another. Nearly the whole city was crowded into the area confined by the grands boulevards north of the Seine, pushing toward the boulevard Montparnasse on the south. The boulevards occupied the line of fortifications dating from the time of Charles V, and they had remained a semirural promenade through the eighteenth century. Much of this early Paris remains intact to this day (Olsen 35-36).
Sanitation was inferior in the city. Domestic piped water did not come to Paris until late in the nineteenth century, and before that time, water carriers sold water from the streets. Cesspools were emptied into the gutters, and disease was rampant. Paris was not then a city of light and used oil lamps suspended by wires. The boulevards were brilliantly lighted, while other streets were dark (Olsen 37).
Demolition and reconstruction started in the nineteenth century under Louis-Philippe, and many of the new buildings were extremely luxurious in ornamentation and decoration. The result of this construction and change was to turn Paris into "the embodiment of nineteenth-century urban civilization, a realized ideal toward which cities throughout the world would aspire" (Olsen 44).
A key figure in this change was Baron Haussmann, prefect of the Seine, who reshaped the city and made Paris totally different from what it had been in 1852. This was during the Second Republic, and the Third republic contin
...