The blind 3rd century poet Ossian — dubbed the “Homer of the North” — may have never actually existed as scientists have found that his tales were merely 18th-century copies of Irish folklore, putting an end to the 250-year-old literary controversy. Poems by the Scottish bard Ossain are considered to be some of the most important literary works ever to have emerged from Britain or Ireland, given their influence over the Romantic period in literature and the arts.
Figures from German Johannes Brahms to English poet William Wordsworth reacted enthusiastically. French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte took a copy on his military campaigns and US President Thomas Jefferson believed that Ossian was the greatest poet to have ever existed.
However, since James Macpherson published what he claimed were translations of ancient Scottish Gaelic poetry by Ossian, scholars have questioned the authenticity of the works, which were heralded as the Scottish equivalent to Homer at the time.
Researchers, including those from University of Oxford in the UK, showed that the structures of the social networks underlying the Ossian’s works and their similarities to Irish mythology. The researchers mapped the characters at the heart of the works and the relationships between them to compare the social networks found in the Scottish epics with classical Greek literature and Irish mythology. The study showed that the networks in the Scottish poems bore no resemblance to epics by Homer, but strongly resembled those in mythological stories from Ireland.
The poems launched the romantic portrayal of the Scottish Highlands which persists, in many forms, to the present day and inspired Romantic nationalism all across Europe. “By working together, it shows how science can open up new avenues of research in the humanities. The opposite also applies, as social structures discovered in Ossian inspire new questions in mathematics,” said Ralph Kenna, a statistical physicist in the UK.
‘When you look in through the windows of existentialism, the first thing you see is a busy café’.
Reading Sarah Bakewell’s splendidly conceived book, I remember one summer fortnight in Paris, sitting in the warmth and freedom of the cafés that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre had patronised, debating philosophy, arguing vital questions of human existence and identity, and liberally gulping apricot cocktails.
The sunny days bring back to memory the 1930s on the Left Bank of Paris, where in the vicinity of the Saint-Germain-Prés Church, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas mingled socially and intellectually. The Café Philo in New York is evocative of such gatherings.
I remember having a drink at Bar Napoleon, a beer and a meal at Deux Magots on Rue Bonaparte, and an evening at the jazz hangout Lorientais, where a book under your arm, symbolic of the anti-bourgeois sensibility, could be the passport to entry. It was here that Sartre and Beauvoir had laboured on their books amidst the cacophony of chatter, blues, jazz and ragtime.
Music and freedom were still in the air that summer afternoon in 1932 when the age-old philosophical puzzle about reality came up before the three friends who met at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on Rue du Montparnasse while sipping their cocktails. Raymond Aron had studied phenomenology under Edmund Husserl at the University of Berlin, and on this historic day, explained the concept to his friends Sartre and Beauvoir, emphasising the role of philosophy as a descent into ‘down-to-earth matters’, a proclivity towards Heidegger’s complete “disregard for intellectual clutter”. The meeting inspired Sartre to spend a year in Berlin and engage in “doing philosophy that reconnected it with moral, lived experience”, a kind of hijacking of Husserl and Søren Kierkegaard to blend a very aggressive phenomenology with a “philosophy of apricot cocktails, of Parisian gardens, the cold autumn sea at Le Havre… the way a woman’s breasts pool as she lies on her back, a film, a jazz song”. This was philosophy of “music and sex, shame and sadism, vertigo and voyeurism”.
The realist turn in Sartre moved him towards the very idea of free will and human freedom that lay at the heart of all experience, distinguishing humans from other species. Unlike non-humans, there is no predefined nature; essentialism stands rejected as you create your nature and your being through what you choose to do: “I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along… a work in progress,” in Bakewell’s words. Using her widely researched familiarity with a subject she fell in love with as a teenager, Bakewell draws attention to Sartre’s historic lecture on existentialism (published as ‘Existentialism and Humanism’) that turned both him and Beauvoir into cult advocates of a philosophy in which one’s existence and authenticity depend on the choice arrived at — not as a victim of society but as its “true voice”.
