It was the Prefect Hausmann, under the Second Empire, who gave Paris the appearance we recognise today, with its grand boulevards and elegant apartment buildings. At the beginning of the 19th century, however, Paris was already undergoing radical transformation: the confiscation of property belonging to the Catholic Church during the Revolution made way for real estate speculators on an unprecedented scale. Chiefly during the Napoleonic Empire, a massive destruction of churches and convents joined a gradual disappearance of the medieval and Renaissance buildings, especially housing, which constituted the heart of Old Paris. The population’s increasing wealth accelerated this process, which was not lost on contemporaries: some deplored the massive erasure of the past; others emphasised the inconvenience posed by the construction sites taking over the city.
‘Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses which enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy. The threatening walls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have been decorated with hieroglyphics. For what other name could the passer-by give to the Xs and Vs which the horizontal or diagonal timbers traced on the front, outlined by little parallel cracks in the plaster? It was evident that every beam quivered in its mortices at the passing of the lightest vehicle. This venerable structure was crowned by a triangular roof of which no example will, ere long, be seen in Paris. This covering, warped by the extremes of the Paris climate, projected three feet over the roadway, as much to protect the threshold from the rainfall as to shelter the wall of a loft and its sill-less dormer-window. This upper story was built of planks, overlapping each other like slates, in order, no doubt, not to overweight the frail house.’
Balzac, At the sign of the Cat and Racket, translation by Clara Bell.
A few days more and the pillars of Les Halles will have disappeared; Old Paris will exist no longer except in the works of those novelists with the courage to faithfully describe the last vestiges of the architecture of our forefathers; for their part, serious historians take little note of such things […] The former pillars of Les Halles were the Rue de Rivoli of the fifteenth century, and the pride of the parish of Saint Eustache. This was the architecture of the Marquesas Islands: three square trees standing upright on a stone base; then, ten or twelve feet from the ground, whitewashed joists made a real medieval floor. Above, a half-timbered building, frail, gabled, patchworked in places, like a Spanish quilt. A narrow mews behind a full door ran alongside a boutique and led to a small square courtyard, a veritable well lighting a wooden staircase, with balusters, by which one climbed up to the two or three upper stories. Moliere was born in a house like this! To the shame of the city, they rebuilt a nasty modern house in yellow plaster in its place, eliminating the pillars. Today, the pillars of Les Halles are one of the cesspools of Paris. Nor is this the only wonder from the past whose disappearance we are witnessing.
Balzac, Ce qui disparaît de Paris, 1845
The spectacular demolition of churches and convents tore the urban social fabric all the more because it was accompanied by the creation of new streets and the construction of new modern buildings, erasing and transforming traditional reference points for Parisians. Saint-Jean-en-Grève, a parish church until 1793, was located behind the Paris City Hall.