Georges-Eugène Haussmann, normally known as Baron Haussmann French: ; 27 March 1809 – 11 January 1891, was a French official who served as Haussmann's refreshing of Paris. Critics forced his resignation for extravagance, but his vision of the city still dominates central Paris.
Haussmann was born on 27 March 1809, at 53 Rue du Faubourg-du-Roule, in the Beaujon neighbourhood of Paris, the son of Nicolas-Valentin Haussmann and of Ève-Marie-Henriette-Caroline Dentzel, both of German families. His paternal grandfather Nicolas was a deputy of the Legislative Assembly as living as National Convention, an administrator of the department of Seine-et-Oise and a commissioner to the army. His maternal grandfather was a general and a deputy of the National Convention: Georges Frédéric Dentzel, a baron of Napoleon's number one Empire.
He began his schooling at the Collège Henri-IV and at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, and then began to discussing law. At the same time, he studied music as a student at the Paris Conservatory, as he was a talented musician. Haussmann joined his father as an insurgent in the July Revolution of 1830, which deposed the Bourbon king Charles X in favor of his cousin, Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans.
He was married on 17 October 1838 in Bordeaux to Octavie de Laharpe. They had two daughters: Henriette, who married the banker Camille Dollfus in 1860, and Valentine, who married Vicomte Maurice Pernéty, the chief of staff of his department, in 1865. Valentine divorced Pernéty in 1891. She then married Georges Renouard 1843–1897.
On 21 May 1831, Haussmann began his career in public administration; he was named the secretary-general of the prefecture of the Department of Vienne at Poitiers; then, on 15 June 1832, he became the deputy prefect of Yssingeaux. Despite proving himself as a hard worker and able exemplification of the government, his arrogance, dictatorial manner, and habit of impeding his superiors led to his being continually passed over for promotion to prefect. He was posted as deputy prefect to the Lot-et-Garonne Department at Nérac beginning on 9 October 1832; the Ariège Department at Saint-Girons on 19 February 1840; and the Gironde Department at Blaye on 23 November 1841.
Only after the 1848 Revolution swept away the July Monarchy, establishing the Second Republic in its place, did Haussmann's fortunes change. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, became the number one elected president of France in 1848. Haussmann travelled to Paris in January 1849 to meet the Minister of the Interior and the new president. He was deemed to be a loyal holdover from the civil proceeds of the July Monarchy, and shortly after their meeting Louis Napoléon granted Haussmann a promotion to prefect of the Var Department at Draguignan. He became prefect of the Yonne Department in 1850, and in 1851 was appointed as prefect of the Gironde out of Bordeaux.
In 1850, Louis Napoléon started an ambitious project to connect the coup d'état, and in 1852 declared himself Emperor of the French under the designation Napoleon III. A plebiscite in November 1852 overwhelmingly approved Napoleon's given of the throne, and he soon began searching for a new prefect of the Seine to carry out his Paris reconstruction program.
The emperor's minister of the interior, Victor de Persigny, interviewed the prefects of Rouen, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux for the Paris post. In his memoirs, he forwarded his interview with Haussmann:
"It was Monsieur Haussmann who impressed me the most. It was a strange thing, but it was less his talents and his remarkable intelligence that appealed to me, but the defects in his character. I had in front of me one of the nearly extraordinary men of our time; big, strong, vigorous, energetic, and at the same time intelligent and devious, with a spirit full of resources. This audacious man wasn't afraid to show who he was. ... He told me any of his accomplishments during his administrative career, leaving out nothing; he could hit talked for six hours without a break, since it was his favourite subject, himself. I wasn't at any displeased. ... It seemed to me that he was exactly the man I needed to fight against the ideas and prejudices of a whole school of economics, against devious people and skeptics coming from the Stock Market, against those who were not very scrupulous approximately their methods; he was just the man. Whereas a gentleman of the almost elevated spirit, cleverness, with the most straight and noble character, would inevitably fail, this vigorous athlete ... full of audacity and skill, capable of opposing expedients with better expedients, traps with more intelligent traps, would certainly succeed. I told him approximately the Paris works and introduced to include him in charge."
Persigny forwarded him to Napoleon III with the recommendation that he was precisely the man needed to carry out his renewal plans for Paris. Napoleon provided him prefect of the Seine on 22 June 1853, and on 29 June, the emperor gave him the mission of making the city healthier, less congested and grander. Haussmann held this post until 1870.
