I

C'est Haussmann qui a lancé Paris dans le tourbillon des grandes dépenses. Les villes ont imité Paris, les particuliers ont imité Paris.
Zola, Notes for La Curée

Haussmann launched Paris into the whirlwind of great expenses. Cities imitated Paris, individuals imitated Paris.

Haussmannization is used very loosely, to designate virtually every topographical alteration or social change that marked Paris during Haussmann's tenure as prefect of the Seine. The word itself has come to signify in shorthand any radical topographical modernization of any city. The verb appeared in 1892, and the substantive in 1926; each gave linguistic presence to a phenomenon that was recognized if not baptized by Haussmann's contemporaries. The uniform facades and long, straight avenues of the new city led Verlaine to complain about "the long boredom of your haussmanneries" (Sagesse, III, xix, 1880). Like any abstraction, haussmannization is an umbrella concept, with a variety and number of elements that can be crowded under its reach. For many observers haussmannization came to stand for everything that fit under the still more comprehensive category of urbanization, itself to be found under the most capacious classification of all—modernization. Haussmannization certainly partakes of these phenomena. But the enterprise of urban renewal on which Haussmann and others embarked in the nineteenth century is by no means equivalent to urbanization and still less to modernization. On the contrary, its advocates invariably present urban planning as an antidote to the chaos attendant upon urbanization. The model urban planner attempts to impose order on the disorder that is the inevitable consequence of dramatic social change.

Haussmannization has the further advantage of designating agency and therefore assigning responsibility for otherwise incomprehensible large-scale social phenomena. Individuals, discrete actions, and particular circumstances render the vagaries, the complexities, and the conundrums of social change more comprehensible. At the same time, attribution to an individual of that which reaches well beyond the scope of any individual risks the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Why, as well, should one speak of "haussmannization" instead of

"napoleonization"? Why should one focus on Haussmann, the administrator, rather than on the emperor, the individual most responsible for the transformation of Paris? Napoléon III dismissed Berger, Haussmann's predecessor as prefect of the Seine, because he seemed incapable of executing the grandiose plans that the emperor had for Paris. Haussmann recounts in his Mémoires that, on his first day in office, Napoléon III presented him with a map marked in red for the new streets to be constructed. To be sure Haussmann added much, and the water supply and sewer systems were understandably his special pride. (He lamented in his Mémoires that his sewer systems went unappreciated because unseen.)

The focus on any one individual, prefect or emperor, is probably misguided. Urban renewal did not commence with Haussmann or the Second Empire. It was the Second Republic that began work on the rue de Rivoli, and earlier prefects, such as Chabrol under the Restoration and Rambuteau during the early part of the July Monarchy, had sought to modernize the city.^[2] Then too, the remodeling of Paris undertaken by Napoléon III and Haussmann fits within the tradition of urban planning that began in the Renaissance and was realized in a number of eighteenth-century cities (including Bordeaux, where Haussmann spent several years as prefect). But where Versailles, for example, was built entirely according to plan from almost the very beginning, the nineteenth-century city had to dislodge centuries of the old before it could install the new.

Every attempt to redo a city is fraught with both anxiety and adventure. Descartes' scorn for the patently irrational layout of the medieval city carried an assumption of potential mastery. Utopian notions of a rationally organized urban environment made that assumption explicit throughout the Enlightenment. There is more than a little justification in reading the reworking of nineteenthcentury Paris as an amazing, and ultimately futile, attempt to impose Cartesian France on the unruly France of the romantics and the Revolution.^[3] Such an ambitious enterprise had to fall short, for these visions of a reconfigured Paris demanded actual control over urban phenomena that seemed to elude human authority. But in every instance, the dream of definition also raised the specter of meaning lost in complexity, confusion, and change.

