• DOI:10.1086/237781
• Corpus ID: 144533244

Napoleon III's Transformation of Paris: The Origins and Development of the Idea

@article{Pinkney1955NapoleonIT,
  title={Napoleon III's Transformation of Paris: The Origins and Development of the Idea},
  author={David Pinkney},
  journal={The Journal of Modern History},
  year={1955},
  volume={27},
  pages={125 - 134}
}

• D. Pinkney
• Published 1 June 1955
• History
• The Journal of Modern History

LOUIS NAPOLEON fancied himself something of an architect. An English visitor calling at the Bibliotheque nationale in the early 1850's for a copy of Hittorf's L'carchitecture polychrome chez les Grecs was told that it had been sent to the Elysee Palace for the president of the republic, who only a few days earlier had asked for it, together with several other books on architecture.2 While in exile in Britain he had laid out a portion of the grounds of Brodick Castle, an estate of his friend, the Duke of Hamilton.3 During the early years back in Paris his visitors often found him surroundedby his sketches of landscaping in the Bois de Boulogne or, pencil in hand, working over a street plan of Paris; and in 1853, when Georges Haussmann took the oath of office as prefect of the Seine, the emperor handed him a map of Paris on which he had drawn in color the streets that he proposed to build.4 This map, the creation of Louis Napoleon alone, became the basic plan for the transformation of the city in the two following decades. Napoleon attributed the conception of his idea of rebuilding Paris, one contemporary recorded, to a chance meeting with a young man in New York City in the later 1830's. This man showed him a plan for a model city that he proposed to build in a single operation and not, Napoleon said, "as in Europe, one house at a time."5 Napoleon was intrigued and later declared: "That day I promised myself on my return to Paris. . . to rebuild the capital of capitals...."I The story seems ingenuous. One might with equal plausibility maintain that he took the germ of his plans from Fourier's "Plan d'une ville garantiste," in which the author described a model city intended, among other objects, to remedy the evils of overcrowding and disorder that he observed in the Paris of his time.7 Possibly Napoleon picked up the idea from the Saint-Simonians. Public works always held an important place in their prescription for the salvation of society, and in 1832, moved by the frightening toll of cholera in Paris, the SaintSimonian journal, the Globe, proposed a specific program of slum clearance and building in the city. Its heroic scale, as well as some of its details, suggests an affinity with Louis Napoleon's later 1 Research assistance in the preparation of this article was financed by grants from the University of Missouri Research Council.