3-003-804 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

New Boulevard Malesherbes, looking towards the Madeleine, [Paris], 1861. '...the construction of the Boulevard Malesherbes has led to the disappearance of La Petite Pologne, a small district possessing an unenviable notoriety for the bad reputation of its inhabitants, who were an eyesore to the "West-end" of the French capital...Henceforth Paris will be purged of these infectious neighbourhoods...Our View of the new Boulevard is taken from the point where it forms an angle with the Madeleine...at one extremity and the Arc de Triomphe at the other. The angle itself is to be occupied by a new church, the Eglise de St. Augustin...The scaffolding in our foreground indicates the site of this new church, now in course of construction. One remarkable circumstance relating to this new boulevard (nearly a mile in length, and thirty-seven yards wide) is the rapidity with which it has been completed since the plan of its execution was definitively decided upon. In less than six months eighty-four houses have been demolished, many new ones erected, and a little-frequented neighbourhood converted into an animated and elegant quarter, worthy of the splendid monuments that adorn it'. From "Illustrated London News", 1861.