It pretty much gave us the city we know and love today, in many ways, but it must’ve been fantastically expensive. Where’d all the money come from? How could the French afford it?
The costs were high, but not unaffordable if you’re willing to do it. The Wikipedia article which you cite gives figures in the order of magnitude of several hundred million francs for the redesign of Paris. For the sake of comparison, this French newspaper article from 1871 gives you figures of a bit more than two billion francs for the annual budgets of the 1850s and 1860s; this New York Times story of 1860 gives a figure of 750 million francs for the floating government debt of that year. Compared to that, the costs of redesigning Paris were considerable in the sense that they amounted to a sizable portion of the overall government budget. But they were still within the range of what can be achieved if the government really wants to do it and is willing to prioritise the matter high on its agenda - which was certainly the case for the Second Empire, which was eager to add imperial grandeur to a city which it intended to showcase as the capital of a major world power. France is, and also was in the 19th century, a highly centralised country with a high degree of control of the central government over all affairs of the entire nation; in such a situation, it is feasible to commit large percentages of the overall government budget to redesigning the capital - in particular if, as the 1871 French article states, the whole project is presented under the added angle of social welfare (creating jobs for the working masses who undertake the construction projects).
From the wiki link above
France wasn’t always the Socialist utopia with a moderately good economy it is today. List of regions by past GDP (PPP) - Wikipedia
France 1870 GDP is roughly 74 billion, versus 98 billion for the entire United States at that time.
Today, France has a GDP of 2.8 trillion, versus 18.56 trillion for the United States (roughly, I may be comparing the wrong 2 years). 1870 France was a wealthy world power, only a little behind the UK/Germany/Russia/USA.
So comparatively, today France is 6.6 times weaker economically and there are also many laws against changing anything in iconic cities like Paris. That’s why so much stuff is leftover from the last rebuild - it’s considered of great historical value, so it’s against the laws to gut everything and replace it with modern glass and steel boxes or apartment buildings.
That was more nearly the slap-damn middle of the 19th century than the late.
Anyway, the Empire was booming; France had continued to be the richest ( after perhaps Britain ), most populous. most important state in Europe — and always with the wars, despite L’Empire c’est la Paix — industry had gone through a boom; that earlier Man of November pre-Trump was accepted, if not adored by all and the Bonapartist ideal precludes tedious consultation with those to be affected by, say, compulsory purchase. And the foreign French empire, as distinct from The Empire, was profitable. France could continue her old purpose of beating up her neighbours.
A state which could afford the rebuilding after the debacle plus a fast repaid indemnity was not poor.
Seriously, all men are poorer for not reading Philip Guedalla’s biography of the 2nd Empire.
The Second Empire: Bonapartism, the Prince, the President, the Emperor
One of the funniest works ever written, if one has certain historic doubts about the French.
A lot of the actual building was done by private speculators. Much of the funding came from share or bond issues as well as loans from banks.
Emile Zola’s La Curee (The Kill) goes into some detail about how this process was gamed. Saccard uses his contacts at the planning office to find where the new boulevards will run, then buys up entire blocks that are to be affected before anyone else knows a bout it. He jacks up the rents (thus increasing the compensation payable when his property is taken for the roads) and then uses these funds to build impressive new buildings along the new route.
Wow. I’m sure it was fun to work “socialist utopia” into your post. but it might be more informative to point out that the populations of France and U.S.A. were almost identical in 1870 — each had 38 million people. Economically, France was a little behind U.S.A. where it matters: GDP per capita.
Today, BTW, if we consult a chart showing GDP per hour worked we find that France ($61) is still behind the U.S.A. ($63) but only slightly — it has largely caught up! I guess that socialist utopia isn’t doing so bad. (The fall in France’s population “advantage” was not due to socialism — France’s population is still much larger than any state, including the two of comparable area, Texas and California.)
The citizens of Luxemburg ($82 in the table) will be intrigued to learn that they are “three times weaker economically” than Alabamans. (And Alabamans are almost twice “weaker” than Thailand.)
