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.mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

All roads lead to Rome

Sheltered by the ramparts

Belleforest's map of Paris

Pont Neuf

Paris, an open-plan city

Haussmann: Minister of Paris

Everything's connected!

Rue Passagère

In a roundabout fashion...

Lining the streets

Processions

From the League to the Fronde

Taking to the streets

Forward march!

The resilient Republic!

Let the party begin!

The Boulevard of Crime

The carnival

Industrious street life

Colporteurs

The central market

Paving the way...

It's a dirty job...

Standing firm

Let there be light!

Sleep soundly, good people!

The beat goes on...

Standing firm

Street cleaning is a much easier task on paved streets. Hence Philippe Auguste's decision to order that the streets be paved. However, doing so was an extremely expensive undertaking, and the royal authorities ended up passing on the cost to property owners, which did anything but speed up the process.

"Putting the laborers to work"

The year of Our Lord 1296, the Wednesday before the Fête de la Madeleine.

It was decided without delay that henceforth we would entrust an elected official from La Marchandise with the task of ensuring that those who worked on the roadways put in sufficiently long and complete days, as they were expected to do. The official would set the laborers to work each day and ensure a good day's work was done. He would also oversee how much stone and mortar was used during the day.

On Saturdays, the official would report to the clerk of La Marchandise on the number of stones and the quantity of mortar used.

Leroux de Lincy, Histoire de l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris, Paris, 1846. (Free translation from the French)

It was not until the 19^th century that Paris was paved on a massive scale: some one million paving stones were used annually circa 1830.

John Loudon McAdam

John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836) gave his name to the technique he invented for building hard-surfaced roads.

The process involved using layers of materials one on top of the other, with each new layer thinner than the previous: the largest at the bottom to provide stable a foundation, followed by a finer layer to fill any holes, then a very thin layer to provide the finishing. Today, the final layer consists of asphalt, or tar, which the French often mistakenly refer to as macadam. A more accurate term is tarmac, a contraction of "tar macadam".

Materials evolved in line with requirements and techniques, ranging from sandstone and granite to wood and asphalt.

Gisèle Freund

Gisela Freund was born in Berlin in 1908 to a middle-class family. Her father was a keen art collector. He gave his daughter a camera for her high-school graduation, before she went on to study sociology.

Her Jewish background and socialist beliefs led her to leave for Paris in 1933, where she finished her studies and published a thesis on French photography in the 19^th century. While in Paris, she frequented and photographed writers, many of whom gained fame, including Joyce, Malraux, Michaux, Sartre & de Beauvoir, Gide, Huxley and Beckett.

When the war broke out, she fled to Argentina, where she documented Patagonia. After the conflict, she joined the Magnum agency, from which she was fired under the McCarthy era for her alleged Communist sympathies.

In 1968, she was the first photographer to show at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. François Mitterrand asked her to be his official photographer following his election to the presidency in 1981. The assignment was her last work as a photographer. She was awarded the Grand Prix National des Lettres, Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, and died in the year 2000, leaving 300 photographs to the French state.

Asphalt layers, Paris

.The street

Standing firm