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

considerations. Health and crime were two others. In the course ofdemolition, many of the festering abscesses of the old city had been lanced; the traditional plague-breeding spots as well as the lairs of assassins and rogues, such as the Buttes-Chaumont. In this city where riot and revolution had become almost a regular feature of life, there was one further aim all-important to the mind of the precariously installed Louis-Napoleon. The acute eye of Queen Victoria had spotted, during her visit of 1855, that he had had the streets of Paris covered with macadam, ‘to prevent the people from taking up the pavement as hitherto’. Later on, it would have been apparent to any military observer what excellent fields of fire Haussmann’s long, straight streets afforded, what opportunities to turn the flank of a barricade there were for troops debouching from their oblique intersections, and how easy the wide boulevards made it to transport riot-breakers from one end of Paris to another. They had, thought Haussmann, at last succeeded ‘in cutting through the habitual storm-centres’. But in fact, with what force will be seen later, he had to a large extent achieved the defeat of his own purpose.
    In no way did Louis-Napoleon earn the title of ‘the Well-Meaning’ more than in his endeavours to improve the miserable lot of the French working man, and herein lay the source of perhaps the saddest paradox of his reign. It was the section of France for which he strove hardest, yet when the crunch came, the working class provided his most violent enemies. Louis-Napoleon’s far-reaching social reforms included the setting-up of institutions of maternal welfare, societies of mutual assistance, the establishment of workers’ cities, homes for injured workers; also projected were shorter working hours and health legislation; the loathsome prison hulks were abolished and the right to strike granted. The Emperor’s own personal contribution to charitable works was considerable, and in his efforts to ingratiate himself with the workers he even decreed that, instead of being named after his mother, Reine Hortense, a new boulevard over the covered-in St.-Martin canal should be given the name of a worker, Richard Lenoir. But many of Louis-Napoleon’s more progressive ideas were frustrated by the greed of the new bourgeoisie and the conservatism of the provinces, facts which did not escape the notice of the workers of Paris.
    As much as anyone else he was aware of the problems and the dangers; ominously, he told Cobden ‘It is very difficult in France to make reforms; we make revolutions in France, not reforms.’
    Under the surface life in fact had altered little, with both economic and political problems sharpening the French workers’ discontent. They alone it seemed had been left out of the general wave of ‘ enrichissez-vous ’, as was typified by the fact that between 1852 and 1870 thewages of a miner in the Anzin collieries increased by a mere 30 per cent, while the company’s dividends had tripled. Though workers’ wages had increased, almost nowhere had they kept up with the rise in the cost of living. In Paris, for example, the average daily wage rose only 30 per cent over the duration of the Second Empire, while the cost of living rose a minimum of 45 per cent. Conditions were particularly harsh for the workers of Paris, where, as one unfortunate by-product of Haussmann, their rents roughly doubled during the period, so that by 1870 they ate up one-third of their wage packet. Meanwhile food could take another 60 per cent, which left very little over for the other good things of life. Bourgeois chroniclers of the period claimed that the workers of Paris had little taste for meat; the truth was that they simply could not afford it, and it was no coincidence that in 1866 butchers first sold cheap horsemeat (thereby introducing a taste which in four short years would be forced upon a much wider Parisian clientele). Indebtedness