration,” the usually undemonstrative Haussmann declared.14
Each avenue was built by a separate company, the new concessionnaire whose successful bid had been accepted by Haussmann. A law passed in 1852 allowed for the large-scale application of the right of eminent domain (declaration of l’utilité publique), the seizure of private property for a public project, the expropriation of houses, shops, and apartment buildings to be demolished and then cleared away. In order to ensure full compliance and the complete execution of a new avenue, each construction company was obliged to deposit a substantial bond, or caution, with the city as well as the amount of the indemnity to be paid each owner of expropriated property (for which a municipal subsidy would then reimburse the company).
The expropriation of thousands of parcels of privately held real estate would inevitably bring many complaints, including of inadequate compensation. The situation was soon remedied, however, when the indemnity for expropriated property was raised significantly, ironically leading to future property owners clamoring to have their land taken by the city! In order to cut through the time-consuming red tape involved in obtaining the authorization of the legislative body for release of the property subvention indemnities, in 1858 Prefect Haussmann created the Public Works Treasury of Paris. This allowed him to expedite the process by directly issuing Bons, or script (IOUs drawn on this fund), as a form of redeemable payment covering the city’s subventions for each of these expropriations, much as he had done in the case of wheat. This, however, led to grave complications.15
When the original hundred-million-franc ($1.3 billion) Public Works Treasury fund was later exhausted, Haussmann, impatient with endless committees, haggling, and lost time, illegally issued an additional unauthorized seventy million francs worth of Bons beyond the Treasury’s limit, in order to complete the construction under way. His growing critics immediately cried wolf, demanding his head. In any event, the Legislative Body under Morny’s direction retroactively honored the payment of the bons when they were acquired by the Crédit Foncier, thanks to the cooperation of the Pereire brothers. Neither Haussmann nor the senior officials he personally appointed profited by a single centime through this transaction or any other, and the avenues were completed on time. The prefect was a rigorous taskmaster, but his actions did add fuel to the proverbial fire of those critical of his high-handed, authoritarian rule and clamoring for the removal of this wayward, incorruptible prefect of the Seine.
* * *
With the gradual completion of the new broad avenues and boulevards, there would be a greater need for public transport, and Haussmann licensed taxis, horse-drawn fiacres, and omnibus concessions for this purpose. The competition for future profits was fierce, complete with the usual attempted pots de vin—bribes. And once the new thoroughfares were opened, contracts were issued for the laying of underground gas pipelines, resulting by 1870 in 33,000 new gas outlets, for street lamps, public buildings, and private houses. Overnight the dark, crime-ridden medieval passageways of Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris and Émile Zola’s Dram Shop were giving way to a city of light.16 The London Louis Napoléon had so admired years ago and attempted to imitate was in fact now being overshadowed by a modern new spacious Paris.
With the full support of the emperor, Baron Haussmann also confronted the calamitous public health problems facing the capital arising from the polluted drinking water taken directly from the Seine and older city wells, the exclusive water supply used by most of the large working-class areas of Paris. Never a man to dither, Prefect Haussmann undertook major engineering projects to bring clean sources of drinking water by the new aqueducts of Arcueil, of the Dhuys, and the Vanne, from Belleville, Prés Saint-Gervais, and elsewhere, including new artesian wells in and outside Paris. In 1860, the Compagnie Générale des Eaux was formed to take charge of the distribution of water for the capital. Simultaneously, work was done on the extensive new underground sewage canals.17
Haussmann also received the closest support from Louis Napoléon (and indirectly Empress Eugénie) when it came to the public welfare and medical services offered by Paris. Eugénie had always been especially interested in orphans and destitute women, for whom hospices and clinics were opened, to which she personally ultimately contributed probably more than a million francs out of her own purse. Of the city’s numerous hospitals, including general hospitals, lying-in facilities for women, and others “for incurable diseases,” some were modernized and extended and one or two demolished and replaced. Shelters for the homeless, too, were established. Perhaps the most famous hospital, the enormous Hôtel Dieu on the Ile de la Cité, was completely rebuilt and expanded as the few hundred older adjoining buildings were demolished, for the first time leaving a large open piazza before it and the neighboring Notre Dame Cathedral.
