Beginning in 1852 and continuing for more than two decades, the French emperor Napoleon III, along with his apparatchik—Baron Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine—embarked on a massive public works program to regularize and sanitize the medieval agglomeration that was Paris. The best-known aspect of this program was the circulatory network of new, straight boulevards that was surgically inserted into the fabric of the old city. Not for nothing was Haussmann dubbed the “Attila of the straight line” by a contemporary critic. Commissioned in 1862 as the official photographer of Paris, Charles Marville—the subject of a traveling retrospective making its final stop at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—had a front-row seat to Napoleon III’s profound transformation of the city.
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