The Shadow of Great Britain

There are more foreigners and provincial people in Paris than Parisians.

——Balzac

As the carriage rattled along the banks of the Seine River, Arthur scrutinized the city’s silhouette through the radiant sunlight, unable to resist comparing the scene before him with his memories from four years ago.

Four years, even in a person’s life, is not a short period.

But for a city, four years can sometimes seem fleeting, and sometimes it can feel extensive.

In 1833, when he first came to Paris, the aftermath of the cholera had not yet fully subsided, and the political atmosphere here was still tense due to the influence of the June uprising in 1832. At that time, the streets were permeated by a sour smell covered with lime, many gutters in the small alleys were still filled with decaying garbage, and on rainy days, sewage would overflow.

He still remembered that occasionally, if he wasn’t careful, stepping on the cobblestone streets would splash mud spots onto his pant legs.

But what about four years later?

Of course, the city’s face of Paris seemed to have not changed much from the outside, with not too many new buildings constructed, nor too many new landmark edifices.

But at least on several main streets along both banks of the Seine River, municipal officials seemed to have genuinely done some work.

The cobblestones were laid more neatly, and there were no more large puddles in a few low-lying areas.

Although the pedestrians on the streets still appeared crowded, their steps no longer hesitated like before.

Of course, such a municipal philosophy that works on small details is likely closely related to the administrative philosophy of Count Rampito, the Seine District’s administrative officer in charge of Paris’s urban planning. Count Rampito, like his predecessor Earl De Warwick, differed from their predecessors during the Napoleonic Era and did not favor using experts who supported major urban construction plans, but preferred small-scale renovation projects.

According to Count Rampito’s own words, he especially despised macro frameworks that brought adverse effects to the city’s landscape and residents’ lives.

Thus, after the end of the Napoleonic imperial period, more than half of the planned large-scale engineering projects in Paris were aborted.

Of course, the stoppage of large engineering construction plans does not mean Paris’s cityscape had no changes. It’s just that most achievements by new municipal officials were in small-scale areas, with a lot of effort put into maintaining and refurbishing highways and road paving, as well as unblocking canals and solving water supply issues.

Many legacy projects from the Napoleonic Era, such as the Urk Canal, many city markets, water facilities, drainage facilities, and street lighting facilities, were completed and put into use during these twenty years.

Besides, they also put a lot of effort into rectifying housing construction issues and vigorously promoted urban greening work. City Hall strictly limited the location of new houses and required all renovated houses to coordinate with the original houses and streets, with trees planted on both sides of all main roads in Paris.

Just as Earl De Warwick said in his farewell speech as the Seine District’s administrative officer: ”I believe that making the people’s lives beautiful and healthy is true politics. And my mission is to bring fresh air, water, and shade to Parisians, and I am very grateful I have achieved this.”

However, although City Hall has been committed to improving Paris’s cityscape, there are still many aspects where they have not done satisfactorily.

Paris’s Cite Island, a place almost comparable to the East End of London, has seen little improvement after four years in terms of being dark, damp, and overcrowded with buildings.

This major artery that should connect the Left and Right Banks of the Seine River has not only failed to perform its original purpose; instead, it has created a negative impact on blocking traffic, even after City Hall constructed seven or eight bridges on Cite Island in the past decade.

But as a New Londoner who has lived in London for many years, Arthur can quite understand this phenomenon. Even though Paris has built about a hundred new streets in the past twenty years and the city scale is constantly expanding, as a center city of the Industrial Era, the speed of expanding the city’s size is always slower than the speed of people pouring in.

As a result, foreign tourists are often surprised to see palaces neighboring cottages, and cathedrals facing chicken farms.

Moreover, Paris has a significant difference from London: in London, typically, the poor live in one area, while the rich live in another. In Paris, the living conditions are vertically stratified, with many poor and rich living in the same building, where the poor usually live on higher floors, and the rich live on lower floors.

However, perhaps influenced by London, the rich and powerful in Paris are gradually unwilling to squeeze into the city’s central area with the poor; they are starting to move towards the remote western part of Paris, to live in various luxurious villas newly developed by major real estate developers, while the eastern and central districts of Paris are rapidly turning into places gathering the poor.

Moreover, in the past two years, Parisians’ ways of entertainment have been quietly changing.

Due to the French government’s successive orders in 1828 and 1836 to ban prostitution and gambling, these measures have led to the emergence of other forms of consumption activities, with people’s energy starting to shift to various newly developed arcade shopping streets.