The program for the new, modernized Paris of the Second Empire differed from urban renewal plans elsewhere in the self-confidence and the practicality that lay behind the dream of definition. The age of Haussmann trusted its ability to adapt an old urban infrastructure to new demands upon space and authority. Then it did so. In imposing a new order on itself, Paris after 1850 stood out in the scope, in the centralized execution, and in the identification with a single figure that lay behind the enterprise of change. Compared to Haussmann, predecessors and successors in urban planning were timid—both in Paris and elsewhere. Of course, they also lacked the unconditional support to meet pressing new demands that Napoléon III gave his prefect.^[4] Like the seal itself, Haussmann's plans tied the city to both past and future in a consciousness of overall grandiosity. The majestic spaces and broad avenues belong to a long tradition of urban planning. Haussmann's politics of nomination were calculatedly familiar in pushing his own agenda. The empire made sure to mark urban space, new and old, as its own. Just as the ancien régime named the new streets of the new Quartier Dauphine after members of the royal family, the empire baptized the splendid new boulevards with the names of the imperial family: 1854, only a year after Haussmann's appointment, saw the opening of the avenue de l'Impératrice (currently the avenue Foch), the avenue Joséphine for Napoléon III's grandmother (now the avenue Marceau), the avenue de la Reine-Hortense for his mother (avenue Hoche), and the avenue du Prince-Jérôme for his cousin (avenue MacMahon); 1857 celebrated the birth of the imperial prince the year before with the boulevard Prince-Eugène (boulevard Voltaire); and 1858 gave the boulevard along the right bank of the Seine to the emperor (now the avenues Henri-Martin, Georges-Mandel, du Président-Wilson). With the exception of the avenue du Prince-Eugène, all of these new streets lead either to the Arc de Triomphe or to the imperial playground, the Bois de Boulogne. In 1857, as Haussmann recounts it, instead of the title of duke that he did not want, the emperor accorded Haussmann the even greater consideration of his own boulevard (which crosses the site where he was born).

Contemporaries quite naturally experienced these changes as inescapable dislocation. If Descartes despaired over the jumble of the premodern city, small as it was, how much more disorderly, how much

more distressing, was the European capital of 1850 that had doubled its population in only fifty years. Or the city of 1860 that had incorporated the immediate suburbs into the city proper, doubling its area, increasing its population by one-third, and moving from the twelve arrondissements or administrative subdivisions that it had maintained since the early eighteenth century to the twenty that Paris has still today. By 1870 great numbers of apartment buildings had been torn down and replaced, and broad new thoroughfares like the boulevard Saint-Germain in the Latin Quarter had cut through the labyrinth of criss-crossing, narrow, crooked streets of old Paris. The confident discourse of placement so prominent in the works of the July Monarchy soon gave way to a discourse of displacement. Balzac's intensely creative and authoritative flâneur turned into Flaubert's bewildered artist and failed revolutionary who wanders the city with no more than idle thoughts about making it his own. If Baudelaire's flâneur was a successful artist, he was ambivalent about the city that supplied the very conditions of his creativity. This ambivalence within dislocation was a constant theme. The sense of the city as the site of the pathology of modern life was not born in Paris or in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it was there and then that the city became indissolubly associated with a pathological state.

The sense of dislocation focused on the transformations engineered by Haussmann. Not that the dislocation began or ended with the empire. From the beginning of the Arc du Carrousel in 1806 to the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, Paris added monuments. The destruction of medieval Paris began early in the century. Napoleon determined to complete the Louvre early on in the First Empire and initiated numerous building projects in central Paris. One of the sites that the original Flâneur, M. Bonhomme, took in on his daily rounds was the Arc de Triomphe. But if construction on the monument began in 1806, shortly after the resounding victory over the Prussians at Austerlitz, it was not inaugurated until 1836, two regimes and thirty years after the scaffolding first went up.

