Paris, Friday

Tomorrow with simple ceremony President Doumergue will formally open the full length of the Boulevard Haussmann as it was designed by the great town planner of the reign of Napoléon III. Thus it will have taken the boulevard just 70 years to cut its way across the older streets of Paris, for the first decree authorising the construction of the boulevard was signed in 1857.

Story of cities #12: Haussmann rips up Paris – and divides France to this day Read more

Eugène Georges Haussmann was the son of a journalist and the grandson of a member of the Convention which refused to vote for the death of Louis XVI. He was in 1852 appointed to the Préfecture of the Seine, when he was handed by Napoléon III a sketch-map of Paris showing the straight Roman-like roads of which the Emperor dreamed for his capital. The great town-planner, however, went about his work so whole-heartedly that he became known as the ‘Attila of expropriation,’ and his wholesale manner of carrying out his schemes aroused the enmity of not a few.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891), French civil servant and urban planner. Photograph: Alamy

Baron Haussmann, stricken with grief, retired to Corsica. In 1888, after his return to Paris, there was some talk of removing his name from the boulevard to which it had been given, but philosophically he replied: “Let them remove it. As long as Paris stands my name will remain graven on the stones of the city.”

In 1868 the boulevard stopped at the Rue Taitbout, where the war of 1870 caused it to remain stationary for nearly sixty years. The first wall to be felled in the completion of the last section was to have come down on October 14, 1914. Again war stopped the plans.

No account of the depreciation of the franc has been taken by the jury appointed to consider the claims of property owners whose houses and land have been expropriated, for the figure of 72 million francs fixed in 1914 amounts only to 74 million to-day, with the franc at 122 as against 25 to this pound in 1914.

The construction of the last section of the Boulevard Haussmann, which joins the Boulevard des Italiens at the Rue Drouot, is not a luxury but a necessity, for the congestion of traffic on the grands boulevards and the Place de l’Opéra is such that some way out had to be found. Moreover space has been left for the entrance to a large underground railway station giving admission to the line which will eventually follow the grands boulevards.