Baron Haussmann: How One Man Built Modern Paris

Without its sublime monuments, colossal boulevards, and magnificent buildings, Paris would not be the City of Light. Without its unique urban fabric, Paris would not be the most visited city in the world. It owes its development to two men, Emperor Napoleon III and his right-hand man, Prefect Haussmann. Haussmann was seen as a destroyer. I mean the nickname was the Alsatian Attila, you know, he came through like a Hun, really, you know, to build this neo-functional city. The Baron changed the face of the French capital in a series of gargantuan construction projects undertaken between 1853 and 1870, implementing a methodical plan to decompartmentalize the city. 63 kilometers of new roads and 40,000 buildings were created. To pull down thousands of buildings, build new ones, build new arteries, is an absolutely fascinating undertaking that I don't know of any other parallel for. Haussmann's Paris also unveiled many prestigious new monuments, watching over the new thoroughfares. It indicates not only direction, but also the extent of the incursion. It adds a kind of majesty, highlighting the notion of length. Almost 2,000 hectares of parkland were introduced, along with 600 kilometers of aqueducts and 380 kilometers of sewers to improve the capital's deplorable sanitation. It was a seething mass of humanity undertaking an immense task. But redevelopment came at a price. The lower classes were often forced into exile and laborers met their deaths in the drive to give Paris a facelift. There were thousands of men at work with some very serious falls and injuries. This is the extraordinary and controversial tale of the epic works undertaken by Baron Haussmann, the story of the 19th century's largest construction site. An aerial view of Paris, the broad avenues, the elegant buildings. To create this grandiose spectacle, Haussmann demolished more than 20,000 houses, and he doubled the average width of the city's roads from 12 to 24 meters. It is hard to imagine that 170 years ago, before Haussmann and Napoleon III, the city of light was a maze-like cesspool. In the mid-19th century, Paris was still a medieval city with its narrow streets and dilapidated housing. According to eyewitness accounts, you could hardly walk into people's homes, such was the stink. They described rooms in which 12 people sleep, people who don't change their clothes or take off their shoes to sleep, and in the middle of them, a mother breastfeeding her children. Precarious conditions amid a population explosion triggered by the economic activity in the capital. Fertile ground for the propagation of one particularly despised and deadly disease, cholera. Tens of thousands of people died in Paris, including the well-off and the more secure. The disease really made its mark during this period. No one knew where cholera came from or how it spread, but one thing was certain, Paris was in need of major surgery. The daunting task fell to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. All too aware that mid-19th century Paris lagged cruelly behind other cities he had visited, like London and New York, France's emperor, driven by the idea of progress, resolved to change things, and fast. He was very focused on the idea of a large-scale program of works as a way to employ people, and to simultaneously improve the social standing of people, and to drive growth in the economy. There's a wonderful story that when he arrives at Suzanne for election, he has a rolled map of Paris under his arm, and when he opens it up, you see these great sort of colored pencil lines, like saber cuts, as Zola will later say, right through the heart of the city. So he does go in there, I think, with a really big idea. Elected president of the Republic in 1848, he wanted to create a network of wide and bright roads through the capital, echoing the work of his uncle, Napoleon I, who ruled between 1799 and 1815. Between Place de la Concorde and the Louvre, the emperor opened the first section of the Rue de Rivoli, a large rectilinear trunk road some 900 meters long. It was quite literally a breath of fresh air, bringing Paris to life. The new thoroughfares imagined by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte also needed to be wide alongside buildings that respected a strict alignment. But the creation of these new boulevards and avenues would come at a price. The very heart of the capital had to be demolished and rebuilt. Achieving these ends meant issuing compulsory purchase orders to acquire all the land covering the avenue's planned route. Paris had to wait for a coup. On December 2nd, 1851, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte seized full power. A few months later, in March 1852, he forced through an authoritarian law making it possible for buildings to be expropriated in the public interest. Paris had never experienced anything like it. All that remained was to appoint the ideal candidate to carry out this colossal project. The key man would be a prefect, a native of Paris who spent his entire career working for the state. His name was Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In June 1853, when Napoleon III put him