City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris - Hardcover

by Rupert Christiansen (Author)

A sparkling account of the nineteenth-century reinvention of Paris as the most beautiful, exciting city in the world

In 1853, French emperor Louis Napoleon inaugurated a vast and ambitious program of public works in Paris, directed by Georges-Eugè Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine. Haussmann transformed the old medieval city of squalid slums and disease-ridden alleyways into a City of Light characterized by wide boulevards, apartment blocks, parks, squares and public monuments, new rail stations and department stores, and a new system of public sanitation. City of Light charts this fifteen-year project of urban renewal which -- despite the interruptions of war, revolution, corruption, and bankruptcy -- set a template for nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban planning and created the enduring landscape of modern Paris now so famous around the globe.

Lively and engaging, City of Light is a book for anyone who wants to know how Paris became Paris.

Author Biography

Rupert Christiansen has been writing about the arts for the Daily Telegraph since 1996. His many books include Prima Donna, Paris Babylon, and Romantic Affinities, which received the Somerset Maugham Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1997, he teaches at Keble College, Oxford and lives in London.