THE TWO DECADES of the Second Empire were marked by a kind of revolution in Paris, but of a very different kind to the hurly-burly of the previous eighty-two years. The key figure was Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, though it might be more appropriate to refer to him as ‘Baron’, since his title may well have been self-conferred, resting on the fact that his maternal grandfather, Baron Dentzel, had no male heirs. Haussmann, an early example of the classic French fonctionnaire or state employee who though unelected can wield immense influence, made his career as prefect – the appointed representative of central government in a French department – first in the Var, on the western Riviera, and then in Yonne (Burgundy) before being nominated prefect of the Seine – the department that in those days encompassed Paris and its suburbs – in 1853. He was to occupy this post for seventeen years, falling from grace only a few months before his master Napoleon III.

Edmone Texier's Tableau de Paris, published in the year Haussmann assumed responsibility for the city, is the most comprehensive survey known to me of what pre-Haussmannian Paris was like. To read his assertion that ‘la large et longue rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine commence déjà à donner une idée de la splendeur de la cité dans laquelle le voyageur pénètre’ / ‘the broad and long rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine already begins to give us an idea of the splendour of the city the traveller is entering’ might make the unwary reader think that Texier was writing about Paris after Haussmann. The Faubourg's German inhabitants also get a good press, described as ‘ouvriers intelligents et laborieux’ / ‘intelligent and diligent workmen’, and as such favourably contrasted to the pseudo-intellectuals – ‘la classe des lettrés ou soi-disant tels’ / ‘the lettered classes, or at least those who claim to be so’ – who are identified as the other major category of German immigrants to Paris.