in charge of the capital, he was 44 years old and already had his own ideas about town planning. Haussmann was prefect of the Gironde region. He lived in Bordeaux, a town with large bright avenues, where the width of the roads was in proportion to the height of the buildings standing alongside them. So when he took over the reins in the capital, it was very much with the idea that Paris could look like Bordeaux. But how best to decompartmentalize the capital? Haussmann turned to the Simien Commission's plan, ordered by Napoleon III, which outlined a network of main roads connecting the city's six recently built railway stations, such as the Gare de l'Est, which opened in 1849. All these stations were rail termini for lines heading north, southeast, east and west. It's all very well spewing streams of passengers onto a railway platform, but what do you do with them? And if a traveler wants to continue their journey, how do they get from one station to another? So linking railway stations was one of the major preoccupations of the great restructuring of Paris. Haussmann's great public works began as soon as he took office in June 1853. He inherited the ongoing two-kilometer extension of the Rue de Rivoli, initiated by Napoleon I. The aim was to create a major east-west axis. On top of this, a north-south axis had to be driven through the city center. Boulevard de Sebastopol would make the junction with the Gare de l'Est and be extended to the left bank along Boulevard Saint-Michel. This produced a large cross that would facilitate movement throughout the city. This first network would be the centerpiece of the process. These thoroughfares cut through an urban fabric which, while dense along the streets, was actually much less so through to the rear of the buildings. Roads could be built through the backyards and relatively open garden spaces. Haussmann wanted to replace these old Paris houses with what would come to be referred to as Haussmannian constructions, of a type that had actually been springing up in the capital for several decades prior to his arrival. Haussmann did not invent them, but he wanted them to be used systematically, lining his new arteries. So the idea was to have a not exactly uniform but a very homogenous degree of replication in the landscape of the modern Haussmann city. All the buildings had to be aligned. While their style remained free, the prefect imposed certain rules. On the ground floor would be stores with a basement beneath. On the second, so-called noble floor, Haussmann insisted on the presence of a long balcony whose existence owed nothing to chance. The buildings had to respect an alignment with their flatness tempered by balconies that also had a little architectural monumentality. There are large full-length windows of the type found in châteaux during the classical era. The top floor under the roof would also have a balcony reflecting another Haussmann characteristic. A top floor standing slightly withdrawn relative to the rest of the façade. The attic had to be set back from the façade of the four floors below for a very simple reason. To create an oblique line that would allow the sun to penetrate right into the street. The idea was to allow the air to circulate around the wide thoroughfares and to let the light in from above the high façade. Haussmann had to work fast to erect these new buildings as Napoleon III was planning to host a major event in 1855, two years later, the World Fair. And the new Paris was to be the highlight of the show. Being able to host the royalty of the entire world in Paris, and that the host of that was the new emperor of France, was extraordinarily important to establishing the legitimacy of the regime as a whole. The world comes to Paris essentially and that is part of the importance of his project. 1853, Rue des Reboulis. Hundreds of workers hired by the city worked day and night to build the street and clear the area around the Louvre of the insalubrious homes that had sprung up there like warts over the centuries. And there was not a wrecking ball or a crane in sight. Old Paris was torn down by hand using picks. The working method was simple. Start at the top and finish at the bottom in the old-fashioned way. Remodeling of the city was essentially done by hand in many ways. Basically you need a lot of workers knocking things down. The demolition works strike me by the tremendous amount of manual labor involved. And of course remember that that was part of the objective, right? It was to to use these large amounts of labor. So they were not really seeking technological optimization of the construction or the demolition sites. Napoleon III insisted that the great public works in Paris must also benefit the working classes. But further along the Rue de Rivoli, on the final stretch, Prefect Haussmann faced an unexpected obstacle at the foot of a medieval monument, the Saint-Jacques Tower. Hidden beneath one of the most densely populated districts of old Paris was a small hillock. It meant that the Rue de Rivoli either had to be flattened or a hump left in the middle of the street. The problem was a hump would ruin the perspective Haussmann wanted. Bear in mind that when moving