Historian Reacts - England: The Broad Street Pump - Epidemiology Begins! - Extra History - #2

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[samrevlej]

Cholera epidemics are actually one of the reasons for which Paris was renovated under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s. If you think Paris nowadays is dirty, 1800s Paris was one of the filthiest places in Europe, along with London. So Haussmann, the prefect in charge of Paris, and his team of urbanists and architects (mostly them but he took credit) designed a new sewer system, along with a new city grid with wide boulevards, destroying narrow and sinuous streets in the old medieval quarters.

Downside: we lost a great deal of medieval architecture and the working class got mostly cleared out of the bourgeois new Paris into the suburbs. Upside: we gained a very beautiful cityscape and a much cleaner capital.