T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Lif
The reader will have noticed how tempting it is to make this chapter out of nothing but the voices of the discontented. There were plenty of them: at times in the later 186os it seemed as if Haussmann had hardly a single friend, apart from the pamphleteers he paid and the editors of guidebooks, who are obliged to make the best of things. Haussmannization was unpopular in Paris: the defeat of the official slate in the city in the 1869 elections was bound up with that fact, as was the decisive no which Paris gave to the emperor's plebiscite of 1870: so too was the uprising against the empire on 4 September of the same year. Revenge on Haussmann could occasionally be sweet. An American called Sheppard described the scene in the western districts on 4 September [the date the 2nd Empire was overthrown] as follows: "The busts of the Emperor and Empress were thrown out of the windows of the houses in which they were found; and on one ladder I saw a well-dressed bourgeois [member of the middle class]effacing the street name of the Boulevard Haussmann, and substituting that of 'Victor Hugo.'” One month later, when the mob first invaded the Hotel de Ville, there was some of the same symbolism: ''Furniture is smashed. A splendid plan of Paris, drawn up by Haussmann's engineers and Napoleon's Haussmann, is cut to pieces by the vengeful Reds. They break into the chamber where the twenty mayors are in session. The mayors flee."
Time and again one is struck by the vehemence and diversity of and diversity of opposition to the new city: vengeful Reds and well-dressed bourgeois in temporary agreement as to what they had suffered at whose hands. It is often hard to make out what the agreement derived from: what was it exactly that so little endeared Baron Haussmann to his fellow citizens, and persuaded them that public works were the worst part of empire?
A Cartoon from the 2nd Empire: The Imperial Menagerie -- Haussmann, The Beaver Lucrative Activity)