around on horse-drawn vehicles it's extremely hard to climb a hill. And the descent is even more treacherous because the animal is pushed by whatever load it's meant to be pulling. Haussmann had no choice. To complete his project the road had to be flattened. But by fixing one problem he created another. Now an entire district stood above the level of the new thoroughfare. The only solution was to pull it all down and start again. That obviously leads to the need to expropriate the adjoining plots of land to indemnify the owners. It was a big increase in the budget. In addition to the buildings to be demolished a stone base had to be added to the Saint-Jacques tower at its foundations to raise it up to the level of the new road. This brought the cost up to 30 million francs from the original budget of 18 million. Any further such oversights would be disastrous for the finances of the city. But it was obvious where the root of the problem lay. Unfortunately the plans of the city did Haussmann thus commissioned an ultra-precise map of the city using the triangulation method. A technique known since ancient times but never used to map Paris. Topographers worked using a series of three points. First they measured the distance between two of them on the ground. Once that was known they measured the angle separating the two points from the third from an elevated position. Using trigonometric calculations they were thus able to determine the distance between them from the third point allowing it to be accurately positioned on a map. In the second stage the topographers completed the triangulation by measuring levels. A simple operation carried out using telescopes and graduated sites. These calculations produced Haussmann's map of Paris. The first to offer a three-dimensional perspective of the city thanks to the levels indicated in red. It would prove to be an invaluable weapon in his public works project. It's very interesting to see that through that Haussmann started developing a methodology that we still in effect use today still refined further but for large-scale urban projects that you really have to do the fundamental work of establishing the land that you're working on and all the parameters before you get going. Haussmann pressed ahead but less than a year after taking office he faced another problem. The state could not finance all the construction work. He needed to find developers ready to put their hands in their pockets to erect these new buildings and they weren't exactly banging on Haussmann's door to offer funding. It doesn't come easy it doesn't all fall into place terribly easy with retrospect we think oh it just was bound to happen it wasn't bound to happen. A lot of people are going to be very skeptical about the story that they're being told and perhaps rightly so initially. Haussmann then turned to two rising stars of French finance the Pereyre brothers Emile and Isaac. Brothers are fascinating characters they arrived in Paris in poverty and they were responsible for the first passenger railway line in the Paris region and use that to start build up to what would be an enormous fortune. Unlike traditional banks theirs the Crédit Mobilier was listed on the Paris Stock Exchange. This gave the Pereyre brothers far more scope to considerably increase the money at their disposal. It was a financial windfall that strengthened their hand in negotiations with Haussmann. The Pereyre brothers in the event bought a large piece of land they would then do the development build the buildings using capital that was raised on the equity markets and then sell back the buildings to investors. Thanks to the Pereyre brothers money workers and scaffolding transformed the center of Paris into a gigantic construction site. Floor by floor the first buildings of the Rue de Rivoli began to rise out of the ground. Their free stone facades made them instantly recognizable to the people of Paris. The masonry in Paris has a very characteristic light beige color. This limestone with its very characteristic blonde color sourced in the Paris region and beyond helps give the Paris landscape its uniformity. The roofs of the new buildings were made to slope at a 45 degree angle. For the first time the people of Paris saw the widespread use of a new material that would make the city's roofs the stuff of legend, zinc. The use of zinc made it possible to incorporate angles and accommodate the profile of buildings. It's very efficient and durable and setting the gray patina of the zinc against the blondness of the masonry gives the characteristic gray blonde effect typical of the visual image of Haussmann's Paris. The work on the Rue de Rivoli the main artery in the first network that was to be the basis for everything else produced a complete transformation of Paris. But at what cost? In 1855 after three years of construction and the demolition of several hundred properties the buildings of the Rue de Rivoli finally rose from the debris in time for the World Fair. The whole world was given its first glimpse of a thoroughfare that extended long more than three kilometers. It was groundbreaking. This series of buildings with a continuous line of balconies on the second and