19th-Century Reconstruction and Growth

Reconstruction and modernization of Paris began under Napoleon I, the French military commander who seized power in 1799 and declared himself emperor in 1804.
Napoleon envisioned the city as the glorious capital of his expanding empire. Many of his projects were completed after his downfall in 1814-1815.

Napoleon's Paris
Napoleon rid the city of two of its medieval landmarks: the Grand Châtelet prison, which was replaced by a square and a fountain, and the prison tower of the Templar stronghold in the Marais, where the royal family had been imprisoned during the Revolution.

The city’s new monuments were built in the neoclassical style, echoing the edifices of the Roman Empire.
Notable examples of these monuments include the Arc de Triomphe, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (at the entrance to the Palace of the Tuileries), the Madeleine church, the Bourse (stock exchange), and the new north facade of the Palais Bourbon (now the seat of the National Assembly).

Napoleon enlarged the square of Notre Dame for his coronation in 1804 and also opened several broad avenues, such as Rue de Rivoli, Boulevard Malesherbes, and Avenue de l’Observatoire.

The new Canal de l’Ourcq, later to be followed by Canal Saint-Martin, increased water supply to Paris, where shortage had always been endemic, and also allowed the creation of several new fountains.

New cemeteries away from the city center, including Père Lachaise, Montparnasse, and Montmartre, improved sanitation in the inner city.

Napoleon also built three new bridges (including the Pont des Arts), paved the riverbanks, lit many streets with gaslights, built new markets, and numbered houses.

Restoration
Paris’s population grew by about 120,000 inhabitants during Napoleon’s rule, and it grew by just as many during the Restoration, the subsequent return to power of the Bourbon dynasty with the accession of Louis XVIII (1814-1815; 1815-1824).

The population growth led to the expansion of the city and the construction of several new neighborhoods.

The fashionable arcades of central Paris were also built in this period. However, the growth also led to further poverty, squalor, and social discontent, and street riots became common.

In July 1830 a crackdown on civil rights sparked the July Revolution in the streets of Paris, in which Charles X was overthrown in favor of Louis Philippe of the house of Orléans.

Louis Philippe’s reign, known as the July Monarchy, was marked by intensive industrialization in Paris and the spectacular increase of the population to over 1 million.

Most Parisians lived in appalling conditions and were subjected to recurring, deadly cholera epidemics.

Intending to improve the quality of life in Paris, Count Rambuteau, the prefect of the Seine, laid out more than 100 new streets and improved and embellished existing squares.

The erection of the Luxor Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde and the completion of the Arc de Triomphe date from Louis Philippe’s reign.

The first railroad tracks were installed in 1837, and starting in 1841 a new fortification wall was built around the inner suburbs.

As with Charles X, the combination of extreme poverty and repression of freedom of expression brought about the downfall of the July Monarchy.

The Revolution of 1848 overthrew Louis Philippe and established the Second Republic. The Second Republic became the Second Empire in 1852, when the elected president, Louis Napoleon (nephew to Napoleon I), declared himself Emperor Napoleon III.

Haussmann Redesigns Paris
Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine, continued in the footsteps of his predecessor Rambuteau, but on a much larger scale.

Haussmann swept away and rebuilt large areas of medieval Paris, notably many inner-city slums, and widened numerous avenues.

One of the reasons for widening the city’s streets was not for aesthetics, but for crowd control: During Paris’s all too frequent spates of civil unrest, protestors easily barricaded the city’s narrower streets.

Most of central Paris as seen today, with its characteristic broad avenues and six-story buildings, is Haussmann’s legacy.

Above all, the present aspect of Île de la Cité is largely due to Haussmann, who cleared most of its old streets, demolishing even mansions and churches.

Haussmann laid out the city’s main north-south axis (Boulevards Sébastopol and Saint-Michel) and west-east axis (Rue de Rivoli and Rue Saint-Antoine).

His other major achievements were the star-shaped Place de l’Etoile around the Arc de Triomphe with its twelve radiating avenues, the new opera house of the Palais Garnier (completed in 1875); and the Avenue de l’Opéra, which connected the Palais Garnier to the Palace of the Tuileries.

Several new parks and gardens were created, and the wooded areas of the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes were redesigned.

Haussmann also planted thousands of trees along the city’s avenues and built or rebuilt several markets, notably Les Halles.

He provided Parisian homes with a sewer system and running water, and improved transportation with the construction of six new railway stations.

By 1870 Paris was a metropolis with almost 2 million inhabitants, and was arguably the most beautiful city in Europe.

The city hosted Universal Expositions (World’s Fairs) in 1855 and 1867. However, the city never adequately addressed the problem of poverty.

Haussmann cleared the slums of central Paris and relocated their inhabitants to the suburbs, but these suburbs were engulfed by the city again in 1860 when they were annexed as the 13th to 20th arrondissements. These low-income areas were then subject to the city’s taxes, a burden that proved unbearable to most of their inhabitants.

Commune of Paris
The Second Empire crumbled in the wake of the swift military debacle that was the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871).

On September 2, 1870, Napoleon III surrendered to the German army after the Battle of Sedan, in northern France.

When the news reached Paris, its citizens revolted, overthrew the regime, and established a provisional government.

German armies surrounded Paris and besieged the city for four months, until finally, on January 28, 1871, famine and exhaustion forced the city to capitulate. However, after a brief occupation by the German forces, Parisians rebelled against the provisional national government of Adolphe Thiers at Versailles.

The Parisian revolutionaries established the Commune of Paris, which ruled the city for 72 days, from March to May.

Thiers’s government sent troops to assault Paris on May 21, unleashing a week of unspeakable violence remembered as the Bloody Week (La Semaine Sanglante).

In the course of resisting the invasion, the supporters of the Commune (called Communards or Fédérés) set fire to much of central Paris, including the Palace of the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville.

More than 20,000 Communards, among them women and children, were massacred.
The final fighting took place at the Père Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris, where the last Communards were lined up and shot against a wall.

The wall, since known as Federates’ Wall (Mur des Fédéraux), is now a shrine in their honor. Thiers’s administration, which became known as the Third Republic, remained at Versailles until 1879 out of fear of the Parisian masses.

Third Republic
During the Third Republic, city planners sought to continue Haussmann’s objectives and continued to widen Parisian streets and build new houses for the growing population.

Numerous new monuments were constructed or altered. Notably, the burnt skeleton of the Palace of the Tuileries, long the seat of the monarchy and empire, was torn down, while the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the bourgeoisie, was rebuilt.

In 1885, on the death of beloved French author Victor Hugo, the church of the Panthéon was officially redesignated a secular burial place for distinguished French citizens, and Hugo was interred there.

The Basilica of Sacré Coeur was built on top of the hill of Montmartre to atone for the sins committed by the people of Paris during the Commune of Paris.

The Place du Château-d’Eau was renamed Place de la République and enhanced by a statue depicting the Republic, inaugurated on Bastille Day in 1884.

Paris’s recovery and renewed prosperity were marked by the 1878 and 1889 Universal Expositions. The latter celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the French Revolution as well as France’s technical and scientific achievements, symbolized by the Eiffel Tower and a Gallery of Machines.

Another exposition, in 1900, highlighted further scientific and technical feats, including motion pictures, the telephone, the gramophone, and above all, electricity.

Paris’s first Métro line opened in 1900 and the first bus route in 1905. Political unrest persisted, however, punctuated by spates of violence caused by anarchists or triggered by the Dreyfus Affair, a controversy involving a Jewish officer in the French army who was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894.