Parks and Politics During the Second Empire in Paris

Abstract

This paper is about the politics of park design in Paris during the Second Empire. It argues that the decision to build parks was not politically innocent, that the parks created by Baron Haussmann and Adolphe Alphand were caught up in and reflected the sometimes contradictory and ideologically inconsistent politics of Napoleon III. The parks played an important role in maintaining a precarious balance among various competing political interests and competing social classes. Spaced over the increasingly delineated social map of Paris, the parks anchored certain strategic neighborhoods, forged new identities for quartiers in the annexed zone, and brought those areas into a net of social and political influence cast over the city by Haussmann. Raising the value of surrounding properties, they created lucrative ground for bourgeois real-estate speculation while also providing jobs for labor that flocked to the capital and helping to balance a city budget stretched to the limit by the rebuilding project. Defended by Haussmann as symbolic of the Emperor's concern for public well-being, the parks received their share of criticism during the Second Empire because they were identified with an authoritarian political regime, reflective of bourgeois taste and mores, and surrounded by rumors of corruption and political favoritism.