During the mid-19th century when Napoleon III established the Second Empire, Paris became a glamorous city of tall, imposing buildings. Many homes were embellished with details such as paired columns and elaborate wrought iron cresting appeared along rooftops. But the most striking feature borrowed from this period is the steep, boxy mansard roof. You can recognize a mansard roof by its trapezoid shape. Unlike a triangular gable, a mansard roof is almost vertical until the very top, when it abruptly flattens. This singular roofline creates a sense of majesty, and also allows more usable living space in the attic. In the United States, Second Empire is a Victorian style. However, you can also find the practical and the decidedly French mansard roof on many contemporary homes.
Haussmann’s renovation of Paris was a vast public works program commissioned by Emperor Napoléon III and directed by his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, between 1853 and 1870. It included the demolition of medieval neighborhoods that were deemed overcrowded and unhealthy by officials at the time; the building of wide avenues; new parks and squares; the annexation of the suburbs surrounding Paris; and the construction of new sewers, fountains and aqueducts. Haussmann’s work was met with fierce opposition, and he was finally dismissed by Napoleon III in 1870; but work on his projects continued until 1927. The street plan and distinctive appearance of the center of Paris today is largely the result of Haussmann’s renovation.
The architecture of Haussmann’s Paris
Napoleon III and Haussmann commissioned a wide variety of architecture, some of it traditional, some of it very innovative, like the glass and iron pavilions of Les Halles; and some of it, such as the Opéra Garnier, commissioned by Napoleon III, designed by Charles Garnier but not finished until 1875, is difficult to classify. Many of the buildings were designed by the city architect, Gabriel Davioud, who designed everything from city halls and theaters to park benches and kiosks.
His architectural projects included:
The construction of two new railroad stations, the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est; and the rebuilding of the Gare de Lyon.
Six new mairies, or town halls, for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th and 12th arrondissements, and the enlargement of the other mairies.
The reconstruction of Les Halles, the central market, replacing the old market buildings with large glass and iron pavilions, designed by Victor Baltard. In addition, Haussmann built a new market in the neighborhood of the Temple, the Marché Saint-Honoré; the Marché de l’Europe in the 8th arrondissement; the Marché Saint-Quentin in the 10th arrondissement; the Marché de Belleville in the 20th; the Marché des Batignolles in the 17th; the Marché Saint-Didier and Marché d’Auteuil in the 16th; the Marché de Necker in the 15th; the Marché de Montrouge in the 14th; the Marché de Place d’Italie in the 13th; the Marché Saint-Maur-Popincourt in the 11th.
The Paris Opera (now Palais Garnier), begun under Napoleon III and finished in 1875; and five new theaters; the Châtelet and Théâtre Lyrique on the Place du Châtelet; the Gaîté, Vaudeville and Panorama.
Five lycées were renovated, and in each of the eighty neighborhoods Haussmann established one municipal school for boys and one for girls, in addition to the large network of schools run by the Catholic church.
The reconstruction and enlargement of the city’s oldest hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris on the Île-de-la-Cité.
The completion of the last wing of the Louvre, and the opening up of the Place du Carousel and the Place du Palais-Royal by the demolition of several old streets.
The building of the first railroad bridge across the Seine; originally called the Pont Napoleon III, now called simply the Pont National.
Since 1801, under Napoleon I, the French government was responsible for the building and maintenance of churches. Haussmann built, renovated or purchased nineteen churches. New churches included the Saint-Augustin, the Eglise Saint-Vincent de Paul, the Eglise de la Trinité. He bought six churches which had been purchased by private individuals during the French Revolution. Haussmann built or renovated five temples and built two new synagogues, on rue des Tournelles and rue de la Victoire.
Besides building churches, theaters and other public buildings, Haussmann paid attention to the details of the architecture along the street; his city architect, Gabriel Davioud, designed garden fences, kiosks, shelters for visitors to the parks, public toilets, and dozens of other small but important structures.
The hexagonal Parisian street advertising column (French: Colonne Morris), introduced by Haussmann
A kiosk for a street merchant on Square des Arts et Metiers (1865).
The pavilions of Les Halles, the great iron and glass central market designed by Victor Baltard (1870). The market was demolished in the 1970s, but one original hall was moved to Nogent-sur-Marne, where it can be seen today.
The Church of Saint Augustin (1860–1871), built by the same architect as the markets of Les Halles, Victor Baltard, looked traditional on the outside but had a revolutionary iron frame on the inside.
The Fontaine Saint-Michel (1858–1860), designed by Gabriel Davioud, marked the beginning of Boulevard Saint-Michel.
The Théâtre de la Ville, one of two matching theaters, designed by Gabriel Davioud, which Haussmann had constructed at the Place du Chatelet, the meeting point of his north-south and east-west boulevards.
