History 172
Modern France
Haussmannisation
Right: Gare Saint Lazare
Claude Monet, 1877
Modernity/Modernisation
• 18th Century
– Battles between the Ancients and Moderns
• Rousseau/republicanism – ancient
• Encyclopédiste/liberalism – modern
– French Revolution
•
•
•
•
Liberal (markets, limited suffrage, rationalisation)
Radical (republican, democratic, ‘virtue’)
Liberal authoritarianism/technocratic (modern)
Bonapartism - authoritarian, w/liberal fig-leaf
Modernity/Modernisation
• Spurts:
– Latter half of 19th century
• Haussmannisation
• Second industrial revolution
– Mid twentieth century
• Les trentes glorieuses (1950s-1970s)
Urban growth
vs
Urbanisation (19th c)
• Urban growth = population of city rises
• Urbanisation = rising proportion of nation’s
population lives in cities
• Paris: both
– Influx from countryside
– Annexation
• 1860: Belleville, La Villette, Montmartre
Annexation of banlieues
New boundary
Old boundary
Population
• 1817 = 700,000
• 1857 = 1.2 million (before annexation)
• 1860 = 1.8 million (after)
• Most who arrived were poorer than those in
Paris already
Population
Meaning of these numbers?
• 1960s sociological explanations
– Uprootedness  loss of cultural context
• Atomisation
• Crime
– Eastern Paris
• Indigents: more than 12% of population
– Half of population died before age of 19
– Infanticide – orphanages (1/3 of children
deposited there died within one year)
Disease
Cholera
1832, 1849, 1884
Deaths were high
1832  13,000 die
Right: Alfred Rethel, upon
reading Heine’s description of
Paris in 1832
1832 Cholera
• That night, the balls were more crowded than ever; hilarious
laughter all but drowned the louder music; one grew hot in the
chahut, a fairly unequivocal dance, and gulped all kinds of ices and
other cold drinks--when suddenly the merriest of the harlequins felt
a chill in his legs, took off his mask, and to the amazement of all
revealed a violet-blue face. It was soon discovered that this was no
joke; the laughter died, and several wagon loads were driven
directly from the ball to the Hotel-Dieu, the main hospital, where
they arrived in their gaudy fancy dress and promptly died,
too...[T]hose dead were said to have been buried so fast that not
even their checkered fool's clothes were taken off them; and
merrily as they lived they now lie in their graves.
•
– Heinrich Heine, German poet and journalist (1832)
Meaning of these numbers?
• Newer sociological interpretations
– Chain migration (not uprootedness)
– Communities in Paris
•
•
•
•
Gare Montparnasse  Brittany
Gare de Lyon  Burgundy, Auvergne, Lyon
Saint Lazare  Normandy
Gare de l’Est  Alsatian
– Paris becomes polyglot: migrants arrived with
different dialects and even languages (breton)
Contemporary anxieties about
teeming cities:
Who is who? Who can you trust?
• Often treated poor as different race
– Phrenology: reading of skulls for indications of who
the person is: attempts to assign a typology to people
based on physical traits
– Certain physical traits indicated that one might be a
criminal
– The moral and the biological are conflated
• Emile Zola (novelist): genes predispose people to social
behaviour
– E.g., crime, alcoholism
Contemporary views of Paris
• ‘A great manufactory of putrefaction in which
poverty, plague… and disease labor in concert
and where sunlight barely ever enters. It is a
foul hole where plants wilt and perish and
four out of seven children die within their first
year.’
– Victor Considérant
Contemporary views of Paris
• ‘How ugly Paris seems after one year away.
How one is stifled in these dark, damp, narrow
corridors which we are pleased to call the
streets of Paris. One would think it was an
underground city, so sluggish and obscure.
People throng in the liquid darkness like
reptiles.’
– Vicomte de Launay
East / West divide
East, banlieue
West
1848
• Fear of masses and socialism
• Election of Louis Napoleon
– Elected president in 1848 – male popular vote
– Became Emperor in 1851 – plebiscite Nov 1852
• 1852: First time provinces impose their
politics upon Paris??
Haussmann
• Appointed Préfet of the Dept of Seine in 1853
• Given extraordinary powers to remake Paris
• Carried through rapid changes that others had
tried before
– ‘It is easier to slice through the middle of a pie
than through the crusts’
Haussmannisation
• Circulation, circulation
– Air
– Capital
• Prevent barricades
1830 – Romantic view
1848 – Sober View
Implementing Haussmannisation
• Forced expropriation by state
• State sells to private developers (cheap)
• From ‘bankers’ to ‘banking’ – new financing
– Even lower classes begin holding money in banks
– De-personalisation of bank industry – banks take on legal
personalities
– All this increases credit
• Taxes, tourism & economic growth would pay for it
• Were Napoleon III and Haussmann proto-Keynesians?
Imperialism of the ‘straight line’
Cutting through Paris with boulevards
Show-off Cities
• See and be seen
• Tourism
• Anonymity, Alienation?
• The flaneur: someone who moves spontaneously
through the city, observing, being seen, consuming…
somewhat alienated but engaged with fascination…
less ‘organic’ relationship to city
Building Avenue de l’Opéra
Today
Map of Paris
Étoile – western Paris
Orderly Consumerism
Alienation?
Cities and perpetual motion