Pre-reading Questions

Paris
Answer these questions on a separate sheet of paper. Please restate the question in
your answer.
Example: In my own words I think beauty is
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

In your own words, what is beauty?

Is ____(insert town)________ beautiful?
What is the most beautiful place youve ever visited?
Why is it beautiful?
Do you think it was always beautiful? Why or why not?
Does beauty take sacrifice? In other words, do you have to give something up and/or be cruel in order
to achieve beauty?

7.
8.
9.

Imagine that you are going to Paris this summer.What kind of sights do you expect to see in Paris?
What kind of smells?
Do you think that Paris always had the sights and smells that it is currently famous for? Why or why not?
***
The article you are about the read was posted in the New Yorker.
Read the article and stop reading where you see a solid line

This line indicates where you must stop to reflect of what youve just read. To do this, answer the questions in the text boxes
using the same paper as your Pre-reading Questions above. Once you have reflected and answered the necessary question(s)
you may continue reading.
The sections which are grayed out you do not need to read unless you would like to. There are no questions related to the gray
areas.
1

March 20, 2014

Paris Reborn and Destroyed

1. Before starting to read the article, what do you think the title means?

Posted by Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker

Place Saint-Andr-des-Arts. c. 1865. Charles Marville Marville/Muse Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet/The Image Works.

The Paris we know is shaded white and gray, a city of zinc roofs and pale stone faades fitted with iron balconies and
crosshatched with whitewashed shutters. Its parks are laced with gravel paths that leave your shoes coated in a fine chalky film.
In the blue hour of middle evening, just after the sun has set but before the light has finished draining from the streets, the roofs
glow blue, sometimes so intensely that the blank walls below pick up the color and reflect it, giving the city a submerged
quality, as if it had sunk quietly to the ocean floor.
Aside from that phosphorescent flush, the work of a few intrepid graffitists, and the ghoulish green light projected by the
electric crosses marking the entrances to pharmacies, most buildings are blank, the color of a wishbone picked dry and left out
to bleach. Paris is serious about keeping its dignity austere. A law passed in the eighteen-eighties prevents anyone from posting
anything on any building in the city under any circumstances. Thats why the startling thing about a photograph of the Place
Saint-Andre des Arts [shown above], taken around 1865, isnt the two covered wagons resting on wooden wheels in front of
the building, or the horses hitched to them, but the building itself, which is covered in words: ads for carpenters, for leather, for
wine, for a steam bath on Rue Monsieur le Prince and a humbler water bath on Rue Larrey. MECHANICAL BEDS AND
ARMCHAIRS FOR THE ILL AND WOUNDED, reads the text above a fresco of a patient propped up with the help of one of the
fabulous machines. 2. In what is this? (The answer is on this page.)
2