fifth floors set back under the roof on the same floor the fifth created what was at the time an absolutely astonishing vista. All public areas now had monuments and the modest residential buildings became part of this landscape. It was a street that the people of Paris were eager to see, walk up and down and wander along because it offered so much more than just a show. When the Rue de Rivoli was first opened the just disbelief of the people to be able to cross from what's today the Place de la Concorde to the Place de la Bastille in a matter of minutes without stopping on a enormous flat wide road for them that was just inconceivable to do that. With the boulevard Sebastopol and Saint-Michel under construction it was now only a matter of time before the first network was complete. Success was already assured for both the emperor and for Haussmann. And it was only the beginning. In mid-1850 Haussmann had another operation underway. His objective was to revive what was a vital organ for the capital. Not far from the new main intersection stood the Church of Saint-Eustache. Ever since the 12th century the area beside it had been the site of an extremely disorganized food market. Before L'Isle was established it was just a mass of movable wooden trestle tables amid a few wooden shelters in a grimy setting. For Napoleon III who liked to foster an image as a despot who was sympathetic to the people replacing them with a functional infrastructure and symbol of modernity became a matter of urgency. In the early 1850s the architect Victor Baltard was assigned with the task. In 1852 the first structure was erected. But thanks to its imposing stonework architecture the people soon began referring to it as the market fort. Napoleon knew the building was unpopular. According to Haussmann he said it's vast umbrellas that I need nothing more. Napoleon III sketched out the vast umbrellas for Haussmann. Summoned by the prefect in 1853 Baltard was tasked with delivering a new project and in record time. Construction had to begin as soon as possible. He succeeded brilliantly. His 24 meter high pavilions all had the same features. Down below in the vast cellars food could be stored and cheese matured. At ground level enclosures made from bricks and louvered shutters allowed the air to circulate. The glass allowed light to enter while the hole was supported by a cast iron structure that was both sturdy and airy. The use of metal meant that walls or columns of relatively thick stone could be replaced by much more slender cast iron pillars. This freed up space and allowed the light in. By combining these iron pillars which resist compression much better than stone pillars with iron frames and with glass which could now be produced on an industrial scale. Large areas could be covered with very few points of support. The resulting lightness and transparency produced architecture that was both visually stunning and extremely functional. Thanks to the use of metal the Leal market covered an area of some 40,000 square meters. The project which began in 1853 rapidly became the largest in Paris. In addition to the 90,000 cubic meters of soil excavated and removed it consumed 600 tons of cast iron, 700 tons of iron girders, 18,000 cubic meters of concrete, as well as 1.8 million bricks. Of the 12 pavilions by 1857 eight had already been built. The others would be completed later. As described by author Aimee Zola, Leal became the belly of Paris. It appeared like some vast modern machine, a steam engine or a cauldron supplying the digestive needs of a whole people. A huge metal belly bolted and riveted constructed of wood, glass and iron with the elegance and power of a mechanical engine. But for Haussmann the city center markets brought another problem. Food was transported by cart so you really had to imagine an incoming flow and outgoing flow. The market became part of a new urban scheme. One that allowed Leal to act as a wholesale market supplying other markets scattered around Paris. As a symbol of the restoration of Paris the central market attained legendary status. It's a myth that now has been consigned to the past. In 1969 it was decided to move the market to Rangis, just outside Paris. The iron and steel masterpiece designed by Victor Baltard was duly demolished. By 1858 Paris' city hall was in turmoil. Haussmann had just approved another hellish series of works. On the left bank he was preparing to construct several new major arteries. On the right bank he continued to open up the railway stations creating new connection hubs. Paris was extending its arms. This was what became known as the second network. Once you've created this big cross in Paris by using secondary roads you can serve either the very densely populated districts not connected to the heart of the city or create new districts that will need links to the city center. To finance the second network incorporating the rest of the city Haussmann put the municipality in debt to the tune of 180 million francs. A real fortune. You'll take a financial hit first but things will change as a result. He makes Paris desirable to live it in a way that then produces enormous rise in property prices and this will generate