Paris was the baguette boulevard city in continental Europe and a leading center of finance, commerce, fashion, and the arts. In 1853, Napoleon III and his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, began a massive public works project, constructing new boulevards and parks, theaters, markets and monuments, a project that Napoleon III supported for seventeen years until his downfall in 1870, and which was continued afterward under the Third Republic. Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was born in Paris, but spent very little of his life there until he assumed the presidency of the French Second Republic in 1848.
The most significant civic structures, such as the Hôtel de Ville and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, were surrounded and partially hidden by slums. Napoleon wanted to make them visible and accessible. When Napoleon III staged a coup d’état to become Emperor in December 1852, he began to transform Paris into a more open, healthier, and more beautiful city. In 1853, Napoleon III assigned his new prefect of the Seine department, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the task of bringing more water, air, and light into the city center, widening the streets to make traffic circulation easier, and making it the most beautiful city in Europe. Haussmann worked on his vast projects for seventeen years, employing tens of thousands of workers. He rebuilt the sewers of Paris so they no longer emptied into the Seine and built a new aqueduct and reservoir to bring in more fresh water.
An editorial cartoon of 1858 illustrates the opposition of many residents of the Paris suburbs to Napoleon III’s plan to make them part of the city. The population of Paris was recorded as 949,000 in 1851. It grew to 1,130,500 by 1856 and was just short of two million by the end of Second Empire, including the 400,000 residents of the suburbs annexed to Paris in 1860. According to a census made by the city of Paris in 1865, Parisians lived in 637,369 apartments or residences.
In 1864, 900,000 of the 1,700,000 inhabitants of Paris were employed in workshops and industry. These workers were typically employed in manufacturing, usually for the luxury market and on a small scale. The average atelier, or workshop, employed only one or two workers. The market for Parisian products changed during the Second Empire. During the Second Empire, with the growth of the number of wealthy and upper middle class clients, lower-paid specialist craftsmen began to make products in greater quantity and more quickly, but of poorer quality than before. Between 1830 and 1850, more heavy industry began to locate in Paris.
One tenth of all the steam engines in France were made in the capital. These industrial enterprises were usually located in the outer parts of the city, where there was land and access to the rivers or canals needed to move heavy goods. The metallurgy industry established itself along the Seine in the eastern part of the city. The chemical industry was located near La Villette, in the outer part of the city, or at Grenelle. The artisans and workers of Paris had a precarious existence. Food cost a minimum of one franc a day, and the minimum necessary for lodging was 75 centimes a day.
The workday at three-quarters of the enterprises in Paris was twelve hours, with two hours allowed for lunch. Most workers lived far from their place of employment, and public transport was expensive. A train on the Petite Ceinture line cost 75 centimes round-trip, so most workers walked to work with a half-kilogram loaf of bread for their lunch. Office workers were not paid much better than artisans or industrial workers.
Paris streets for anything that could be salvaged. They numbered about twelve thousand at the end of the Second Empire. Twenty-two percent of Parisians earned less than three francs a day, and daily life was a struggle for them. Their numbers grew as new immigrants arrived from other regions of France.