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Member of the Chamber of Deputies for Haute-Corse
In office 14 October 1877 – 27 October 1882
Member of the Senate
In office 9 June 1857 – 4 September 1870
Monarch	Napoleon III
Prefect of Seine
In office 23 June 1853 – 5 January 1870
Monarch	Napoleon III
Preceded by	Jean-Jacques Berger
Succeeded by	Henri Chevreau

Personal details
Born	(1809-03-27)27 March 1809 Paris, France
Died	11 January 1891(1891-01-11) (aged 81) Paris, France
Resting place	Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
Political party	Bonapartist
Spouse	Octavie de Laharpe (m. 1838⁠–⁠1890)
Children	Marie-Henriette Valentine Eugénie (illegitimate)
Education	Lycée Condorcet
Alma mater	Conservatoire de Paris
Profession	Official, prefect

Georges-Eugène Haussmann, commonly known as Baron Haussmann (French: [ʒɔʁʒ øʒɛn (baʁɔ̃) osman]; 27 March 1809 – 11 January 1891), was a French official who served as prefect of Seine (1853–1870), chosen by Emperor Napoleon III to carry out a massive urban renewal programme of new boulevards, parks and public works in Paris commonly referred to as Haussmann's renovation of Paris. Critics forced his resignation for extravagance, but his vision of the city still dominates central Paris.

Biography
Legacy
See also

Biography

Origins and early career

Haussmann was born on 27 March 1809, at 53 Rue du Faubourg-du-Roule, in the Beaujon neighbourhood of Paris, the son of Nicolas-Valentin Haussmann and of Ève-Marie-Henriette-Caroline Dentzel, both of German families. His paternal grandfather Nicolas was a deputy of the Legislative Assembly and National Convention, an administrator of the department of Seine-et-Oise and a commissioner to the army. His maternal grandfather was a general and a deputy of the National Convention: Georges Frédéric Dentzel, a baron of Napoleon's First Empire.

He began his schooling at the Collège Henri-IV and at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, and then began to study law. At the same time, he studied music as a student at the Paris Conservatory, as he was a talented musician. Haussmann joined his father as an insurgent in the July Revolution of 1830, which deposed the Bourbon king Charles X in favor of his cousin, Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans.

He was married on 17 October 1838 in Bordeaux to Octavie de Laharpe. They had two daughters: Henriette, who married the banker Camille Dollfus in 1860, and Valentine, who married Vicomte Maurice Pernéty, the chief of staff of his department, in 1865. Valentine divorced Pernéty in 1891. She then married Georges Renouard (1843–1897).

On 21 May 1831, Haussmann began his career in public administration; he was named the secretary-general of the prefecture of the Department of Vienne at Poitiers; then, on 15 June 1832, he became the deputy prefect of Yssingeaux. Despite proving himself as a hard worker and able representative of the government, his arrogance, dictatorial manner, and habit of impeding his superiors led to his being continually passed over for promotion to prefect. He was posted as deputy prefect to the Lot-et-Garonne Department at Nérac beginning on 9 October 1832; the Ariège Department at Saint-Girons on 19 February 1840; and the Gironde Department at Blaye on 23 November 1841.

Only after the 1848 Revolution swept away the July Monarchy, establishing the Second Republic in its place, did Haussmann's fortunes change. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, became the first elected president of France in 1848. Haussmann travelled to Paris in January 1849 to meet the Minister of the Interior and the new president. He was deemed to be a loyal holdover from the civil service of the July Monarchy, and shortly after their meeting Louis Napoléon granted Haussmann a promotion to prefect of the Var Department at Draguignan. He became prefect of the Yonne Department in 1850, and in 1851 was appointed as prefect of the Gironde out of Bordeaux.

In 1850, Louis Napoléon started an ambitious project to connect the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris by extending the Rue de Rivoli and create a new park, the Bois de Boulogne, on the outskirts of the city, but he was exasperated by the slow progress made by the incumbent prefect of the Seine, Jean-Jacques Berger. Louis-Napoleon was highly popular, but he was blocked from running for re-election by the constitution of the Second French Republic. While he had a majority of the votes in the legislature at his disposal, he did not have the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution. At the end of December 1851, he staged a coup d'état, and in 1852 declared himself Emperor of the French under the title Napoleon III. A plebiscite in November 1852 overwhelmingly approved Napoleon's assumption of the throne, and he soon began searching for a new prefect of the Seine to carry out his Paris reconstruction program.

The emperor's minister of the interior, Victor de Persigny, interviewed the prefects of Rouen, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux for the Paris post.

Persigny sent him to Napoleon III with the recommendation that he was exactly the man needed to carry out his renewal plans for Paris. Napoleon made him prefect of the Seine on 22 June 1853, and on 29 June, the emperor gave him the mission of making the city healthier, less congested and grander. Haussmann held this post until 1870.