The Hotel-Dieu de Paris, the oldest hospital in Paris, next to the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité, was enlarged and rebuilt by Haussmann beginning in 1864, and finished in 1876. It replaced several of the narrow, winding streets of the old medieval city.
The Prefecture de Police (shown here), the new Palais de Justice and the Tribunal de Commerce took the place of a dense web of medieval streets on the western part of the Île de la Cité.
The Gare du Nord railway station (1861–64). Napoleon III and Haussmann saw the railway stations as the new gates of Paris, and built monumental new stations.
The new mairie, or town hall, of the 12th arrondissement. Haussmann built new city halls for six of the original twelve arrondissements, and enlarged the other six.
Haussmann reconstructed The Pont Saint-Michel connecting the Île-de-la-Cité to the left bank. It still bears the initial N of Napoléon III.
The first railroad bridge across the Seine (1852–53), originally called the Pont Napoleon III, now called simply the Pont National.
A chalet de nécessité, or public toilet, with a facade sculpted by Emile Guadrier, built near the Champs Elysees. (1865).
The Haussmann building
The most famous and recognizable feature of Haussmann’s renovation of Paris are the Haussmann apartment buildings which line the boulevards of Paris. Street blocks were designed as homogeneous architectural wholes. He treated buildings not as independent structures, but as pieces of a unified urban landscape.
In 18th-century Paris, buildings were usually narrow (often only six meters wide); deep (sometimes forty meters) and tall—as many as five or six stories. The ground floor usually contained a shop, and the shopkeeper lived in the rooms above the shop. The upper floors were occupied by families; the top floor, under the roof, was originally a storage place, but under the pressure of the growing population, was usually turned into a low-cost residence. In the early 19th century, before Haussmann, the height of buildings was strictly limited to 22.41 meters, or four floors above the ground floor. The city also began to see a demographic shift; wealthier families began moving to the western neighborhoods, partly because there was more space, and partly because the prevailing winds carried the smoke from the new factories in Paris toward the east.
In Haussmann’s Paris, the streets became much wider, growing from an average of twelve meters wide to twenty-four meters, and in the new arrondissements, often to eighteen meters wide.
The interiors of the buildings were left to the owners of the buildings, but the façades were strictly regulated, to ensure that they were the same height, color, material, and general design, and were harmonious when all seen together.
The reconstruction of the rue de Rivoli was the model for the rest of the Paris boulevards. The new apartment buildings followed the same general plan:
ground floor and basement with thick, load-bearing walls, fronts usually parallel to the street. This was often occupied by shops or offices.
mezzanine or entresol intermediate level, with low ceilings; often also used by shops or offices.
second, piano nobile floor with a balcony. This floor, in the days before elevators were common, was the most desirable floor, and had the largest and best apartments.
third and fourth floors in the same style but with less elaborate stonework around the windows, sometimes lacking balconies.
fifth floor with a single, continuous, undecorated balcony.
mansard roof, angled at 45°, with garret rooms and dormer windows. Originally this floor was to be occupied by lower-income tenants, but with time and with higher rents it came to be occupied almost exclusively by the concierges and servants of the people in the apartments below.
The Haussmann façade was organized around horizontal lines that often continued from one building to the next: balconies and cornices were perfectly aligned without any noticeable alcoves or projections, at the risk of the uniformity of certain quarters. The rue de Rivoli served as a model for the entire network of new Parisian boulevards. For the building façades, the technological progress of stone sawing and (steam) transportation allowed the use of massive stone blocks instead of simple stone facing. The street-side result was a “monumental” effect that exempted buildings from a dependence on decoration; sculpture and other elaborate stonework would not become widespread until the end of the century.
Before Haussmann, most buildings in Paris were made of brick or wood and covered with plaster. Haussmann required that the buildings along the new boulevards be either built or faced with cut stone, usually the local cream-colored Lutetian limestone, which gave more harmony to the appearance of the boulevards. He also required, using a decree from 1852, that the facades of all buildings be regularly maintained, repainted, or cleaned, at least every ten years. under the threat of a fine of one hundred francs.
Stations Napoleon III and Haussmann punctuate the city with prestigious achievements. Charles Garnier built the Opera in an eclectic style and Gabriel Davioud designed two symmetrical theaters on the Place du Châtelet .
The Hôtel-Dieu , the Barracks de la Cité , which will become the Paris Police Prefecture and the Commercial Court replace the medieval quarters of Île de la Cité .
Each of the twenty new districts receives its town hall.
Stations
Haussmann had the Gare de Lyon built in 1855 by François-Alexis Cendrier and the Gare du Nord in 1865 by Jacques Hittorff .
He dreams of interconnecting the Parisian railway stations by rail but will be content to facilitate their access by connecting them with important axes.
