Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussman

In this book by David P. Jordan, readers learn who was Georges Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine and de facto mayor of Paris under Emperor Napoleon III. Haussmann is most famous for personally directing the reconstruction of Paris, and the modern city that we know today (complete with wide boulevards, grand vistas, and arcades) was his doing. Jordan relates Haussmann's family background, the story of his youth, and his mindset. His personality and goals come alive as readers see how modern Paris was built by a law-school-trained bureaucrat and not an architect or urban planner. Haussmann was a obsessed with rationality and salubrity. He wanted a clean, bright city where traffic (bearing goods and services) could flow unimpeded. He wanted impressive vistas and grand boulevards that would make Paris a world-class imperial capital. He wanted clean water to enter the city and modern sewers to take it out of the city. And he wanted it all without additional taxation on the unruly people of Paris. Jordan shows how he achieved this and how he reached his limits of what could be done . . . at least by a man with his temperament. This book is well written and deserves an audience beyond academic circles. It is definitely worth reading by anyone who wants to know how Paris got the way it is.

Jordan has marshalled his impressive research and writing skills to tell the story of how such an arrogant, unsentimental, and philistine man created one of the most magnificent urban centers in the world. When Jordan discusses how certain roads and venues were decided upon, the laying of the sewers, the struggles that the Prefect of the Seine had with his political opponents and landlord antagonists, how he cooked the books to raise the necessary cash for the effort, and Haussmann's inglorious fall, the book is a first-rate monograph. The author's presentation makes us see how Paris became the prime example of "authoritarian urban planning" and yet also bravely suggests that such iron-fisted control was needed to defeat the coterie of landlords, politicans, and entrepreneurs whose personal interests lay in defeating Haussmann's schemes. Yet Jordan's prose is a bit too Haussmann-like itself. Jordan conceives of Haussmann as the prefect did of Paris -- in a singularly determined way -- and repeatedly insists that we share this view. He constantly hammers away at Haussmann's arrogance, contempt for democratic procedures, his political ruthlessness and his disdain for the poor. And while these details are not correct, they're repeated so constantly that they ultimately detract from Jordan's achievement -- it's as though the author came to resent spending all those years and efforts researching a man who ultimately repelled him. Jordan is so insistent that we see Haussmann on his terms that he doesn't let us enjoy for ourselves the paradoxes and foibles of his protagonist. When the baron writes some feeble pastoral poetry about his youth, Jordan doesn't trust us enough to relish the absurdity of this autocrat imagining himself as a romantic, he insists on telling us how absurd it is and why we should think so. We're also constantly and needlessly told each time he took credit for the work of someone else and how much his arrogance was flattered by the attentions of Napoleon III. Jorda! n grounds his protagonist's character so early on that these repeated instances of his appalling behavor seem petty. Inasmuch as he criticizes Haussmann for creating a Paris that orders around its citizens, Jordan himself overly-directs his readers. Moreover, the book spends less time than I would have liked discussing the myriad problems of transforming Paris -- there's less here about the expropriations, the architecture of the new Haussmann buildings (virtually non-existent in the book despite the early presence of the intriquing quote that "Haussmann's Paris represents a paradox in that he created an architectually fascinating city without creating any memorable buildings"), and the forced relocations of the poor into the banlieue than on Haussmann's bullying tactics in the Yonne and Bordeaux (fascinating as those episodes are Jordan overly relishes them as evidence of the Baron's ruthlessness). In other words, there are several instances where there's m