Rebuilding of Paris

Main page: Haussmann's renovation of Paris

The Avenue de l'Opéra, one of the new boulevards created by Napoleon III and Haussmann. The new buildings on the boulevards were required to be all of the same height and same basic façade design, and all faced with cream-coloured stone, giving the city center its distinctive harmony.

Napoleon III and Haussmann launched a series of enormous public works projects in Paris, hiring tens of thousands of workers to improve the sanitation, water supply and traffic circulation of the city. Napoleon III installed a huge map of Paris in his office, marked with coloured lines where he wanted new boulevards to be. To a degree the boulevard system was planned as a mechanism for the easy deployment of troops and artillery, but its main purpose was to help relieve traffic congestion in a dense city and interconnect its landmark buildings. He and Haussmann met almost every day to discuss the projects and overcome the enormous obstacles and opposition they faced as they built the new Paris.

The population of Paris had doubled since 1815, with no increase in its area. To accommodate the growing population and those who would be forced from the centre by the new boulevards and squares Napoleon III planned to build, he issued a decree annexing eleven surrounding communes, and increasing the number of arrondissements from twelve to twenty, which enlarged the city to its modern boundaries.

For the nearly two decades of Napoleon III's reign, and for a decade afterwards, most of Paris was an enormous construction site. To bring fresh water to the city, his hydraulic engineer, Eugène Belgrand, built a new aqueduct to bring clean water from the Vanne River in Champagne, and a new huge reservoir near the future Parc Montsouris. These two works increased the water supply of Paris from 87,000 to 400,000 cubic metres of water a day. He laid hundreds of kilometres of pipes to distribute the water throughout the city, and built a second network, using the less-clean water from the Ourq and the Seine, to wash the streets and water the new park and gardens. He completely rebuilt the Paris sewers, and installed miles of pipes to distribute gas for thousands of new streetlights along the Paris streets.

Beginning in 1854, in the centre of the city, Haussmann's workers tore down hundreds of old buildings and cut eighty kilometres of new avenues, connecting the central points of the city. Buildings along these avenues were required to be the same height and in a similar style, and to be faced with cream-coloured stone, creating the uniform look of Paris boulevards. Victor Hugo mentioned that it was hardly possible to distinguish what the house in front of you was for: theatre, shop or library. Haussmann managed to rebuild the city in 17 years. "On his own estimation the new boulevards and open spaces displaced 350,000 people; ... by 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation; he had spent ... 2.5 billion francs on the city; ... one in five Parisian workers was employed in the building trade".

To connect the city with the rest of France, Napoleon III built two new railroad stations: the Gare de Lyon (1855) and the Gare du Nord (1864). He completed Les Halles, the great iron and glass produce market in the centre of the city, and built a new municipal hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu, in the place of crumbling medieval buildings on the Ile de la Cite. The signature architectural landmark was the Paris Opera, the largest theatre in the world, designed by Charles Garnier, crowning the center of Napoleon III's new Paris. When the Empress Eugenie saw the model of the opera house, and asked the architect what the style was, Garnier said simply, "Napoleon the Third."

Napoleon III also wanted to build new parks and gardens for the recreation and relaxation of the Parisians, particularly those in the new neighbourhoods of the expanding city.

Napoleon III's new parks were inspired by his memories of the parks in London, especially Hyde Park, where he had strolled and promenaded in a carriage while in exile; but he wanted to build on a much larger scale. Working with Haussmann and Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, the engineer who headed the new Service of Promenades and Plantations, he laid out a plan for four major parks at the cardinal points of the compass around the city. Thousands of workers and gardeners began to dig lakes, build cascades, plant lawns, flowerbeds, trees, and construct chalets and grottoes. Napoleon III created the Bois de Boulogne (1852–1858) to the west of Paris: the Bois de Vincennes (1860–1865) to the east; the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (1865–1867) to the north, and Parc Montsouris (1865–1878) to the south.

In addition to building the four large parks, Haussmann had the city's older parks, including Parc Monceau, formerly owned by the Orleans family, and the Jardin du Luxembourg, refurbished and replanted. He also created some twenty small parks and gardens in the neighbourhoods, as miniature versions of his large parks. Alphand termed these small parks "green and flowering salons." The intention of Napoleon's plan was to have one park in each of the eighty neighbourhoods of Paris, so that no one was more than a ten-minute's walk from such a park. The parks were an immediate success with all classes of Parisians.

"Baron Haussmann"

To thank Haussmann for his work, Napoleon III proposed in 1857 to make Haussmann a member of the French Senate and to give him an honorary title, as he had done for some of his generals. Haussmann asked for the title of baron, which, as he said in his memoirs, had been the title of his maternal grandfather, Georges Frédéric, Baron Dentzel, a general under the first Napoleon, of whom Haussmann was the only living male descendant. According to his memoirs, he joked that he might consider the title aqueduc (a pun on the French words for 'duke' and 'aqueduct') but that no such title existed. This use of baron, however, was not officially sanctioned, and he remained, legally, Monsieur Haussmann.

