La rue Soufflot et le Panthéon

Work on the project to extend the rue Soufflot began in 1846—well before Napoleon III assumed power—and was not completed until 1876, when Marville made this photograph. The emptiness of the street is misleading, for it was most likely full of people and vehicles moving too fast to register on the negative (though a blur of carriages in the distance is just visible). In 1872, listing some of the “grave inconveniences” of Haussmannization, the newspaper Le Temps described the “grand roads vomiting and absorbing torrents of pedestrians and vehicles wildly, with no rule and beyond any direction.”