Change of habitat- change of mentality at the time of the Haussmannian breakthroughs in the second half of the nineteenth century
Change of habitat- change of mentality at the time of the Haussmannian breakthroughs in the second half of the nineteenth century

Summary/Abstract: This research aims to analyze the fundamental transformations of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, at the time of the Second Empire. Of course, we will not study these transformations with the eyes of a professional architect or a specialist in urban planning but with the "civilizationist" aim of someone who wishes to popularize the Great French culture and civilization. It is this period that is of most interest because it is to the Second Empire and to the Baron de Haussmann that Paris owes its brilliance and its power of cultural and romantic seduction today because it is this Prefect of Paris who took charge of the heaviest works of urban planning, systematization, the fight in favor of general hygiene, and a change of air and perspective in the old French capital, at the time mentioned above. Everything that was modern, from the capital's water supply to the bathrooms of every house and apartment (it was the time of the "sewerage" campaign), to the gas illumination of all Paris, to the grand boulevards thanks to which the French capital is renowned to this day, to modern urban planning and, above all, to the graceful new (late nineteenth century) Art Nouveau architecture that produced the Parisian masterpieces, we owe the whole to Baron d'Haussmann. It was him who dared to disembowel the old medieval Paris to adorn it with the brilliance of twentieth-century modernity; it was him, in fact, the man who changed the mentality of all by offering them a new habitat.

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