In Europe

spiritual dominion of the citizenry found their apotheosis’. Of course, Haussmann's
grands travaux
were based on the necessities of law and order – from that point on, military units could operate much more easily in the event of a rebellion – but that was not their most important objective. The boulevards were primarily designed to be modern transport corridors between the various terminals; nineteenth-century Paris, like London and Brussels, was a complete chaos of horses, carts, carriages, coaches and omnibuses. They also served as visual corridors between monuments and major government buildings, national symbols to be viewed in awe by Parisians and visitors alike and therefore requiring a great deal of space. The boulevards served as dividing lines between the city's bourgeoisie and the common workfolk, between the wealthy arrondissements and dirty, smoky suburbs. But at the same time Haussmann's plan generated unprecedented dynamism, because it was based, for the first time, on an all-inclusive view of the phenomenon of the ‘city’.
    ‘Modern Paris could not exist within the boundaries of the Paris of the past,’ enthused the poet and journalist Théophile Gautier. ‘Civilisation blazes broad trails through the old town's dark maze of little streets, crossings and dead-end alleys: she brings down houses the way the pioneers in America bring down trees.’ In this way Paris was to become the outpost of the modern age, a beacon for the modern spirit, a light in the provincial darkness, France's song of glory, the city state of the new Europe.
    No other metropolis is so much a city and, at the same time, so infused with the countryside as Paris. In the three-minute walk from my hotel to the nearest boulevard I pass six greengrocers, five bakeries, five butchers, three fishmongers. Shop after shop, the crates are displayed on the pavement: apples, oranges, lettuce, cabbage, leeks, radiant in the winter sun.The butcher shops are hung with sausages and hams, the fish lie in trays along the pavement, from the bakeries wafts the scent of hundreds of varieties of crisp and gleaming bread.
    It has always been a complicated relationship, that of the Parisians with their mysterious rural roots, ‘
la France profonde
’, and an intense one as well. Many Parisians, or their parents, or otherwise their grandparents, originally come from the countryside. These days the French are not ashamed of that, they actually cultivate and flaunt it with holiday houses and products from ‘home’ on the table. It's all a part of ‘
l'exception Française
’, even though one third of France's urban population today consists of foreigners.
    Around the turn of the century, however, they seemingly wanted to shake off the dust of the countryside as soon as they arrived in Paris. In that sense, too, one could speak of two French nations. The more the big cities grew to be machines full of light and movement, the darker and sleepier the provinces seemed.
    Generally speaking, the Parisians saw farm folk as savages or barbarians. One could pick them out in a crowd by the sound of their clumping, clattering clogs, and even when they wore shoes in the city, their strange, waddling gait immediately gave them away. This social rift was found everywhere in Europe, but nowhere as emphatically as in France.
    Around 1880, there were still many people in the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Massif Central, in all those villages and river valleys where Europe today spends its holidays, who had never seen a cart or a wagon. Everything went by horse or mule. Local dialects predominated; according to official figures from 1863, one quarter of all French citizens barely spoke a word of French. Many regions were still using units of measure and weight, and some of them even currencies, that had been officially done away with a hundred years earlier. Anyone who had visited Paris, even if only for a day, bore the honorary title ‘Parisian’ for the rest of their lives.
    There was nothing very romantic about ‘pure’ French country life. The provincial court records bear constant witness to inhuman poverty and harshness. A daughter-in-law murdered ‘because she was sickly and no good to us’; a mother-in-law thrown down a well to avoid paying a yearly annuity of twenty francs and three sacks of grain. One old man's wifeand daughter beat him severely with a pestle, a hammer and a rake, because they had grown tired of feeding him. Little Rémi from