Like spokes on a wheel, these wide boulevards typify the landscape of Paris. Beautiful components of the city, tourists have come to associate these streets with “La Ville Lumiere”. But this architecture has a more sinister origin: it developed out of a desire to stop protesters.
The second image shows a now-demolished street called rue du Jardinet, and as you can see, it’s quite narrow. Paris was dominated by such passageways for centuries, but authorities had grown hostile to them by the mid-1800s. And this is because the streets hindered the military from restoring order/crushing dissent.
Beginning in 1789, France experienced constant civil unrest — six different governments were overthrown by 1870. Many of the disaffected came from the Parisian urban dwellers, who assembled hastily made barricades in the streets to stop the soldiers. In the February Revolution of 1848, protesters put up as many as 6,000 barricades.
So, when Napoleon III got into power in 1852, he hired an architect named Georges-Eugene Haussmann to re-invent the city. And Haussmann went to work, razing block after ancient city block, replacing the old passages with the sweeping boulevards that characterize Paris today.
Source(s): All information and images from “Paris & the Barricades: How Haussmann Rebuilt a City to Prevent Unrest,” by Charlie Lawrence Jones. _CityMetric_, November 3, 2017. DOI: citymetric.com/fabric/paris-barricades-hiw-haussmann-rebuilt-city-prevent-unreat-3453.
