“We’ll always have Paris”: Bogie got it right, at least when it comes to this year’s Oscar nominations. While many critics note the nostalgia evinced in “Hugo” and “The Artist” for the innocence of early cinema, they overlook how these films, along with two other nominees, “Midnight in Paris” and “A Cat in Paris,” also evoke nostalgia for a certain idea of Paris.
That this particular Paris is so fashionable in an age of political unrest and economic upheaval would not have surprised the man who, more or less single-handedly, created the stage setting for the Paris we will always have.
This year marks the 160th anniversary of the event that transformed Paris into the city that frames so many of this year’s Oscar nominees. It was in 1852 that President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, fired by the memories and myth of his uncle’s earlier reign, proclaimed the birth of the Second Empire. Keen on creating a city worthy of its new imperial ambitions, the new emperor appointed a technocrat, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to remake Paris. In one of his first acts as emperor, Louis-Napoleon called Haussmann to his palace and showed him a map of Paris on which he had slashed a number of straight lines across the dense squiggles of streets and alleys that formed a still mostly medieval city.
Haussmann assumed his task with ruthless efficiency. He proceeded to disembowel, as Haussmann proudly described his work, the center of the city. The Ile de la Cité, the small island anchored in the middle of the Seine, was entirely razed. More than 30,000 inhabitants in the thick hive of tenements that sprawled to the walls of Notre Dame were forced out, and the island was transformed into a lifeless platform for the cathedral.
The same logic of urban renewal played out elsewhere in the city: Haussmann sought to check nearly a millennium of largely unplanned growth with the imposition of rectilinear street patterns and broad boulevards lined by apartment buildings with uniform facades and uniform height.
Suddenly, the New World seemed to have been dropped on the Old World. For the literary critic Edmond de Goncourt, Haussmann’s Paris anticipated the horrors of America: “These new boulevards, without curves, without unexpected perspectives, implacably straight, make me think of some American Babylon of the future.”
Contemporary critics of Haussmann joked bitterly that the scandalous curves of the Seine would also need to be straightened.
In fact, the new Paris — or, rather, the earlier one some of these films now celebrate — struck contemporaries to be as phony as, well, a Hollywood lot.
Haussmann’s buildings hid the older quarters from the public’s view, while his boulevards were wide in order to prevent the construction of barricades. Zola dismissed the new capital as an “enormous hypocrisy.” Flaubert muttered that everything in Paris had become false, including the whores, and the working class was forced toward the periphery of the city. By and large, the Impressionists avoided Haussmann’s Paris, instead depicting the margins and corners exempt from the massive urban transformations.
Haussmann did his best to empty the city of the individualism, insurrection and romanticism celebrated by Goncourt and Hugo, Balzac and Baudelaire. His aim was to flatten Paris into an image: promenades, panoramas, Sunday outings, great exhibitions, and official parades. It was a stage that did not belong to those who lived there, but to those who used it as the backdrop to their politics or their art. Paris had been reduced to a spectacle.
This Paris — the boulevards, quais and cafés along which the characters depicted by Martin Scorcese and Woody Allen stroll, run, and fall in and out of love — is the work of an administrator who carved out the heart of Paris and replaced it with the hardware designed to control it.
The great rail stations like Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon, the setting for “Hugo,” which now seem so fragile, were the monumental expressions of a government wishing to impose the same centralizing logic on the nation that it had done for the capital. All roads and all rails, just as all hopes and dreams, now had Paris as their terminus.
Even though Hollywood inevitably reinvents history, history tends to reassert itself in odd ways. “A Cat in Paris,” a French entry to the Academy Awards this year, nominated for best animation film, pulls us into a dizzying maze of alleys and streets, weirdly angled buildings and tilting chimneys that Haussmann tried to leave on his editing room floor. With Dino, the cat, as guide, we visit a Paris that is simultaneously mythic and contemporary, a densely populated world where the moral economy is no less out of kilter as the sloping roofs. It is left for a child and thief to reaffirm what the audience knows in its heart to be right and just.
The film’s great success earlier this year in France is perhaps not surprising. As the nation’s economy falters, its society frays and its political parties fumble for answers, the citizens have turned to a cartoon that portrays a Paris the American films have ignored. It may suggest that Haussmann’s transformation of Paris will always be incomplete, Hollywood nothwithstanding.
By Robert Zaretsky, a professor of history at the University of Houston, Honors College, and the author of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.