Haussmann often came up with good ideas, but he was terrible at turning those brilliant ideas into reality every single time.
He loved straight avenues, especially lining both sides with grand, imposing buildings. The idea was not bad, but when he set to work, mistakes kept cropping up. For example, while building Avenue de l'Opéra, he ran into one of the Louvre Museum's side wings.
Widening those old streets inevitably involved historical relics. In 1860, workers renovating a basement accidentally broke through into a set of strange ruins. The site had originally been intended for a luggage storage facility.
Napoleon III had always wanted to determine the exact location where Caesar and the Gauls had once fought their decisive battle. This spurred the rapid development of archaeology in France, and archaeologists did indeed discover ancient trenches and Gallic coins in the Alesia region. A huge statue of Vercingetorix was erected on that former battlefield, later archaeological site, and the sculptor used Napoleon III's facial features for the work.
Portraits, sculptures, and other artworks often had their models. The statue representing the city of Strasbourg in Place de la Concorde was modeled after Victor Hugo's mistress, Juliette Drouet. After the Franco-Prussian War ended, her statue was once draped in black gauze.
The statue originally erected at this entrance was a short woman, whose image came from one of Napoleon's paintings.
Napoleon Bonaparte was Italian. Though his paintings were far inferior to Leonardo da Vinci's, the woman's facial features in that painting were still recognizable.
At first, people did not believe Napoleon I could paint. Only after Napoleon III decided that the clumsy painting was his uncle's work did people model a bust after her image.
After the sculpture was completed, people began arguing about who the model in the painting had