*Starred Review* Paris as we know it today, with its broad boulevards, majestic squares, and ornate apartment blocks, came into being under Louis Napoleon, who wanted to create a capital worthy of his nascent Second Empire aspirations. Employing Baron Haussmann turned out to be his master stroke, as Haussmann had engineering, financial, architectural, aesthetic, and political talents to bring off this massive undertaking. Author Christiansen focuses his efforts on illuminating Haussmann's personality, his remarkable intelligence, and his foresight. Haussmann thought not only about how Paris would appear but how it might function better, its municipal water and sewer systems becoming a model for all future city planners. Specific architects also changed the city's face, Charles Garnier and his iconic opera house the leading example. But Louis Napoleon stood pulling the strings and holding the power. Paris' reconstruction was one factor in his scheme to replace the nation's Second Republic with the Second Empire. His tactics now sound eerily familiar: restrictions on voting rights, tax reduction leading to deficits, appeal to oppressed classes. Good reading for all lovers of the City of Light.--Mark Knoblauch Copyright 2018 Booklist

WITTY, LEARNED AND INFORMATIVE at lightning speed (the author does the Commune in about 16 pages), Rupert Christiansen's "City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris" offers the fascinating story of a metamorphosis. The city of graceful spaciousness that we know today took shape during France's glittering Second Empire (1852-70), an era of mind-boggling wealth and terrible destitution presided over by the man Karl Marx memorably called a "grotesque mediocrity": the Emperor Louis Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew. To keep his grasp on power, this "second-grade dictator" (in Christiansen's words) needed to take control of his country's politically volatile, physically decaying capital. Enter Georges-Eugene Haussmann, prefect of the Seine: Louis Napoleon's very own Robert Moses. Like his 20th-century New York City counterpart, Haussmann was a razer. He wiped out whole (poor) neighborhoods to make room for roads and bridges. He knocked down and excavated old Paris and replaced its medieval crannies and narrow twisting streets - so handy for throwing up barricades in insurrectionary moments- with broad rectilinear avenues arranged like the spokes of a wheel, to establish links between the Paris railway stations and promote the expansion of trade. His watchwords were commerce, efficiency and ventilation. Christiansen speculates that his "choking asthma... might go some way toward explaining his subsequent obsession with clearing blockages and opening up airflow." But whatever the psychic roots of Haussmannization, its political aim was to make Paris "a smoothly functioning machine that could be controlled and surveyed, generating the maximum of profit for a contented affluent citizenry controlled by a ruling elite." Along the sweeping new boulevards, fiveand six-story apartment houses for the prosperous were built of "dressed and polished limestone from the quarries of the Oise," their facades a filigree of ironwork. The "architectural miracle" of the Palais Gamier opera house rose like a soufflé at one splendid end of the Avenue de l'Opéra. The city's cathedralesque department stores; its lovely public parks (the golden-gated Parc Monceau, the ButtesChaumont, the elaborately landscaped Bois de Boulogne); its new sewers, completed in 1867, whose "spacious tunnels had gaslit galleries that became a major tourist attraction, notably visited by both the czar of Russia and the king of Portugal" - all these "marvels of the new Babylon" were brought into being, in the emperor's name, by Baron Haussmann. Whose career imploded, along with the whole Second Empire, in early 1870. That year, Louis Napoleon went seeking glory on the battlefield, only to be defeated and taken prisoner by the Prussians. There ensued political chaos, the siege of Paris, the Commune and the tragic massacre that ended it. For days, Paris burned. A veteran British journalist, Christiansen enhances his lively account of this transformative era with a bibliography for further reading, as well as wonderful photographs and period illustrations throughout: a fancy-dress ball at the Thileries palace; the shantytowns that once encircled Paris; four fiercely determined ladies riding the "bone-shaking" velocipede, precursor of the bicycle; a huge hot-air balloon whose function was to float mail out of the city under siege, and so on. In the baron's time, it was politically incorrect for those among the intelligentsia to admire his handiwork. It still is. But no matter how you feel about Haussmannization, this little book will make you want to walk the expansive elegance of Paris, as well as its back streets, from one end to the other, seeking out French history in the sites it brings so vividly to life.

