Haussmann, Baron

Occasionally, authorities have taken draconian steps to retrofit an existing city. The redevelopment of Paris by the prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, under Louis Napoleon was a grandiose public works program stretching from 1853 to 1869. Haussmann s vast scheme absorbed unprecedented amounts of public debt, uprooted tens of thousands of people, and could have been accomplished only by a single executive authority not directly accountable to the electorate. 

The master builders of Soviet society were rather more like Niemeyer designing Brasilia than Baron Haussmann retrofitting Paris. A combination of defeat in war, economic collapse, and a revolution had provided the closest thing to a bulldozed site that a state builder ever gets. The result was a kind of ultrahigh modernism that in its audacity recalled the utopian aspects of its precursor, the French Revolution. 

Quoted in John Merriman, Baron Haussmann s Two Cities (typescript, p. 8), later published in French as chap. 9 of Merriman s Aux marges de la ville Faubourgs et banlieues en France, 1815-1871 (Paris Seuil, 1994). This part of my discussion is greatly indebted to Merriman s careful account. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 

Most of the poems in Les fleurs du mal make use of traditional forms, such as the sonnet, and feature conventional rhyme schemes with a standard number of syllables per line. (Syllables determine meter in French poetry.) Baudelaire s radical achievement was to make classical forms fit new subjects. Baudelaire explores the dark side of the human psyche, the moods of melancholy and despair, as well as unconventional forms of behavior, such as lesbianism and drug use. He is a poet of lust rather than love, devoting poems to the smell of his lover s hair, or to descriptions of the body of a prostitute, which he likens to a cadaver. The Parisian Scenes section of Les fleurs du mal takes Paris as its subject, but this is a city haunted by terrifying old men who remind the poet of demons and hideous crones, who mirror the inner torment of the poet s soul. Baudelaire also lamented the changes that Napoleon III and his prefect Baron Haussmann had wrought upon Paris in their effort to modernize the city, and bemoaned his sense of displacement and exile in his own home. 

---