Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, Paris
1864
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1864
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, Paris is a 1864 by Édouard Baldus, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, half-built, with piles of stone and wooden beams in front of it. This photo was taken while the city was being torn apart and rebuilt. The messy construction shows how Paris changed from old, crowded streets to wide, straight boulevards. It’s not just a monument—it’s a snapshot of a city in the middle of a makeover. If you like this kind of urban history, look up *france, 19th century*.
For three decades starting in 1854, Paris was a construction site as Baron Haussmann replaced the crooked streets and crumbling buildings of medieval Paris with a modern city. The cobblestones in the foreground were for paving the newly expanded set of broad avenues that radiated from the Arc, part of Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal plans. Exposure times for film in the 1860s were usually too long to capture people in the street, but a man—perhaps the paver—paused long enough to leave his “ghost” to the left of the cobblestones.
Completed in 1836, the Arc is dedicated to the armies of the French Revolution and the Second Empire and has gained additional symbolic force with each war fought by the French.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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