resources which allow the city to prosper to grow again. Napoleon III and Haussmann were planning a revolution. Their intention was to annex Paris from the territory separating the city from the fortifications that constituted its frontier. With the stroke of a pen the area of the capital doubled in size while its population increased from 1 to 1.7 million inhabitants. Work on the second network which began in 1858 would transform the whole face of the capital. But how to make this new Paris understandable to its residents? How to help them find their way around? Haussmann's answer was to use monuments. Old or new they became targets that the new arteries must aim for. The most emblematic of them would be the Paris opera. A colossal building 173 meters long and 125 meters wide. It indicates not only direction it also indicates the scope of the new road. It adds a kind of majesty by giving an idea of its length. These landmark monuments became one of Haussmann's obsessions. He wanted them everywhere even where they were impossible. As evidenced by the dome of the commercial court on the Ile de la Cité which Haussmann shifted to one side. Haussmann shifted it far enough to the right to make sure it was right in line with the Boulevard de Sébastopol to create a line of sight effect. While occasionally excessive the idea of filling Paris with monuments gave rise to some real feats of architecture. Such as the Saint-Augustin church often ignored by Parisians. It is home to the largest dome in Paris 26 meters in diameter and almost 80 meters high. Thousands and thousands of people go by it. Most people think it's much older than it actually is and most people don't really look at how it's designed. More than just a church Saint-Augustin is an outstanding technical feat. Designed by architect Victor Baltard it owes its existence to the extension of Boulevard Marseille. This is a road that Haussmann intended to divide into two branches to serve new districts. In doing so the fork created a void. It was seen as an opportunity to take something which is an imperfection and turn it into something special. While the idea for a second branch turned out to be problematic and was eventually abandoned Haussmann pressed ahead with the church and construction began in 1860. Napoleon III even planned to make it his final resting place. A mausoleum honoring the glory of Bonaparte. It needed to be a monumental construction visible from all over Paris and be topped off with a dome. Any mausoleum worth its salt had to bear comparison with the Basilica of Saint Peter's in Rome. The tomb of the Apostle Saint Peter and Saint Paul with its imposing dome that reaches out to pilgrims. Fully aware that he could not make it as imposing Victor Baltard was also aware that it would not escape comparison. The main problem and it was a big one was the site at the corner of Boulevard Marseille which was hardly the Vatican. Baltard saw that Haussmann had given him a narrow plot of land to build this monument on. One that was also a very strange shape a kind of polygon like a cork. On the map it looks most peculiar. It is a horrible site it's a tiny it's a quite a small footprint stuck between roads that is highly highly constraining for the architect whereas simultaneously he had instructions to make something as grand and as visible as possible. How to make this monument visible? How to erect an imposing dome on a narrow strip of land without the aid of buttresses to stabilize the structure? Baltard met the challenge with a unique piece of architecture. At the heart of his design was a gigantic metal hall. At the top tension resisting steel arches spread the entire weight of the structure across columns made from cast iron an alloy that is particularly resistant to the forces of compression. He uses the metal in order to go very high to create volumes and to give effects of light so to create a remarkable space. This metal hall invisible from the outside serves as the backbone. It allows an imposing volume to be erected and supported using very few materials. To finish it off the stone surrounding the structure gives it a solemn and imperial character. Basically it's a kind of stone hull supported inside by a metal structure. The stone architecture is supported by the cast iron and without it the church would collapse. It is a work of genius because it is a hybrid that harnesses all the modern techniques of the day. Baltard used the same system of cast iron columns to carry the imposing dome. In order to make it as lightweight as possible without forfeiting strength the structure was constructed entirely of metal. Saint Augustine's dome, unlike a masonry dome, causes no downward pressure. It is structurally autonomous as if laid on the building. Opened in 1860 the church of Saint-Augustin was completed after the fall of the empire in 1870. With its dome measuring 26 meters in diameter Saint-Augustin dominates the Paris skyline. While at street level the church acts as a landmark. People like a city that they can understand and I think Saint-Augustin makes an important contribution to understanding the image of the city. It's a new legibility of the city, an understanding of how the