The Impact on Haussmanization David P. Jordan, "Haussmann and Haussmannisation: The Legacy for Paris." French Historical Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 87-92.       When Georges-Eugène Haussmann died (10 January 1891) he had been so long absent from public life that there was no recent picture to accompany his obituary. L’illustration doctored an old photograph, deepening the lines around eyes and mouth, taking some flesh off his cheeks, removing most of his hair, and changing his coat and cravat. The now melancholy, tired countenance of a vanished supremacy gazes sadly out at us.1      He had fallen from power more than twenty years earlier, reluctantly sacrificed by Napoléon III, who no more understood the financial legerdemain that brought his prefect down than did most of those closing in for the kill. Few regretted the departure of this harsh, arrogant, humorless, and utterly efficient administrator. His reputation was soon completely ruined by the debacle of Sedan, which engulfed the Second Empire in vituperation. But of all the significant figures of the age Haussmann created work that endured longer, even aged gracefully, and entered into the consciousness of the French in ways impossible to measure. The plan and to some extent the vision of Paris that all who live there or have spent time in residence there carry in their minds is the city he made. There is a nice irony in the fact that the Boulevard Haussmann—there was a rancorous debate in the Chamber of Deputies about thus honoring him—was the only major street cut, or rather completed, between 1920 and 1940.2 The city’s debt for his massive urban renewal was retired only in 1929.      Urban patterns persist, sometimes through centuries, and bind future generations. . . Haussmann’s work on Paris, I here argue, is similar. He fixed the shape, the itineraries, the architecture, and in part the culture of Paris in ways that have shown surprising vitality for more than a century. His successors have added onto his work without obliterating it. Even those who loathe Haussmann’s urban ideas and influence have found themselves enmeshed in his net. The Third Republic embraced and continued his work, despite official denials. The most radical proposals for transforming Paris anew, those of Le Corbusier, were in fact haussmannisme raised to another level. Throughout the twentieth century small but significant efforts were made to escape his conceptualization of the city, culminating in the De Gaulle and Pompidou years, when a new Paris lifted skyward. At ground level Haussmann’s streets endured, and so too did public attachment to his city under attack. . . .     The uniform look of the new city was created as much by the buildings lining the new, obsessively straight streets as by the streets themselves. The striking regularity of the typical Haussmann building—in the Beaux-Arts manner, its height fixed by decree depending on the width of the street, with balconies (their depth regulated) and ornamental ironwork—was achieved with surprisingly vague general regulations. On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, for example, ‘‘owners and their neighbors should arrange between themselves to have, in each construction îlot, the same height for each floor in order to continue the principal lines of the façades and to make the entire îlot a single architectural ensemble.’’ The architects of the day shared a common vocabulary and needed no additional coercion to produce a homogeneous cityscape.     Haussmann underlined the severe rectilinearity of the transformed city by planting rows of chestnut trees and, in the center of Paris, where the urban fabric was closely woven and he had little room to maneuver, by improvising, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes clumsily, to keep his neoclassical aesthetics intact. He created optical illusions by moving monuments (or building new ones) and occasionally erected an eccentric new building or monument to fill an irregular urban space or to complete a geometric pattern.     Haussmann’s percées [the process of cutting through existing blocks of buildings]imposed an enduring template on Paris and on an urban logic worked out in the quarter century after his fall. Paris was seen as the quintessential modern city at the end of the nineteenth century not because its buildings were technically advanced (mostly they were not), or because new patterns of urbanization had been developed (Haussmann’s ideas were traditional, neoclassical), or because Haussmann brought new levels of comfort to urban living (quite the contrary). His most unconventional and innovative ideas—moving the cemeteries out of the city, for example—were rejected. It was the newstreets, especially the boulevards, that were universally admired. Haussmann’s shortcomings as a city maker were perpetuated by virtually all the successive governments through the Third and Fourth Republics, indeed well into the 1960s. The scope of his transformations was enormous. . .     There were attempts to break the mold, many originating with young architects who felt muzzled by the inherited conventions. But the building codes and regulations, although precise and restrictive about ornamentation, were not crippling, and there was no widespread call for change until nearly the end of the century. Clients, always the bane of architects, were content. The building style developed in the 1850s and 1860s, fixed in city regulations and given the imprimatur of the Beaux-Arts curriculum and atelier system associated with good taste, modernity, and wealth, became the style of choice for those able to invest in the new city. Familiar façades, building materials, and predictable ornamentation proclaimed the social standing of the occupants. The ‘‘type haussmannien d’immeuble’’ [ the Haussmannian type of building] had become the very essence of a public building.