Such a philosophy, in the wake of Auschwitz and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would enable people to fall back on their own choices and potential to fashion a better future in a world of mind-boggling violence and outrage. The idea of essence or fixed human nature stood rejected in the face of oppression, racism and the hegemony of religious belief. The Catholic Church blacklisted Sartre and Beauvoir, and Marxism rejected the idea of a freedom that negated the very thesis of inevitable revolution and the envisaged trajectory of history.
Thus, to be an existentialist meant freedom of existence, going to sleep at odd hours, making free love, listening to jazz and dancing to ragtime. This was social behaviour at once radical and nonconformist, a rejection of bourgeois values and right-wing complacency of established norms and received assumptions. Noticeably, there was more conversation than coffee or cocktails.
The café became the ‘happening’ place of all creative art and writing, a world of lovers and artists, musicians and students, that would send ripples right into the rebellious 1960s, bringing most of us, even young teenage undergraduates, in contact with existentialism, with the question of authenticity, with the ‘proto-punk style’ of living, with wearing black woollen turtlenecks and debating philosophy at social events. The Firebox Café in Bloomsbury or the nearby Cuts Café, with its walls lined with the political works of George Orwell, comes to mind, especially at a time when the Left needs to seriously reinvent itself. As Yevgeny Zamyatin would say, “Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.”
Such was the deviant world of Paris, the ‘topsy-turveydom’ of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Queneau deep in debate on freedom and the embarrassment of tolerating a rich elite society or the bourgeois order of marriage and fidelity, so profoundly rejected through the bohemianism of Sartre and Beauvoir.
The existential temperament of the 1940s engaged itself seriously with political issues as is clear from the controversial writings published in the journal, Les Temps Modernes, and the newspaper,Liberation. No state apparatus could overpower this sense of freedom, evident from Sartre’s refusal to accept the Legion of Honour or the Nobel Prize in 1964, arguing for “a writer’s need to stay independent of interests and influence”, living with the credo “whatever you experience, as you experience”. Such was the world view that taught you to live on the edge, a Nietzschean affirmation of an assertive existence. Life for many, thus, “would be always one big existential café”. And in such a world, as Bakewell argues, there was no place for the ‘post-structuralist signifier,’ but an obsession with life itself, with its sorrows and joys, with nuclear war, with environment and foreign policy, with the wretched of the earth. The major questions that concern us are lucidly brought out by the ‘cafephilos’, icons who stand tall even today. The revival of the post-war Parisian café or the coffee house culture ought to be the call of the day.
Shelley Walia is professor and fellow, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh.
London-While all Parisians have transformed into political analysts talking about Brexit and its repercussions on lifestyle and fashion, fashion designers and the U.K. said that the coming years will be dedicated to women.
Britain has made its decision and appointed a woman, “Theresa May,” as a prime minister for the first time since Thatcher.
Fashion, on the other hand, celebrated femininity through romantic outfits shining with optimism, drifting away from a reality burdened by economic regression and terrorist attacks around the world. The fashion shows of Dior, Atelier Versace, Armani, Ralph & Russo, Giambattista Valli, Elie Saab and others have transformed Paris into an oasis to escape; not only from the sad, complicated reality, but also from the trending “sports fashion”. Most designers directed their creativity towards the golden old days, when women used to fully celebrate their femininity without being accused of lavishness.
This season, Paris disregarded the worsening economic conditions and all the drama to introduced unique designs made of extravagant fabrics that would take you to wonderland.
Inspired by the fifties, designers have gone above and beyond to meet the demands of today’s classic women. Christian Dior overcame the World War II’s austerity to return women’s stolen femininity. All designers introduced masterpieces that required thousands of work hours and many meters of fancy fabrics worth hundreds of thousands dollars.
Valentino, Giambattista Valli, Alexis Mabile, Victor & Rolf chose the Marie Antoinette and the Elizabethan era in their collections with many ballgown skirts, high necklines, and frill sleeves. John Galliano also traveled back in time, particularly to the era of Napoleon Bonaparte and introduced for Maison Margiela a revolutionist collection, unlike the previous ones, which featured dramatic and surrealistic works.
