City of Light
The Making of Modern Paris
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A sparkling account of the nineteenth-century reinvention of Paris as the most beautiful, exciting city in the world
In 1853, French emperor Louis Napoleon inaugurated a vast and ambitious program of public works in Paris, directed by Georges-Eugè Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine. Haussmann transformed the old medieval city of squalid slums and disease-ridden alleyways into a "City of Light" characterized by wide boulevards, apartment blocks, parks, squares and public monuments, new rail stations and department stores, and a new system of public sanitation. City of Light charts this fifteen-year project of urban renewal which -- despite the interruptions of war, revolution, corruption, and bankruptcy -- set a template for nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban planning and created the enduring landscape of modern Paris now so famous around the globe.
Lively and engaging, City of Light is a book for anyone who wants to know how Paris became Paris.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Christiansen (Prima Donna: A History), a writer on the arts for the British Daily Telegraph, describes how, during the Second Empire period (1851 1871), Paris became a modern city known for its broad boulevards lined with five- or six-story apartment buildings, parks, and monuments. The city's population had grown rapidly, and "its oases of splendor, such as the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by a fetid wilderness of filth, stench, and crime." Almost single-handedly responsible for the city's transformation was Georges Eug ne Haussmann, a kind of mid-19th-century French Robert Moses. Christiansen portrays Haussmann as an arrogant but incorruptible workaholic who incorporated 12 surrounding villages into Paris, instantly increasing its population by a third, and he impressively tackled the herculean task of supplying the burgeoning city with an adequate water supply and sewage system. As with Moses, Haussmann's urban engineering often had a pernicious effect on the poor, who were "badly hit by the rise in rents and crowded... into the attics, basements, hallways, and stairways of buildings that Haussmann had yet to condemn." Yet for the middle and upper classes, the city became more spacious and beautiful, boasting such new, captivating structures as Charles Garnier's Op ra. This very readable volume is a valuable contribution to modern French and urban history.
