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, inspired by the memories and myth of his uncle’s earlier reign, proclaimed the birth of the Second Empire. Eager to create 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 Île 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 that some of these films now celebrate—struck contemporaries 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 Scorsese 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.