France underwent an epocal change: old patterns of living were dying and new ones were taking their place. The semi-feudal, aristocratic and largely agricultural social order was giving way to an industrialized and bourgeois order which transformed existing certainties of social and psychological existence. Modernization was however, a deeply ambilavent process. On the one hand, it clearly brought to many a better standard of living but on a more disturbing level it also led to new forms of social control and, through its continual revolutionizing of methods of production disturbed and disrupted traditional, ingrained patterns of living.
Paris, like any other city, had never remained static. From as early as 1770 pressure was building up within the city for more space and it began the steady process of exansion. What this process of expansion did was to allow greater opportunities for property developers and speculators to buy land cheap and sell at a handsome profit. New sites periodically became available and new property developments were created. The new bourgeoisie made unheard of profits through property speculation. The arrival of the railway in the 1830's in its turn contributed to this process. The trick was to build expensive appartments and make them so desirable that the wealthy would move in and in their turn push property values even higher.
Georges Haussmann was appointed by Louis Napoléon as the prefect of the Seine between 1853 and the fall of the Emperor in 1870. Through direct grant, public loans and creative accounting, Haussmann set about on one of the most ambitious projects in urban planning in the history of Europe. In order to glorify the new Napoleonic empire he began to construct a city that would not only rival the major European capitals of London and Berlin but which would also echo the Rome of the great Emperor Augustus. Louis Napoléon, through Haussmann had in their sights then, the recreation of the glories of Augustian Rome. The Paris opéra (the Opéra Garnier not the Nouvel Opéra at Bastille) would become the focal point of Paris and the focal point of Napoleonic cultural supremacy. The social consequences of Haussmanization may be described thus:
the enforced movement of large sections of the working-class population from the centre to the periphery;
the replacement of spontaneous urban growth by coherent social planning of a decidedly authoritarian nature as vistas were regularized and wide boulevards facilitated the rapid movement of troops to quell any potential unrest;
the transformation of a single socially heterogeneous city into two distinct and socially homogenous groupings - a bourgeois west and a working class east.