The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne

same. Gold poured in from new mines in California and South Africa. Mighty banking concerns like the Crédit Lyonnais and the Crédit Foncier were established, the latter especially designed to stimulate the vast new building programme. In the cities there sprang up huge stores like the Bon Marché and the Louvre. The railway network increased from 3,685 kilometres to 17,924, so that all of a sudden the Riviera—formerly the haunt of only a few eccentric English at Cannes—became a Parisian resort. Telegraph lines radiated out all over the country, and shipbuilding expanded as never before. Guizot’s exhortation of ‘ enrichissez-vous ’ applied with even more force to the Second Empire. Men like Monsieur Potin the grocer became millionaires overnight; and, as Daubet’s unhappy Nabab discovered, scandals and vicious intrigues could reduce them to nothing again just as quickly. Speculation raged:
C’est une frénésie, une contagion,
Nul n’en est á l’abri, dans nulle région … 1
    The contagion spread to the summit of the Establishment, with even the Duc de Morny tainted; while he was Ambassador to St. Petersburg Bismarck recalled that de Morny had used the diplomatic bag to sendtrainloads of valuables back to Fiance duty-free, which were later auctioned and reputedly brought him a profit of some 800,000 roubles. Yet out of this cauldron a new wealthy bourgeoisie had arisen, installing itself solidly and comfortably in the châteaux from which its forebears had driven the aristocrats. As ostentatious as any European aristocracy and determined not to be driven out in its turn, the bourgeoisie was the chief political mainstay of the regime that was responsible for its good fortune; though it had little favourable to say of its benefactor. Never before had France as a whole been more prosperous, and in a remarkably short time she had established herself as one of the world’s leading industrial powers. Her population at the census of 1866 had grown to 37½ million, but the most remarkable feature was the immense growth of the big cities, especially Paris, as a result of this industrialization.
    The Second Empire’s greatest surface achievement (in fact its one truly ineffaceable landmark) was Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris. In 1859 the old ‘Farmers-General’ wall around the city had been demolished, and seven new arrondissements incorporated. At one leap Paris, now with a population of two million, spread out as far as the circle of protective forts that had been constructed by Louis-Philippe. In the centre of the city 20,000 houses were demolished and 40,000 new ones were built at an enormous cost (inflated by the arts of profiteers). Great boulevards cut through the evil-smelling higgledy-piggledy alleys of old Paris, and the city essentially as it stands today was born. Haussmann was more a financier and an engineer than a man of high artistic sense, and his new Paris provoked violent controversy. The conservative Goncourts said it made them think of ‘some American Babylon of the future’, but George Sand thought it a blessing to be able to walk without ‘being forced every moment to consult the policeman on the street corner or the affable grocer’. To an innocent from abroad, like Edwin Child, Haussmann’s Paris seemed ‘about the most magnificent town, I should think, in the world; all houses being six, seven and eight storeys high and everything so different and so far superior in elegance, utility, sociability, etc., to London…’. But away from the centre there were still rural scenes beyond the Arc de Triomphe; there were fields where the Trocadero now stands, and windmills at Montmartre; Passy had the air of an isolated village, and Auteuil was regarded as ‘just about the end of the world’. In his beloved Bois de Boulogne, the Emperor himself had done much landscaping, cutting new drives and creating artificial cascades.
    But for Haussmann aesthetics had been only one of several