page_title: History of parks and gardens of Paris
section_title: Parks and gardens of Napoleon III (1852–1870)
hierarchical_section_title: History of parks and gardens of Paris / Parks and gardens of Napoleon III (1852–1870)
context_page_description: Paris today has more than 421 municipal parks and gardens, covering more than three thousand hectares and containing more than 250,000 trees. Two of Paris's oldest and most famous gardens are the Tuileries Garden, created in 1564 for the Tuileries Palace, and redone by André Le Nôtre in 1664; and the Luxembourg Garden, belonging to a château built for Marie de' Medici in 1612, which today houses the French Senate. The Jardin des Plantes was the first botanical garden in Paris, created in 1626 by Louis XIII's doctor Guy de La Brosse for the cultivation of medicinal plants. Between 1853 and 1870, the Emperor Napoleon III and the city's first director of parks and gardens, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, created the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, Parc Montsouris and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, located at the four points of the compass around the city, as well as many smaller parks, squares and gardens in the neighborhoods of the city. One hundred sixty-six new parks have been created since 1977, most notably the Parc de la Villette and Parc André Citroën.
context_section_description: Napoleon III became the first elected President of France by an overwhelming vote in 1848. When he could not run for re-election, he organized a coup d'état in December 1851 and had himself declared Emperor of the French in December 1852. One of his first priorities as Emperor was to build new parks and gardens for Paris, particularly in the neighborhoods far from the center, where the few public parks of the city were all located.
  Napoleon III named Georges-Eugène Haussmann his new prefect of the Seine in 1853, and commissioned him to build his new parks. Haussmann assembled a remarkable team: Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, the city's first Director of the new Service of Promenades and Plantations; Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, the city's first gardener-in-chief; Eugène Belgrand, a hydraulic engineer who rebuilt the city's sewers and water supply, and provided the water needed for the parks; and Gabriel Davioud, the city's chief architect, who designed chalets, temples, grottos, follies, fences, gates, lodges, lampposts and other park architecture.
  Over the course of seventeen years, Napoleon III, Haussmann and Alphand created 1,835 hectares of new parks and gardens, and planted more than six hundred thousand trees, the greatest expansion of Paris green space before or since. They built four major parks in the north, south, east and west of the city, replanted and renovated the historic parks, and added dozens of small squares and gardens, so that no one lived more than ten minutes from a park or square. In addition, they planted tens of thousands of trees along the new boulevards that Haussmann created, reaching out from the center to the outer neighborhoods. The parks of Paris, particularly the Tuileries gardens and the new Bois de Boulogne, provided entertainment and relaxation for all classes of Parisians during the Second Empire.
caption: Sunday promenade in the Bois de Boulogne, by Henri Evenepoel (1890s)
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