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Paris likes to present itself as a well-preserved historical city, but in fact it has expended vast amounts of energy destroying its architecture. This boulevard, for example, bears the name of its creator Baron Haussmann, the man who flattened most of medieval Paris in the 1870s and who was so unsentimental that he even knocked down his own birthplace. Bizarrely, the wave of rebuilding was commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III after a stay in England. He was especially impressed, it is said, by the beauty of Southport, the seaside town near Manchester.
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