Haussmann's Renovation of Paris

Emperor Napoleon III appointed Georges-Eugene Haussmann as Prefect of the Seine in 1853 to carry out a sweeping renovation of Paris that continued until Haussmann's dismissal in 1870, demolishing much of the city's dense medieval street pattern to cut wide, straight boulevards lined with uniform stone-faced apartment buildings, new sewers and water systems, and large public parks. Motivated by public health concerns after cholera epidemics, by improved troop movement and crowd control following the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and by a modernizing civic vision, the project displaced large working-class populations from the city center and drew lasting criticism for its social cost even as it created the wide-boulevard, harmonized-facade cityscape now regarded as quintessentially Parisian. It became one of the most influential and most widely imitated large-scale urban renewal projects in modern history.