and for six years in prison in France for attempting to overthrow King Louis-Philippe. He had been especially impressed by London, with its wide streets, squares and large public parks. In 1852 he gave a public speech declaring: "Paris is the heart of France. Let us apply our efforts to embellishing this great city. Let us open new streets, make the working class quarters, which lack air and light, more healthy, and let the beneficial sunlight reach everywhere within our walls". As soon as he was President, he supported the building of the first subsidized housing project for workers in Paris, the Cité-Napoléon, on the rue Rochechouart. He proposed the completion of the rue de Rivoli from the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville, completing the project begun by his uncle Napoléon Bonaparte, and he began a project which would transform the Bois de Boulogne (Boulogne Forest) into a large new public park, modelled after Hyde Park in London but much larger, on the west side of the city. He wanted both these projects to be completed before the end of his term in 1852, but became frustrated by the slow progress made by his prefect of the Seine, Jean-Jacques Berger. The prefect was unable to move the work forward on the rue de Rivoli quickly enough, and the original design for the Bois de Boulogne turned out to be a disaster; the architect, Jacques Ignace Hittorff, who had designed the Place de la Concorde for Louis-Philippe, followed Louis-Napoléon's instructions to imitate Hyde Park and designed two lakes connected by a stream for the new park, but forgot to take into account the difference of elevation between the two lakes. If they had been built, the one lake would have immediately emptied itself into the other. Haussmann did not have time to finish the third phase, as he soon came under intense attack from the opponents of Napoleon III. The downfall of Haussmann (1870) and the completion of his work (1927) In 1867, one of the leaders of the parliamentary opposition to Napoleon, Jules Ferry, ridiculed the accounting practices of Haussmann as Les Comptes fantastiques d'Haussmann ("The fantastic (bank) accounts of Haussmann"), a play-on-words based on the "Les Contes d'Hoffman" Offenbach operetta popular at the time. In the autumn of 1867, the voucher program was ruled as official debt by the Court of Accounts, rather than as the "deferred payments"