“The old Paris is passing.”

Welcome back to The Land of Desire, a French history podcast dedicated to exploring all the weird adventures, mysteries and surprising backstories behind French cultural icons. This week’s episode marks the beginning of a series I’m really excited about: La Belle Époque, the Golden Age of Paris. In the years following the destruction of the city by city planners, invading armies and local uprisings, Paris became more wondrous than ever before. By the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was the cultural capital of the world, and the most famous icons of French culture were coming into being. This week, we’ll start from the ground up, literally, as we explore Paris’s great makeover at the hands of Baron Haussmann, transforming from a crumbling medieval city to a world-class metropolis.

Episode 4: “La Belle Époque: A Tale of Two Cities”

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“He undertook to make Paris a magnificent city and he completely succeeded…we only wish one thing today: that we complete through liberty what was started by despotism.” – Jules Simon, on Baron Haussmann

Transcript

Bienvenue, and welcome back to The Land of Desire, a podcast about the weird, wacky and wonderful stories from French history. Today’s episode kicks off an entire series about the Golden Age of Paris, from the 1870s to the 20th century, when medieval Paris gave way to modern Paris, and the cultural icons we associate with the city were born. To begin, we’ll tackle the most literal evidence of these changes: the dramatic facelift Paris underwent from an ancient medieval city to a modern metropolis. Please enjoy “A Tale of Two Cities: The Death and Life of Paris”

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“The sewer is the conscience of the city. All things converge into it and are confronted with one another. In this lurid place there is darkness, but there are no secrets.…All the uncleanliness of civilization, once it is out of service, falls into this pit of truth, where the immense slippage is brought to an end…Here, no more false appearances…absolute nakedness…nothing more but what is, wearing the sinister face of what is ending.” – Les Miz

When Victor Hugo penned these words in his 1862 masterpiece, Les Miserables, he was living 270 miles from Paris, on the tiny island of Guernsey, having moved away from the city he loved so as to avoid watching its destruction. Hugo loved and revered medieval Paris: the old city, full of twisting turns and dark alleyways, narrow streets and, yes, stinking sewers. The rest of Europe was on a determined path towards modernization, yet Paris lagged behind: there was just too much going on! First, there was a king. Then, there was a revolution. Then, there was an emperor named Napoleon. Then, he was kicked out and there was another revolution which brought back a new king, related to the old one. Then, he was kicked out and there was another revolution which brought back a new emperor, related to the old one. In the midst of all this chaos, medieval Paris lingered on, crumbling from neglect. Victor Hugo himself had managed to rescue part of it, with the publication of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831. Notre Dame cathedral should have been a source of national pride, as the world’s best example of Gothic architecture, a home-grown French tradition. But the cathedral was falling apart. All of a sudden, with the success of Hugo’s book, Paris woke up and commissioned its greatest architects to restore the church. For a moment, Victor Hugo believed he had won, that he had convinced Paris that the medieval city was one worth saving. He was wrong. Just a few years later, Hugo’s beloved neighborhoods were slated for destruction to make room for a new, modern city and he couldn’t bear to watch: Hugo placed himself into self-imposed exile. By the time he returned in 1870, the city was unrecognizable, torn up by the emperor…but also torn up by the Parisians themselves. Today we’re examining a tale of two cities: the Old Paris and the New.

Victor Hugo may have loved the stinking sewers of medieval Paris, but many other Parisians were less romantic, with one writer asking, “This is the city that Mr. Hugo…wants to reestablish? Dark houses, passages without air, the sun nowhere, thieves in every street, hungry wolves at each city gate, anxiety everywhere.” In the crowded city center, the tiny squalid neighborhoods may have retained their medieval streets, but they also maintained medieval diseases. The year after The Hunchback of Notre Dame was published, the hospital next door to Notre Dame suddenly began receiving streams of desperately ill people. Cholera, a disease which usually results from contaminated water supplies, killed more than 7,000 people in just two weeks. One German poet attending a masquerade ball in Paris watched a guest collapse, his limbs cold, his face turning blue. As he wrote, “laughter died out, dancing ceased, and in a short while carriage-loads of people were hurried to the hospital to die…Soon the public halls were filled with dead bodies, sewed in sacks for want of coffins. Long lines of hearses stood en queue outside Pere Lachaise cementary…The rich gathered up their belongings and fled the town.” At its worst, cholera killed 50% of its victims. Those sewers of truth beloved by Victor Hugo were perfect breeding grounds of disease and after another cholera epidemic passed through in 1848, Parisians had lost any remaining fondness for their city’s ancient ways.