The picture was taken by Charles Marville, a photographer hired by Pariss historic-works department in the late eighteenfifties to capture before-and-after shots of the city as it was razed and rebuilt during the Second Empire. The first Bonaparte
had chosen to remake all of Europe. His nephew, Louis-Napoleonwho
3. What do you think happened to Paris during the
First Empire so that it needed rebuilding during the
returned from years of exile to become President of the Second Republic
Second?
4. What connotation does the word Empire have?
briefly before being crowned emperor, as Napoleon IIIbegan by setting his
(Is/was France democratic? What kind of leader?
Etc)?
5. What do you know about Napoleon?
sights on a
single city. To
mastermind his project, he chose Georges-Eugne Haussmann, a career bureaucrat and an early ally, giving him free reign to
demolish, align, remodel, expand, and evict on a scale that still seems close to insane. 6. What does evict mean?
A project of this magnitude needed documenting, not least for propaganda purposes. 7. Prediction: Who/What social class of people
do you think were evicted from their homes?
The camera, barely two decades old, was the obvious tool.
As the exhibition of his photographs at the Metropolitan Museum makes clear, Marville was the right man for the job. For
starters, he was a local. His father was a tailor, his mother a laundress. He grew up on a cramped street near the Louvre that
later vanished to make way for one of Haussmanns imperial avenues. Like Baudelaire, his contemporary, Marville honed his
eye on Paris; the city taught him to see. He knew its places and its people, but he had ambitions beyond the practical realm of
his upbringing. If he had reservations about scrapping the last name he was born with, Bossuthe word means
hunchbackhe was cured of them by Victor Hugo, who published his novel about
8. Why was Marville chosen for the job to
document Paris? Parahprase your answer
the bossu of Notre Dame in 1831, around the time that Marville chose his alias. He
using the text. Paraphrase means to
restate the text in your own words.
was eighteen, an art student at the Academie Suisse, and apparently not bothered by
the idea of making a clean break with his familys history. Marville understood tradition without getting too sentimental about
it. You can hear some of the romantic eagerness of a self-made man in his chosen name, which sounds like a mashup of ma
ville and merveille: Marville, my marvellous city.
Its hard to fathom just how enormous an undertaking the remaking of Paris was. In the early eighteen-thirties, seven hundred
and eighty-five thousand people lived there. By 1851, the year that Louis-Napoleon staged his coup, there were more than a
million. (New York had half as many.) That number only grew as workers started flocking to the city once construction was
under way. 9. What does this sentence That number only grew as tell you about the availability of work in France? Paris had long
been in bad shape, much of it a medieval warren of cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, as Dickens put it in A Tale of
Two Cities. 10. What do you think a medieval city looked like? Give examples if you can. Napoleon III didnt come up with the
idea of renovating the city; important projects had begun in the eighteen-thirties and forties. But he and Haussmann changed
the scale of the operation by many orders of magnitude. Crumbling houses were extracted like so many rotting teeth, and
replaced with Haussmanns signature apartment buildings, with their tall windows to let in fresh air and sunshine. Narrow,
3

filthy streets were razed to make way for wide boulevardsthe better for the swelling bourgeois class to stroll along on a warm
spring day, and for the military to roll its cannons down should an uprising need to be quashed.
Some of Marvilles photos capture the profoundly
surreal quality of the transformation. Here is
Boulevard Henri IV [image shown below], at the
12. Do you think Parisians knew of Napolons ulterior motive? In other words, do
you think the average French commoner knew that Napolons secret plan was to
eastern edge of the Marais, looking like a location
enlarge promenades for better military access? Why or why not?
for There Will Be Blood: just dirt and rubble
under a flat sky, plus a couple of horses loitering in front of a lonely building that wouldnt seem out of place in an abandoned
frontier town. In the distance, at the Place de la Bastille, the tapered July Column could be a derrick gushing oil. The image is
just as weird as anything Dali ever made.
Here [shown in Marvilles photo] are the
Carrires dAmrique, the quarries in the
newly incorporated Nineteenth
Arrondissement, which were exploited, for
their gypsum and millstone, to make new
buildings in the city center. Broken-off
railroad ties litter the ground in front of
yawning ditches. Its a desolate, scorchedearth kind of place. Today, the ButtesChaumont Park, one of the greenest spots in
Paris, is there. Here are the barracks of the Fifth Arrondissements calf market, with its heavy wooden beams and stone pillars,
abandoned because the emperor has decided, reasonably
enough, that livestock shouldnt hang out in the center of the
city anymore. And here is Napoleon IIIs pet project, the
brand-new building of Les Halles market [image shown to the
right], light streaming through its glass roof. Its exactly the
structure the emperor had in mind when he demanded that his
architects make him umbrellas of iron: modernity incarnate.
11. Here we learn that the wide boulevards for which Paris is famous (think Les
Champs lyses) were not simply for pedestrians but also for military power.
What does this tell us about Napolon III as a ruler?

For the viewer accustomed to Pariss relentless beauty, its easy to be fooled by what seems familiar in Marvilles pictures.
Many of them capture a certain sheen on the cobblestones, like the one in the Ned Rorem song Early in the Morning, about a
woman eating croissants at a cafe on Rue Franois-Premier (a Haussmannian street if ever there was one) while she waits for
4

