CITY OF LIGHT

The Making of Modern Paris

By Rupert Christiansen

206 pp. Basic Books. $25.

Witty, learned and informative at lightning speed (the author does the Commune in about 16 pages), Rupert Christiansen’s “City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris” offers the fascinating story of a metamorphosis. The city of graceful spaciousness that we know today took shape during France’s glittering Second Empire (1852-70), an era of mind-boggling wealth and terrible destitution presided over by the man Karl Marx memorably called a “grotesque mediocrity”: the Emperor Louis Napoléon, Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew. To keep his grasp on power, this “second-grade dictator” (in Christiansen’s words) needed to take control of his country’s politically volatile, physically decaying capital.

Enter Georges-Eugène Haussmann, prefect of the Seine: Louis Napoléon’s very own Robert Moses.

Like his 20th-century New York City counterpart, Haussmann was a razer. He wiped out whole (poor) neighborhoods to make room for roads and bridges. He knocked down and excavated old Paris and replaced its medieval crannies and narrow twisting streets — so handy for throwing up barricades in insurrectionary moments— with broad rectilinear avenues arranged like the spokes of a wheel, to establish links between the Paris railway stations and promote the expansion of trade. His watchwords were commerce, efficiency and ventilation. Christiansen speculates that his “choking asthma … might go some way toward explaining his subsequent obsession with clearing blockages and opening up airflow.” But whatever the psychic roots of Haussmannization, its political aim was to make Paris “a smoothly functioning machine that could be controlled and surveyed, generating the maximum of profit for a contented affluent citizenry controlled by a ruling elite.”

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Along the sweeping new boulevards, five- and six-story apartment houses for the prosperous were built of “dressed and polished limestone from the quarries of the Oise,” their facades a filigree of ironwork. The “architectural miracle” of the Palais Garnier opera house rose like a soufflé at one splendid end of the Avenue de l’Opéra. The city’s cathedralesque department stores; its lovely public parks (the golden-gated Parc Monceau, the Buttes-Chaumont, the elaborately landscaped Bois de Boulogne); its new sewers, completed in 1867, whose “spacious tunnels had gaslit galleries that became a major tourist attraction, notably visited by both the czar of Russia and the king of Portugal” — all these “marvels of the new Babylon” were brought into being, in the emperor’s name, by Baron Haussmann. Whose career imploded, along with the whole Second Empire, in early 1870. That year, Louis Napoléon went seeking glory on the battlefield, only to be defeated and taken prisoner by the Prussians. There ensued political chaos, the siege of Paris, the Commune and the tragic massacre that ended it. For days, Paris burned.