Downfall

During the first half of the reign of Napoleon III, the French legislature had very little real power; all decisions were made by the Emperor. Beginning in 1860, however, Napoleon decided to liberalise the Empire and give the legislators real power. The members of the opposition in the parliament increasingly aimed their criticism of Napoleon III at Haussmann, criticising his spending and his high-handed attitude toward the parliament.

The cost of the reconstruction projects was also rising rapidly. In December 1858 the Council of State ruled that a property owner whose land was expropriated could retain the land that was not specifically needed for the street, greatly increasing the cost of expropriation. Property owners also became much more clever in claiming higher payments for their buildings, often by creating sham shops and businesses within their buildings. The cost of expropriations jumped from 70 million francs for the first projects to about 230 million francs for the second wave of projects. In 1858, the Cour des Comptes, which oversaw the finances of the Empire, ruled that the Caisses des Grands Travaux was operating illegally by making "disguised loans" to private companies. The court ruled that such loans had to be approved by the parliament. The parliament was asked to approve a loan of 250 millions francs in 1865, and another 260 million francs in 1869. The members of the opposition were particularly outraged when in 1866 he took away part of the Luxembourg to make room for the new avenue between the Luxembourg Gardens and the Observatory, and destroyed the old garden nursery which lay between rue Auguste Comte, rue d'Assas and the avenue de l'Observatoire. When the Emperor and Empress attended a performance at the Odeon Theater, near the Luxembourg gardens, members of the audience shouted "Dismiss Haussmann!" and jeered the Emperor. Nonetheless, the Emperor stood by Haussmann.

One of the leaders of the parliamentary opposition to Napoleon, Jules Ferry, ridiculed the accounting practices of Haussmann as Les Comptes fantastiques de Haussmann, or "The fantastic accounts of Haussmann", in 1867 (a play on words of "Les Contes Fantastiques de Hoffmann", The Fantastical Tales of Hoffmann). The republican opposition to Napoleon III won many parliamentary seats in the 1869 elections, and increased its criticism of Haussmann. Napoleon III gave in to the criticism and named an opposition leader and fierce critic of Haussmann, Emile Ollivier, as his new prime minister. Haussmann was invited to resign. Haussmann refused to resign, and was relieved of his duties by the Emperor. Six months later, during the Franco-German War, Napoleon III was captured by the Germans, and the Empire was overthrown.

In his memoires, Haussmann had this comment on his dismissal: "In the eyes of the Parisians, who like routine in things but are changeable when it comes to people, I committed two great wrongs; over the course of seventeen years I disturbed their daily habits by turning Paris upside down, and they had to look at the same face of the Prefect in the Hotel de Ville. These were two unforgivable complaints."

After the fall of Napoleon III, Haussmann spent about a year abroad, but he re-entered public life in 1877, when he became Bonapartist deputy for Ajaccio. His later years were occupied with the preparation of his Mémoires (three volumes, 1890–1893).

Death

Haussmann died in Paris on 11 January 1891 at age 81 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. His wife, Louise-Octavie de la Harpe, had died just eighteen days earlier. At the time of their deaths, they had resided in an apartment at 12 rue Boissy d'Anglas, near the Place de la Concorde. The will transferred their estate to the family of their only surviving daughter, Valentine Haussmann.

Georges-Eugène Haussmann and Napoleon III make official the annexation of eleven communes around Paris to the City. The annexation increased the size of the city from twelve to the present twenty arrondissements. Painting by Adolphe Yvon
The Paris Opera was the centerpiece of Napoleon III's new Paris. The architect, Charles Garnier, described the style simply as "Napoleon the Third".
The Bois de Boulogne, built by Napoleon III and Haussmann between 1852 and 1858, was designed to give a place for relaxation and recreation to all the classes of Paris.

Legacy

Portrait of Baron Haussmann, by Henri Lehmann (1860, Musée Carnavalet)

Haussmann's plan for Paris inspired the urban planning and creation of similar boulevards, squares and parks in Cairo, Buenos Aires, Brussels, Rome, Vienna, Stockholm, Madrid, and Barcelona. After the Paris International Exposition of 1867, William I, the King of Prussia, carried back to Berlin a large map showing Haussmann's projects, which influenced the future planning of that city. His work also inspired the City Beautiful Movement in the United States. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York, visited the Bois de Boulogne eight times during his 1859 study trip to Europe, and was also influenced by the innovations of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. The American architect Daniel Burnham borrowed liberally from Haussmann's plan and incorporated the diagonal street designs in his 1909 Plan of Chicago.

Haussmann had been made senator in 1857, member of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1867, and grand cross of the Legion of Honour in 1862. His name is preserved in the Boulevard Haussmann.