The Bonaparte’s dream: Paris during the Empire

The Bonaparte’s dream: Paris during the Empire

Napoleon I began the modern urban transformation of the French capital with the intention of giving his own imprint to the city. The Rue de Rivoli project, the starshaped layout of the square around the Arc de Triomphe and the planned Palace of the King of Rome were the prodromal elements of this project86, where the Quarter of the King of Rome was conceived as a new ‘imperial city’, dedicated to administration, knowledge and the armed forces87. But it would be Napoleon I’s nephew, Louis Napoleon88, the first elected president of the Second Republic and later Emperor under the name of Napoleon III, who between 1852 and 1870 would initiate the process of modernising Paris under the Second Empire, with the help of the prefect Georges Eugène Haussmann89 .

Design: Saint Petersburg Case Study, «Architecture: Material and Imagined», vol. 64, pp. 250-254. 86 “...Napoleon wanted to create a real administrative city, connected to the right bank by the new Jena Bridge and which would be dominated by the Palace of the King of Rome, the imposing building built on the hill” Buclon R. 2013, Du Foro Bonaparte de Milan au Quartier du roi de Rome de Paris. Continuités et divergences d’une utopie républicaine à une vision impériale, January 2013, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome Italie et Méditerranée vol. 125, n. 2, Roma, p. 2. 87 Ivi, p. 8. 88 Charles-Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, called simply Louis-Napoleon, born on 20 April 1808 in Paris and died on 9 January 1873 in Chislehurst (United Kingdom) president of the Second French Republic from 1848 to 1852 and Emperor of the French from 1852 to 1870. Son of Louis Bonaparte (Brother of Napoleon I) and Hortense de Beauharnais (Firstborn daughter of Empress Josephine and adopted daughter of the Emperor). 89 Georges Eugène Haussmann, better known with the imperial title of Baron Haussmann, (1809 - 1891) Prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1870, he directed the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire by further elaborating the vast plan of renewal desired by Napoleon III.

Fig. 15 Paris City Plan 1861-1869. Source: The Norman B. Leventhal Map Center (NBL Map Center) at the Boston Public Library (BPL).

The urban transformation plan was born from the need to find solutions to the problems that had emerged due to overpopulation and the unhealthy state of the oldest neighbourhoods. The functional reorganisation of the medieval fabric of the city required interventions in both the central areas and the suburbs, in order to create or transform green areas, new public buildings, sewerage networks and roads (Fig. 15). The road network comprised the construction of two large crossing/connecting axes in a west-east and northsouth direction, whose point of intersection, the Place du Châtelet, was to be transformed into a large urban hub that Haussmann designed in direct communication with the centre of civil and commercial power in the city (the Hôtel de Ville and Les Halles). In the historic

Fig. 16 Paris sewer network in 1837 (up) and Paris sewer network between 1856 and 1878 (down). Source: Belgrand E. 1887 Les travaux souterrains de Paris V: les e´gouts et les vidanges, Dunod, Paris.

centre of Paris, the residential blocks were demolished and replaced by a series of public buildings; the basilica of Notre-Dame was monumentalised, according to the logic typical of the period, freeing it from the buildings that over the centuries had been built around it. A further intervention was the creation of Grands-Boulevards and Boulevards exterières, the ring routes around the city. Napoleon III’s plan also provided for an extension of the administrative boundary up to the Thiers fortifications with the annexation of eleven of the surrounding municipalities. In Hausmann’s modernisation of the French capital, the reorganisation of underground Paris played an important role through the implementation of innovative drainage and sanitation systems. In 1857, the programme of reconstruction of the sewers began with the construction of the Collecteur Général d’Asniéres, a new elliptical structure over four metres high and five and a half metres wide, built to ensure that waste water was transported quickly and efficiently to the Seine downstream from the city. The sewage system was completed in 1870 (Fig. 16) with more than 570 kilometres of pipeline, more than four times the extent of the network in 1850, and in 1868 the construction of a vast siphon under the Seine connected the two sections of the Collecteur de la Bièvre90. These underground tunnels represented for Hausmann:

[…] the internal organs of the metropolis, similar to those of the human body. Clean, fresh water, together with light

90 Gandy M. 1999, The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space, «Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers», vol. 24, n. 1, pp. 23-44.

and heat, should circulate like the different fluids whose movement and supply sustain life itself. These fluids would flow invisibly, maintaining and preserving public health without interrupting the smooth functioning of the city or spoiling its external beauty91 .

The desire to separate rainwater from human waste was an integral part of the Haussmann’s original concept for building an efficient and innovative sewage system, not only for hygienic reasons, but also for not dispersing that portion of human excrement which until then had been profitably used as fertiliser for agriculture and in the production of saltpetre92 for gunpowder. The increasing use of domestic water, which doubled between 1870 and 1890, and the cholera epidemics of 1884 and 1892 eventually made it necessary to overcome the traditional dependence on cesspools. However, the original project of water separation was not realized, and 1894 the connection between private homes and the mixed sewage system was made compulsory. The interrelationship between technology and urbanisation was therefore one of the most important aspects of Haussmann’s rationalisation work of the city, according to the Emperor’s request. The provision of light and electricity, the organisation of a new mobility system and the efficient management of drinking water

91 Haussmann B. 1854, Mémoire sur les eaux di Parigi, présenté a la commission municipale par le préfet de la Seine, Vinchon, Parigi, p. 53. 92 Potassium nitrate is one of several nitrogen-containing compounds collectively referred to as saltpeter (or saltpetre in the UK). Potassium nitrate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula KNO3. It is an ionic salt of potassium ions K and nitrate ions NO3. Potassium nitrate is one of several nitrogen-containing compounds collectively referred to as saltpeter (or saltpetre in the UK).