The rebuilt city as subject

Stand on a Paris street corner in 1877 and almost every direction you look, the city is brand new. The cream-stone apartment building on your right was finished maybe five years ago. The wide pavement under your feet was laid the year before that. The avenue running straight away from you for half a mile, ruler-straight, ending at the cast-iron sheds of a railway station — that didn’t exist when your parents were children. Paris in 1877 is one of the youngest-looking old cities on Earth. The medieval city it replaced has been gone for less than a decade. And the man responsible is not a king, or an architect, or even a Parisian. He is a tall, blunt, much-loathed civil-service prefect named Georges-Eugène Haussmann(1809–1891), and what he did to Paris between 1853 and 1870 is the reason the city you can still walk through today looks the way it does.

Here is the short version. The emperor Napoleon III — nephew of the famous one, ruler of France 1852–1870 — looked at Paris in the early 1850s and saw a problem. The city was medieval. Narrow, twisting lanes. Open sewers. Cholera outbreaks. Tenements stacked five and six stories around courtyards the sun never reached. And, awkwardly, those same crooked little streets had a habit of filling up with revolutionary barricades every twenty years or so — 1830, 1848 — because they were impossible to clear with cavalry. Napoleon III had spent his exile years in London, which had been modernizing for a generation, and he wanted Paris to do the same. So in 1853 he put Haussmann, a career bureaucrat with a flair for ruthless project management, in charge of the largest urban-renewal program in European history. The brief was simple, and it was carried out for seventeen years straight: gut the medieval core, drive long straight boulevards (a boulevard is a wide, tree-lined, multi-laned avenue, the wider sibling of an ordinary street) through whatever was in the way, line them with new buildings to a uniform code, and put a new sewer and a new water system underneath.

The result is what every tourist photo of Paris is secretly a picture of. You know the look without knowing the name. Long axial avenues that hit each other at big star-shaped intersections. Six-story cream limestone apartment blocks, all to roughly the same height (because the regulation said so), with mansard roofs — that distinctive double-pitched gray attic roof, named for an earlier architect, that sits like a square hat on top of every Haussmann block. Wrought-iron balconies on the second floor and the fifth, never the others (because the regulation said so). Identical chimneys. Identical window ratios. Block after block of it for miles, with the occasional church steeple or train-station roof poking up to remind you which neighborhood you’re actually in. The effect, walking through it, is a city as a single coordinated artwork — beautiful in a faintly tyrannical way, because one man made all these decisions. Which is exactly what people hated about it at the time, and exactly why it still photographs so well.

The cost was enormous, in both senses. Roughly twenty thousand buildingswere demolished. Whole neighborhoods of working-class Parisians were pushed out — they couldn’t afford the new apartments going up in the streets where their old apartments used to be, and they ended up in the cheaper suburbs. The price tag bankrupted the city repeatedly, and in 1870 Haussmann was finally fired for the creative accounting that had kept the project going. A few months later Napoleon III lost a war to Prussia, lost his throne, and the empire that had hired Haussmann collapsed too. But the work was done. The medieval city was gone. The new Paris was — give or take a few unfinished stretches — standing.

Now, the intersection in the picture. Walk west from the center of Paris, cross the river, climb the gentle slope of the right bank, and just east of one of Haussmann’s brand-new railway terminals — the Gare Saint-Lazare, the great commuter station that swallowed the western suburbs — you arrive at a place called the Place de Dublin. In 1877 they called it the Carrefour de Moscou (carrefour is the French word for an intersection or crossroads). It sits in the Quartier de l’Europe — the “European Quarter,” named because the streets that meet there are all named after European capitals: rue de Moscou (Moscow), rue de Saint-Pétersbourg (St. Petersburg), rue de Bucarest (Bucharest), and the others. Five streets converge on this one spot. The buildings around it are so new the stone is still pale. The pavement is so new the cobblestones are still nearly level. And rising from the wedge of land between two of those streets — where rue de Turin and rue de Moscou peel away from each other — is a single tall Haussmann apartment block, narrower at the front than the back, shaped like the prow of a ship, six floors and a mansard, balconies on the regulation floors. The wedge building is still there. You can stand on the Place de Dublin today and see it, more or less unchanged, with a café on the ground floor where Caillebotte painted a doorway.

This is the setting of the picture. Not “a Paris street.” A specificParis street, in the freshest, newest, most aggressively rebuilt neighborhood in the freshest, newest, most aggressively rebuilt city in Europe. The morning after rain. Painted by a man who lived a few blocks away, and who looked at Haussmann’s geometry — the long perspective lines, the uniform façades, the wedge — the way an engineer looks at a good piece of work. Approvingly.