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This video was recorded at HIST 276 - France Since 1871. Modern Paris was indelibly shaped by the rebuilding project ordered by Napoleon III and carried out by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s. The large-scale demolition of whole neighborhoods in central Paris, coupled with a boom in industrial development outside the city, cemented a class division between center and periphery that has persisted into the twenty-first century. Curiously, this division is the obverse of the arrangement of most American cities, in which the inner city is typically impoverished while the suburbs are wealthy. Reading assignment: Sowerwine, Charles. France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society, pp. 94-205.

Disciplines:

• Humanities  / History