Abstract
Paris is one of those cities that arouse extreme emotions. From the Middle Ages it was an important centre of culture and art. The article presents two themes that show the city as a palimpsest. One concerns the description of the eighteenth-century city, a city of narrow dangerous streets, devoid of technical infrastructure, based on Le Tableau de Paris by Sebastien Mercier. The second theme is the 19th-century revolutionary reconstruction of the city, which was ordered by Emperor Napoleon III and carried out by Georges Eugene Haussmann. The implementation of the vision of an orderly spatial arrangement resulted in the demolition of entire quarters of buildings. The new Paris with its monumental buildings, tenement houses and new infrastructure was to become the true capital of the world. Great changes affected both the inhabitants and all areas of social life. Haussmann’s plan was so prophetic that both the administrative division into districts as well as the communication system and recreational areas created at that time serve the city’s residents to this day.