When Emperor Napoleon III assumed control of the country in 1851, he was determined to bring Paris into the modern age, whether citizens like Victor Hugo wanted it or not. Napoleon III was a man with a vision: clean sidewalks, working sewers, modern buildings and, above all, beautiful, wide, smooth roads. It was a massive project, the kind of civic dream that only an emperor could produce. Luckily, he had just the man for the job: Georges-Eugene Haussmann. Haussmann wasn’t an especially skilled urban planner or architect, but he was a marvelously effective civil servant. He was the guy who gets things done. I cannot stress enough how rare such a person was in 1850s Paris. Haussmann started right away. Since the order of the day was, “Go big or go home”, why not start in the middle of everything: time to rebuild the Rue de Rivoli, smack dab in the middle of the city. The construction work was insane: the old road was basically lopsided and had to be leveled out, they had to put the tower of St-Jacques on stilts to build up the ground below, and they even rebuilt one of the bridges. Three thousand laborers worked 24 hours a day. Naturally the budget spiraled out of control. And yet! When all was said and done, the new Rue de Rivoli made its debut on deadline – and it was beautiful. Better yet, it was useful – for the first time, there was a big, wide, level, straight road connecting the Louvre to City Hall. Perhaps most significantly, the Rue de Rivoli introduced Paris to the Haussmann apartment building. I promise you, you know exactly what this is: 7 or 8 stories high, with gleaming white limestone walls and wrought iron balconies. During the Second Empire, over 100,000 homes would be built. Parisians were delighted, and if anybody besides Victor Hugo missed the tiny medieval streets which had been swept away, they didn’t show it. With that initial victory under their belts, Napoleon III and Haussmann spent the next twenty years tearing up the heart of medieval Paris and putting up a gleaming modern city in its place.

We don’t have enough time to list all of the changes Haussmann accomplished: the squares, parks, boulevards, bridges, train stations, marketplaces, opera houses, schools, hospitals, churches, office buildings, the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe, connecting the Right and Left banks, and craziest of all, completely rebuilding the Ile de la Cité. Victor Hugo’s heart of the city was gone, replaced by gigantic government buildings and large parks. Under Haussmann’s watch, Paris added 85 miles of roads, 420 miles of sidewalks, 15,000 more streetlamps, and nearly doubled its number of trees. Basically, today it is nearly impossible to stand on a street corner in Paris and not see evidence of Haussmann’s works. If you want to escape Haussmann’s influence, you have to travel far away from the city center, to an area which wasn’t even part of Paris at all. But that was about to change.

On January 1, 1860, Napoleon III doubled the size of Paris. He did this by forcing 11 small villages on the outskirts of Paris to become part of Paris, and he did this because he wanted their tax dollars. The villages weren’t entirely pleased about this, but that’s the nice thing about being an emperor: you don’t need to care what other people think. In theory, that is.

The truth is, ten years into Haussmann’s projects, the cracks were beginning to show. Things had gone smoothly when it was just the poor neighborhoods being torn up – when Haussmann set his eye on improving the fancier neighborhoods of the Right Bank, all of a sudden, Parisians were shocked, shocked I tell you, to feel the weight of the emperor’s power on their beloved neighborhoods! Meanwhile, just because poor neighborhoods were being bulldozed doesn’t mean the poor people who lived there magically disappeared. Unable to afford to live in the swanky new buildings going up where their homes used to be, poor Parisians began moving into those newly annexed neighborhoods of Paris, especially Montmartre and Belleville. Yeah, these Parisians may have had new streetlights, but they may not have had heating. The fresh, modern Paris was starting to look like it was only available to the upper and middle classes. Worst of all, there was nothing they could do about it: Napoleon III was the emperor, and his word was the final word. Since it would be treason to speak against the emperor himself, Haussmann became the scapegoat of the empire and the personification of all of its problems: authoritarianism, class divides, shady corruption and disregard for the will of the people. And it is at this moment, with Paris up in scaffolding and a population ready to explode, that Emperor Napoleon III made a stupid mistake. Yes, I’m talking about launching the Franco-Prussian War, as described in episode 2.

