11. Paris and the Belle Époque

France Since 1871 (HIST 276)

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.

00:00 - Chapter 1. The Old Paris: A Portrait of Urban Poverty
07:27 - Chapter 2. Napoleon III and Haussmann: Building the Boulevards of Modern Paris
19:09 - Chapter 3. New Modes of Commerce in Belle Époque Paris
23:00 - Chapter 4. The East-West Dichotomy: Mapping the Character of the New Neighborhoods
38:23 - Chapter 5. Exile from the Center: The Development of Working Class Suburbia

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Fall 2007.