



1 / 10 Chevron Chevron Place Saint-André-des-Arts. c. 1865. © Charles Marville Marville/Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.

The Paris we know is shaded white and gray, a city of zinc roofs and pale stone façades fitted with iron balconies and crosshatched with whitewashed shutters. Its parks are laced with gravel paths that leave your shoes coated in a fine chalky film. In the blue hour of middle evening, just after the sun has set but before the light has finished draining from the streets, the roofs glow blue, sometimes so intensely that the blank walls below pick up the color and reflect it, giving the city a submerged quality, as if it had sunk quietly to the ocean floor.

Aside from that phosphorescent flush, the work of a few intrepid graffitists, and the ghoulish green light projected by the electric crosses marking the entrances to pharmacies, most buildings are blank, the color of a wishbone picked dry and left out to bleach. Paris is serious about keeping its dignity austere. A law passed in the eighteen-eighties prevents anyone from posting anything on any building in the city under any circumstances. That’s why the startling thing about a photograph of the Place Saint-Andre des Arts, taken around 1865, isn’t the two covered wagons resting on wooden wheels in front of the building, or the horses hitched to them, but the building itself, which is covered in words: ads for carpenters, for leather, for wine, for a steam bath on Rue Monsieur le Prince and a humbler “water bath” on Rue Larrey. “MECHANICAL BEDS AND ARMCHAIRS FOR THE ILL AND WOUNDED,” reads the text above a fresco of a patient propped up with the help of one of the fabulous machines.

The picture was taken by Charles Marville, a photographer hired by Paris’s historic-works department in the late eighteen-fifties to capture before-and-after shots of the city as it was razed and rebuilt during the Second Empire. The first Bonaparte had chosen to remake all of Europe. His nephew, Louis-Napoleon—who returned from years of exile to become President of the Second Republic briefly before being crowned emperor, as Napoleon III—began by setting his sights on a single city. To mastermind his project, he chose Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a career bureaucrat and an early ally, giving him free reign to demolish, align, remodel, expand, and evict on a scale that still seems close to insane. A project of this magnitude needed documenting, not least for propaganda purposes. The camera, barely two decades old, was the obvious tool.

As the exhibition of his photographs at the Metropolitan Museum makes clear, Marville was the right man for the job. For starters, he was a local. His father was a tailor, his mother a laundress. He grew up on a cramped street near the Louvre that later vanished to make way for one of Haussmann’s imperial avenues. Like Baudelaire, his contemporary, Marville honed his eye on Paris; the city taught him to see. He knew its places and its people, but he had ambitions beyond the practical realm of his upbringing. If he had reservations about scrapping the last name he was born with, Bossu—the word means “hunchback”—he was cured of them by Victor Hugo, who published his novel about the bossu of Notre Dame in 1831, around the time that Marville chose his alias. He was eighteen, an art student at the Academie Suisse, and apparently not bothered by the idea of making a clean break with his family’s history. Marville understood tradition without getting too sentimental about it. You can hear some of the romantic eagerness of a self-made man in his chosen name, which sounds like a mashup of ma ville and merveille: Marville, my marvellous city.

It’s hard to fathom just how enormous an undertaking the remaking of Paris was. In the early eighteen-thirties, seven hundred and eighty-five thousand people lived there. By 1851, the year that Louis-Napoleon staged his coup, there were more than a million. (New York had half as many.) That number only grew as workers started flocking to the city once construction was under way. Paris had long been in bad shape, much of it a medieval warren of “cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want,” as Dickens put it in “A Tale of Two Cities.” Napoleon III didn’t come up with the idea of renovating the city; important projects had begun in the eighteen-thirties and forties. But he and Haussmann changed the scale of the operation by many orders of magnitude. Crumbling houses were extracted like so many rotting teeth, and replaced with Haussmann’s signature apartment buildings, with their tall windows to let in fresh air and sunshine. Narrow, filthy streets were razed to make way for wide boulevards—the better for the swelling bourgeois class to stroll along on a warm spring day, and for the military to roll its cannons down should an uprising need to be quashed.

Some of Marville’s photos capture the profoundly surreal quality of the transformation. Here is Boulevard Henri IV, at the eastern edge of the Marais, looking like a location for “There Will Be Blood”: just dirt and rubble under a flat sky, plus a couple of horses loitering in front of a lonely building that wouldn’t seem out of place in an abandoned frontier town. In the distance, at the Place de la Bastille, the tapered July Column could be a derrick gushing oil. The image is just as weird as anything Dali ever made. Here are the Carrières d’Amérique, the quarries in the newly incorporated Nineteenth Arrondissement, which were exploited, for their gypsum and millstone, to make new buildings in the city center. Broken-off railroad ties litter the ground in front of yawning ditches. It’s a desolate, scorched-earth kind of place. Today, the Buttes-Chaumont Park, one of the greenest spots in Paris, is there. Here are the barracks of the Fifth Arrondissement’s calf market, with its heavy wooden beams and stone pillars, abandoned because the emperor has decided, reasonably enough, that livestock shouldn’t hang out in the center of the city anymore. And here is Napoleon III’s pet project, the brand-new building of Les Halles market, light streaming through its glass roof. It’s exactly the structure the emperor had in mind when he demanded that his architects make him “umbrellas of iron”: modernity incarnate.

For the viewer accustomed to Paris’s relentless beauty, it’s easy to be fooled by what seems familiar in Marville’s pictures. Many of them capture a certain sheen on the cobblestones, like the one in the Ned Rorem song “Early in the Morning,” about a woman eating croissants at a cafe on Rue François-Premier (a Haussmannian street if ever there was one) while she waits for her lover to show up: “They were hosing the hot pavement / With a dash of flashing spray / And a smell of summer showers / When the dust is drenched away.”

The glisten caught by Marville’s camera is no flashing spray, however, but raw sewage, left festering on the cobblestones to splash up under carriage wheels and seep into the soft soles of shoes and the hemlines of dresses. Marville’s Paris was more Middle Ages than New Wave, and you can bet it didn’t smell like summer showers. In “Tableau de Paris,” his rollicking, pungent chronicle of the city in the late eighteenth century, the writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier describes the “cadaverous odor” emanating from churches full of decomposing bodies awaiting proper burial, and the putrid fosses d’aisances, indoor pits where a household’s excrement was collected. The air reeks constantly of shit, Mercier tells us. The pits are badly made, not to mention terribly maintained, and their contents run into neighboring wells used by bakers turning out their daily loaves: “Oh superb city! What foul horrors are hidden in your walls!” After cadavers stolen or bought by young surgeons eager for anatomy practice are hacked up, the discarded parts often wind up in the fosses—a dash of literal spleen to season Baudelaire’s metaphor.