Haussmann's Paris by e-bike: the seventeen years that drew the city

Two and a half hours along the grand boulevards, past the Opéra Garnier and the star-shaped squares, to understand how Paris, between 1853 and 1870, took on the face it still wears today. An guided tour in a small group, five participants maximum per guide, on Tern electric bikes. We set off from the meeting point in the 7th arrondissement and come back to it. The stories are told from the street, the pavement, the forecourt or the bridge: no monument admission, no interior visit and no food or drink are included in the price.

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Between 1853 and 1870, Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann restitched Paris in seventeen years of works. The figures Haussmann himself recorded, still argued over by historians, give nineteen thousand seven hundred and thirty buildings pulled down, some sixty kilometres of new streets cut through the old fabric, a sewer network that went from around one hundred kilometres in 1850 to close to six hundred, and some eighty thousand trees planted. How many inhabitants were pushed out towards the outer districts is still debated, so we put no number on it. The result has become so familiar that nobody looks at it any more. This tour exists to make the drawing legible again, façade by façade, junction by junction, until the city stops being a backdrop and becomes a project, with its choices, its costs and its expropriations.

The full route comes to around fourteen kilometres, including the transfers to and from the meeting point in the 7th arrondissement, flat from end to end: ground that pedal assist makes comfortable. You ride from one junction to the next without effort, stop at the foot of the monuments instead of sailing past them, and keep your breath for listening. Seven stops are planned, from the Étoile to the Place Vendôme, subject to the traffic, roadworks and safety conditions of the day, with stretches where the view says it all: Avenue Foch and its planted side lanes, the Trocadéro forecourt facing the Eiffel Tower, the riverbank at the mouth of the Alma tunnel. The exact distance of the route chosen is confirmed to you in writing.

The tour suits anyone who likes architecture and city planning, Parisians who would finally like to understand the building they live in, and visitors back in Paris for a second time. You need to be able to ride a bike and to be comfortable in Paris traffic: the route uses streets and avenues open to traffic, with wide junctions, bus and taxi lanes, and crossings to negotiate. There is time at the start to get the feel of the bike and a safety briefing, and the pace is set by the group.

The indicative price is 75 euros per person, all taxes included, on a shared tour, and 95 euros per person, all taxes included, on a private one, electric bike and helmet included. Your enquiry is not a firm booking: we confirm the final price in writing before any payment, together with the date and the meeting point. Five participants maximum per guide; beyond five participants we may be able to run a second group at the same time, subject to our availability, at the same price per person, and we confirm that to you in writing.

On this ride

Haussmann's Paris by e-bike: the seventeen years that drew the city

Just off the Place de l'Étoile

Commissioned by Napoleon in 1806, the arch was only finished and inaugurated in July 1836: all the emperor ever saw was a full-size mock-up in wood and canvas, run up in a month by Chalgrin for Marie-Louise's entry into Paris on 2 April 1810, their wedding day. His ashes, on the other hand, passed underneath on 15 December 1840, on their return from Saint Helena. We stop away from the roundabout, on a side lane or a wide pavement: the central island can only be reached through the pedestrian underpass, which bikes may not use, and twelve avenues arriving at the same point are not something a group crosses. Even from there the Haussmann principle reads at a glance: avenues radiating outwards, one single façade height, one single drawing imposed on every owner.

Avenue Foch

Opened in 1854 under the name Avenue de l'Impératrice, it is one hundred and twenty metres wide and close to thirteen hundred metres long. It is the widest avenue in Paris, wider than the Champs-Élysées, and Haussmann pushed for it against an earlier scheme that allowed for a roadway of just sixteen metres. Planted side lanes, mansions set back from the road, gardens along the edges: it shows you what an address on a brand-new boulevard was already worth, and why speculation followed the demolition crews street by street.

Trocadéro forecourt

From the forecourt the Eiffel Tower stands whole in front of you, from the Champ-de-Mars to the tip: this is the photo stop of the route, and a very good place to talk about scale and perspective. It is also the place to tell the story of the protest published in Le Temps on 14 February 1887, signed by forty-seven writers and artists against the three-hundred-metre tower, among them Zola, Maupassant, Gounod, Dumas the younger and, in a nice irony for this route, Charles Garnier himself, architect of the opera house we reach an hour later.

Pont de l'Alma

At the mouth of the tunnel, the Flame of Liberty is an exact replica, in gilded copper, of the one the Statue of Liberty holds in New York: three and a half metres, paid for by an international subscription launched for the centenary of an American daily published in Paris, given to the City of Paris in thanks for the restoration of the statue by French firms, and unveiled on 10 May 1989. So it was not put up in memory of Diana Spencer: geography alone turned it, after 1997, into a spontaneous place of tribute that visitors still bring flowers to. A short stop, and a lesson in how Paris lets its monuments be reassigned.