From Gare de Lyon, rue de Lyon , boulevard Richard-Lenoir and boulevard de Magenta make it possible to reach Gare de l’Est . Two parallel axes, rue La Fayette and boulevard Haussmann, on the one hand, rue de Châteaudun and rue de Maubeuge, on the other, join the neighborhood of the Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord stations to that of the Saint-Germain station. Lazarus . On the left bank, therue de Rennes serves the Montparnasse station , then located at the current location of the Montparnasse tower .
Monuments
Napoleon III and Haussmann punctuate the city with prestigious achievements. Charles Garnier built the Opera in an eclectic style and Gabriel Davioud designed two symmetrical theaters on the Place du Châtelet .
The Hôtel-Dieu , the Barracks de la Cité , which will become the Paris Police Prefecture and the Commercial Court replace the medieval quarters of Île de la Cité .
Each of the twenty new districts receives its town hall.
They take care to inscribe these monuments in the city by providing vast perspectives. Thus the avenue of the Opera is thought to offer a grandiose setting to the building of Garnier, but this one found this avenue too narrow and had to raise its facade to fight against the heights become excessive of the buildings which surrounded it, while that the houses which prevented from contemplating, according to them, Notre-Dame leave room for a large forecourt.
In religion, the Second Empire saw the advent of St. Eugene Church (now Church Saint-Eugène-Sainte-Cécile ), the church of the Holy Trinity , of St. Ambrose Church and St. Augustine Church. The latter is remarkable for its very high vault without buttresses, made possible by the use of a metal frame, and its emblematic location at the crossroads of several major boulevards.
Modern public facilities
The renovation of Paris is global. Sanitation of housing implies better air circulation but also a better water supply and better disposal of waste.
In 1852, drinking water came mainly from the Ourcq . Steam engines also extract water from the Seine, whose hygiene is deplorable. Haussmann entrusts the engineer Belgrand with the realization of a new system of water supply of the capital, which will lead to the construction of 600 kilometers of aqueduct between 1865 and 1900. The first, that of the Dhuis , brings a water captured near Château-Thierry . These aqueducts dump their water in reservoirs located inside the capital. Inside the capital and next to the park Montsouris , then Belgrand erects the largest water reservoir in the world to receive water from the valve , thereservoir of Montsouris .
A second network, devoted to non-potable water, continues to draw water from the Ourcq and the Seine, used for cleaning the roads and watering green spaces.
The evacuation of wastewater and waste goes hand in hand with the supply of drinking water. Here again, it is the Second Empire which gives the decisive impetus to the modernization of the sewerage network of Paris . The law of 1852 requires the connection of buildings to the sewer when the street has one. The streets that do not have access will benefit from the installation of a sewer system entirely visitable: more than 340 kilometers of sewers were built under the direction of Belgrand between 1854 and 1870. The network is unitary: the waters of rain flow through the same gallery as wastewater. The sewers are no longer poured into the Seine in the middle of Paris but far downstream, in Asnières . To achieve this, an inverted siphon installed under the Alma bridge allows the pipelines of the left bank to pass their waters on the right bank.
These two networks, expanded and perfected over the following periods, are still in place today.
Napoleon III also reorganized the distribution of gas in Paris. In 1850, he awarded a concession to a single company, the Paris Gas Company, while maintaining price control. The consumption of lighting gas , a by-product of the transformation (pollutant) of coal into coke , which had made its appearance in Paris under the July Monarchy , increases significantly. The industrialist and chemist Payen writes:
“In fact, while in an interval of fourteen years, from 1848 to 1862, the population of Paris, including that of the annexed territory, had hardly increased by half, the consumption of gas was fivefold. In the presence of a similar progression, it’s time to notify because it can be provided that in no distant there would not be a single district of Paris absolutely immune to the fumes of these plants. ”
At the same time, Haussmann entrusts to Davioud the development of street furniture still widely present today on the sidewalks and gardens of the capital.
Green spaces
Green spaces are rare in Paris, a city that has always developed inside enclosures that, despite successive extensions, ended in corseting.
Seduced by the vast parks of London, Napoleon III entrusts the engineer Jean-Charles Alphand , future director of Works under the Republic, the creation of several parks and woods. The Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes line the city to the west and east. Within the walls of Thiers , the Buttes-Chaumont Park and Parc Montsouris offer walks to the inhabitants of the neighborhoods too far away from the large outdoor woods. The Parc Monceau , former property of the Orleans family, was partly zoned and built. Each neighborhood also receives small squares(about 80 squares for the 80 districts of Paris, the will being that any inhabitant of Paris can find a square within ten minutes walk of his home 25 ), while rows of trees line certain avenues ( it is estimated that 80,000 trees are planted in the streets of Paris during this period 25 ).
