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My new book, Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris, begins and ends with boulevard inaugurations. I don’t mean inaugurations taking place on boulevards, but the rather quasi-spiritual consecrations of the roads themselves. As a historical musicologist, I wanted to write about the soundscapes of these events: the din of the speeches, the horn calls, the symphonic and choral renditions of works by Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Handel, and Beethoven. I share some details of that din below, but I want to think through something here that I did not in the book:

A boulevard inauguration is a ridiculous concept.
 
An inauguration, if we look the word up in the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the formal or definite commencement or introduction of a course of action, an important era or period of time, etc.” Inaugurations are temporal acts that mark a paradigm shift. A political inauguration draws an imaginary line between one administration and the next.
 
An architectural inauguration initiates a system. The Paris Métro was inaugurated on July 19, 1900, during the World’s Fair—a suitable occasion to inaugurate anything. World’s Fairs, as I detail in Chapter 2 of my book, “served as vast playgrounds for both host citizens and international visitors.”[1] The new Métro system was celebrated in a variety of ways: through the ornate entrances that frame each stairway like a painting, through a ceremonial first descent down the stairway, and finally with a ceremonial first ride. In the moments prior to its inauguration, the completed Métro sat vacant, like an ancient tomb about to be excavated. Its inauguration, then, not only celebrated the achievement of its construction, but also summoned it into use.
 
A political inauguration might feature the swearing of an oath followed by speeches and a parade. This sequence of acts promises the voting public—however superficially—that the hitherto useless candidate will now be a useful leader. A building or station inauguration might feature a ribbon cutting or the breaking of glass, followed by applause, as if the inauguration is not complete until the people’s voices—or hands—are heard.
 
A boulevard, by contrast, is not a person, a building, a station, or an administration. To inaugurate a boulevard is like inaugurating the scissors that cut the ribbon or the bible on which the oath is sworn. Why celebrate a thing whose only use value is, well, its use?
 
The French word boulevard once referred to the external ring of fortifications around a city. Directly translated as “bulwark,” boulevard was used in this way into the early nineteenth century. Over time, it came to serve as a metaphor for geopolitical borders. Chateaubriand once urged post–Revolutionary France to regain its status as “le boulevard naturel de l’Europe contre la puissance de l’Angleterre” (“the natural bulwark between Europe and English power”).[2]
 
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the word boulevard metamorphosed from bulwark to thoroughfare. This semantic shift followed the tremors of industrialization, which saw the demolition of urban fortifications (the “bulwarks”) and the expansion, in their place, of interconnected roads (the “boulevards”). The boulevard thus became urbanization’s leading motive, and the resulting composition sounded increasingly French.  
 
While sometimes interchangeable with “avenue,” the chestnut-tree-lined “boulevard” is most associated with Parisian urban planning. One of the first was engineered in the 1670s by Sébastien Le Prestre, the Marquis of Vauban, and connected the Porte St. Denis to the Bastille. Between 1853 and 1870, George-Eugène “Baron” Haussmann helped to redraw the map of Paris—for better or for worse—by cutting long, straight boulevards through densely populated neighborhoods.
 
Scholars know that this work began much earlier. Rambuteau’s widened roadbeds, observes Esther da Costa Meyer in her recent book Dividing Paris, provided a “prototype” for the Second-Empire boulevard.[3] As a student of symbolic space, Napoléon III wished to equate urbanization with imperialism by framing public works as a manifestation of his uncle Bonaparte’s legacy. Assisted by the bone-dry persona of the classically trained Hellenophile Haussmann, Napoléon III (“Le petit,” as Marx branded him) pushed the idea of urbanization as a net-positive procedure, driven by a mix of classical aesthetic principles, imperial prowess, and market forces. The epitome of this ultra-rational urban planning was the construction of an “axis” of thoroughfares. The longitudinal boulevard de Sébastopol connected the Île de la Cité to the boulevard Saint Michel, intersecting with the newly expanded rue de Rivoli.
 
Haussmann’s exploits, as scholars like David Harvey have argued, transcended mere public works and became ideology. As I discuss in Chapter 1 of my book, the notion of “Haussmannization” became as overbearing to urbanism as “Wagnerism” became to music. Like Richard Wagner’s endless, referential melodies, Haussmann’s arrow-like boulevards have entered the Western intellectual vernacular. Indeed, the ideological relationship between music theory and urbanism—between musical and urban space—is worth further study. Like Pythagoras’s monochord, which promised scientific rationale for all available musical pitches, Haussmann’s boulevard is an “epistemic thing”: a material phenomenon whose intellectual capital lies dormant, awaiting theorization.[4] Monochords and boulevards thus share the same Western intellectual conceit: the equivalence of the straight line with scientific progress.
 

Their ubiquity and utility should make boulevards almost too quotidian to be noticed, much less contemplated. And yet, the urban thoroughfare—in particular the boulevard—holds a certain mystique in the Western artistic imagination. From the prose of Balzac and Zola to the poetry of Baudelaire to the operettas of Offenbach to the oil paintings of Pissarro, the boulevard persisted like a tableau vivant, a philosophical plane whose devotion to mobility was a symptom of the modernist imagination that birthed it. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire depicts an 1848 Paris boulevard as not only the canvas of bourgeois revolutionary upheaval, but also its sounding board: “A regiment passes, on its way, as it may be, to the ends of the earth, tossing into the air of the boulevards its trumpet-calls as winged and stirring as hope.”
 
Twentieth-century critics, especially those interpreting Baudelaire via Karl Marx, remind us that the boulevard was a contested political space. As Marshall Berman writes in All That is Solid Melts into Air, “the Napoléon-Haussmann boulevards created new bases—economic, social, aesthetic—for bringing enormous numbers of people together.”[5] It is the aesthetics of the boulevard’s politics that interested me while writing Fanfare for a City. The boulevard, despite its macadam, brick, iron, and stone, could be remarkably pliant, especially around the tumultuous years of 1830, 1848, and 1870. One morning, state armies could dazzle the streets with colorful flags, shiny armor, and organized fanfare. The next, barricades, bloody rags, and street songs could overload the senses.
 
It makes sense, then, why artists and cultural critics continue to regard the Parisian boulevard as a symbolic space of modernity. But why inaugurate one, let alone several in quick succession?

On April 5, 1858, a crowd of dignitaries—including the emperor, empress, and Haussmann—military personnel, and civilians assembled for the inauguration of the boulevard de Sébastopol, the new, canyon-like orifice tunneling down the middle of Paris’s Right Bank. A giant velvet curtain enveloped the boulevard, suspended across two massive, gold-plated pillars. To the cue of military fanfare, the curtain was drawn, revealing the hitherto unseen north-south vista. For days following the spectacle, the press meticulously described the sights and sounds of the event, detailing the fabric and color of imperial pennants, the roar of the onlookers, and the distinct timbre of the emperor’s voice. Walter Benjamin would liken this inauguration ceremony to “the unveiling of a monument.”

Yet the intent of the boulevard, I argue, was by no means to commemorate what came before it.[6] Indeed, much of Haussmannization came at the cost of working-class communities who lived in and around Paris’s belly, the Île de la Cité. If anything, the Boulevard de Sébastopol wanted not to commemorate but to forget. For Haussmann, who regarded himself as an “artist of demolition,” urban modernity was a tabula rasa, a new movement whose stately fanfare called to abandon the old city once and for all.

Other boulevard inaugurations followed. The boulevard Malesherbes was inaugurated with similar fanfare on August 13, 1861, two days before the imperial holiday of the Saint-Napoléon honoring Bonaparte’s birthday. The Second Empire propaganda machine was hard at work promoting public works projects as constitutive of the French supremacy, listing boulevard inaugurations on the same schedule as other national commemorative events.  

Of all the public works inaugurated during the Second Empire, that of the boulevard du Prince-Eugène, on December 7, 1862, was a multimedia sensation. Named after Napoléon III’s other uncle, the boulevard linked the Place du Trône (now the Place de la Nation) and the Place du Château d’Eau (now the Place de la République). While any street festivity is likely to disrupt traffic, this event was on another level. The inauguration, which consisted of several days’ worth of speeches, orchestral concerts, and choral singing, completely uprooted Paris’s weekend concert schedule and press coverage. Haussmann delivered a lengthy prepared speech, whose text circulated verbatim on the front pages of the newspapers. In the speech, he detailed not only the architectural rationale for the new boulevard, but also justified all of the public works he had already greenlit.[7] Song and hymn texts flooded the press in the weeks preceding the inauguration. Many of them addressed the new boulevard in the second-person tu, as if Prince Eugène himself was the guest of honor:

Greetings! Splendid boulevard,
Who bears such a glorious name;
An eager crowd has come to see you,
With a radiant collective grin.[8]

With the intensity of an operatic premiere, the inauguration of the boulevard du Prince-Eugène was symptomatic of the Second Empire’s penchant for pageantry. As I argue in my book, however, boulevard inaugurations were never just about the boulevard. To inaugurate a road, after all, is to tread on it, to assemble on it, to crowd it—it is to render it temporarily unusable, thereby negating its raison d’être. Rather, it was the sensory delirium surrounding the boulevard that mattered to the imperial regime. For Napoléon III’s Second Empire, any opportunity to curate the sights and sounds of the city needed to be taken, even if it meant disrupting the very mobility promised by its new infrastructure. Inaugurations commemorate and move on. The Haussmannian boulevards, on the other hand, sounded the urban past into oblivion. The past is dead, they seem to say, long live modernity.

My book closes a half century after the inauguration of the boulevard du Prince-Eugène. On January 15, 1927, another boulevard was welcomed into Paris’s tapestry of thoroughfares. The boulevard Haussmann was finally complete after a long and delayed period of construction—so long that the press had lampooned its progress for years. With empire now casting its shadow only over the colonies, the président de la République française gave a lukewarm speech in the company of the late Baron Haussmann’s surviving family (he died in 1891).
 

The musical program was retrospective and not ostentatious. It featured, among other things, la Marseillaise, a tune banned during the Second Empire, and passages from Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, a twenty-seven-year-old opera about poor Parisians living on the outskirts of the city. Haussmann’s namesake boulevard was inaugurated to the sounds of republican fanfare and working-class sentimentality. Ironic, perhaps. The Baron would have hated it.

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Jacek Blaszkiewicz is an assistant professor of music history at Wayne State University. His articles on nineteenth-century French music, urbanism, sound studies, opera, and operetta are published in the journals 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Current Musicology, The Journal of Musicology, and The Opera Quarterly. His research has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the American Musicological Society.

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 [1] Jacek Blaszkiewicz, Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024), 43.
[2] Chateaubriand, Correspondance générale, Vol. 4 (Paris, 1789-1824), 270.
[3] Esther da Costa Meyer, Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852-1870 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 95.
[4] See Alexander Rehding, “Instruments of Music Theory,” Music Theory Online 22, no. 4 (December 2016), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.4/mto.16.22.4.rehding.html
[5] Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1982), 151.
[6] My interpretation of these events departs from that of other scholars, for whom these spectacles recall the ancien régime. See da Costa Meyer, Dividing Paris, 99-100.
[7] “Bulletin,” Le Pays: Journal de l’empire, politique, littéraire, agricole, etc., December 9, 1862.
[8] Blaszkiewicz, Fanfare for a City, 4.