Haussmann interior design

Paris before haussmann
Georges eugène haussmann died
Haussmann architecture

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Story of cities #12: Haussmann rips up Paris – and divides France to this day

He was the Parisian who ripped up his home city; one of the most famous and controversial urban planners in history. Even now, 125 years after the death of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, France remains divided over whether the man who transformed Paris into the City of Light was truly a master planner – or an imperialist megalomaniac.

Internationally, Haussmann is celebrated for much that is loved about the French capital; notably those wide avenues flanked with imposing buildings of neatly dressed ashlar and intricate wrought iron balconies.

To his republican compatriots, however, Haussmann was an arrogant, autocratic vandal who ripped the historic heart out of Paris, driving his boulevards through the city’s slums to help the French army crush popular uprisings.

Historian and Haussmann expert Patrice de Moncan is exasperated by the century’s worth of criticism that has been levelled at this hugely influential figure. “Sometimes I don’t know where to start; it’s bullshit from beginning to end,” De

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Georges Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891)

He was appointed in charge of the redevelopment of Paris, one of the great projects of the Emperor. The latter said of Haussmann that he was capable of « mobilizing a whole population » and that he embodied the « certificate of expertise » of the new regime.

The project was to open up ways of communication and build infrastructures by which not only commerce would be facilitated, but the inhabitants’ every day life would be improved with better hygiene and better living conditions. Haussmann could count on the support of Persigny, the Interior Minister, and to the devoted and efficient team that surrounded him : Dumas the scientist as well as the architects Hittorff, Baltard, Ballu, Garnier . The two rival bankers, Pereire and Rothschild were there to back him, as well as several Protestant banks.

Finance for the project was organised through a system of loans guaranteed by the city’s revenues. The latter were in constant increase and were presented as a model of « pro

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Haussmann, Georges-Eugeène

HAUSSMANN, GEORGES-EUGEÈNE (1809–1891), creator of modern Paris.

Georges-Eugène Haussmann was not an architect, an engineer, a city planner, a hydrologist, or a landscape designer. He was a lawyer by education, a career administrator by choice, and the man who created modern Paris (where he was born and where he died).

He pompously (and illegitimately) called himself a baron. His maternal grandfather, a revolutionary and Napoleonic general, Georges-Frédéric Dentzel (1755–1828), had been ennobled during the First Empire, but French titles are not heritable through the female line. His paternal grandfather, Nicolas Haussmann, also had a revolutionary past. The grandson's administrative career is a classic example of the breach forced by the bourgeoisie into government service during the French Revolution, which was widened by Napoleon's reforms of the state.

Haussmann was educated at the Lycée Henri IV, the best school in Paris, where he made an important friendship with the duc de Chartres, the eldest son of the duc d'Orléans who would become King