Lecture 11 - Paris and the Belle Époque

Modern Paris was indelibly shaped by the rebuilding project ordered by Napoleon III and carried out by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s. The large-scale demolition of whole neighborhoods in central Paris, coupled with a boom in industrial development outside the city, cemented a class division between center and periphery that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Curiously, this division is the obverse of the arrangement of most American cities, in which the inner city is typically impoverished while the suburbs are wealthy. **Reading assignment:** Sowerwine, Charles. France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society, pp. 94-205.