The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 10 November 2014
by David P. Jordan
Those who wish to create great monuments, or to transform provincial towns into great cities, are faced with a great 21st-century dilemma. Great works throughout history, are often, if not mostly, the result of great individual power. One man, one king or queen, weilds imperial power over vast resources both material and human. The result is often derided by contemporaries but ultimately vindicated by history. Today, in an increasingly democratic world, great proposals are confronted with democratic bickering, design by committee and community meeting, whittling away by the forces of mediocrity, and, of course, the limitations of the public purse (see the debate over Gehry's proposed Eisenhower monument in Washington, DC). It is a dilemma because even the most liberal designer or urban champion will admit, from time to time, to wishing that one could dictate the unopposed imposition of a great and undiluted work of civic art.
To this day, one of the great figures of urban disruption, indeed the prototype of the form, is Baron Georges-Eugéne Haussmann, the Parisian technocrat who plowed a wide swath through that great city during the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Haussmann pursued a relentless rise through French administration and bureaucracy during a time of shifting forms of government, from revolution to empire to republic and back again. He was politcally adept, though, because of his arrogance, his early postings were to remote districts of the country. He eventually rose through Bordeaux and through politcal connections, was appointed the Prefect of the Seine. In this post, devising complicated and forward-thinking financing schemes (such as the first wide application of deficit spending in the history of Paris), he pushed through a program of demolition and construction that transformed Paris from a cluttered and impoverished medieval agglomeration to a world capital, with its wide urbane boulevards, glittering monuments, and lavish urban life. The result was both a triumph for his friend, the Emperor, and a brutalization of the city, as reflected in his arrogant disregard for the middle and lower classes and how they would survive in the newly gentrified landscape, and even his constant battle with landowners who resented not receiving a bigger slice of the economic windfall that his program engendered. It is often remarked that he made the city less vulnerable to uprising and revolution by making the boulevards too wide to barricade, and straight enough for effective gunfire. But, it seems Haussmann was much more concerned with a kind of urban hygeine that reflected bitter, but largely presumed by this author, memories of a youth spent tramping across a filthy and crowded Paris.
Partly due to subsequent revolutions, and the burning of the Hôtel de Ville during the Paris Commune, there is sparse historical record of Haussmann the administrator. The author also had to contend with an even more sparse record of Haussmann the man, as so much of his personal correspondence is lost to history. The one notable exception is, of course, Haussmann's own hagiographic memoirs, which largely read like an administrative report. So, much of the story has an indirect feel, filling in the man from around the edges of his accomplishments and (few) failures. Haussmann's story is a clinical treatise on the history of great individual bureaucratic power applied to the creation of vast civic and imperial monuments. The story has its sequels in subsequent urban history. For exmaple, one could easily replace the city of Paris with the city of New York, and Baron Haussmann with Robert Moses, to replicate in many remarkable details the story of Moses's own epic career. Jordan's book on Haussmann, therefore, is necessarily shorter on details than Caro's work on Moses. This is also not an exhaustive analysis of the urban successes and failures of Haussmann's transformations. Still, one gets a good overview of the man and his work and how Paris was transformed, and how that transformation endured for a century and a half and helped to define the character of that city and its inhabitants. We also get a slight glimpse of the city that was lost. One wonders about the stories of the tens of thousands of lower-class citizens displaced by Haussmann's ambition. History may be cruel to Haussmann's memory, but it has forgotten altogether about the people most immediately impacted by his work.
See Also: [The Power Broker by Robert Caro]