Baron Haussmann (1809–1891), a Protestant from Alsace, modernized Paris – he said he “embellished” it – as the Prefect of the Seine, i.e., virtually the Mayor of Paris, from 1853 until 1870 when he was dismissed. He superintended a massive work of destruction and rebuilding of the city, as appointed by Napoleon III.
The Second Empire
His boss, Louis-Napoleon (1808–1873), who had made himself President of the Second Republic since December 1848, in a coup d’étaton 2 December 1851 dissolved the National Assembly, so giving himself authoritarian rule, which he consolidated the following 2 December, when he made himself Emperor, within the Second Empire. (The implications of this are best described by Marx, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852)). Napoleon III’s Second Empire ended when he had to surrender at Sedan 9 months later after dismissing Haussmann (2 September 1870), so virtually ending the Franco-Prussian war, though not before the Siege of Paris when the city...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Carmona, Michel. 2002. Haussmann: His life and times and the making of modern Paris. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Harvey, David. 2003. Paris, capital of modernity. London: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. Trans. Martin Nikolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Mead, Christopher Curtis. 2012. Making modern Paris: Victor Baltard’s central markets and the urban practice of architecture. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Miller, Michael B. 1961. The bon Marché: Bourgoeis culture and the department store, 1869–1920. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Papayanis, Nicholas. 2004. Planning Paris before Haussmann. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pinkney, David H. 1958. Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Paris. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sutcliffe, Anthony. 1990. Paris: An architectural history. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Tambling, J. (2018). Haussmann, Georges Eugène. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_39-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_39-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities