A Short History of Knocking Paris Down

There is a thing about Paris that nobody tells you, which is that the Parisians have spent roughly four hundred years trying to demolish it, and the only reason it survives at all is that they kept running out of money before they could finish the job. The city you photograph from the Pont Neuf — and here is a small joke the French have been quietly enjoying since 1607 — it is in fact the oldest bridge in Paris, which they named the New Bridge, the way you might christen a geriatric Labrador “Puppy.” It was a sensation in its day, chiefly because it had no houses built on top of it, an innovation so radical that crowds came simply to stand on a bridge and look at a river, which tells you everything you need to know about the entertainment options of the seventeenth century.

We begin around 1600 with Henri IV, a man who loved Paris so dearly that he laid out the gorgeous Place Royale — now the Place des Vosges, because the French rename things in a way that it’s taken Donald Trump almost two terms to rediscover — and then, in a stroke of cosmic editing, got himself fatally stabbed in 1610 while stuck in a traffic jam on the Rue de la Ferronnerie. Read that again. The king who modernised the capital was murdered because the capital’s streets were too narrow to drive a carriage down. If irony were a building material, Paris would be much taller than it is.

His grandson, Louis XIV, took one appalled sniff of the place — and to be fair to him, it stank like the inside of a Renaissance shoe — and did what any reasonable absolute monarch would do: he abandoned it entirely, decamping to a malarial swamp at Versailles to construct the most expensive draughty barn in human history. A palace, mark you, of seven hundred rooms and not a single functioning lavatory worth the name, so that the most refined court in Europe spent a century relieving itself behind the curtains, in the stairwells, and very probably in the soup. The Sun King radiated glory from every orifice, and the corridors smelled accordingly. Meanwhile he generously knocked Paris’s medieval walls flat and replaced them with tree-lined promenades — the grands boulevards — which is the single most useful thing he did, and he did it mostly to get the rabble’s eyeline off his back.

The eighteenth century’s great contribution to urban planning was a wall built specifically to extract money, the Farmers-General wall, a tax cordon so loathed that Parisians coined a pun about it — le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant, “the wall walling Paris makes Paris murmur” — which is exactly the sort of thing people say when they cannot legally set fire to a tax inspector. They got their wish a few years later in 1789, when the citizenry, in a fit of architectural criticism, dismantled the Bastille brick by brick and sold the rubble as souvenirs. The Parisians invented the heritage gift shop and the revolution in the same afternoon.

Napoleon, predictably, wanted Arches. He began the Arc de Triomphe and then had the bad manners to lose at Waterloo before it was finished, so it sat for thirty years as the world’s grandest unfinished doorway, a monument to a triumph that hadn’t happened, which is at least honest.

But the man we have really come here to discuss — the patron saint of municipal vandalism, the demolition artist’s demolition artist — is Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who from 1853 set about the medieval city with the gleeful thoroughness of a man clearing a blocked drain with cordite. Hired by Napoleon III to “modernise,” Haussmann tore the heart out of the Île de la Cité, evicted the poor to the outer darkness, and drove his vast straight boulevards through the slums for two stated reasons and one unstated one. The stated reasons were light and sewerage. The unstated one — and you have to admire the candour of the architecture even where you cannot admire the man — was that boulevards a hundred feet wide are extremely difficult to barricade and extremely easy to fire a cannon down. Every elegant Parisian vista you have ever swooned over is, fundamentally, a clear line of artillery fire aimed at the working class. Bon appétit.

Haussmann bankrupted the city, was sacked for creative accounting, and left behind the uniform cream-stone Paris that the entire world now considers the most beautiful thing ever built — which is the kind of result that makes you despair of justice entirely. Do something appalling on a sufficiently enormous scale and they put your name on the boulevard.

Then came the Eiffel Tower (1889), and here the cultured classes of Paris distinguished themselves by signing a furious petition denouncing it as a “useless and monstrous” iron asparagus that would disgrace the city forever. The novelist Maupassant reportedly lunched in the tower’s restaurant every single day — not because he liked it, but because it was the one spot in all Paris from which he could not actually see the bloody thing. This, we will note, is a complaint Parisians would reissue word-for-word eighty years later.

Because the twentieth century arrived, and with it the truly imaginative atrocities. Le Corbusier — a Swiss watchmaker’s son with the soul of a concrete car park — proposed in his Plan Voisin to bulldoze the entire Marais, the Right Bank’s irreplaceable old quarter, and replace it with eighteen identical cruciform towers set in windswept lawns. Read that one twice, too. He wanted to demolish the most beautiful district in Europe and put up something that looks like the back of a hospital. Mercifully, the French ignored him, then waited until 1973 and built the Tour Montparnasse instead — a single black filing cabinet so universally despised that, in a flourish of déjà vu that would make Maupassant weep, locals observe that the finest view in Paris is from its summit, because it is the only place in the city you cannot see the Tour Montparnasse. The same joke. The same tower. The French simply cannot stop building things you have to climb in order to escape looking at.

They flattened the gorgeous iron-and-glass markets of Les Halles in 1971 — “the belly of Paris,” Zola called it — leaving a literal hole in the ground for years, then filling it with a shopping centre of such surpassing dreariness it had to be demolished and replaced again. Two acts of vandalism for the price of one; you have to respect the commitment.

President Mitterrand, not to be outdone, gave Paris his Grands Projets: the glass Pyramid at the Louvre (loathed, then beloved — they always are), the Grande Arche, and a new national library shaped like four enormous open glass books. Glass. To store books in. The first thing the sun did was begin gently roasting the nation’s literary heritage, obliging them to bolt wooden shutters over the inside of the towers — a library that had to be partially boarded up to stop it cooking its own contents. There is, somewhere, an architect who was paid for this.

And so to now, where Mayor Hidalgo rips up the expressways, evicts the motorcar, paints everything with bicycle lanes, and proposes that Parisians swim in the Seine — a river into which the city has been enthusiastically defecating since Henri IV got stuck in that traffic jam. Notre-Dame caught fire in 2019, burned in front of a weeping planet, and was rebuilt good as new by 2024, proving that the only thing Paris does faster than knocking its monuments down is putting them back up the instant a tourist starts crying.

Four centuries, then, of demolition, eviction, bankruptcy, tax walls, roasted libraries, and towers built to be climbed and resented — and the maddening, unforgivable punchline is that the result is still, by some distance, the most beautiful city on earth.

Honestly. Some people have all the luck and none of the taste