From the first day of the show, Atelier Versace emphasized its nostalgia for the past. Donatella Versace provided various designs filled with seduction and femininity, ranging from Haute Couture dresses to prêt-a-porter coats.
Profiting from his wide experience with feminism and romance, Elie Saab always succeeds in giving women exactly what they dream of. Saab was inspired by old New York City and focused on volumes, folds, and unique motifs in his designs. He also focused on details like heavy three-dimensional floral print embroidery, and used classic fabrics like silk, tulle and velvet. It is worth mentioning that for this season, the Lebanese
designer has also introduced party dresses for young girls. Child models walked the runway alongside older counterparts wearing miniature versions of their gowns.
In Atelier Armani’s show, no one can accuse Giorgio Armani of preferring romance or drama on modern elegance. Armani opened his show with a woman ensemble composed of a masculine jacket and pants tailored with feminine fabrics, before he moved to velvet dresses. In his collection, he focused on calm colors like pearl white, light pink, and sky blue.
Ralph & Russo’s collection had also played on emotions especially nostalgia by recalling the fifties and seventies. The designers sought to attract women’s attention and introduced fit dresses, skirts, and pants along with heavy beading of crystals and pearl in addition to three-dimensional floral prints and feathers.
Designers including Elie Saab, Armani and Ralph & Russo have completed their lines with accessories, and introduced collections of clutches, shoes and hats that fit the Haute Couture fans.
Unlike the previous designers who recalled the past, Jean Paul Gaultier preferred nature and presented a collection in which colors like dark green and wooden-inspired brown have played a very important role. His show was calm and focused on designs that celebrate feminine standards by highlighting the waist and bust lines. Although the collection perfectly fits the European bourgeoisie, it missed factors of vitality and glamour that distinguished the other shows of the week.
Giambattista Valli has also chosen nature as a source of inspiration. Yet, unlike Gaultier, he included many vivid colors in his collection and reduced exaggeration by introducing different designs like baby-dolls dresses, and others inspired from the fifties with puffy sleeves. Valli opened his show with feminine white designs then moved to long dresses tailored with black, red, and sky blue Muslin. He also used fur and concluded the show with three dramatic exceptional dresses.
All the pomp and pageantry of Britain was on display today for the annual ceremony of Trooping the Colour, a parade in central London held each year to honor the monarch's official birthday, timed to coincide with the better weather of May and June. This monarch’s real birthday falls on April 21, the date on which she was born in 1926.
Members of the royal family, including Camilla the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge holding Princess Charlotte, Prince George, Prince William, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Philip stand on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony on Horseguards Parade in central London, Britain June 11, 2016. Trooping the Colour is a ceremony to honour Queen Elizabeth's official birthday. The Queen celebrates her 90th birthday this year.
She has now ruled for 64 years, becoming Britain's longest reigning monarch, exceeding the reign of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Royal guardsmen in their distinctive bright red tunics and tall bearskin helmets, known as busbies, wheeled and marched on the Horse Guards Parade in the heart of London as Queen Elizabeth II, dressed in a striking neon green coat, dress and hat, took the salute.
Until 1987 the Queen, a keen horsewoman, would take the salute on horseback, riding sidesaddle and wearing the uniform of the Colonel-in-Chief of whatever Guards regiment was heading the parade on the day.
Tens of thousands of tourists, many from China, crowded the streets to watch the ceremonies, which involved 1,000 soldiers, 200 horses and 200 musicians, some of them mounted.
The ceremony dates back to 1760, when whichever regiment was guarding the monarch – it is done in rotation – presented its colours, or regimental flag. The ritual of presenting, or trooping, the flag, dates back to the various wars British soldiers were involved in in Europe, when at the start of each day each unit’s flag was paraded in front of the troops so they would recognize them as a rallying point in the heat of battle.
A couple of things to note – the Queen always dresses in bright colours when attending official functions such as today's event to allow the crowd to spot her easily.
And the bearskin headgear worn by the Brigade of Guards, charged with protecting the Monarch and guarding her official residences, dates back to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, when British forces under the Duke of Wellington defeated the Grand Armee of Napoleon Bonaparte. They were originally part of the uniform in battle of Napoleon's Imperial Guard, many of whom perished in a desperate last minute charge against British lines.
