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But the old market of Les Halles was the shock of its era, almost exactly one hundred years before; it was, in its shocking modernity, the Centre Pompidou of its day, and not because of the audacity of its architect Baltard (as I had thought until recently); for Baltard wanted something relatively traditional; stone structures. It was Napoleon lll who wanted "de vastes parapluies, rien de plus." ("Just run me up a few huge umbrellas; that's all we need"), an admirably radical architectural request.

Zola, for all his instinctive modernism, nonetheless conveys a degree of shock, the shock of the new in Le Ventre de Paris:

"Florent regardait les grandes Halles sortir de l'ombre...allongeant à l'Infini leurs palais à jour...Elles entassaient leurs masses géometriques...elles apparurent comme une machine moderne, hors de toute mésure.."

"geometric masses….modern machine!"…there has always been shock.

Eyeing our poor old piecemeal London we are perhaps tempted to think that Paris has grown old slowly, organically, elegantly. It did not suffer at the hands of puritanical utopians in the sixties as did London; it was not bombed in the war, true. But Paris had already had its urbanistic trauma; and how!….
Haussmann's disembowelling and rationalisation. The speed and therefore greater shock of Haussmann's project was remarkable. Parisians were precipitated into modernity. The photographer Charles Marville was in Haussmann's team to take photos of demolitions in progress, of the eventrement, or gutting of the city. His photographs show us streets as recent
and as raw (notice the newness of the trees) as, say, Ceaucescu's Bucharest boulevards in the eighties.

The brothers Goncourt note, in 1860: "Our Paris, the Paris in which we were born, the Paris on the manners of 1830 to 1848, is disappearing….I am a stranger to what is coming and to what is here, as for example to those new boulevards which have nothing of Balzac's world about them but make one think of London or some Babylon of the future." It is interesting to see how modern London was perceived to be by the French; how racy as well: Stendhal , for example, admires the "breadth of the (London) streets and the scantily clad women"

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