While serving as a deputy prefect at Ariège much earlier in his career, Haussmann had met and become friendly with an alienist, a medical doctor specializing in mental disorders. He became interested in this problem, and now as prefect of the Seine announced “a project of capital importance,” as he referred to it, involving the construction of a series of asylums in Paris, crowned by the new clinic for mental disorders attached to the School of Medicine in the Latin Quarter.18
Since in France the state was responsible for paying the clergy and maintaining the places of worship, Prefect Haussmann also built a number of Catholic churches, to replace those demolished, at least one Protestant reformed church, in the Rue Roquépine, and two synagogues, in the Rue de la Victoire and another in the Rue des Tournelles.19 At the same time the prefect was also responsible for the city’s educational facilities, something of very special interest to Haussmann. On his instructions, many schools were modernized or enlarged, including the Sorbonne, the Faculté de Médecin, the Lycée Bonaparte (Condorcet), the Lycée Saint-Louis, the Lycée Napoléon (Henri IV), and the Lycée Charlemagne. In addition, thanks to Eugénie, the country’s first École Supérieure des Filles, or high school, was built, not to mention numerous new communal schools for boys and girls.20
Unlike his uncle, Napoléon I, Louis Napoléon was most interested in the public buildings and monuments of the country, and at Eugénie’s urging, he appointed Prosper Mérimée—who had taught her history as a child—to be the first Inspector General of Historic Monuments. Thanks to his diligence, a register of thousands of historic monuments and buildings throughout France was drawn up and hundreds of them saved and restored, including the crumbling ramparts of Carcassonne. Among the historic buildings saved and restored in Paris were Charlemagne’s Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité and the Hôtel Carnavalet in the Marais with its newly installed museum.
The prefect also had the Hôtel de Ville exhaustively refurbished, and its galleries and salons decorated by some of the most celebrated artists of the day. There the prefect and his wife were to give their stunning masked balls for six thousand invités every January, while not forgetting innumerable diplomatic receptions and dinners for the heads of many European states, including one for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Palais de Justice, under extensive renovation and expansion ever since Louis Philippe’s reign, was now finally completed. The new palatial Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, also initiated by Louis Philippe, then stopped mid-course during the upheavals of 1848, was officially opened by Haussmann in 1855. The Élysée Palace, Louis Napoléon’s favorite hideaway in Paris, was now extensively refurbished as well. In addition to other structures, Haussmann rebuilt the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and of course constructed the Palais de l’Industrie for Louis Napoléon’s first Exposition Universelle in 1855. In 1861, the prefect also broke ground for Charles Garnier’s new Opéra.21 It was during his tenure, of course, that all the grand railway stations of the capital were erected in their permanent form, and the first electric telegraph network was installed throughout the country.
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To the French of the Second Empire, when it came to the clink of gold, everything was a blague, everyone had his price, every man had his vice and weakness and was susceptible to corruption. The staggering bribes received by Napoléon I’s foreign minister, Prince de Talleyrand, had been the talk of every capital in Europe, and his grandson, the notorious half brother of Napoléon III, Count, and shortly to become Duke, de Morny, ably ensured the continuation of this particular family tradition. Georges Haussmann came to Paris the complete outsider, without friends or party backing, and was to leave it in the same manner. At the same time, this irritatingly honest prefect became the ideal surrogate target for Louis Napoléon’s political enemies when it came to a remorseless series of well-choreographed malicious accusations and innuendo, including vicious attacks against members of his family.
Unable to attack Emperor Napoléon directly, the prefect had to bear the brunt of these afflictions. While still presiding over the Legislative Body, Auguste de Morny was in a position to ward off some of these assaults against the prefect, but after his death in 1865, that parliamentary protection ended and the abusive assaults on Haussmann’s good name increased.