As we discussed last time, Emperor Napoleon III’s surrender to the Prussians was met with a big “Heeeeellll no” back at the capital. The emperor was booted right out, and a new republican government rose up in its place. Unfortunately, this new government couldn’t do any better, so Paris found itself under Siege, eating the elephants and all that. If you can believe it, while the citizens of Paris were locked inside their city with nowhere to go, receiving no help from the rest of the country, losing faith in their government and their national army, they grew…restless.

Over at the negotiating table, the Prussians wanted everything: money, disarmament, and a parade through the town square. Disarming the people of Paris? Telling the guys back home that the government was comin’ for their guns? No way. In the end, the government settled for a compromise: we’ll disarm the army, but let the locals keep their guns. Yeah, you’re gonna wish you hadn’t done that. Nevertheless, the peace treaties were signed, and Paris was able to begin rebuilding itself. Many of Haussmann’s beautiful houses were destroyed by Prussian shells, all of the beautiful new trees were chopped down for firewood. Thousands of middle and upper class Parisians decided they’d had enough of the capital, and over 100,000 of them left for the countryside, leaving behind the working classes. Yes, the same working classes who spent the past twenty years getting kicked out of their homes, forced into the forgotten outskirts of the city, left to starve, humiliated by the army, who spent the past six months of hell becoming more and more radicalized. All the city needed was a lit match and it would explode. The French countryside was about to offer Paris a light.

The time had come for a proper election to replace the emergency government which had formed in response to the emperor’s defeat. The result were astounding: the French countryside had had enough of Paris and its politics, its progressivism, its secularism and its snobby superiority towards everybody else. Paris shouldn’t have been surprised that the countryside won big: over 80% of the nation’s population were farmers. But they were completely blindsided by the victory of so many Catholic, conservative winners, over half of whom were blatantly in favor of bringing back the monarchy. The new Assembly passed three incredibly stupid, incredibly insulting laws. First, all debts, which had been put on hold during the war, had to be paid within the next 48 hours. Next, all landlords could demand all the back rent which had been put on hold during the war, and they could demand it now. Finally, the local militias? Let’s not pay them any more wages. I can’t put it any better than the historian Alistair Horne, who says, “With these three unenlightened strokes a vast cross-section of Parisian society – the clerks and shopkeepers, artisans and minor officials, few of whom owned their own dwellings – now found themselves thrust into the same camp as the underprivileged proleteriat, whom they had hitherto despised and distrusted.” Boom. France blew itself up. Before the Parisians could even let these childish, devastating new laws sink in, it was time for that hold Parade O’ Prussians to take place. This final indignity was too much. Paris may have seemed quiet after the Prussians left, as they scrubbed the pavement to wash away any trace of the soldiers, but in truth, they were making plans.

The national government was ready to collect all of the cannons left over in Paris after the end of the Siege. These cannons had been paid for by fundraisers, and most of them owed their existence to the hard-earned money of the working classes. Understandably, the locals believed that the cannons belonged to them, not to the government. The locals told the army to buzz off, and dragged two hundred cannons all the way up to the top of Montmartre. For any of you who have climbed Montmartre carrying nothing heavier than a camera, take a moment to appreciate that. Since the army had been forced to disarm after the end of the Franco-Prussian war, the citizens of Paris with all of their guns and now two hundred cannons, was easily the most powerful armed force in all of France. Whoopsie! Within two weeks, militias had taken over the streets, the old government had fled Paris, and a new government had emerged: The Commune.

It’s hard to talk about the Commune, because it’s been coopted by socialist writers, as well as anti-socialist writers, to suit their own ends. The Commune had nothing to do with Communism. It did have to do with the fact that the glitzy, glamorous Paris of the 1850s was built by and yet off limits to the poor and the working class who made up most of the city’s population. The writer Edward de Goncourt overheard one Commune member ask, “What is it to me that there should be monuments, operas, cafe-concerts, where I have never set foot because I had no money?” So the Commune attracted those who felt left out of the new Paris, as well as those who resented being ruled by a bunch of country bumpkins. We don’t have time to go into the details of the Commune, but it was like the campus political group from hell: The Commune spent more time arguing over stupid b.s. than it did figuring out what kind of leadership it wanted to be. The Commune was too busy writing decrees about gambling, public urination, and, I swear to God, new laws about the Ham Market, to pay attention to their enemies.

