Chapter 5 · 1851 to 1870
Straight Lines
The Eagle's nephew takes power and tears the old city down to build boulevards troops can march along. The map itself changes hands, and in 1860 it grows from twelve districts to twenty.
- Map
- 12 districts, 20 districts
- Newspaper
- The Moniteur
- Street lighting
- Gas lamps
The levels
- The December Night2 December 1851
- The Great Demolition1 June 1853
- Orsoni's Bombs5 January 1858
- Twenty Districts2 January 1860
- The Exposition1 April 1867
- Sedan14 July 1870
- Interlude 5
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The booklet opens
Prologue
One way “The June Days” can end
The workshops of 1848 had been kept open long enough for the faubourgs to remember who had stood by them, and the associations of that summer were still meeting in back rooms when the president's term ran short.
Otherwise
The workshops of 1848 had been closed and the June barricades shot down, and the faubourgs had learned what the Republic of order would do to them. In December they elected a prince with a famous name.
The prince-president could not stand again. He had the army, the prefects and a list of names.
This is the story of nineteen years in which a city was torn down and built again in straight lines, so that soldiers could march down them and nobody could block them with a cart.
The factions
The Revolution
- Republicans of '48
- Deputies and lawyers of the outlawed Republic, who still believe in the ballot and the courts.
- Workers' Associations
- Bookbinders, bronze-workers and typographers: mutual-aid societies, strike chests and, later, the International.
- Conspirators
- Exiled plotters and Italian patriots with bombs in their luggage.
- Exiles
- Poets and journalists writing from islands and Brussels, smuggled back into Paris in coat linings.
The Law
- The Empire
- The prince-president, then emperor, and the plebiscites that make him so.
- Imperial Army
- Cuirassiers in breastplates and the line regiments of the Crimea and Italy.
- Prefecture
- Sergents de ville with swords and cocked hats in every street, and the warnings that close newspapers.
- Political police
- Informers in the workshops and the cafés, and the black cabinet that opens letters.
- The prefect's financiers
- Haussier and the banks of the works: loans, expropriations and speculation on the new boulevards.
Neutral factions
- The Church
- Shopkeepers
- The press
- Ragpickers and smugglers
- Foreign Powers
- The faubourgs
Characters
- Charles-Louis Lamaury, the Eagle's nephew
- Baron Georges Haussier, prefect of the Seine
- Aristide Morel, poet in exile
- Eugène Varlant, bookbinder
- Felice Orsoni
- Adèle
The booklet closes
After the finale of chapter 5: Straight LinesSealed so it does not spoil the story for you.Break the seal
Epilogue
If the Revolution won Sedan
The Republic was proclaimed, and within a fortnight the Prussians were outside the walls. The new boulevards were full of National Guards drilling in the autumn rain.
Otherwise
The regency held for a while, and then the Prussians were outside the walls and it did not matter who held the Tuileries.
Twenty thousand gas lamps lit the new city. In the besieged winter that followed, most of them went out.