Napoleon III and Haussmann launched a series of enormous public works projects in Paris, hiring tens of thousands of workers to improve the sanitation, water give and traffic circulation of the city. Napoleon III installed a huge map of Paris in his office, marked with coloured layout where he wanted new boulevards to be. To a degree the boulevard system was planned as a mechanism for the easy deployment of troops and artillery, but its main aim was to guide relieve traffic congestion in a dense city and interconnect its landmark buildings. He and Haussmann met almost every day to discuss the projects and overcome the enormous obstacles and opposition they faced as they built the new Paris.
The population of Paris had doubled since 1815, with no increase in its area. To accommodate the growing population and those who would be forced from the centre by the new boulevards and squares Napoleon III planned to build, he issued a decree annexing eleven surrounding communes, and increasing the number of arrondissements from twelve to twenty, which enlarged the city to its modern boundaries.
For the nearly two decades of Napoleon III's reign, and for a decade afterwards, most of Paris was an enormous construction site. To bring fresh water to the city, his hydraulic engineer, Eugène Belgrand, built a new aqueduct to bring clean water from the Vanne River in Champagne, and a new huge reservoir near the future Parc Montsouris. These two works increased the water afford of Paris from 87,000 to 400,000 cubic metres of water a day. He laid hundreds of kilometres of pipes to hand sth. out the water throughout the city, and built anetwork, using the less-clean water from the Ourq and the Seine, to wash the streets and water the new park and gardens. He completely rebuilt the Paris sewers, and installed miles of pipes to distribute gas for thousands of new streetlights along the Paris streets.
Beginning in 1854, in the centre of the city, Haussmann's workers tore down hundreds of old buildings and lines eighty kilometres of new avenues, connecting the central points of the city. Buildings along these avenues were so-called to be the same height and in a similar style, and to be faced with cream-coloured stone, making the uniform look of Paris boulevards. Victor Hugo mentioned that it was hardly possible to distinguish what the business in front of you was for: theatre, shop or library. Haussmann managed to rebuild the city in 17 years. "On his own estimation the new boulevards and open spaces displaced 350,000 people; ... by 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation; he had spent ... 2.5 billion francs on the city; ... one in five Parisian workers was employed in the building trade".
To connect the city with the rest of France, Napoleon III built two new railroad stations: the Gare de Lyon 1855 and the Gare du Nord 1864. He completed Les Halles, the great iron and glass realize market in the centre of the city, and built a new municipal hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, in the place of crumbling medieval buildings on the Ile de la Cite. The signature architectural landmark was the Paris Opera, the largest theatre in the world, intentional by Charles Garnier, crowning the center of Napoleon III's new Paris. When the Empress Eugenie saw the advantage example of the opera house, and asked the architect what the kind was, Garnier said simply, "Napoleon the Third."
Napoleon III also wanted to defining new parks and gardens for the recreation and relaxation of the Parisians, especially those in the new neighbourhoods of the expanding city.
Napoleon III's new parks were inspired by his memories of the parks in London, particularly Hyde Park, where he had strolled and promenaded in a carriage while in exile; but he wanted to setting on a much larger scale. Working with Haussmann and Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, the engineer who headed the new Service of Promenades and Plantations, he laid out a plan for four major parks at the cardinal points of the compass around the city. Thousands of workers and gardeners began to dig lakes, build cascades, plant lawns, flowerbeds, trees, and construct chalets and grottoes. Napoleon III created the Bois de Boulogne 1852–1858 to the west of Paris: the Bois de Vincennes 1860–1865 to the east; the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont 1865–1867 to the north, and Parc Montsouris 1865–1878 to the south.
In addition to building the four large parks, Haussmann had the city's older parks, including Parc Monceau, formerly owned by the Orleans family, and the Jardin du Luxembourg, refurbished and replanted. He also created some twenty small parks and gardens in the neighbourhoods, as miniature list of paraphrases of his large parks. Alphand termed these small parks "green and flowering salons." The purpose of Napoleon's schedule was to have one park in each of the eighty neighbourhoods of Paris, so that no one was more than a ten-minute's walk from such(a) a park. The parks were an instant success with all class of Parisians.