The fact remained, however, that as the prefect of the Seine, in charge of the herculean construction of an entirely new capital and therefore responsible for many hundreds of millions of francs annually, he was the man who made the ultimate decisions as to the selection of each new project and who was to execute it. He was inevitably the prime target for the discontented, the unscrupulous, the jealous, and the greedy. Speculators were bewildered; they simply could not fathom a man refusing a fistful of gold, bribes ranging from 400,000 to more than two million francs (nearly $26 million). How were thiefs and corrupt politicians and businessmen possibly expected to cope when confronted by a man of principle! Haussmann had to go!22
Although Persigny had originally suggested the nomination of Haussmann for the prefecture—if hardly out of the goodness of his heart—he and Plon-Plon, Prince Jérôme, who were very close associates and both notorious gamblers and speculators in their own right, along with General Émile Fleury, proved to be among the prefect’s most dedicated and dangerous insider detractors among the Bonapartists determined to bring him down regardless of the cost. Cousin Plon-Plon and his father, Jérôme Bonaparte, were now comfortably ensconced with their “actresses” at the Duke of Orléans’s confiscated Palais Royal. As for Persigny, by manipulating his own marriage contract in 1852, and blatantly coercing Églé de la Moskowa, the daughter of the late wealthy banker Jacques Laffitte, he gained a dowry of seven million francs. (Even Louis Napoléon, strongly opposed to this marriage, was unable to prevent a defiant Persigny.) Persigny’s subsequent apparent direct complicity in the murder of his wife’s teenage brother (whose separate seven-million-franc fortune he then gained control of) hardly qualified him as a moral judge of Haussmann or anyone else.23 Both Plon-Plon and the devious Persigny had more than one dark secret.
One man who did work closely with Haussmann during the Second Empire, and who in fact knew him both professionally and as an old family friend, Jean Charles Alphand, a senior engineer and the former head of the Department of Bridges and Highways at Bordeaux before coming to Paris, was so offended by the continuing campaign of vilification, well after Haussmann’s death, that he finally spoke out. “Even his well established single-minded dedication to his work,” Alphand protested, “could not prevent the calumny of these attacks against the very honor of this distinguished high official,” including crude denunciations in the press against him and his family. Moreover, Prefect Haussmann was to leave office, Alphand closed, “in the full knowledge that he had done his duty, and strictly according to the rules. Such a proud man as he could never have lowered himself, humiliated himself by entering into a dishonest transaction with such obvious culprits.”24 For Haussmann, a towering intellect, his work was everything; it was literally his pride and joy. He needed money as much as the next man and worked very hard indeed for his 50,000 francs a year and a pension of 20,000 francs—which in fact he was destined never to receive. People like Auguste de Morny may have thought Haussmann’s rigid integrity to be foolish, but like Louis Napoléon, he was one of the very few individuals Morny sincerely admired and held in the highest respect.
In any event, the wild fabricated accusations of corruption against Georges Haussmann were unexpectedly checked for the moment in 1860 when it was announced that the prefect’s daughter, Marie Henriette, was to wed the very wealthy Protestant Alsatian industrialist Camille Dolfuss. It was now revealed that, far from being a newly enriched public official, the baron could not even provide the full dowry expected under such circumstances. High officials of the municipality of Paris hurriedly got together and offered Haussmann a municipal award for services rendered, to help cover the dowry. Although moved by this well-meaning gesture, he rejected this generous, but clearly unacceptable, offer out of hand. Next Louis Napoléon summoned Haussmann; he, too, offered to pay all or part of the dowry. The sensitive, proud Georges Haussmann, who had reputedly fought a duel of honor in his youth, likewise declined Louis Napoléon’s offer. No one could know “the shame I felt in having to be offered this financial assistance,” Haussmann later wrote. His small dowry—never disclosed—had to suffice. Nevertheless, Louis Napoléon and Empress Eugénie did sign the wedding contract and attend the Protestant wedding in the Temple de L’Oratoire that June.25