There were a lot of enemies. Germany didn’t want a radical Parisian mob in charge any more than France did, so they quietly released the 400,000 French prisoners of war back into the country. Oh, and here are your guns back, as long as you use them on other French people and not us. Once the French National Army – that is, the old-fashioned, conservative, trained army – was reassembled, they began shelling the city indiscriminately. At this point, it was hard to figure out which side to root for. The Communards were running around making life hell, but the French government was dropping bombs on little old ladies and children, blowing churches to smithereens and destroying the very same fancy neighborhoods which would normally be on the side of the government. Perhaps they needn’t have tried so hard. In the end, defeat came because the Commune wasn’t even paying attention. For days, the French army had pummeled the weakest section of the city’s defenses, bombing and bombing until it was time to take on the guards and force their way into the city. When the army approached the defenses, they realized: there was nobody there. Somebody somewhere in the Commune’s militia had left the front door to Paris wide open. So the government walked back in. Remember all those cannons, which had made the Commune so threatening in the first place? They were still on the hill: dirty, unloaded, unassembled, completely forgotten about. While the army was busy scooping up forgotten cannons around the city, while Parisians were turning over omnibuses and streetcarts to build barricades in the streets, the Commune was busy deliberating over crucial, urgent matters like education reform and what to do with illegitimate children. The Commune didn’t stand a chance.

There’s a myth I want to address here for a moment: Emperor Napoleon III didn’t deliberately build wide streets to prevent the people from forming mobs and barricades. He did it because big, wide boulevards are beautiful, useful and efficient. With that said: those big new streets were really, really helpful for the army. It’s hard to build a barricade when a street is a million feet wide. It’s hard to hide a mob of people when there aren’t any dark alleys for them to disappear into. It’s hard to pull up the paving stones to form barricades and potholes when the streets are smooth and flat. As the army poured into the city, they took advantage of the new Paris, eventually pushing back the Communards into their home turf, those few remaining villages where guerilla warfare could still work: Montmartre and Belleville. The national army was taking no prisoners: Communards were shot on sight, old and young, male or female, and the bodies were piling up everywhere. The government was ruthless, and the citizens of Paris who weren’t joining in on the fighting were huddled up inside their homes, afraid of both sides equally. Since they knew they could expect no mercy from the government, the Communards stopped at nothing to survive. They lit the city on fire. Communards filled the Tuileries Palace with gunpowder until BOOM! The beautiful expensive new shops of the Rue de Rivoli filled with flames. Fires scorched the Palais-Royal, the Palais de Justice, the police stations, the Legion of Honor, the Ministry of Finance. Nothing was sacred, not even Victor Hugo’s beloved Notre Dame Cathedral, which was set to be blown up until a Communard pointed out that their own soldiers in the hospital next door might be killed. Finally, in the most symbolic moment of the fight, the Hotel de Ville itself burned down to the ground. Paris was burning, and a doctor recalled wandering into his backyard to see “a cloud of smoke over Paris…all around us fall from the skies, like black rain, little fragments of burnt paper; the records and the accounts of France.” While scholars argue back and forth about the number of dead, somewhere around 10,000 Parisians died during the Commune, more than the French Revolution’s entire Reign of Terror. As the smoke cleared, a shellshocked Paris asked: how do we rebuild?

The answer is: house by house. Before the battle was even over, a British man observed one industrious Frenchwoman sweeping the pavement and door clear of rubbish. Dead bodies were collected in wagons all over the city and buried in mass graves, in parks, in squares, or else burned in gigantic pyres which filled the air with the smell of burning flesh. Some of the dead were even left in the great craters which had been blasted into Haussmann’s new boulevards. Even now, as people walk down the grand boulevards of Paris, they pass over the bones of the Communards. Yet the cleanup of Paris wasn’t easy at first: an entire generation of house-painters, construction workers, and tile-layers were dead or in jail. For a generation, certain streets in Montmartre and Belleville appeared to be inhabited only by old women. While the women figured out how to rebuild a city, everyone else tried to figure out how to rebuild a nation.