Given the time that these many projects took to complete, many Parisians were well aware that they were witnessing the end of one world and the birth of another. In a note that he added to the definitive edition of Notre-Dame de Paris in 1832, Victor Hugo protested vehemently against the "vandalism" that deprived the city of many

of its most admirable medieval and renaissance buildings. A decade later, in 1844, Balzac evoked the end of the old central market. It would thereafter exist only in the work of those novelists "courageous enough to describe faithfully the last vestiges of the architecture of our forefathers."^[5] Two years later in La Cousine Bette, and at a length that is exceptional even for him, Balzac painted a somber picture of the insalubrious and dangerous quarter surrounding the Louvre (where the glass pyramid of the Grand Louvre stands today). "Our nephews, ' he noted, "who will undoubtedly see the Louvre finished, will refuse to believe" that such a shameful, "barbarous" place actually existed in the heart of Paris, right under the windows of the royal palace (7:99).^[6]

Balzac was right. His "nephews" did see the completion of the Louvre. The quartier that Balzac portrayed in such vivid detail disappeared without a trace, swallowed up by the magnificent rue de Rivoli in Haussmann's vast urban enterprise. At midcentury the pace and scope of urban transformation accelerated perceptibly. Demolition was not confined to one area; it occurred everywhere and over almost the entire city. Destruction and construction dominated experience of the city as never before.

So strong was the sense of a new city that Émile de Labédollière entitled his history-cum-guide book of 1860 Le Nouveau Paris. Yet another work on Paris? The author answered his own question by insisting on the absolute necessity of this one: "Paris is transfigured." Much has been done, but—and here the present tense is especially striking—"great highways are opening every day."^[7] The detailed maps of every arrondissement that accompanied each section of Le Nouveau Paris used dotted lines to indicate projected new streets. Labédollière equated all of this construction with progress. The frontispiece of Le Nouveau Paris shows the towers of medieval Paris being carted away to the cheers of the workers standing by.

Others, predictably, were more reticent. The clearing of the area around the Arc du Carrousel preparatory to the completion of the Louvre moved Baudelaire to a poignant portrayal of exile. In one of his most celebrated poems, "Le Cygne" (1860), the poet mourned that "old Paris is no more (the form of a city, alas, changes faster than the human heart)." The swan that he later remembered had escaped from its cage in search of water. Flopping about miserably in the dust, the awkward bird presents the very image of exile, just as

 Plate 12. 
Frontispiece by Gustave Doré to Émile de Labédollière,
 Le Nouveau Paris  (1860). Gustave Doré's engraving 
shows old Paris being carted away past a crowd of 
cheering workers. Meanwhile, the devil looks on from 
above at the latest transformations of the city. His gaze 
focuses on the map of the new Paris held in place by the 
bespectacled author. (Photography courtesy of the Houghton 
Library, Harvard University.)

the building blocks and the debris lying about are so many signs of rupture with the past. In this poem dedicated to Victor Hugo (who had recently refused to accept the amnesty that would permit him to return from exile) the newly completed Louvre reminds Baudelaire of the disconsolate bird and "anyone who has lost that which can never be recovered."^[8] However divergent their interests and their goals, both Labédollière and Baudelaire, writing in the same year, translated the drama of haussmannization. That drama of urban transformation was all the more intense, and haussmannization all the more disruptive, because they were part of the larger, still more intense drama of the economic and social transformations of the Second Empire. A "whole new society," as Jules Vallès later put it in Le Tableau de Paris, "jumped onto the stage." Paris of the Second Empire was at once product and producer of haussmannization. Like many of his contemporaries, Vallès denounced this society and criticized the Second Empire for its authoritarian government, dissolute social elite, and corrupt politics. It was the coup d'état of 2 December 1851, from which the empire emerged a year later, that prompted Marx (in the opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon ) to make the celebrated observation that when history repeats itself, the first time is tragedy, the second is farce. For other critics as well, of almost every persuasion, although for different reasons, the Second Empire labored under the great disadvantage of not being the First. Victor Hugo never tired of pointing out that Napoléon the Little was not Napoléon, whatever the apparent lineage.

The discourse of haussmannization participated in a more comprehensive discourse of the Second Empire and in the transformations of French society encouraged by the government. (The Second Empire is generally identified as the "take-off" period for the modern French economy.) In a regime with minimal parliamentary politics and where the censors were ever vigilant, criticism was likely to be indirect. So much is true of any authoritarian regime. Haussmann, in the context, was an ideal target of indirection. Haussmann and haussmannization could be attacked, criticized, or simply discussed in terms distanced from but obviously related to the emperor and his regime. In a very short time, haussmannization became a recognizable metaphor for the Second Empire itself.