HAUSSMANN: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris
Michel Carmona, Carmona Michel, , trans. from the French by Patrick Camiller. . Ivan R. Dee, $35 (536pp) ISBN 978-1-56663-427-4
The notorious city planner for Napoléon III, and prefect of the Seine region, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann turned Paris from a still medieval urban area to a triumphant imperial city—Haussmann makes New York's Robert Moses look timid by comparison. Haussmann believed in cutting across straight lines for wide boulevards, no matter what was standing in the way. He drove tens of thousands of poor residents out of the city's center and destroyed many ancient sites. Yet Paris did not follow obediently according to Haussmann's plans, and press campaigns, Carmona shows, finally made the public reject his work. In four main sections, Carmona, a professor of urban studies at the Université Paris IV–Sorbonne (who has written untranslated biographies of historical figures like Queen Marie de Médicis and Cardinal Richelieu), provides a reliable survey in academic prose of the rich source material available about Haussmann. In a utilitarian rather than elegant translation, this new book can get lost in some fairly tedious detail, but it hits all the necessary marks and then some, showing, for instance, that for all his imperial obsessions, even Napoleon III was not enamored of the giant radiating
Reviewed on: 03/11/2002
Genre: Nonfiction