city is connected up through these boulevards, these monuments. You always know roughly where you are. They re-script the city to really force the symbolic aspects of Paris or into the eye, I guess, of the flaneur. While Saint-Augustin never became a mausoleum for the deposed emperor Napoleon III, who died in Britain in 1873, the church remains one of Victor Baltard's most impressive technical achievements. One of these landmark target monuments would come to be regarded as the most impressive achievement of the second network. The Place de l'Etoile, site of the Arc de Triomphe. Commissioned by Napoleon I to celebrate France's victory of Austerlitz in 1805, this 50 meter high colossus was completed in 1836. Since the first empire almost nothing had been built in the surrounding area. There it was in the middle of an area with no grandeur, almost a vacant lot that forms a shapeless square. A dedicated Bonapartist, Haussmann planned to give this masterpiece of stone the setting it deserved. Haussmann created a square with 12 avenues radiating out of it, as if Paris was extending its arms. It was absolutely majestic. A kind of gigantic square that had never been seen before, except maybe at Saint Peter's in Rome. A target monument serving 12 avenues, the Place de l'Etoile became the hub around which the smart districts of western Paris were structured. In addition to these 12 avenues, the monument would be set off by 12 buildings, each only three stories high. Designed by architect Jakitov, they stand a little further back to better show off the Arc de Triomphe. On the ground, Haussmann planted trees to give some volume to the vast square. Until Haussmann came along, a square was a meeting place, a theater of ceremonies, of festivities, of power. Haussmann's squares had none of that. They were crossroads, hubs of communication. People circulated, but they passed through. There was nothing to see. Haussmann wanted to bring unity to a city that was extending further and further, faster and faster. This would be the avant-garde role of street furniture, so much in evidence today that it has become almost invisible. It is omnipresent, from benches to street lamps, to the grids at the feet of the trees now scattered around the city. Paris at the time had a department of architects and designers who were in a position to do the design themselves, and that had an enormous impact. Wherever you ventured, right through the city, in any district, this urban furniture was the same. Haussmann's genius was to have conceived the city as an intrinsic, indivisible whole, complete in itself. But before completing the second network and turning definitively to the new Paris, Haussmann still had one last score to settle with the old city. Between the Ile de la Cité, the traditional center of the capital and its prefect, it was almost a personal matter. It harked back to his student years, when he walked through it daily on his way to law school. Having left the Chaussee d'Antin quarter this morning, I was walking alongside the old courtrooms with, on my left, the despicable heap which not long ago brought dishonor on the city, a haven for thieves and murderers who seemed to flout the attentions of the police and the criminal courts. During the 1860s, Haussmann razed to the ground almost the entire island, preserving only its monuments. He made it the city's administrative center, with police headquarters, a commercial court, and some spanking new law courts. The size of the square in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral was increased sixfold. The better to show off the monument, where restoration work had been underway since 1844, overseen by architect Viollet-le-Duc. He was the man responsible for the steeple made from timber and lead that rose up in 1868, a structure that would be destroyed in the great fire of Notre-Dame on April 15th, 2019. Haussmann demolished a whole neighborhood nearby in order to rebuild the Hotel Dieu, the historic hospital in the center of Paris, which was also torn down. I've never been able to forget this insalubrious section of river, tucked between two hospital buildings and polluted by every type of excrement from the 800 patients within. In all, nearly 10,000 residents were forced to give up their homes, evicted from the island. The city's residents, who had welcomed the public works with open arms, were by now in a state of shock. He was seen as a destroyer. I mean, the nickname was the Alsatian Attila. You know, he came through like a Hun, really, you know, sort of no sense of history, sort of destroying to right and left to build this new functional city. A destroyer to some, a modernizer to others, Haussmann's transformation of the Ile de la Cité was the most controversial aspect of the great works of Paris. And while he built a city of light, the work on the second network also had a dark side. The Richard Lenoir vault, for example, an underground construction forbidden to the public. Built between 1860 and 1862, it totals 1.7 kilometers in length and covers the Canal Saint-Martin. It owes its existence to the construction of Boulevard Voltaire, which connects the Place de la République to the Square of Nations, across