Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Traditional customs - How did Paris accomplish its transformation from a dirty city to a romantic capital?

How did Paris accomplish its transformation from a dirty city to a romantic capital?

Literary giant Ernest Hemingway said: if you lived in Paris when you were young, Paris will follow you all your life.? This quote speaks to what many people aspire to in Paris.

Paris is a flowing feast in Hemingway's writing, a Woody? Allen's enchanting midnight dreams, the whimsical world of the heroine of "Angel Love Beauty", a city with a thousand faces, sometimes surprising, always exciting.

But what you may not know is that more than 150 years ago, Paris was a crumbling old medieval city with narrow roads, garbage and urine, sludge and slums.

How Paris transformed itself from a crumbling medieval city into a world-famous romantic capital, and how that transformation influenced the city for generations to come, British scholar and critic Rupert Christian has written in his book City of Light: Paris, the City of Light. British scholar and critic Rupert Christian's book, City of Light: The Reconstruction of Paris and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis, uncovers for you how the transformation of Paris has shaped the city for generations to come. City of Light? The secrets of Paris.

In 1848, Napoleon's nephew Louis ? Napoleon? Panama returned to Paris after three years of exile in England, at a time when France had already experienced more than half a century of turmoil since the Revolution, and the First Industrial Revolution was unfolding, further polarizing France between the rich and the poor.

As the Industrial Revolution progressed, the population of Paris surged from 600,000 to 1 million, slums were everywhere, the crowded city became a hotbed of infectious disease, and dangerous neighborhoods harboring thieves and robbers surrounded the government buildings on the island, inadvertently threatening the stability of society.

The problem of sewage disposal was even more difficult, as the Seine, Paris's water supply, was so polluted by the population that the narrow canal became infamous and smelly.

How dirty was the Seine's water? The book mentions the example of the famous painting "The Death of Marat," in which the revolutionary Marat had dived into the Seine while on the run; he later developed a serious skin disease and had to spend the rest of his life in a bathtub, most likely infected with a fatal skin disease contracted from the filthy river water.

Worse still, contaminated river water was often sent straight to people's homes untreated, where germs entered the body and killed countless people in the Great Plague outbreak of the 1830s.

During his exile in London, Napoleon III witnessed the great changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution to Britain, and the cityscape of London also gave him a great impact. At this time, the highest power in France has been mastered by Louis XVI. Napoleon was also ready to make his mark.

In 1852, Louis Napoleon made an important speech in Bordeaux. Napoleon made an important speech in Bordeaux, setting out his vision of a better France. He set out his desire to bring prosperity back to France through massive infrastructure development: ? We have large tracts of uncultivated land to be cleared, roads to be opened up, ports to be improved, rivers to be dredged, canals to be made navigable, and railroads to be completed...? Everywhere there are ruins that need to be repaired, false gods that should be padded, and truths that should be celebrated...?

Louis? Napoleon's speech received thunderous applause and users from the populace, after which Louis? Napoleon was officially crowned Emperor of France? Napoleon III. The great transformation of Paris was on the verge.

From filth to the City of Light

Besides Napoleon III, another key figure in the great transformation of Paris was Georges? Baron Eugène Haussmann. In 1853, Comrade Haussmann, then Governor of Bordeaux, was y appreciated by Napoleon and invited to join the renovation team, and from then on, he resigned from the post of Governor of Bordeaux and became the Governor of Seine (Paris), shouldering the important task of renovating Paris.

Osman officially inaugurated on this day, Napoleon III drew a map, with blue, red, yellow, green color pen outlined a new boulevard planning grid, thus opening up the city's blocked meridians, so that she can breathe freely. For the next 17 years, this drawing remained the blueprint for the transformation of Paris.

Haussmann's radical transformation of Paris, he demolished 20,000 old medieval buildings, which accounted for 60% of the total number of buildings in Paris at the time, and he also opened up 12 wide boulevards to the Arc de Triomphe as the center of a radial extension to all parts of the city. Haussmann also ingeniously added rows of greenery on both sides of the road, and over a period of 17 years, a **** planted 600,000 trees, adding two thousand hectares of parkland, which was the earliest incarnation of the boulevard.

Once a place where crowded streets provided hiding places for rebels and criminals, Paris has been transformed into a smooth, controlled, easy-to-inspect machine. Everyone's feet enjoyed strolling along the clean, straight, wide walkways, and everyone's respiratory system benefited from the clearing and cleansing of Paris's crumbling backstreets, the breeding ground for plague and crime.

Another of Haussmann's innovations was the revamping of the Parisian sewer system, with the installation of new sewage treatment plants far from the city center, the construction of more than 60 kilometers of new sewers over a five-year period, and the use of cleverly designed cleaning trucks to clean and purify the sewers, and even the design of airy, illuminated corridors in the sewers, which have made them one of the major tourist attractions of Paris. One of the main tourist attractions in Paris.

Over the next hundred years, tireless Parisian urban planners and water experts took up Haussmann's baton, expanding and perfecting the city's sewers. This project is still considered to be the most perfect underground drainage system in the city. Today, the total length of the Parisian sewers is 2,450 kilometers.

It is fair to say that Haussmann's remodeling revolutionized Paris, creating an enduring urban layout that has made it a world-famous city. City of Light?

The Great Alteration of Paris changed the syntax of urban development

The impact of the Great Alteration of Paris did not stop there, it was a landmark event in the history of urban development, which made Paris the prototype of the modern metropolis, influencing the planning of the layout of countless cities that followed.

How did the Remodeling of Paris influence the planning of later cities? In his urban planning, Haussmann originated the boulevards and built several large parks that became Paris' ? lungs of the city?

It could be argued that Haussmann was the first to pioneer green space in urban planning, making the boulevard a standard feature of a city. Since then, planting greenery on both sides of the road and preserving a green space in a crowded city has become a ****ing knowledge of urban planners around the world.

In the great transformation of Paris, Haussmann built five- and six-story apartment buildings on both sides of the boulevards in the center of the city, and these stretches of apartment buildings have withstood the test of time and have not become dilapidated, they are still beautiful and elegant, picturesque, and perfectly integrated into the fabric of the city. More importantly, this apartment building model has been widely imitated across Europe and has become one of the residential building styles in high-density cities.

In addition to this, there were a number of Ottoman innovations, including a train station in the center of the city, as well as street lamps to provide nighttime illumination for the city, and as a result, open-air cafes and street theaters were created, and the nightlife of the modern city became richer with each passing day.

In the 100 years since, modeled on Parisian elegance, capitals around the world have replicated this urban style? The area around Victoria Station in London, the Rue de Louise in Brussels, and the boulevards of Budapest are just a few examples.

Historian Colin? Jones commented: ? Ottoman changed the grammar of urban development to such an extent that it has been difficult to find another language ever since.?