City of Light: The Rebuilding of Paris

Rupert Christiansen

Jul 2018 · Head of Zeus Ltd

About this ebook

A sparkling account of the nineteenth-century rebuilding of Paris as the most beautiful city in the world, as part of the stunning Landmark Library series.

'This really is an impressive book' Sebastian Faulks.

'Brisk, vivid and unexpectedly stirring... No one writes as evocatively and entertainingly about Paris as Christiansen does' Mail on Sunday.

'Every page is a pleasure, every building, every gas lamp brought shimmering to life... Don't board the Eurostar without a copy' The Times.

'A wonderful book, amazingly vivid... But also a truly original work of scholarship' Theodore Zeldin.

In 1853 the French emperor Louis Napoleon inaugurated a vast and ambitious programme of public works, directed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine. Haussmann's renovation of Paris would transform the old medieval city of squalid slums and disease-ridden alleyways into a 'City of Light' – characterised by wide boulevards, apartment blocks, parks, squares and public monuments, new railway stations and department stores and a new system of public sanitation.

City of Light charts a fifteen-year project of urban renewal which – despite the interruptions of war, revolution, corruption and bankruptcy – would set a template for nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban planning and create the enduring and globally familiar layout of modern Paris.

Ratings and reviews

Quite a fascinating read on the effort to make Paris 'great', the obstacles to the effort, the consequences of the effort and change, both intended an unintended. I see a lot of parallels to politics of today, with the obsession of the grand plan, the opening-up, the streamlining, the congestion busting: all things in the name of efficiency. I now see this is nothing new, nor is localised opposition to change and the poor being left behind. Whilst utopias are repeatedly promised by leaders as being all good for everybody, the tale of Louis Napoleon and Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris outlined in this book shows such utopias are far more fiction than fact. Urban development is a story of progress, not perfection.

About the author

Rupert Christiansen is the opera critic and arts columnist for the Daily Telegraph. His books include Tales of the New Babylon: Paris in the Mid-19th Century and Romantic Affinities: Portraits From an Age 1780-1830. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.