her lover to show up: They were hosing the hot pavement / With a dash of flashing spray / And a smell of summer showers /
When the dust is drenched away.
The glisten caught by Marvilles camera is no flashing spray, however, but raw sewage, left festering on the cobblestones to
splash up under carriage wheels and seep into the soft soles of shoes and the hemlines of dresses. Marvilles Paris was more
Middle Ages than New Wave, and you can bet it didnt smell like summer showers. In Tableau de Paris, his rollicking,
pungent chronicle of the city in the late eighteenth century, the writer Louis-Sbastien Mercier describes the cadaverous odor
emanating from churches full of decomposing bodies awaiting proper burial, and the putrid fosses daisances, indoor pits
where a households excrement was collected. The air reeks constantly of [human waste], Mercier tells us. The pits are badly
made, not to mention terribly maintained, and their contents run into neighboring wells used by bakers turning out their daily
loaves: Oh superb city! What foul horrors are hidden in your walls! After cadavers stolen or bought by young surgeons eager
for anatomy practice are hacked up, the discarded parts often wind up in the fossesa dash of literal spleen to season
Baudelaires metaphor. 13. Explain the dichotomy between the Paris we think of today and the Paris it once was. In other words, today we
consider Paris to be one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, but it wasnt always this way; how was it before? (Sights,
smells, etc.) Are you surprised by this?

For relief, turn to Marvilles photos of public pissoirs, one of Haussmanns

more ingenious projects for cleaning up the streets. Seen through Marvilles
lens, they become sculptural, even elegant, objects, equal parts form and
function. The stalls are organized in a row or an artful ring, and blocked off
from prying eyes by a metal fence that shields a body from knees to neck.
Each is topped with an ornate street lamp, markers of Pariss emerging status
as the City of Light. Step right up, the lamps say. No shame in availing
yourself of a functional sewage system. This is what progress is all about.
***
14. travaux is the plural noun of the verb TRAVAILLER. What is
Napoleon III liked to play up the humane goals of his grands travaux.
grands travaux in English? And why is the adjective grands
In an 1850 speech, he announced that his government would open up plural and in front of the noun? (In other words, in French, the
adjective usually follows the noun, so why doesnt it here?)
popular quarters which lack air and light, so that sunlight may penetrate
everywhere among the walls of the city just as the light of truth illuminates our hearts. There was truth behind the treacle.
Disease was flushed out, dark alleys were illuminated, running water was installed, public parks were built, transportation was
improved. But, as David Harvey points out in his excellent study Paris, Capital of Modernity, the notion that the remaking of
Paris was a project that only Napoleon IIIs prophetic vision and Haussmanns skill could have achieved was also convenient
hype, a founding myth [that] helped secure the idea that there was no alternative to the benevolent authoritarianism of
5

Empire. Haussmann, Harvey writes, was prepared to ride roughshod over the opinions of others and make absolutely no
concessions to democracy. The reconstruction of Paris, with its insistence on order, scientific planning, and the unstoppable
march of progress, was, in many ways, a project directly inherited from the Enlightenment. It was also a pitch for the benefits
of despotism.
Haussmann relied on what he called percements: wide avenues that would pierce through the clotted chaos of the city, clearing
out everyone and everything in their way. Its a violent word. Paris, for Haussmann, was a boil to be lanced. (In his memoirs,
Haussmann unsurprisingly served the idea with a benign
15. The author chimes in here and calls Haussmanns building tactic
percements a violent act. In your opinion, what is so violent about it?
spin: It is easier to cut through the center of the pie
than through the crust.) Thousands of people were displaced as the citys new byways sliced straight through the places they
had lived for generations. Who were they? What did they think and feel about the convulsions that their city was made to
undergo? 16. How would you feel if you and your family were forced to leave your home and not allowed to come back so that your
neighborhood could be made beautiful for others?

In Marvilles first years working for the city, his shutter moved too slowly to capture people as more than faint smudges,
ghostly blurs haunting the edge of the frame. Even after shutter speed had been shaved down to seconds, he liked to take
pictures in the early morning, when he had the streets to himself. 17. Shutter speed is the time needed to a camera to take a picture.
Why was Marvilles shutter speed so slow?