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Even before the arrival of Haussmann in Paris, Louis Napoléon had been thinking about the creation of large parks and dozens of green “squares” with which to embellish a gray, drab Paris. Haussmann brought Alphand in to deal with the complicated engineering problems. Attempts to duplicate London’s Hyde Park’s beautiful Serpentine had to be altered, however, resulting in two lakes at two different levels. Meanwhile the Bois de Boulogne, a tract of land transferred by the state to the city of Paris in 1852, did indeed become the showpiece in which Louis Napoléon had put so much store, the park soon completed by the further acquisition of the Plaine de Longchamp. In fact, it was thanks to the intervention and considerable persuasion of Auguste de Morny that Louis Napoléon agreed to include this additional acreage, which Morny then arranged for the Jockey Club to lease on condition of creating France’s foremost racecourse, complete with extensive stabling. (The Champ de Mars, heretofore used for public races, could now revert to a thankful army for its parades and maneuvers.) Additional roads were built and extensive floral gardens and tens of thousands of trees were planted across the Bois de Boulogne’s 2,090 bucolic acres, reaching from the Porte Maillot all the way down to the banks of the Seine surrounding the Palais de St. Cloud. A pleased Louis Napoléon got his longed-for park, and Morny his racetrack—both brothers were content. Longchamp, of course, remains France’s premier racetrack to this day. In 1860, Haussmann next transferred the state-owned Bois de Vincennes to the municipality. In addition, much smaller parks were also created at Monceau, at the former Buttes Chaumont gravel pits, and at the Park of Montsouris along the southernmost limits of the city, today the home of the Cité Universitaire. Louis Napoléon’s dream of a green Paris was indeed fulfilled.26
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By 1867, after fourteen consecutive years, Haussmann was utterly exhausted, both physically and mentally, and requested a meeting at the Tuileries in order to tender his resignation. Louis Napoléon, who was in declining health and incapacitated much of the time, had just lost Morny two years earlier; he pleaded with Haussmann not to abandon him now. How many men could he really rely on, especially unusually talented, responsible, and honest men?
To Haussmann’s regret, he was to stay on, while the calumnies leveled against him continued to accumulate. By January 1870, Louis Napoléon, desperate to form a new liberal government under Émile Ollivier, reluctantly agreed to the new prime minister’s main condition of removing Haussmann from office. When the betrayed prefect now refused to stand down, Louis Napoléon fired him. Haussmann was shocked and deeply hurt and affronted. Years earlier the prefect had declined Louis Napoléon’s offer to provide dowries, ultimately for both of his daughters. When, however, Haussmann now did make one personal request, to have his grandfather’s title, as baron—bestowed originally by Napoléon I, restored and transferred to him for services rendered, Louis Napoléon declined. No reason has ever been given for this ungrateful act—but at least Louis Napoléon had made a duke out of the political hack and sergeant of dragoons, Gilbert Persigny.
By the time Haussmann stepped down in January 1870, he had overseen the demolition of 19,722 buildings, which had been replaced by some 43,777 new structures, all with running water and sanitary facilities. He had designed and overseen the construction of ninety-five kilometers of broad new gas-lit streets, including most of the great thoroughfares of the capital. Despite the mud-slinging and the fabricated allegations to the contrary, he had never taken a single bribe, nor had he speculated on or ever owned a single property destined to be condemned and expropriated, or indeed of any kind in Paris. Altogether he had overseen the expenditure of 2,553,668,424 francs (more than $32 billion), all of it properly accounted for to the last centime.
He had created an entirely new Paris, the envy of Europe, with a modern sewage system, fresh clean water supplies, gas lighting, handsome buildings, vast green public gardens, and tree-lined avenues.
All this was quickly forgotten after the collapse of the Second Empire, when Haussmann’s scheduled annual pension of 20,000 francs was suppressed, along with his senatorial stipend of 30,000 francs. Eventually he received a total of a mere 6,000 francs a year from the Third Republic, the same pension as a provincial prefect. If after four consecutive decades of service as a public official Georges-Eugène Haussmann did not leave office a rich man, at least he had his cello, and the knowledge of having bestowed the jewel of the Second Empire, the City of Light, on his and all future generations.27