When it comes to legislation, the Commune didn’t achieve much. It was only around for a few months, and those months were spent regulating the Ham market. But there was one critical legacy: after the Commune, there would no longer be any threat of a return to the monarchy. Regardless of whether people agreed with the Commune, the workers had made their point: the people cannot be ignored, they cannot be trampled over, and they cannot be oppressed without eventually erupting into violence. The Republic of France was here to stay.

[peaceful bird sounds]

In the years following the Commune, many of Haussmann’s construction buildings quietly restarted. The roads which were in progress gained sidewalks, the half-finished apartment buildings acquired roofs and and the parks in progress were finished. During those years, whenever workers began digging into the earth or bulldozing an ancient building to make way for the new, the same gentleman would appear at each site. His name was Theodore Vacquer, and he was the assistant curator for a brand new museum: the Musee Carnavalet, dedicated to the history of the city of Paris itself. Years ago, before the fall of the empire, before the Siege and the Commune, Napoleon III had authorized a project which caused special pain to Victor Hugo: the construction of a new Parisian sewer system. The medieval tunnels of Hugo’s memory were to be replaced by a network of sewer tunnels over 360 miles long! Digging these tunnels meant excavating under some of the oldest parts of the city, including the Ile de la Cité. Theodore Vacquer knew that a thousand years before Victor Hugo’s medieval Paris even existed, this area was home to the first Paris: an ancient Roman settlement named Lutetia. Vacquer was eager to fill his new museum with any ancient artifacts he could find, and it seemed as though every day a workman tripped over a 2,000 year old bit of history. The city of Lutetia had grown for three hundred years, adding public baths, arenas, and amphitheaters alongside its roads and homes and finally renaming itself Paris around the year 360 AD. Then, in the 9th century, Paris faced the original barbarians at the gates: the Vikings. The Parisians were under siege, surrounded by the Vikings, until finally their defenses collapsed. The early Parisians were forced to hand over enormous amounts of silver and gold to the Vikings before they would agree to leave. It was the end of ancient Paris, and it would take another 400 years before a new kind of city could take its place: a medieval Paris which would build bridges, new roads, and a beautiful cathedral: Notre Dame. The truth is, Victor Hugo’s Paris was just another version of the city, built on top of the ashes of the first. For the first time, Parisians were able to look deep into their own past, and see the ways in which the city had recovered, and rebuilt itself, time after time, over thousands of years. As the city recovered from the disruption, upheaval, and violence of the last forty years, many were unable to recognize the Paris they saw. As the writer Balzac wrote at the time, “The old Paris is passing.” What would the new Paris bring?

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In the weeks to come, we’re going to explore this new Paris. Rising out of the ashes of the Commune, Paris was about to enter its Golden Age. This is the Paris we think of today: gay Paris, the city of lights, filled with cafés and cabarets, Impressionist painters and ballerinas, fabulous food, even the Eiffel Tower. In my very unbiased opinion, it’s one of the most exciting times in the history of France, if not the world. Please join me again for the next episode, where we’ll begin taking a closer look at Belle Époque Paris.

Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. If you want to see photographs of old Paris, check out this week’s blog post at www.thelandofdesire.com Join me again in two weeks for a new episode and in the meantime, you can subscribe to this show on iTunes, Stitcher, and the Google Play store. The Land of Desire is written, researched and produced by Diana Stegall – that’s me! – so if you have a moment, please rate and review this show on iTunes, I promise I really appreciate it! That’s all for the next two weeks, so until then…au revoir!

 

Further Reading:

For incredible before-and-after shorts of Charles Marville’s Paris, check out Paris Marville!

Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (David P. Jordan, 1995)

The Other Paris (Luc Sante, 2015): I haven’t finished reading this, but when I do it’s going to start showing up a lot more often!

The Invention of Paris (Eric Hazan, 2011): An unromantic, fascinating history of Paris and her revolutions, street-level.

“In Praise of the Flâneur” (Bijan Stephen, The Paris Review, October 2013): If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the flâneur, this will get you caught up. Take a moment and consider what the Parisian identity would be like without sidewalks.

Sources:

The Fall of Paris: The Siege and The Commune 1870-71 (Alistair Horne, 1965)

Paris Reborn: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann and The Quest to Build A Modern City (Stephane Kirkland, 2013)

Dawn of the Belle Époque (Mary McAuliffe, 2014)