His photographs have some of the idyllic emptiness of the drawings made a century earlier by the Grand Tourists visiting
Rome, as if teeming Paris were in the same state of picturesque abandonment.
To get a sense of the people Marville avoided, better to look to Daumier, Marvilles exact contemporary and just as much a
documentarian with his sketchpad as Marville was with his camera. People were Daumiers raison dtre, and he captured so
many splinters of life, as it was disrupted by Haussmann, that the composite portrait is as gloriously messy as Marvilles photos
are poised and still. In one drawing, from the early eighteen-fifties, a family stands on a strange street, fresh from being
relocated after the expropriation of their home. Carriages rumble by. Madame, in her cape and bonnet, and Monsieur, in his
top hat, pitifully clutching the family birdcage, stare, open-mouthed and saucer-eyed, at the new neighborhood theyre
supposed to call home. Their little son, absorbed by some worm or rock on the ground, has already adjusted to the change of
scene, as children do. The bewilderment of the parents is extremeone more second of gaping and theyll be run over by a
horse and cartbut so is the elation of the wizened couple in a second Daumier sketch, standing in nightcaps at their open
window and grinning like theyve just won the lottery. In a sense, they have. To their left, workers are taking pickaxes to a
neighboring building. The sickly plant on their sill is suddenly blasted with sun. For the first time in their lives, they can see the
city below.

Old Paris is no more (the form of a city / Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart), Baudelaire wrote. Marville kept
his cards closer to his chest. His job was to record his citys rebirth, not to lament its passing, though that distinction isnt
always so clear. 18. The slow shutter speed explains why Marville did not take many pictures with peopletheir images were blurred due to

movement. However, if Marville had todays camera technology back in the mid-to-late 1800s, do you think he still would have
preferred to capture building and street images instead of human subjects? Why or why not?

The most unsettling photograph in the Met exhibit is from 1876, showing the ongoing construction at the Avenue de lOpra
[image shown to the below]. By the time it was taken, Napoleon III had died in exile, and Haussmann had fallen out of favor,
accused of spending exorbitant amounts on civic projects. (Haussmann, with his potato-shaped head and unfortunate neckbeard
wrapped like a bandage around his jaw, was an easy mark for Daumier; in one caricature, he is given a beavers body from the
neck down, looking like one of Maurice Sendaks wild things grown to paunchy middle age as he hulks over an apartment
building, fussily clutching a trowel.) Prussia had gone to war with France and won. The revolutionary Commune had briefly
introduced socialist rule to Paris before being violently suppressed.

Still, the reshaping went on.

The Opra and its
surrounding neighborhood
were the jewel in
Haussmanns crown, a prime
showcase for the upscale
conformity he prized, and for
once Marville focusses his
camera on a group of people,
two dozen or more, gathered
at the site. They stand in a
line on what, until recently, was the working-class neighborhood of Butte Saint-Roch and is now a pile of rock and dust. Others
perch like buzzards on top of the surrounding decrepit buildings marked for destruction, peering out over the immediate void.
If they squint, they might just be able to see the delicate trees that line the completed boulevard in the foreground and the little
dog that sniffs at the new sidewalk, signs of the kinds of people who will soon move in to take their place. Its a knotted,
ambivalent image. 19. The author chimes again and in the beginning of the second paragraph of this page and calls this image the most
unsettling and the Met Museum in New York. Using the text (and your imagination), paraphrase what is so unsettling
about this Marville photograph?

We have reached the end of the play, and the chorus has come out, at last, to tell us what we are supposed to remember, what
moral we should have perceived. What kind of song are they singing? Something happy, or furious, or wistful, or none of the
What do you think we are supposed
above? Theres no way to tell. We have to be content with knowing that they were there. 20.
to remember about Paris? The beauty it
21. Now, after having read this article, explain the meaning of the title, Paris Reborn
and Destroyed. Refer back to your answer to number 1; were you correct?

is today or the medieval ghettos it once

was?

Post-reading Questions

Paris
Answer these questions on a separate sheet of paper. Please restate the
question in your answer.
Example: Charles Marville was
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Who was Charles Marville and why is he important to the history of Paris?
Who was Napolon III and why is he important to the history of Paris?
What did Paris look and smell like before Napolon IIIs beautification projects?
How were the commoners treated who lived in the ghettos of Paris?
What happened to them?
What happened to their homes and neighborhoods?
Paris is now considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Now that you know the level of
violence committed during the beautification of Paris, do you think it was the right thing to do?

8.

Imagine that you are a tour guide for this summer. Now that you have read the article what will you do
or say differently to your tour groups and/or how will you think differently when roaming the beautiful
wide boulevards of Paris and admiring its magnificent buildings?