A concise yet admirably thorough account of the reinvention of one of the world's great cities.Longtime Daily Telegraph arts writer Christiansen (Literature/Keble Coll., Oxford; I Know You Are Going to be Happy: The Story of a Sixties Family, 2013, etc.), who has won the Somerset Maugham Award, opens with the 1875 debut of architect Charles Garnier's opulent, ostentatious Opra, the very emblem of Second Empire extravagance. But the real story begins decades earlier. Many readers think of Paris as a timeless museum of grace and beauty. In 1853, when French Emperor Louis Napoleon undertook a massive public works program under the direction of the brilliant but ruthless Baron Haussmann, much of Paris was, in fact, a fetid slum with a few sanctuaries of splendor. Inspired by the emperor's admiration for London's municipal works, cost (both monetary and human) would be no object. The author details how this campaign of leveling and building transformed Paris from curved forms into straight lines and broad vistas, creating almost as much upheaval as improvement. He gives due credit to Haussmann's key collaborators, demonstrating how an ideology of efficiency ruled and how a banking boom underwrote italong with immense government debt. While giving voice to Haussmann's most ardent critics, who were appalled by his aesthetic and deplored the banality of the new Paris' thirst for amusement, Christiansen shows how many of the more sensible measures were social investments that benefited everyone, especially sanitation, the greening of Paris, and the educational reforms of Jean Victor Duruy. The author also showcases the influence exerted by an era of free trade and burgeoning technologies. He develops a crisply written narrative that moves from Louis' ascent to the presidency through France's disastrous war with Prussia, the collapse of the Second Empire, and the bloodbath of a Parisian civil war.Capsule character studies of Louis and Haussmann enrich an engrossing short history that reminds us of the urban planning and social engineering blunders we continue to make today. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Wide boulevards, leafy parks, charming squares, pleasing fountains, and fin de siècle architecture characterized by Charles Garnier's l'Opéra define for many the very essence of Parisian life. The urban renewal project that created the city as we now know it was conceived, designed, and implemented primarily by two ambitious and controversial figures: -Napoléon III, the president of France from 1848 to 1852, and his public works mastermind, Baron Georges-Eugène -Haussmann. British author Christiansen (Paris Babylon; Romantic Affinities) does an excellent job of placing the transformation of Paris within the context of political, social, and economic influences of the time. Against the backdrop of a Europe in transition, the time period covered is from Louis Napoléon's ascent to power to the collapse of the Paris Commune in 1871. VERDICT This popular history is a quick and enjoyable read for anyone interested in how City of Light came to be.-Linda Frederiksen, Washington State Univ. Lib., Vancouver © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Christiansen (Prima Donna: A History), a writer on the arts for the British Daily Telegraph, describes how, during the Second Empire period (1851-1871), Paris became a modern city known for its broad boulevards lined with five- or six-story apartment buildings, parks, and monuments. The city's population had grown rapidly, and "its oases of splendor, such as the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, [were] surrounded by a fetid wilderness of filth, stench, and crime." Almost single-handedly responsible for the city's transformation was Georges EugA"ne Haussmann, a kind of mid-19th-century French Robert Moses. Christiansen portrays Haussmann as an arrogant but incorruptible workaholic who incorporated 12 surrounding villages into Paris, instantly increasing its population by a third, and he impressively tackled the herculean task of supplying the burgeoning city with an adequate water supply and sewage system. As with Moses, Haussmann's urban engineering often had a pernicious effect on the poor, who were "badly hit by the rise in rents and crowded... into the attics, basements, hallways, and stairways of buildings that Haussmann had yet to condemn." Yet for the middle and upper classes, the city became more spacious and beautiful, boasting such new, captivating structures as Charles Garnier's OpAcra. This very readable volume is a valuable contribution to modern French and urban history. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.