II AN AMERICAN URBANIST IN HAUSSMANNTOWN French journalist Sanche de Gramont, in attesting to the dominance of Paris, recounts an anecdote about Rudyard Kipling's visit to Algiers in 1921. Kipling was surprised to find that while the rest of the Middle East was in turmoil, the French Maghreb was rather calm. The city's mayor remarked that, "Paris is the trump of our diplomacy. If a local chief becomes excited, dissatisfied, or wants to play the prophet, there is always the solution of a trip to Paris. Paris turns wolves into sheep."
5 Many a visitor has been made to feel like a wooly ruminant by Paris, its intimidation consistent with the metaphorical feminine gender with which writers and residents tend to describe it/her. Paris' grandeur, historical pathos, and beauty intimidate, as would an encounter with a grand courtesan of those characteristics. Kipling's story applies to the Parisians as well, since the matriarchal dominance of Paris over the entire nation is like that of no other city in the developed countries of the world. Major governmental, productive and intellectual functions and institutions are shared among New York, Washington, and Los Angeles in the United States, between London and Manchester in England, by Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Rome and Milan in Italy, Tokyo and Osaka in Japan, and Berlin, Bonn in Germany. In France they are concentrated in Paris. It is indisputably "the" political, diplomatic, intellectual, commercial, historical, and tourist capital of the nation. Geographically, the extensive road system of France appears as spokes on a great wheel whose hub lies at the tiny island in the Seine that Julius Caesar chose as an encampment in 53 BC. That domination has diminished somewhat with the advances in transportation and communication that had spread economic development to other cities and regions and with the emergence of the Internet as a ubiquitous mode of cultural diffusion. Unlike New York, Paris arrived at the opening of the 19th Century with enough turbulent history behind her to enrich the biographies of a dozen cities. In a land with little in the way of natural borders, control of the city has historically played an enlarged role in national politics and hegemony. Various emperors and kings found it necessary to regularly expand its encircling walls, or bulwarks (the etymological antecedent to the term which Paris has made famous, the "boulevard"), beginning with Philip Augustus' wall containing little more than the Ile de la Cité and Ile Saint Louis, to the fifth wall of the Thiers fortification in 1840. But threats to the control of the city came as often from within as from without. The greatest political event of French history before the 19th Century was, of course, the Revolution of 1789 that plunged the city into a rollercoaster of republics and authoritarian regimes that played out over decades. There is little necessity to review these events herein except insofar as the Revolution and its aftermath supply the present interest herein with events and scenes coincident with and influenced by it. Almost with a dramatic chronology, a century on from the Revolution, Paris had refashioned itself as a city for the modern age and, as though on cue, was raising a steel tower in the Champs de Mars as the bold focal point of its first centenary celebrations. To ascend the Eiffel Tower in 1989 was to stand at the midpoint of the Bicentenaire. Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann's mausoleum in Père Lachaise cemetery is rather modest. In the entablature above the arch of the narrow, oxidized door is incised "Famille Haussmann." Save for the arch, the architecture is a pastiche of classical elements, ornate capitals atop fluted pilasters. It hardly stands out among the numerous similar mausoleums in this subdivision of Paris's most renowned burial ground. But it has a special significance for me. Even with a map that can be purchased at a florist shop across the street from the entrance, it took me a while to find Haussmann. Most visitors to Père Lachaise come to visit Héloïse and Abelard, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Modigliani, Jim Morrison, or anyone of dozens of other luminaries trying to get some "eternal rest" here. Haussmann is probably overlooked by most, but not by an urban planner, or anyone familiar with the planning of Paris. His neighbors in Père Lachaise might have made their own distinctive marks on the city, its history and its lore, but none made such an impression on what we instantly recognize as the very morphology of the city as did Haussmann. Haussmann was the Prefect de la Seine in Paris from 1853 to 1870, essentially the director of public works, but probably no other urban planner, not Sixtus V in Rome before him, or Robert Moses in New York after him, made such an impact and imprint upon a world class city. But before we consider his accomplishments and destruction more specifically, it is useful to delve into Paris BH (Before Haussmann). Paris began where we might have expected, beside that little island around which the river Seine flows, known as the Cité, on which there was a settlement of a Celtic tribe called the Parisii. They called it Lutetia. On the right bank, to the north the land was not well-suited for habitation. It was swampy and marshy, which remains commemorated in the Marais (marsh); the left bank, mostly meadowland, was preferable. Today, of the several little islands in this reach of the Seine, only the Ile-St.-Louis remains, but it had been unsettled upon for some time. Although the Romans were having difficulty pacifying the Gauls (particularly that pesky Vercingetorix), Julius Caesar, author of the
Caesar's Gallic Wars from which I learned much of my Latin, sent legionnaires there in 52 BC. If the Romans had had their way they might well have imposed a street grid pattern upon the island consistent with their standard layout of a Roman
castrum, or military encampment. That would be coherent with the present-day rectilinear layout of the Cité as well as Ile-St.-Louis, but the Roman influence upon the subsequent shape of things is conjectural. Remains of the Roman settlement are mostly on the Left Bank where remnants of their baths, some temples, a theater, and some traces of an aqueduct have been excavated. There might even have been a Roman temple near the east end of the Cité if the effigies of Roman gods uncovered in the 19th C in the crypt of Notre Dame are considered evidence. Although Lutetia was not as strategically significant a Roman outpost as those they established at Lyons and Trier, the Romans erected the first walls toward the end of the Third Century, owing to attacks from "barbarians" (Gallic tribes fought amongst themselves as well as against the Romans). When Rome went into decline in the same century so did Roman hegemony over Lutetia. By the Fifth Century there were only vestiges of Roman control and the region fell into chaos and lawlessness among the barbarian or Germanic tribes. One tribe, the Franks, began to assert dominance. They were pagans, but in 496 their leader, Clovis, was baptized at St. Rémi and the relationship between the Franks and the Catholic Church became established. Before he died Clovis had achieved control over all territory north of the Loire River, and his dominion extended over parts of the contemporary Low Countries and parts of western Germany. He made Paris his capital and conducted court in the old Roman governors' palace in the Cité. During the Middle Ages Paris was dominated by several large and influential monastic institutions. They continued to exert their influence until the end of the 18th Century and retain their presence in the history of the city in the neighborhoods and streets that continue to bear the names St-Germain, St. Severin, St-Denis, etc. St. Denis might have been an Italian monk who came with some others to do missionary work in Gaul around the year 250 C.E., and founded several places of worship in Lutetia. He was eventually martyred by decapitation by Roman authorities and is buried where the Abbey Church of St.-Denis presently stands. A lot of myths and legends followed in the wake of St.-Denis, enough to earn him the exalted position of patron saint of France. During most of the early Middle Ages, Paris did not expand significantly and was ruled over by mostly a sorry and dissolute procession of Merovingian and Carolingian Kings, with only the exception of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor; but he actually ruled from Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), not Paris. It is not until the 13th Century, the time of the Paris of Louis IX, that Paris begins to expand (in 1200 the population was about 200,000). Other towns in Europe during the late Middle Ages were growing as well, owing mostly to improvements in agriculture, principally better methods of tilling soil that expanded food surpluses sufficiently to support larger urban centers. With the growth of towns came concentrations of wealth, and with that the necessity for its protection. That meant more, and better, walls. It was to be a long period, owing to political instability as well, that urban defensibility played a significant part in urban morphology.
6 Walls kept bad people out; but there were differing opinions about what form of street system within the city served defensibility better. The meandering, confusing street pattern of many Medieval towns, laid out before there...