The British guardsmen were so impressed by their bravery that they adopted the headgear as a tribute that lasts until today.
After today's display of marching and music, the Royal Air Force staged a flypast, with fighters, transport aircraft, helicopters and the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, which includes a Supermarine Spitfire and a Hawker Hurricane, both of which saw service in World War II.
Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip arrive back at Buckingham Palace from Horseguards Parade after the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony in central London, Britain June 11, 2016. Trooping the Colour is a ceremony to honour Queen Elizabeth's official birthday. The Queen celebrates her 90th birthday this year.
Guardsmen arrive back at Buckingham Palace from Horseguards Parade after the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony in central London, Britain June 11, 2016. Trooping the Colour is a ceremony to honour Queen Elizabeth's official birthday. The Queen celebrates her 90th birthday this year.
Camilla Duchess of Cornwall (L) and Catherine Duchess of Cambridge travel in a carriage to Horseguards Parade for the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony in central London, Britain June 11, 2016. Trooping the Colour is a ceremony to honour Queen Elizabeth's official birthday. The Queen celebrates her 90th birthday this year.
Guardsmen line the Mall for the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony in central London, Britain June 11, 2016. Trooping the Colour is a ceremony to honour Queen Elizabeth's official birthday. The Queen celebrates her 90th birthday this year.
So this is how it feels for your country to be facing a genuine political crisis.
Not the manufactured crises hyped by the media every other month, or even the financial crisis of 2008. I mean a political crisis without precedent in modern American history.
One of the country's two major political parties is on the verge of nominating a man unfit to be president — and the lack of fitness is thoroughly comprehensive.
Donald Trump knows next to nothing about public policy. He is a serial, perhaps a certifiably pathological, liar. And an unapologetic misogynist. He actively encourages racial and ethnic animus, and conspiracy theories, and delights in egging on political violence, and in mocking the disabled. He regularly demonstrates contempt for established institutions of liberal democratic governance both domestically and globally. He has threatened to order the armed forces to engage in actions that would amount to war crimes. And advocated policies that would require government actions on the scale of a police state (the rounding up and deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants) and others that are almost certainly unconstitutional (a blanket ban on the entry of Muslims into the United States).
The conventional wisdom has already decided that Trump will lose the general election against the Democratic standard-bearer. I agree that this is the most likely outcome, but it's far from certain. Yes, Trump receives extraordinarily high unfavorable ratings, but so does the likely Democratic nominee (Hillary Clinton). Trump also scrambles established ideological categories and has inspired a dramatic uptick in turnout among Republicans during the primaries. (With 10 states remaining on the primary calendar, Trump has already surpassed Mitt Romney's vote totals from the entire 2012 primary season by roughly 700,000 votes.) This could render predictions based on past voting behavior highly unreliable. And of course there's always the possibility of a major event this fall (like a significant terrorist attack on American soil) that completely overturns expectations — always a good reason to keep unqualified people from ending up at the head of a major-party ticket in the first place.
All of this means that it's time to start thinking deeply about just how much danger the country now faces.
The best place to start that hard, unpleasant task is with Andrew Sullivan's major (and perfectly timed) essay in this week's New York magazine. In several thousand words, beautifully written and philosophically deep, Sullivan makes a cogent case for considering Trump a potential tyrant whose election could constitute an "extinction-level event" for the American republic. Though Sullivan never comes out and explicitly compares the real estate mogul to Hitler, he does treat Trump as a potential fascist dictator.
Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi's coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump. [New York]
Is it true? Is this America's Weimar moment — a time when a struggling, polarized, decadent liberal democracy faces the choice of whether to empower a dictatorial leader who would extinguish the very freedoms that elevated him to power?
Though I'm grateful that Sullivan has made the extreme case, there are other, less catastrophic (though still quite bad) possibilities that are far more probable. Though our moral imaginations have been decisively molded (some might say warped) by the nightmarish totalitarian dictatorships of the mid-20th century, an America led by President Trump would likely look quite a bit different than that.