One factor to consider in the rebuilding is that the grand boulevards were built in such a way as to enhance the public realm through high quality formal design. They were build broad and straight yes, but with divisions to make them not seem so opressively huge, and even pleasant to walk along, while focusing views on prominent landmarks. These moves make them very valuable addresses to be on, and encouraged dense valuable development along them, generating increased taxes to help pay for it in the long term. Compare that to most road building in the US which is mostly an example of entropy made visible as buildings give way to pavement
Nowadays if you were to do something like this there would be massive amounts of environmental, zoning, building code, labor regulations to meet and lots of court challenges–all significantly increasing costs. There was a lot less of this type of thing back then.
Thanks, all. Good to know.
Actually, in most previous eras in Europe there were a swarm of mediaeval rights, legal challenges and impediments, such as ‘Ancient Lights’ to make redevelopment tiring. ( often all to the good if it preserved the past ). See the slow difficulties in getting rid of the slums in contemporary London or New York.
One had to have the drive of a Chadwick or a Prussian to even start, or the fortunate plenary powers of a Haussmann.
And thank God for all ‘environmental, zoning, building code, labor regulations’; I prefer to go on living.
Yup. After the Great Fire plans to rebuild London in a rational, symmetric fashion with focal points, axial avenues, etc foundered because it would have involved an unacceptable infringement on individual property rights, and the city was instead rebuilt on the same lots laid along the same medieval street pattern.
Seconding this book, I grabbed it in a second-hand bookshop for a song and did not regret it.
A counter-example is Lisbon rebuild by Pombal after the 1755 earthquake (including by demolishing buildings that had survived it).
Yeah, but Pombal was also quite the little dictator.
And, like Haussmann, ended up rejected.
There’s an immense difference between :
A national set of building codes for reasonable safety/efficiency/building longevity, with climate zone specific addenda, and the current system, where corrupt local governments can slap on anything they want and builders have to adhere to thousands of separate codes. This is basically the reason we don’t use the technique of factory made modular construction, which slashes costs and construction times for buildings of all sizes.
There’s an immense difference between reasonable environmental regulations and the current setup where you in principle have to act to protect slight variants on existing organisms who have limited habitat and are likely to become extinct in the near future regardless. (a species with limited habitat is going to suffer severe genetic drift among other problems)
There’s an enormous difference between zoning laws to prevent people sticking pollution belching factories next to day cares and ones that just prevent cities from even developing at all, and also prevent you from putting retail stores in reasonable proximity to the homes they serve, forcing longer car trips.
One rationale for the massive boulevards that I read about was that it provided quick movement for troops and allowed easy use of Napoleon I’s favourite “whiff of grapeshot” to control unruly crowds. It also broke the city into areas to prevent mobs from moving easily. In the last 70 years or so, Paris had plenty of experience with unruly crowds.
Don’t wide boulevards help the unruly mobs as well? It would let them put a wider “front” of unruly individuals who can all mob a particular location, and it lets the large crowds move around more quickly. Come to think of it, it would have made it nice and easy for German tanks to roll up and down the streets as well. One of the reasons that urban areas are so bad for tanks is that enemy infantry can hide in buildings and drop shaped charges and antitank grenades and molotovs on top of passing tanks. The tanks cannot elevate their main gun enough to shoot back easily, and if a tank is disabled, it blocks the whole armored column behind it.
Wide boulevards reduce all these issues. The vehicles can drive down the middle, away from the risk of objects dropped on them, and they can more easily cover the surrounding buildings with their guns. If one is disabled (by a missile perhaps), it leaves plenty of room for the others to maneuver.
Discussed in the Wiki article I linked to: Haussmann's renovation of Paris - Wikipedia
There’s a whole chapter (“Money”) in David P. Jordan’s Haussmann biography Transforming Paris (Free Press, 1995) that goes into the financial aspects of the scheme in quite some detail. It was all deficit-funded, with him operating with powers that often allowed him to hide that fact, or at least many of the details thereof. He could also push off the question of repayment far enough into the future that it wasn’t his problem.
A large part of Haussmann’s thinking was however that the improvements would ultimately be self-funding. While having to work with the constraint that he couldn’t be seen to impose new taxes, the notion was that both vastly increasing property values and moving the demographics upmarket would balloon the existing taxes and boost the city’s income. He even factored in the increase in tourism as additional value.
The numbers are non-trivial. The municipal debt went from 163 to 2,500 million francs, with 44% of the city budget going on keeping up with the interest. It then wasn’t paid off until 1929. As Schnitte noted early on in the thread, the figures are broadly comparable with the entire rest of the French state.