Georges-Eugène Haussmann
gigatos | March 27, 2022
Summary
Georges Eugène Haussmann, commonly known as Baron Haussmann, born on March 27, 1809 in Paris and died on January 11, 1891 in the same city, was a senior French civil servant and politician.
Prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1870, he directed the transformations of Paris under the Second Empire by deepening the vast renovation plan established by the Simeon Commission, which aimed to continue the work begun by his predecessors at the Seine Prefecture, Rambuteau and Berger. The transformations were such that one speaks of “Haussmannian” buildings for the many buildings constructed along the wide avenues that were opened up in Paris under his leadership, the work carried out having given the old medieval Paris the face that we know today.
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Family and education
Georges Eugène Haussmann was born in Paris on March 27, 1809 at 53, rue du Faubourg-du-Roule, in the Beaujon district. He was the son of Nicolas-Valentin Haussmann (1787-1876), a Protestant, commissioner of wars and military steward of Napoleon I, and of Ève-Marie-Henriette-Caroline Dentzel. By his mother, he is the grandson of the general and deputy of the Convention Georges Frédéric Dentzel, baron d”Empire, and, by his father, the grandson of Nicolas Haussmann (1760-1846), deputy of the Legislative Assembly and of the Convention, administrator of the department of Seine-et-Oise, commissioner of the armies.
He studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris and then began a law degree while studying at the Paris Conservatory of Music.
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Career
On May 21, 1831, he was appointed secretary general of the Vienne prefecture, then, on June 15, 1832, sub-prefect of Yssingeaux (Haute-Loire). He was successively sub-prefect of Nérac in Lot-et-Garonne (October 9, 1832), of Saint-Girons in Ariège (February 19, 1840), of Blaye in Gironde (November 23, 1841), prefecture counsellor of Gironde (1848), then prefect of Var (January 24, 1849), of Yonne (May 15, 1850) and of Gironde (in November 1851).
While stationed in Nérac, he frequented the Bordeaux bourgeoisie, among whom he met Louise Octavie de Laharpe, a Protestant like himself (her father was a minister of the Reformed religion according to the marriage certificate), with whom he married on October 17, 1838 in Bordeaux. They had two daughters: Henriette, who married in 1860 Camille Dollfus, a politician, and Valentine, who married in 1865 the viscount Maurice Pernety, chief of staff of the prefect of the Seine, then, after his divorce (1891), Georges Renouard (1843-1897), son of Jules Renouard. He had another daughter, Eugénie (born in 1859), from his relationship with the actress Francine Cellier (1839-1891), and descendants.
Under Haussmann”s administration, Gironde works and projects were important. Numerous railroads were built as well as factories in Bègles. The defense works of the Pointe de Grave were finalized. On the social level, he set up a system of allowances for destitute mothers to help them raise their children and encouraged the establishment of charity offices. In Bordeaux, many roads were built, gas lighting and water supply were improved, notably through a project to build three monumental fountains.
Presented to Napoleon III by Victor de Persigny, Minister of the Interior, he became Prefect of the Seine on June 22, 1853, succeeding Jean-Jacques Berger, until January 1870. In 1857, he became senator and, twenty years later, deputy of Corsica.
On June 29, 1853, the emperor entrusted him with the mission of cleaning up and beautifying Paris.
In the middle of the 19th century, the historic center of Paris looked much the same as it did in the Middle Ages: the streets were still narrow, poorly lit and unhealthy.
During his exile in England (the reconstruction of the English capital after the great fire of 1666 had made this city a reference for hygiene and modern urbanism. The emperor wanted to make Paris a city as prestigious as London: this was the starting point of the new prefect”s action.
Haussmann wished to establish a policy that would facilitate the flow of people, goods, air and water, convinced by the hygienic theories inherited from the Enlightenment and which spread following the cholera epidemic of 1832. This campaign was entitled “Paris embellished, Paris enlarged, Paris sanitized”.
Another objective, politically less defended, was to prevent possible popular uprisings, which were frequent in Paris: after the Revolution of 1789, the people rose up in July 1830 and in June 1848. By demolishing and reorganizing the old center of Paris, Haussmann destructured the centers of protest: because they were scattered in the new districts, it was more difficult for the working class to organize an insurrection.
Furthermore, Haussmann wrote to Napoleon III that it was necessary to “accept in a fair measure the high cost of rents and food as a useful auxiliary to defend Paris against the invasion of workers from the provinces.”
Haussmann was obsessed with the straight line, what was called the “cult of the axis” in the 19th century; to achieve this, he was ready to amputate green spaces such as the Luxembourg garden, but also to demolish certain buildings such as the Innocents market or the church of Saint-Benoît-le-Bétourné.
In eighteen years, boulevards and avenues were built from the Place du Trône (now the Place de la Nation) to the Place de l”Étoile, from the Gare de l”Est to the Observatoire. The Champs-Élysées were developed.
In order to improve hygiene by improving air quality, following the recommendations of his predecessor, Prefect Rambuteau, he created a number of parks and gardens: a square was created in each of the eighty districts of Paris, as well as the Montsouris Park and the Buttes-Chaumont Park.
Other existing spaces were developed. Thus, the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne became popular places for walking. He also transformed the Place Saint-Michel and its fountain, whose dirtiness had marked him when he was a student, passing by on his way to the Law School.
Regulations imposed very strict standards for the size and layout of houses. The tenement building and the private mansion became the reference models. The buildings all look alike: it is the aesthetics of the rational.
In order to highlight the new or old monuments, he set up vast perspectives in the form of avenues or vast squares. The most representative example is the Place de lӃtoile, whose redevelopment was entrusted to Hittorff.
