MARSHALL BERMAN
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life. The new boulevards would enable traffic to flow through the
center of the city, and to move straight ahead from end to end-a
quixotic and virtually unimaginable enterprise till then.
In
addition,
they would clear slums, and open up "breathing space" in the midst of
layers of darkness and choked congestion. They would stimulate a
tremendous expansion of local business at every level, and thus help to
defray the immense municipal demolition, compensation and con–
struction costs. They would pacify the masses by employing tens of
thousands of them-at times as much as a quarter of the city's labor
force-on long-term public works, which in turn would generate
thousands more jobs in the private sector. Finally, they would create
long and broad corridors in which troops and artillery could move
effectively against future barricades and popular insurrections.
The boulevards were only one part of a comprehensive system of
urban planning that included central markets, bridges, sewers, water
supply, the Opera and other cultural palaces, a great network of parks.
"Let it be said to Baron Haussmann's eternal credit" -so wrote Robert
Moses, his most illustrious and notorious successor, in 1942-"that he
grasped the problem of step-by-step large-scale city modernization."
The new construction wrecked hundreds of buildings, displaced
uncounted thousands of people, destroyed whole neighborhoods that
had lived for centuries. But it opened up the whole of the city, for the
first time in its history, to all its inhabitants. Now, at last, it was
possible to move not only within neighborhoods, but through them.
Now, after centuries of life as a cluster of isolated cells, Paris was
becoming a unified physical and human space.
The Napoleon-Haussmann boulevards created new bases, eco–
nomic, social, aesthetic, for bringing enormous numbers of people
together. At the street level they were lined with small businesses and
shops of all kinds, with every corner zoned for restaurants and terraced
sidewalk cafes. These cafes, like the one where Baudelaire's lovers and
his family in rags come to look, soon came to be seen all over the world
as symbols of
La vie parisienne.
Haussmann's sidewalks, like the
boulevards themselves, were extravagantly wide, lined with benches,
lush with trees. Pedestrian islands were installed, to make crossing
easier, to separate local from through traffic, and to open up alternate
routes for promenades. Great, sweeping vistas were designed, with
monuments at the boulevard's ends, so that each walk led toward a
dramatic climax. All these qualities helped to make the new Paris a
uniquely enticing spectacle, a visual and sensual feas t. Five generations
of modern painters, writers and photographers (and, a little later, film-
