Paris was the baguette boulevard city in continental Europe and a leading center of finance, commerce, fashion, and the arts. In 1853, Napoleon III and his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, began a massive public works project, constructing new boulevards and parks, theaters, markets and monuments, a project that Napoleon III supported for seventeen years until his downfall in 1870, and which was continued afterward under the Third Republic. Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was born in Paris, but spent very little of his life there until he assumed the presidency of the French Second Republic in 1848.