The most benign possibility is that a Trump presidency would resemble an American version of Italy under the rule of Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire tycoon who served as prime minister for a total of nine years in four governments between 1994 and 2011.
Like Trump, Berlusconi was a businessman — a media mogul, making him more of a Rupert Murdoch-type figure — before turning to politics. In his campaigns and years in office, he was the constant focus of tabloid gossip, proving himself a vulgarian prone to making outrageous statements about public figures at home and abroad. When it came to governance, Berlusconi repeatedly formed coalitions with the Northern League (a right-wing anti-immigrant and populist party) and the National Alliance (a post-fascist party) while deploying tactics ripped from the playbook of American conservatives (he floated an Italian version of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America) and pursuing policies that combined pro-business tax reform and anti-crime initiatives with increases in public pension rates and funding for public works programs.
Berlusconi was a radical centrist and a glitzy populist with xenophobic-nationalist overtones. Just like Trump.
He was also brought down by corruption — always a fixture of Italian political culture but even more blatant than usual while the flamboyant Berlusconi was on the scene. Accused at various times of abuse of office, bribery, and defamation, he was eventually convicted of tax evasion and found guilty of soliciting an underage prostitute.
If that's all that's all we got from a President Trump — an ideologically incoherent mishmash of sloppily executed policies overshadowed by media-driven scandals and rampant corruption — that would make the Trump administration a failure and signal a sharp drop-off in the effectiveness of America's political institutions. But it certainly wouldn't mark the advent of tyranny in the United States or prove to be an extinction-level event for the republic.
On the other hand, the parallels between Berlusconi and Trump aren't perfect. (Such analogies never are.) For one thing, Berlusconi never ran on a platform of rounding up and deporting millions of people from Italian soil. Neither did he propose to summarily ban the members of an entire world religion from entering the country.
Then there are institutional differences. Berlusconi was a prime minister dependent upon fragile governing coalitions in the Italian legislature. Like all American presidents, Trump would stand at the head of the executive branch of the federal government, entirely independent of the legislative branch, with a fixed term of office and his own base of electoral support. He would also serve as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world, including by far the largest and most formidable nuclear arsenal on the planet, and control a massive surveillance and intelligence-gathering operation spread across numerous agencies and departments.
The moment he took the oath of office, Donald Trump would become exponentially more powerful, at home and abroad, than Silvio Berlusconi (with his significantly less illiberal agenda) ever was or could have dreamed of being.
That leaves us looking for another parallel.
One option is Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India and leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (a Hindu nationalist party). Modi has a disturbing record, both before and after rising to national office. Yet like Berlusconi, Modi is limited in his powers by India's parliamentary system of governance — although this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the BJP currently holds an outright majority of seats in the parliament's lower house — and by India's status as a rising regional (but not yet a global) economic and military power.
That's why the "worst-case" parallel that is most apt is one that's been noted over and over again throughout Trump's campaign for the Republican nomination: Vladimir Putin.
Putin is an authoritarian populist who cultivates an image of a macho toughness while openly flirting with fascistic nationalism and militarism. He has manipulated the Russian political system and constitution to permit himself to stay in power, as either president or prime minister, for 16 years and counting. Political rivals and journalists who dare to criticize him have a way of ending up dead.
In what may be the most ominous fact of all about Trump, the Republican Party's presumptive nominee for president has made no secret of his admiration for Putin's thuggish style of leadership, despite his annexation of Crimea, military meddling in Eastern Ukraine, open defiance of NATO, and mischief-making in Syria over the past two years.
Would Trump dare to make similar moves as president of the United States?
We have no way to know. But the mere possibility should send chills down the spine of every American who cherishes liberal democratic norms and institutions.
No, Trump isn't Hitler or Mussolini. But he could easily be as bad as Berlusconi — and quite possibly push beyond him, to make an outright play for Putinism.
That might not bring American democracy to the verge of extinction. But it would leave it battered and bloody, and ripe for something even worse.
Georges-Eugène Haussmann is feted internationally for transforming the French capital with an audacious programme of urban planning. Yet 125 years after his death, his legacy at home remains much more controversial. Why?