Église de la Madeleine

Napoleon commissioned it by decree of 2 December 1806 as a temple to the glory of the French armies, modelled on a Greek temple: fifty-two Corinthian columns all round it, no cross in the plan and no bell tower. After the Russian campaign he dropped the idea; Louis XVIII, who wanted no Napoleonic war memorial in the middle of Paris, turned it into an expiatory monument to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. The outside stayed Greek, and the building was only consecrated as a church on 9 October 1845. Four years later, on 30 October 1849, three thousand people crowded into a nave hung with black for Chopin's funeral, with his Funeral March orchestrated for the occasion and Mozart's Requiem.

Boulevard des Capucines and Opéra Garnier

Charles Garnier delivered his opera house in 1875, five years after the fall of the emperor who had ordered it; Empress Eugénie is said to have asked him what style it was, and he is said to have answered that it was Napoleon III style. From the boulevard we tell you what Garnier did with the water he hit while digging: rather than pump it out for ever, as the steam engines had tried and failed to do, he had a watertight tank of twenty-five metres by fifty built under the stage and deliberately let it fill, to balance the pressure of the water table and steady the ground. It is that basin, its level held in check and not a lake, that gave Gaston Leroux his setting in 1910. We also tell you about the ceiling Chagall unveiled on 23 September 1964, two hundred and forty square metres commissioned in secret by Malraux and received in a storm of criticism: to defuse it, Lenepveu's earlier ceiling was kept underneath, behind removable panels.

Place Vendôme

A royal square drawn by Jules Hardouin-Mansart from 1699 under the name Place Louis-le-Grand: façades imposed on every buyer, a single drawing, a Corinthian order over a rusticated ground floor, one hundred and fifty years before Haussmann made all of that a general rule. At its centre, a bronze column cast from the cannon taken at Austerlitz. The Commune decreed its demolition on 12 April 1871, on Félix Pyat's proposal, and brought it down on 16 May; the painter Courbet, who only joined the council on 16 April and was not at the ceremony, was nevertheless held responsible. Reconstruction was decided in 1873 and completed in 1875, and the bill reached him on 4 May 1877: three hundred and twenty-three thousand and ninety-one gold francs and sixty-eight centimes, payable in thirty-three annual instalments of ten thousand francs from 1 January 1878. In exile in Switzerland, he died on 31 December 1877, the day before the first instalment fell due. At number 12, Chopin died in 1849; his body lies in Père-Lachaise and his heart in Warsaw, carried there by his sister in a jar of alcohol.

Practical details

Duration: About 2 h 30, stops included
Level: Physically easy: a flat route of about fourteen kilometres, including the transfers to and from the meeting point in the 7th arrondissement, with the exact distance confirmed in writing. You need to be able to ride a bike and to be comfortable in Paris traffic, as the route uses streets and avenues open to traffic. Time to get the feel of the bike and a safety briefing before we set off.
Meeting point: Paris 7th arrondissement, 26 rue Bosquet; we set off from there and come back to the same point, the Haussmann avenues being reached from the 7th; exact meeting point confirmed in writing before any payment
Group: Up to 5 participants per guide; beyond five we may be able to run a second group at the same time, subject to our availability, at the same price per person, confirmed to you in writing
Languages: French or English, please tell us in your request

Booking is a request, not a firm reservation: we confirm feasibility, date, meeting point and the final price in writing before any payment. Prices are indicative, per person, all taxes included, and cover the use of a pedal-assist bike and a helmet. No entrance fees and no indoor visits are included: the stories are told from the street, the forecourt or the bridge.

Frequently asked questions about this ride

Do I need to know anything about architecture?

No. Your guide starts from what is in front of you: the height of the façades, the alignment of the balconies, the line of the avenues, how much sky the stone leaves you. No technical vocabulary is needed, and questions are welcome at every stop.

Do we go inside the Opéra Garnier or any monument?

No. The route passes in front of the buildings and the stories are told from the boulevard, the pavement, the forecourt or the bridge. No paid admission, no interior visit and no food or drink at a third party are included in the price. If you would like to see inside the Opéra or the Madeleine, your guide will tell you how to do it afterwards, in your own time and at your own expense.

What level of cycling does it need?

You need to be able to ride a bike and to be comfortable in Paris traffic: the route uses streets and avenues open to traffic, with wide junctions and crossings to negotiate. It runs to about fourteen kilometres on flat ground, including the transfers to and from the meeting point, and the electric assist absorbs the effort. We take a few minutes at the start to get you comfortable on the bike and to run through safety, and the pace is set by the group.

How much does the tour cost?

The indicative price is 75 euros per person, all taxes included, on a shared tour, and 95 euros per person, all taxes included, on a private one, electric bike and helmet included. The final price is confirmed to you in writing before any payment. No monument admission and no food or drink are included.

How does booking work?

You send us a request with a date, a route and a number of participants. That request is not a firm booking and nothing is due at that stage: we confirm the slot, the meeting point, the make-up of the group and the final price in writing, and that written confirmation comes before any payment. Our terms of sale, the cancellation conditions and the withdrawal-right exception under article L. 221-28, 12° of the French Consumer Code are available from the form.

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