Shopping Arcades and Operas

Paris owes much of its current design and look to Baron Haussman, a French urban planner with a German name.  Napoleon III tasked him, the prefect of Paris, with modernizing the city in 1852.  Ten years later, over half of Paris' buildings had been torn down, its twisting streets replaced with wide boulevards (just in time for the Germans to march in) and its sewage was flowing underground instead of around people's feet.  I learned this while watching a TV show of Paris, and it piqued my interest in the city's urban planning (why?  because I'm a nerd), so when I saw there was a tour on the "Making of Modern Paris" I jumped on it.

The tour was supposed to follow late 18th and early 19th century developments through the Haussmannization of Paris.  We started at the Palais-Royal, originally the palace of Cardinal Richelieu and then passed down through the Royal line.  In 1785, Louis Philippe II inherited the building, and decided to convert portions of the structure into essentially Paris' first mall to increase his cash flow.  Stores still fill the space today.

The gardens in the Palais-Royal

After the Parisians were done with chopping off each other's heads at the end of the 18th century, they blew off ten years of steam by shopping and the trend begun by the Palais-Royal was continued in the form of covered arcades called passages.  The number of passages exploded in the first half of the century as developers continually tried to one up each other by building bigger and fancier shopping areas.  The advent of the department store in the 1850s along with Haussmann's destructive construction led to the decline of the passage and only a handful remain today.  We spent most of our tour in those that are still standing.  Although they were interesting, Magge and I didn't expect to spend so much time looking and them and were hoping to get more into Haussmann's urban planning and architecture.

A couple of passages from the early 1800s

An art nouveau domed ceiling in one of the late 19th century department stores that helped kill the passages

We finished the tour at the Opera Garnier.  It was supposed to the finishing touch of Napoleon III's and Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris and a symbol of the wealth and sophistication of France's Second Empire.  However, by the time the opera house opened in 1875, Napoleon III had already died while exiled in England and France was a republic again.  Perhaps most famous for being the setting for the Phantom of the Opera, it's a beautiful building inside and out.  We walked out of the Opera disappointed that the tour didn't give us what we expected, but it's tough to complain too much about a day walking around in Paris.

The Opera Garnier at the end of a typical Haussmannian boulevard

The interior of the Opera.  The lighting made it difficult to get good pictures.

A Marc Chagall painting was put on the ceiling in the 1960s; it doesn't match any of the rest of the opera house's interior and was controversial at the time