He was the Parisian who ripped up his home city; one of the most famous and controversial urban planners in history. Even now, 125 years after the death of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, France remains divided over whether the man who transformed Paris into the City of Light was truly a master planner – or an imperialist megalomaniac.
Internationally, Haussmann is celebrated for much that is loved about the French capital; notably those wide avenues flanked with imposing buildings of neatly dressed ashlar and intricate wrought iron balconies.
To his republican compatriots, however, Haussmann was an arrogant, autocratic vandal who ripped the historic heart out of Paris, driving his boulevards through the city’s slums to help the French army crush popular uprisings.
Historian and Haussmann expert Patrice de Moncan is exasperated by the century’s worth of criticism that has been levelled at this hugely influential figure. “Sometimes I don’t know where to start; it’s bullshit from beginning to end,” De Moncan says. “But it’s a view many people still hold in France.
Baron Haussmann. Illustration: Alamy
“Haussmann has been portrayed as this almost sinister figure, only out to enrich himself and with his fingers in the till. His critics accused him of filling Paris with cobbled streets, bland buildings with stone facades, and wide, dead straight avenues so the army could repress the masses.”
De Moncan, who is writing a new biography of Haussmann, smarts with the injustice of what he sees as the ongoing maligning of his hero. “Some said he was austere, but from what I have discovered he liked a good party and threw great ones. Others accused him of chasing the girls – it’s true he had a mistress [the opera star Francine Cellier] with whom he had a child, but unlike others at that time, he accepted, recognised and educated the girl.”
In 1848, Haussmann was an ambitious civil servant determinedly climbing the ranks when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte – nephew and heir of Napoléon I – returned to Paris after 12 years’ exile in London to become president of the French Second Republic.
Bonaparte, later elected Emperor Napoléon III, hated what he saw. In his absence, the population of Paris had exploded from 759,000 in 1831 to more than a million in 1846 – despite regular outbreaks of cholera and typhoid that killed tens of thousands.
The French capital was overcrowded, dingy, dirty and riddled with disease. Why, Bonaparte pondered, was it not more like London, with its grand parks and gardens, its tree-lined avenues and modern sewage system? Paris, he declared, needed light, air, clean water and good sanitation.
Haussmann was an imposing figure both physically – at 6ft 3in – and intellectually. Born into a bourgeois military family with strong Lutheran ties, he had been a brilliant student at elite Paris colleges, and personified the Protestant work ethic. Portraits show a tall, solid, often studious figure with a not unkind face, often sporting a chin-strap beard and, in later years, thinning hair.
France’s interior minister, Victor de Persigny, believed Haussmann to be the ideal candidate for the job of Prefect of the Seine and overseer of Napoléon III’s plan to transform the city. “He is one of the most extraordinary men of our time; big, strong, vigorous, energetic and at the same time clever and devious,” wrote De Persigny to the emperor. “He told me all of his accomplishments during his administrative career, leaving out nothing: he could have talked for six hours without a break, since it was his favourite subject, himself.”
Haussmann got the job. A week after his appointment in the summer of 1853, he was summoned to the emperor’s official residence at the Palais des Tuileries, where Napoléon III produced his plan for Paris. It showed a map of the city with three straight, dark lines drawn over it: one running north-to-south and two east-to-west either side of the Seine, all cutting through some of the most densely populated but historic areas of central Paris.
“This is what I want,” Napoléon III told Haussmann. It was the start of the most extensive public works programme ever voluntarily carried out in a European city, turning Paris into a vast building site for more than 17 years.
Haussmann cut a swathe through the cramped and chaotic labyrinth of slum streets in the city centre, knocked down 12,000 buildings, cleared space for the Palais Garnier, home of the Opéra National de Paris, and Les Halles marketplace, and linked the new train terminals with his long, wide and straight avenues.
Less well known is Haussmann’s commissioning of an outstanding collection of street furniture – lampposts, newspaper kiosks, railings – and the decorative bandstands in the 27 parks and squares he created.
Below ground, Haussmann oversaw the installation of les egouts, the city’s complex sewage network. He also commissioned reservoirs and aquaducts to bring clean drinking water to the city.