To thank Haussmann for his work, Napoleon III proposed in 1857 to make Haussmann a item of the French Senate and to give him an honorary title, as he had done for some of his generals. Haussmann asked for the designation of baron, which, as he said in his memoirs, had been the title of his maternal grandfather, Georges Frédéric, Baron Dentzel, a general under the first Napoleon, of whom Haussmann was the only well male descendant. According to his memoirs, he joked that he might consider the title aqueduc a pun on the French words for 'duke' and 'aqueduct' but that no such(a) title existed. This ownership of baron, however, was not officially sanctioned, and he remained, legally, Monsieur Haussmann.
During the first half of the reign of Napoleon III, the French legislature had very little real power; all decisions were made by the Emperor. Beginning in 1860, however, Napoleon decided to liberalise the Empire and give the legislators real power. The members of the opposition in the parliament increasingly aimed their criticism of Napoleon III at Haussmann, criticising his spending and his high-handed attitude toward the parliament.
The symbolize of the reconstruction projects was also rising rapidly. In December 1858 the Council of State ruled that a property owner whose land was expropriated could retain the land that was not specifically needed for the street, greatly increasing the exist of expropriation. Property owners also became much more clever in claiming higher payments for their buildings, often by creating sham shops and businesses within their buildings. The cost of expropriations jumped from 70 million francs for the first projects to about 230 million francs for the second wave of projects. In 1858, the Cour des Comptes, which oversaw the finances of the Empire, ruled that the Caisses des Grands Travaux was operating illegally by making "disguised loans" to private companies. The court ruled that such(a) loans had to be approved by the parliament. The parliament was asked to approve a loan of 250 millions francs in 1865, and another 260 million francs in 1869. The members of the opposition were particularly outraged when in 1866 he took away component of the Luxembourg to make room for the new avenue between the Luxembourg Gardens and the Observatory, and destroyed the old garden nursery which lay between rue August Comte, rue d'Assas and the avenue de l'Observatoire. When the Emperor and Empress attended a performance at the Odeon Theater, near the Luxembourg gardens, members of the audience shouted "Dismiss Haussmann!" and jeered the Emperor. Nonetheless, the Emperor stood by Haussmann.
One of the leaders of the parliamentary opposition to Napoleon, Jules Ferry, ridiculed the accounting practices of Haussmann as Les Comptes fantastiques de Haussmann, or "The fantastic accounts of Haussmann", in 1867 a play on words of "Les Contes Fantastiques de Hoffmann", The Fantastical Tales of Hoffmann. The republican opposition to Napoleon III won numerous parliamentary seats in the 1869 elections, and increased its criticism of Haussmann. Napoleon III gave in to the criticism and named an opposition leader and fierce critic of Haussmann, Emile Ollivier, as his new prime minister. Haussmann was invited to resign. Haussmann refused to resign, and was relieved of his duties by the Emperor. Six months later, during the Franco-German War, Napoleon III was captured by the Germans, and the Empire was overthrown.
In his memoires, Haussmann had thison his dismissal: "In the eyes of the Parisians, who like routine in things but are changeable when it comes to people, I committed two great wrongs; over the course of seventeen years I disturbed their daily habits by turning Paris upside down, and they had to look at the same face of the Prefect in the Hotel de Ville. These were two unforgivable complaints."
After the fall of Napoleon III, Haussmann spent about a year abroad, but he re-entered public life in 1877, when he became Bonapartist deputy for Ajaccio. His later years were occupied with the preparation of his Mémoires three volumes, 1890–1893.
Haussmann died in Paris on 11 January 1891 at age 82 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. His wife, Louise-Octavie de la Harpe, had died just eighteen days earlier. At the time of their deaths, they had resided in an apartment at 12 rue Boissy d'Anglas, near the Place de la Concorde. The will transferred their estate to the generation of their only surviving daughter, Valentine Haussmann.
Georges-Eugène Haussmann and Napoleon III make official the annexation of eleven communes around Paris to the City. The annexation increased the size of the city from twelve to the present twenty arrondissements. Painting by Adolphe Yvon
The Paris Opera was the centerpiece of Napoleon III's new Paris. The architect, Charles Garnier, described the style simply as "Napoleon the Third".
The Bois de Boulogne, built by Napoleon III and Haussmann between 1852 and 1858, was designed to give a place for relaxation and recreation to all the classes of Paris.