T.J.  Clark,  The Painting of Modern Life

The Contemporary Case Against Haussmannization

The separate heads in the case against Haussmannization . . . can  be rehearsed  as follows. First, the business had been done  wastefully  and  dishonestly. The  empire was

in league with the  speculators and the Haute Banque, and the baron had used his power to sell off the richest shares in the new construction work to the brothers Pereire and their unloved Crédit Mobilier [a bank supported by the Second Empire]. Boulevards and railways were all one in the opposition's eyes: things built too quickly, whose profits went to a secret few, and whose appetite for capital distorted the whole industry of France. The argument was only sharpened by its distance from the truth:  in fact the profits of reconstruction had been spread quite wide, to the small proprietors grown rich on  compensation, to the landlords making their fortune from inflated rents, to the swarm of men who fattened on the process  of rebuilding and  found a way to make money out of its side effects. The sight of such fortunes being made enraged those  bourgeois who had not been richly expropriated or had somehow missed the chance to buy at the right  time.  What a howl went up in 1867 when the tinsmith from Fontanges, Lapeyre, was given the contract to demolish the pavilions of the Exposition Universelle [Universal Exposition – what we would call a world’s fair] and sell them off  for  scrap!  He had caught Haussmann's eye originally in  the auctions of rubbish from the slums; had been given key concessions: and when his son was married the baron had sent his card. It was all favours, kickbacks, and corruption, said  those  who  wanted  a part  of all three.

Second, the city that  resulted from this fever was supposed  to be regular, empty, and  boring. Haussmann had killed  the street and the quartier; he had  made instead "la CITE NEUTRE des peuples civilisés." [the neutral city of civilized peoples.] Once upon a time there had ''existed groups, neighbourhoods, districts,  traditions" but all of them had  passed  away.''  There was no more multiformity in Paris, no more surprise, no more  Paris inconnu [unknown Paris]. If the old  bohemian Privat d'Anglemont, the man who had  written the book of that name, could rise again from his  humble grave at  Montmartre, and ... indulge in one of those wild night-walks his spirit loved, he would lose his way at every  step: he would be bewildered indeed before the College de France, and streets and alleys and wastes, which once had the Clottre Saint-Jean de Latran for their centre. Here were the headquarters of wandering Bohemians, street singers and  conjurors, the  vicious and the criminal and the unfortunate, all  afflicted with the common curse of  poverty.  The Boulevards have  broken  through all.

''The straight line," need  one say it, "has  killed  the  picturesque, the  unexpected. The Rue de  Rivoli is a symbol; a new street, long, wide, cold,  frequented by men  as well dressed, affected, and  cold  as the street  itself.... There are no more  coats of many  colours, no more extravagant songs and extraordinary speeches. The open-air dentist, the strolling musicians, the ragpicker philosophers, the jugglers, the Northern Hercules, the hurdy-gurdy players, the sickly snake-swallowers, and the men with seals who said  "papa" -- they have all emigrated. The street  existed  only in Paris, and  the street  is dying...

Street Criers in the Old Paris (c1700)