On his orders, gas lamps were installed along the widened cobbled streets; now when the elegant flâneurs who strolled the 137km of new boulevards retired for the night, the revellers and prostitutes who emerged from the bars and the shadows could walk safely. The new streets came with trees and broad pavements along which café terraces sprang up, soon to be filled with artists and artisans enjoying “absinthe hour”.
In his Dictionary of the Second Empire, Josephy Valynseele wrote of Haussmann: “During his career he showed a maniacal ambition, an impudent opportunism and was, whatever he did, a genius of showmanship.”
But republican opponents criticised the brutality of the work. They saw his avenues as imperialist tools to neuter fermenting civil unrest in working-class areas, allowing troops to be rapidly deployed to quell revolt. Haussmann was also accused of social engineering by destroying the economically mixed areas where rich and poor rubbed shoulders, instead creating distinct wealthy and “popular” arrondissements.
Critics also accused him of destroying the city’s medieval treasures, citing the enduring charm of the narrow winding streets of the Marais: the city’s oldest district and one which escaped Haussmann’s razing.
There was additional outrage at the staggering 2.5bn franc bill for the work – around €75bn today. By 1869 the attacks had become deafening, and Haussmann was forced to vigorously defend himself before MPs and city officials. In the hope of salvaging his own flagging popularity, Napoléon III asked Hassmann to resign. He refused.
“Haussmann had a great belief in public service and had spent his whole career in the service of the king and then the emperor,” De Moncan says. “He believed if he resigned it would be assumed he had done wrong, when in fact he was very proud of what he had done. Napoléon III offered him all manner of inducements but he still refused, so the emperor sacked him.
“The Second Empire and Napoléon III were despised by republicans, and Haussmann was the victim of this political backlash. Victor Hugo hated him, and because everyone in France regarded what Hugo wrote as the word of God, they hated Haussmann too. Hugo, the man who wrote Les Miserables about how desperate conditions were in Paris, accused Haussmann of destroying the city’s medieval charm!”
De Moncan observes this was the same “charm” that had brought epidemics to Paris; the charm that “had 20 people living in one room with no light and no toilets, just a common courtyard into which they did their business. People like Hugo forgot how truly miserable Paris had been for ordinary Parisians.”
Out of a job and persona non grata in Paris, Haussmann spent six months in Italy to lift his spirits. He returned and was given a management post with the military – which lasted less than a week before Napoléon III was defeated.
Haussmann lived out his final days in rented accommodation on a paltry 6,000-franc pension, the equivalent of €20,000 a year today, paying regular visits to his three beloved daughters. In his memoirs, he seems stoic rather than bitter about his fall from grace:
“In the eyes of the Parisians, who like routine in things but are changeable when it comes to people, I committed two great wrongs. Over the course of 17 years I disturbed their daily routines by turning Paris upside down; and they had to look at the same face of the prefect in the Hôtel de Ville. These were two unforgivable complaints.”
Some of Haussmann’s harshest critics, including the politician and philosopher Jules Simon, later changed their view of him: “He tried to make Paris a magnificent city and he succeeded completely,” Simon wrote in 1882. “He introduced into his beautiful capital trees and flowers, and populated it with statues.”
Today, Haussmann is remembered by the grand boulevard that bears his name, on which the Palais Garnier sits, and a statue on its corner with Rue de Laborde in the 8th Arrondissement. But according to De Moncan, Haussmann’s vital contribution to modern Paris is still not fully appreciated.
“Haussmann was never forgiven or recognised in his lifetime in France, and still isn’t. If I give a conference here, people groan when I talk about him. Right up until the 1980s, his buildings were dismissed as rubbish and as many as possible were destroyed, so that all those unlovely 1970s glass and concrete structures could go up.
“But what he did was phenomenal; he was the world’s first modern urban developer. Everyone who came to Paris for the universal exhibitions, including Queen Victoria, was astonished by the transformation of the city. In 1867, there was a meeting of European architects in Germany at which Haussmann was hailed as a pure genius; a brilliant modern urban developer. Yet all that was said about him back home was that he was a crook.”
Does your city have a little-known story that made a major impact on its development? Please share it in the comments below or on Twitter using #storyofcities
This is the latest in a series of articles on the life and times of Kim Jong-pil, a two-time prime minister, based on extensive interviews with the 90-year-old.
