What perhaps most marks out what contemporaries were already beginning to call Haussmannization from the processes of urban development which preceded it was the unitary, holistic vision which underpinned it -­ even if that unitary vision was the work of two men. Few of the elements in this vision were new. After all, the city had been used as a dynastic power site since the Romans. The straight urban street had been highly valued during the Renaissance. Boulevards had existed since the time of Louis XIV. There had been moves to extend the city's perimeters by royal edict under Louis XVI. Napoleon I had attended to the city's infrastructure and sought to highlight prestigious monuments within the cityscape. Furthermore, much of the detail of urban renewal which would be associated  with the notion of Haussmannism had already been trialled by Prefects Chabrol and Rambuteau. The latter in particular had devised the method of renovating decaying neighbourhoods  by creating new streets.

Nonetheless, it was under the Second Empire that  these existing features of  urban transformation were fused together into a programme  of urban renewal covering all the functions which the city performed. Whereas Rambuteau and Chabrol had eschewed the idea of any plan d'ensemble [overall plan for the entire city], Haussmann and Napoleon III gloried in it. For them the modern city was an organism which needed to be analysed according to a strictly utilitarian examination of urban functions.  Napoleon and Haussmann saw themselves as physician urbanists, whose task was to ensure Paris's nourishment,  to regulate and to speed up circulation in its arteries (namely, its streets}, to give it more powerful lungs so as to let it breathe (notably, through green spaces), and to ensure that its waste products were  hygienically and  effectively disposed of. These were all aspects of the new Paris which Napoleon proudly showed off to the world  at the international Expositions which he held in the city in 1855 and 1867.  The world was duly dazzled.

The Succession of Walls around Paris from the Middle Ages Until the 19th Century

The Rue de Rivoli was opened by Napoleon I in 1802 from the Place de la Concorde to the Lourvre and served as a model for the later development of the city

In the past Paris had often  been viewed as a great city whose grandeur could be registered in the vestiges that the past had left on its face. This equation between greatness and the monumental  record had already been eroded during  the eighteenth  century  under  the  pressure  of  more  utilitarian  ap­proaches. Although Napoleon Ill accentuated  his regime's links to both Roman and Napoleonic empires, Paris's own history played very little part in his vision for  the city. Similarly, although Napoleon referred to his projects as 'embellishments', Haussmann himself  admitted he  thought  essentially in terms of Paris's security, circulation  and salubrity'.  Neither man displayed much nostalgic or aesthetic appreciation of the lived environment of the old city. Haussmann, it is true, employed photographers such as Charles Marville and watercolourists like Davioud to make 'before-and-after' pictures of areas being transformed  by his works -- but the emphasis was less on nostalgia for a world that was being lost than relief at its being consigned to history.

History was notable only by its absence from the list of core features of the programme  of Haussmannization  which  Napoleon highlighted  to the municipal council in 1858. His vision was of major  arteries opening,  populous areas  becoming  healthier, rents  tending to gey lower as a  result  of  mo re and  more  building, the working class  getting   richer through   work,  poverty diminishing  through  better organization  of  relief, and Paris  responding to its highest  calling.

The 'highest calling which Napoleon  III, in this vaguely messianic way, planned for Paris was the metamorphosis of an ailing city into the capital  of the world , the shining light of the modern  age. Like all such missions, the project of renewal stressed  how bad the state of Paris had been prior  to its own  advent.  The  political  economist  Victor  Considerant  vehemently  described  Paris  in  1848   as  'a  great  manufactory  of  putrefaction  in  which poverty, plague ... and disease labour in concert and where sunlight barely ever enters. [It i s] a foul hole where plants  wilt and perish and four out of seven children die  within their  first  year.  'Paris, in its  state following the 1848  Revolution,' the writer Maxime du  Camp later  agreed, was on  the point  of becoming  uninhabitable. Its population [was] suffocating  in the tiny, narrow, putrid, and tangled streets in which it had been dumped . As a result of this state  of affairs,  everything suffered:  hygiene, security, speed  of communications and  public morality.

To some  degree  these  damning verdicts on  the  condition of mid-century Paris  are exaggerations which accentuated the Second  Empire's achievement. Paris  at  mid-century obviously faced  many  major social  problems. Yet, despite  the doom-sayers, it was still the largest  manufacturing city in the world, was  a major financial centre, had  a young and  dynamic workforce, had  put in place  a railway infrastructure and  was  beginning the work  of reinventing itself as a modern city. The criticisms of pre-Haussmann Paris  did , however, contain an  important nugget  of truth: namely,  that  by mid-century the  city was  widely   perceived as  a  dangerous, unhealthy and  frustratingly  difficult place  to  inhabit. This  meant that   there  was  a  groundswell of  desire  from within the  urban community for a more  liveable city. This  does  not  mean  to say  that   if Haussmann had  not  existed, the  Parisians would   have  invented him.  But it does  signify  that  Haussmannism  was  already in the air.