Further information on the walk from Concorde-Square to Opera-Garnier and to Grand-Magasin Lafayette and Le Printemps
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The Walk Opera-Garnier to Grand-Magasin Lafayette and Printemps Haussmann, with a detour to Place de la Concorde, is a stroll through central Paris. This is not the historic Paris of the Ile-de-la-Cité, but the business and arts district that developed with the remodeling of Paris by Préfet Haussmann and Napoleon III at the end of the 19th century.
The district we’re passing through is close to the Jardin des Tuileries and the Champs-Elysées, halfway between the Seine and the foot of the Montmartre hill. Landmarks include the Eglise de la Madeleine and, of course, the magnificent Opéra Garnier.
Paris before the works initiated by Napoleon III and supervised by Préfet Haussmann
The district you are visiting is the result of the work carried out by Préfet Haussmann between 1850 and around 1880. Before this, Paris was almost still a medieval city. Préfet Haussmann was certainly not the first to modernize Paris. This had been done timidly under King Henri IV (1608), then Louis XIV, in the 1780s (destruction of houses on the bridges), under Napoleon I, then in the 1830s, Préfet Rambuteau began work around the Hotel de Ville. But the scale of these modernizations had nothing in common with the Haussmannian works.
In 1834, the French social reformer Victor Considérant wrote: “Paris is an immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, plague and disease work in concert, where neither air nor sunlight penetrate. Paris is a bad place where plants wither and perish, where six out of every seven children die in a year. Two cholera epidemics ravaged the city in 1832 and 1848.
By 1850, the population density of the central Les Halles district, for example, was already approaching 100,000 people per square kilometer, in very precarious hygienic conditions. Under Haussmann, 20,000 houses were demolished and over 40,000 built between 1852 and 1870.
The walk Opera-Garnier to Grand-Magasin Lafayette an Bld Haussmann: at the heart of the upheavals generated by Préfet Haussmann’s urbanization work
In 1850, Napoleon III was determined to modernize Paris. Having lived in London from 1846 to 1848, he had seen a great capital with large parks and drainage systems, and a country transformed by the industrial revolution. He took up Rambuteau’s ideas from the 1830s, particularly sensitive to the problems of hygiene and sanitation. As a result, Haussmann’s work focused on housing, sewers, drinking water supply and distribution, transport and the city’s aesthetic appeal.
The gigantic works began with the levelling of mounds scattered throughout Paris. This was to ensure the continuity of the profile of the open thoroughfares. In this way, almost all of Paris was under construction for twenty-five years.
If posterity has retained the name of Préfet Haussmann, he was fortunately surrounded by competent engineers and architects. Architect Deschamps laid out the new thoroughfares and ensured compliance with building regulations. Gabriel Davioud designed the theaters on Place du Châtelet and the urban equipment (many of which are still in use). Charles Garnier builds the Opéra Gabriel (now Opéra Garnier). Hittorff was responsible for the Gare du Nord and Place de l’Etoile (du Général de Gaulle), and François-Alexis Cendrier for the Gare de Lyon.
Engineer Belgrand oversaw the entire new water supply and drainage system: 600 km of aqueducts and the world’s largest storage reservoir at Parc Montsouris, and 340 km of sewers that emptied far downstream into the Seine via a siphon under the Seine at Pont de l’Alma (still in use today).Gas (distribution and lighting) is entrusted to Compagnie Parisienne de gaz. Finally, Adolphe Alphand and gardener Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps take care of parks and plantations (Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, 80,000 trees on certain avenues, a square for each of Paris’s 80 districts, within ten minutes’ walk of every Parisian).
The Haussmann method
All this work was possible because the Empire’s administration relaxed the rules that had previously applied, saving a great deal of time and money. First, the State expropriated the owners of the land affected by the renovation plans. Then, the buildings were demolished and new thoroughfares were built, complete with water, gas and sewage systems.
Unlike Rambuteau, Haussmann had to resort to massive borrowing to raise the money needed for these operations, from 50 to 80 million francs a year. From 1858 onwards, the Caisse des travaux de Paris was the preferred financing tool. The State recouped the money borrowed by reselling the new land in the form of separate lots to developers, who were required to construct new buildings according to precise specifications. Under this system, twice as much money as the Paris municipal budget was spent on construction each year.
Préfet Haussmann also saw the big picture. When, 30 years earlier, Rambuteau had cut a major new thoroughfare through the center of the city, Parisians had been astonished by its width: 13 meters. Haussmann relegated Rue Rambuteau to the status of a secondary thoroughfare, with a network of new thoroughfares 20 and even 30 meters wide. Avenue Foch, which runs from Place Charles de Gaulle, was almost 120 meters wide, with its monumental counter-alleys.
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