Boulevard Haussmann

We are standing on a street named after the man responsible for tearing Paris apart. That is not a metaphor. Baron Haussmann demolished around 20,000 buildings, displaced 350,000 residents, and laid 115 kilometers of new boulevards across what had been a medieval labyrinth of dark, narrow alleys where cholera killed thousands on a regular basis. He called himself an "artiste-démolitionneur," an artist of demolition, and wrote in his memoirs with visible satisfaction about "boning Paris like a carcass." He even tore down the house where he was born.

Napoleon III handed him a color-coded map of the city and essentially said: get it done. Haussmann had no formal training in urban planning or architecture, but he was a financial genius of the creative accounting variety. He paid contractors with debt certificates instead of money, borrowing the equivalent of 463 million francs without it ever appearing on the city's books.

The wide boulevards you see around you were not only beautiful. The old medieval streets had been perfect for revolutionary barricades, and Parisians had used them to launch armed uprisings seven times in the first half of the 19th century. Haussmann's straight, open avenues made barricades structurally useless and gave cannons a clear line of fire.

A later historian wrote that his work caused more damage than a hundred bombardments. The city agreed, fired him, and then named one of its grandest boulevards after him anyway.