Haussmann also built or rebuilt bridges over the Seine as well as new churches, such as Saint-Augustin or the Trinity.
At the same time, with the engineer Belgrand, he created water supply systems and a modern sewage system, then launched the construction of theaters (Théâtre de la Ville and Théâtre du Châtelet), as well as two train stations (Gare de Lyon and Gare de l”Est). He had the slaughterhouses of La Villette built in order to close the existing slaughterhouses in the city.
In 1859, Haussmann decided to extend the city of Paris to the fortifications of the Thiers enclosure. Eleven communes bordering Paris were completely eliminated and their territories absorbed by the city entirely (Belleville, Grenelle, Vaugirard, La Villette) or in large part (Auteuil, Passy, Batignolles-Monceau, Bercy, La Chapelle, Charonne, Montmartre). The capital also annexed part of the territory of thirteen other communes included in the enclosure. At the same time, the Parc des Princes in Boulogne-Billancourt was developed as part of a vast real estate operation under the aegis of the Duke of Morny.
The transformation of the capital had a very high cost since Napoleon III subscribed a loan of 250 million gold francs in 1865, and another of 260 million francs in 1869 (a total of 25 billion euros in 2011). In addition to that, the merchant bank of Pereire invests 400 million francs until 1867 in bonds of delegation, created by an imperial decree of 1858. These delegation bonds were pledges on the value of the land acquired and then resold by the city: speculation thus helped the financing of Parisian works.
But beyond these gigantic works, Baron Haussmann is at the origin of the aesthetic homogeneity of the architecture of the buildings in Paris. Indeed, he imposed very strict construction standards on owners, encouraging the emergence of tenement buildings and the construction of private mansions.
Haussmann”s actions influenced the urban planning of several French cities during the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic. These include Rouen, where more than two hundred plots of land were expropriated for the creation of several new streets, Dijon, Angers, Lille, Toulouse, Avignon, Montpellier, Toulon, Lyon, Nîmes and finally Marseille, which is one of the cities whose physiognomy changed the most. The city of Algiers, then a French colony, was also profoundly redesigned at this time.
Outside France, several capitals – Brussels, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Stockholm – were inspired by his ideas, with the ambition of becoming a new Paris. Haussmannian principles also influenced Istanbul and Cairo. Bucharest has a district that breaks away from the old city called “Little Paris”.
His title of baron has been disputed. As he explains in his Memoirs, he used this title after his elevation to the Senate in 1857, by virtue of a decree of Napoleon I which granted this title to all senators, but this decree had fallen into disuse since the Restoration, stresses that Haussmann used this title by abusing the absence of male descendants of his maternal grandfather, Georges Frédéric, baron Dentzel, whose baronetcy granted in 1808 by Napoleon had fallen into disuse.
He would have refused, with a joke, the title of duke proposed by Napoleon III (see section “Around Baron Haussmann”).
His work was nonetheless contested because of the sacrifices it entailed; moreover, the methods employed were not burdened with democratic principles. The financial maneuvers were often speculative and dubious, which fed the story of Émile Zola in his novel La Curée.
Moreover, the speculative real estate bubble caused by his work, which had its counterpart in Berlin and Vienna, fed the financial bubble that ended with the crash of 1873.
The expropriation laws later led to numerous disputes and drove many small property owners out of business. At the same time, the new regulations imposed a high standard of construction, de facto excluding the less well-off classes of Parisian society.
This period of construction favored malaria in Paris because of the important and long-lasting earthworks. Puddles, puddles and other stagnant water sources remained for a long time, generating a pullulation of anopheles among a large concentration of people. In addition, a large number of workers came from infected regions and were carriers of plasmodium.
A part of the population expressed its discontent as well as its opposition to the government. In 1867, Haussmann was questioned by the deputy Ernest Picard. The stormy debates that Haussmann provoked in Parliament led to a stricter control of the works, which he had skilfully avoided until then.
In the same year, Jules Ferry wrote a brochure maliciously entitled “Les Comptes fantastiques d”Haussmann” (Haussmann”s fantastic accounts), in allusion to Hoffmann”s “Contes fantastiques” (fantastic tales): according to him, the haussmannization of Paris would have cost 1,500 million francs, which is far from the 500 million announced; he was also accused, wrongly, of personal enrichment.
Napoleon III offered Haussmann three times to join the government, as Minister of the Interior, Agriculture and Public Works, but the only title he was likely to accept was that of Minister of Paris, which the Emperor refused. However, from 1860, the prefect of the Seine attended the Council of Ministers.
Haussmann was dismissed by the cabinet of Emile Ollivier on January 5, 1870, a few months before the fall of Napoleon III. His successor was Henri Chevreau; nevertheless, Eugène Belgrand and especially Adolphe Alphand kept a preponderant role and continued his work.
After having retired for a few years to Cestas near Bordeaux, Haussmann returned to public life by being elected deputy in Corsica in 1877, against the outgoing deputy, Napoléon-Jérôme Bonaparte, with the support of the apostolic nuncio and of Cardinal Guibert, archbishop of Paris. He kept this mandate until 1881: he sat in the Bonapartist group of the “Appel au peuple”. He was removed from public life in 1885 and in 1890, he lost successively his elder daughter and his wife. He dedicated the end of his life to the writing of his Memoirs (1890-1891), an important document for the history of urban planning in Paris.
Haussmann, who died on January 11, 1891, is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
“Of the Dhuis? But, duke, that would not be enough – What do you want to be? Prince? – No; but I would have to be an aqueduct, and this title does not appear in the nobility nomenclature.
Also read, biographies – Democritus
External links
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