When I was a child, I was known for running wild around my village, but also for my affinity for reading. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was already fascinated by the memoirs and biographies of world leaders, especially the ones on French hero Napoleon Bonaparte.
I was most fond of biographies of people with excellent leadership skills, like Napoleon, and I found myself delighted by the idea of the limitless achievements of humanity.
History is made by men, I thought, so therefore I must understand the men who have made history.
I spent numerous nights reading books. There are more than 30 books written by and about former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and I have read all of them, cover to cover.
But it was during my middle school years when I read the most. I finished reading a collection of classic novels written in Japanese. Back then, I had a rule that I had to read one book each night, and when I couldn’t finish, I would skip class to do so.
When my Japanese teacher noticed my absence, he would send one of his students to my dormitory to call on me. “Jong-pil is being stubborn again about finishing one book each night,” he would say.
Admittedly, I was proud of my reading habits at the time. I felt proud citing famous poems in Japanese as I walked by classrooms. Most of the books I read at the time were in Japanese, as the Korean Peninsula was under colonial rule, and it was extremely difficult to find books in Korean. Some books were translated into Korean, but they had errors and distortions from the original English version because they were translated from English to Japanese, then to Korean again.
At 90, I still read books. I wake up at around 3 a.m. and indulge myself over and over again. But these days I often read books that I’ve read before, rather than new ones.
It’s a flat lie when people say they simply don’t have time to read. People can always find time to read, at least two to three hours a day. I feel like I have done nothing in a day when I skip reading.
The books that I read when I was full of angst in my teen years later paved the way for me to become a statesman and often influenced my way of thinking.
During the Korean War, the books I read motivated me to be a brave soldier and provided me with an acute sense for strategy. They also propelled me to wage a military revolution, with the strong determination for national growth, and the creativity to make it happen. For every bumpy road in my political career, I persevered, my principles cemented and formed by the multitude of books I read. I don’t like straight talk. Rather, I prefer to speak metaphorically, and I often borrow lines from poems to make my point. Bluntness confines a person’s ideas and his expressions. But in speaking poetically, they can extend their thinking beyond words to fully express their thoughts and sentiment.
In the 1996 general election campaign, I saw myself engaged with a political battle with Kim Young-sam, the president at the time, and Kim Dae-jung. Kim Young-sam was doing all he could in his political capacity to push me and Kim Dae-jung out of the political arena permanently.
His support base also rallied the public, demanding they vote out politicians in their 70s - in what was an indirect jab at me.
Their tactics to target me over my age was enraging. But I never confronted them directly. Instead, I cited the poem “Youth,” by Samuel Ullman. I translated this masterpiece into Korean and distributed the result to my fellow lawmakers in early 1996.
Let me cite some parts of the poem: “Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. … Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. … Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”
In my translation, I used the Korean word for “spirit” rather than “soul” to better emphasize the determining factor of one’s youth.
The efforts by Kim Young-sam and his political faction ultimately ended in vain. Instead, it merely confirmed what I already knew - that the power of metaphors and poetry is more potent than fighting words.
Poetry also linked me with my late wife, Park Young-ok, who passed away early last year. At the height of the Korean War, I asked her to marry me, reciting a line from the poem “One Word More” by the British writer Robert Browning.
I wrote her a letter, asking her to marry me, and at the end, I added, “Once, only once and for one only.”
I still vividly remember the smile that flashed across her face she when she read the letter. Sixty-five years have passed since then, and when I visited her gravesite last year over the Chuseok holiday, I put down a flower pot with that line engraved upon it.
The four-character Chinese idioms I write on New Year’s Day each year can also be traced back to my childhood lessons on the works of the great philosopher Confucius. Most of the ideas he expressed some 2,500 years ago still apply today.
This has long been my way of reflecting on my own inner-strength, as well as my way of expressing myself to others. In good times and bad, I always pick up a brush and write down four very personal characters. And as I complete one character after another, I feel like I am reaching toward a greater version of myself, with each letter awakening within me a feeling of inexplicable strength.