Balance sheet
Louis Lazare indicates that these works had removed 57 streets or passages, 2 227 houses thrown to the ground and more than 25 000 inhabitants, almost all workers, forced to abandon the center of the city were pushed towards the extremities. This displacement, which followed the progress of the works in the center of Paris, was a forced emigration . The majority of the population moved to the neighborhoods surrounding the former wall , mainly to the suburbs of the Temple , Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau 26 , but also in the suburbs mainly in the municipalities of Belleville , Ménilmontant ,Charonne , Ternes , Montrouge , Vaugirard and Grenelle .
Impact
Haussmannian aesthetics: the “wall-street”
Haussmannism does not just draw streets and create equipment. He also works on the aesthetic aspect of private buildings.
The street front of the islet is designed as a homogeneous architectural ensemble. The building is not autonomous and must build a unified urban landscape with the other buildings on the new breakthrough. Nevertheless, the Haussmann island is always heterogeneous: only the parcels located on the new breakthrough are affected by the modernization, and the other parcels of the former islet are not destroyed, constructions of previous centuries coexist with new constructions, and, at random, inconstructible plots, sometimes reveal the backs of their courtyard constructions within the new alignments.
The regulations and easements imposed by the public authorities favor the establishment of a typology that brings to an end the classical evolution of the Parisian building towards the characteristic facade of the Haussmannian Paris:
ground floor and mezzanine with boss wall ;
second floor “noble” with one or two balconies; third and fourth floors in the same style but with less rich window frames;
fifth floor with spinning balcony, no decorations;
attic at 45 degrees.
The facade is organized around strong horizontal lines that often continue from one building to another: balconies , cornices , perfect alignment of the facades without withdrawals or major projections. The Rue de Rivoli model extends to all new Parisian roads, at the risk of a standardization of certain neighborhoods. On the facade, the progress of sawing and transport techniques makes it possible to use the cut stone in “large apparatus”, that is to say in the form of large blocks and not in simple veneer. The streets produce a monumental effect that exempts the buildings to resort to the decoration: the sculptures or casts will multiply only towards the end of the century.
Posterity of Haussmannism
Haussmannian transformations have improved the quality of life in the capital. Large epidemics , including cholera, are disappearing (but not tuberculosis), circulation is improved, new buildings are better built and more functional than old ones. But having intervened only punctually on the old districts, areas of insalubrity remain, which explains the resurgence of the hygienist ideas to the following century, then the radicality of some of the planners of the twentieth century.
The Second Empire has so marked the urban history of Paris that all later architectural and urbanistic currents will be forced to refer to it, either to adapt to it, to reject it, or even to try to take some elements .
The end of “pure” Haussmannism can be dated to the 1882 and 1884 bylaws , which break with the uniformity of the classic street by allowing projections and first fancies at the roof level, which will develop considerably after the 1902 settlement. However, it is still only a “post-Haussmannism”, which only rejects the austerity of the Napoleonic model without questioning the general layout of streets and islets.
After the Second World War , on the other hand, the new housing needs and the advent, a century after Napoleon III, of a new voluntarist power with the Fifth Gaullist Republic opened a new era of Parisian urbanism. This one almost completely rejects the Haussmann heritage in favor of Le Corbusier’s ideas by abandoning street alignment, the limitation of the size and the street itself, abandoned to the car in favor of pedestrian spaces on slabs . This new model is quickly challenged in the 1970s, which mark the beginning of a rediscovery of the Haussmannian heritage: the return to the multifunctional street is accompanied by a return to the limitation of the size and, in some districts, an attempt to recover the architectural homogeneity of Islets of the Second Empire.
Parisian public opinion today has a positive view of the Haussmann heritage, to the point that some suburban cities, such as Issy-les-Moulineaux or Puteaux , are building neighborhoods that claim it up to in their name (“Haussmann Quarter”). These districts are in fact imitations of post-Haussmann architecture of the early xx th century with its arched windows and loggias .
Haussmann had the Gare de Lyon built in 1855 by François-Alexis Cendrier and the Gare du Nord in 1865 by Jacques Hittorff .
He dreams of interconnecting the Parisian railway stations by rail but will be content to facilitate their access by connecting them with important axes.
From Gare de Lyon, rue de Lyon , boulevard Richard-Lenoir and boulevard de Magenta make it possible to reach Gare de l’Est . Two parallel axes, rue La Fayette and boulevard Haussmann, on the one hand, rue de Châteaudun and rue de Maubeuge, on the other, join the neighborhood of the Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord stations to that of the Saint-Germain station. Lazarus . On the left bank, therue de Rennes serves the Montparnasse station , then located at the current location of the Montparnasse tower .
Source From Wikipedia