Le percement de la rue Réaumur

Le percement de la rue Réaumur (c. 1900) depicts one of the great urban transformation projects of late nineteenth-century Paris — the cutting of the rue Réaumur through a dense section of central Paris, a project that began in the 1890s and continued into the early twentieth century as part of the broader Haussmannization of the city. Luce was fascinated by construction sites, demolition, and the raw energy of urban transformation — subjects that connected his aesthetic interests to his anarchist politics, since these projects represented both the creative destruction of modernity and the labor of the working class who executed them. His construction-site paintings from around 1900, including multiple views of the rue Réaumur project, form one of the most distinctive subsets of his oeuvre. The subject also allowed him to depict what Haussmann had been unable to erase: the physical substance of labor, the temporary disorder of a city being remade, the workers themselves in their element. These scenes stand in productive contrast to the polished official imagery of Haussmann's grand boulevards.

The construction site is treated with energetic, directional strokes that convey the physical turbulence of demolition and earthworks. Luce uses a warm, dusty palette of ochres, browns, and greys that evoke the raw materials of the building site — stone, timber, exposed earth.