Since renamed Place Charles de Gaulle, l’Ètoile is every foreign driver’s nightmare experience: well, you try heading into fast and furious traffic coming at you from 12 directions simultaneously while attempting to negotiate, or fight, your way around Napoleon Bonaparte’s monumental victory arch.

Rip it up and start again

No other major city, before or since, has been transformed so radically during peacetime. It employed huge numbers of skilled and unskilled workers along with architects, engineers and landscape gardeners. It restored the city to health after long decades of cholera and typhus. It gave Parisians of all classes parks to play and relax in.

Theoretically, its broad avenues allowed government troops free movement to maintain public order at times of barricades, riots and other disturbances. And, at a time when the city doubled in size and its population trebled, it gave Paris a sense of unity together with an air of bourgeois prosperity.