the Canal Saint-Martin. The canal proved problematic for Prefect Haussmann, who was anxious to control the working-class districts to the east of the city. The Canal Saint-Martin cuts right through Paris, and it's very difficult to move troops across it. You'd have to basically cross bridges, and if you're crossing bridges then bridges can be either set fire to or barricaded or whatever. To run his new thoroughfare across the waterway, Haussmann gave up on the idea of a bridge and decided to cover it. To that end, he created a new artery, the Boulevard Richard Lenoir. This provided multiple crossing points to allow troops to circulate freely in the working-class districts to the east in the event of insurrection. To that end, workers lowered the level of the canal by five meters before covering it with a gigantic millstone vault along a 1.7 kilometer stretch. It was a massive civil engineering project that had the workers of Paris laboring to ensure that they and their kind could be kept under control. Thousands of men were at work with some very serious accidents. They were 10 meters above the bottom of the canal. Some men fell, others injured themselves shifting masonry and the like. The workers had to pay a high price to fulfill the Baron's vision of Paris as a bourgeois capital. As a result of the major public works, the poorest were left by the wayside. In 1868, Émile Zola wrote, Not for their benefit has the city been cleaned up. Every new boulevard drives them in greater numbers into the faubourg. Haussmann accepted this reality in a letter to the emperor. There is no need for Paris to contain factories and workshops. Hence, the great works must not only be continued, they must be hastened to defend Paris against the growing invasion of workers from the provinces. The other idea is cram the bourgeoisie in. So essentially give them a style of life, a home and a style of life in which they'll feel comfortable. The creation of the second network was a triumph for the Haussmannian buildings springing up all over Paris, especially in the smart districts to the west. But not all residents were in the same boat. While the bourgeoisie occupied the main floors, the servants were crammed in under the eaves in attic garrets. A symbol of this acute inequality was the fact the buildings had two staircases, a main one for the bourgeois occupants, and the back stairs for use by the servants. Domesticity was kept out of sight for the main residents, meaning all the amenities were shunted out to the rear, as well as the comings and goings of servants, who had to use a hidden staircase to access their rooms. This is the paradox of the 19th century. It's an era devoted entirely to progress, but not for all. It was the price to be paid for making the new Paris one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Once the 26 kilometers of works on the second network were concluded in the late 1860s, Haussmann was unstoppable. To complete his new city, he planned to create a third network of arteries, which would not be finished until 1926. With its large arteries acting as lungs, Haussmann successfully aired Paris in its entirety. But he also watered it. The Yon region, 150 kilometers from Paris, is home to a little-known component of Haussmann's great works. This underground structure, built in the early 1870s, is still functional 150 years after being put into service. Paris was, at last, going to have a supply of clean water. People realized that the best water was spring water, groundwater that had not been polluted by activities on the surface, so the water had to arrive pure, fresh, without organic matter. This infrastructure carries water from the Amontières spring through 500 meters of underground tunnels, driven to the heart of the Massif, which provide the capital with nearly 30,000 cubic meters of water per day. Or nearly 10% of the total water consumed by Parisians since the 19th century. Giving Paris access to clean water was one of Haussmann's greatest achievements. To bring it to the city, his engineer, Eugène Belgon, set about building a colossal aqueduct more than 150 kilometers long. It boasted lifting devices, bridges, and siphons to carry it across valleys. The engineers on the ground produced gradients and created water courses with the help of an incredible mass of humanity, digging, building, and erecting scaffolding. It was a colossal undertaking, and what they accomplished still survives today. The structure is completely sustainable and will be passed on to future generations. The highlight of the project was the construction of the Montsouris reservoir on the high ground to the south of Paris. With a surface area of three hectares, this colossus has a maximum capacity of one billion liters. It remains a vital piece of infrastructure and demonstrates the sustainability of the city rebuilt by Baron Haussmann. Just like his buildings still standing today, or the 380 kilometers of sewers that helped clean up the city. Resourceful and visionary, the Baron was both a destroyer and the man who gave the capital its distinctive identity. Regardless of the dark side, in the eyes of the world, Haussmann turned Paris into the city of light.