Abstract
The design of this book is, in every sense, attractive. Its illustrations alone are worth its price. And they serve to reinforce the celebratory thrust of Rupert Christiansen’s survey of the rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire. His compact volume does not shy away from grimmer realities at the end of this period, exemplified by ‘Paris’s Civil War’, the barricades of the Commune and the photographed corpses of its victims. There is, however, only a single example of the cramped alleyways which Haussmann, ‘preferring not to involve himself unnecessarily in the humanity of the streets’ (p. 49), had to destroy in order to transform the city into what it is, more or less, today, and that one picture has no sign of the poverty-stricken slum-dwellers forced out as a consequence. More striking are the colour plates of Garnier’s new opera-house (the ‘crowning architectural miracle’ of the régime (p. 74)) and the many images of the Parisian leisured classes enjoying what Christiansen calls the ‘Pleasures of the New Babylon’, itemized as ‘Sex and Shopping’ (pp. 93–111). This dimension of la fête impériale is a prequel to the author’s more extensively researched Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune (1994). He does make the point that, as a result of the massive clearance of the Île de la Cité, ‘thousands of defenceless working people were expelled to make room for two imposingly expansive government buildings’ (p. 57). But it remains difficult in this account to imagine the alienating experience of living in the heart of a city subject to years of radical reconfiguration in order to satisfy the ‘fastidious symmetry’ and ‘artfully calibrated perspectives’ (p. 56) of its planners. This is not a book for the specialist. Some of its assertions are problematic. To state, for example, that Haussmann himself was ‘incorruptible and unmoved by personal gain’ (p. 50) hardly squares with contemporary attacks on speculative property investments on behalf of Francine Cellier, his mistress between 1857 and 1869. Zola made a note of this in his preparation of La Curée (1871), the best-known fictional representation of the rebuilding of Paris, and yet curiously absent from Christiansen’s book. Perhaps because the novel’s uncompromising insights into the culture of greed is inseparable from the ‘reinvention’ of the city. Nor is there any sympathy for Baudelaire’s lamentations, in Le Cygne, that ‘le vieux Paris n’est plus’. He and Flaubert are dismissed as ‘aesthetic purists’ and ‘cynical reactionaries’ (p. 105). By contrast, the admiration for Haussmann, both personally and in respect of his gigantic project is unequivocal: forget a ‘contemptuous arrogance’ (p. 122) making him invulnerable to polemical objections to his vanity; what counts are his ‘phenomenal memory’ and ‘steely efficiency’ (p. 49); his ‘long-suffering’ wife was ‘mousey’ (p. 50) and his mistresses, after all, were merely ‘a nonentity in the corps de ballet and an operetta soprano’; with his ‘cool Olympian dignity’, it was ‘beneath him to refute such tittle-tattle’ (p. 118); and not much space is given to the serious critics of his irresponsible handling of public funds or the uniformity of his urban facades. Nor is this a book which conforms to academic discourse: Louis-Napoleon’s notorious promiscuity makes him ‘always one for the ladies’; his attempted coup in 1840 was ‘another hopeless flop’; his political platform was ‘a return to the good old days when Napoléon was a strong-armed ruler and France was Europe’s top-dog’ (pp. 26–7). But that is not to deny that, as an introduction to this truly historic moment in the development of the French capital, Christiansen’s book is an engaging read.