Paris is indeed an ocean. Sound it: you will never touch bottom. Survey it, report on it! However scrupulous your survey and reports, however numerous and persistent the explorers of this sea may be, there will always remain virgin places, undiscovered caverns, flowers, pearls, monsters—there will always be something extraordinary, missed by the literary diver.
—BALZAC
If everything were as it seems on the surface, there would be no need for science.
—MARX
Paris in 1850 was a city seething with social, economic, and political problems and possibilities. Some saw it as a sick city, wracked by political torments, torn apart by class struggles, sinking beneath its own weight of decadence, corruption, crime, and cholera. Others saw it as a city of opportunity for private ambition or social progress; if the right keys to the mystery of the city’s possibilities were found, the whole of Western civilization stood to be transformed. The city had, after all, grown rapidly in population, from 786,000 in 1831 to more than 1,000,000 in 1846 (table 1). Its industry had undergone a remarkable growth, and it had even enhanced its traditional centralized role as the national hub of communications, finance, commerce, culture, and, of course, state administration. With such a dynamic past, how could it not have a dynamic future?
Table 1 The Population of Paris, 1831–1876
| Year | Old Paris | Communes Annexed in 1860 | Paris after 1860 | % Change |
| 1831 | 785,866 | 75,574 | 861,436 | |
| 1836 | 899,313 | 103,320 | 1,002,633 | 16.39 |
| 1841 | 936,261 | 124,564 | 1,059,825 | 5.70 |
| 1846 | 1,053,897 | 173,083 | 1,226,980 | 15.77 |
| 1851 | 1,053,261 | 223,802 | 1,277,064 | 4.08 |
| 1856 | 1,174,346 | 364,257 | 1,538,613 | 20.48 |
| 1861 | 1,696,141 | 10.24 | ||
| 1866 | 1,825,274 | 7.61 | ||
| 1872 | 1,851,792 | 1.45 | ||
| 1876 | 1,988,800 | 7.45 |
Source: Chevalier (1950).
But in 1850 the city seemed to be trapped within a double straitjacket, each of which appeared to reinforce the other. It was, first of all, caught in the aftermath of the deepest and most widespread crisis of capital yet experienced. The city had seen many an economic crisis before, usually triggered by natural calamity or war. But this one was different. It could not easily be attributed solely to God or nature. To be sure, there had been harvest failures in 1846–1847 that brought misery to the countryside and a flood of distressed people to the city, seeking employment or assistance. But capitalism had matured by 1848 to a sufficient degree that even the blindest bourgeois apologist could see that financial conditions, reckless speculation (particularly with respect to the railways), and overproduction had something to do with the human tragedy that swept out of Britain in 1847 and quickly engulfed the whole of what was then the capitalist world. Most of Europe experienced the same crisis simultaneously, making it difficult to confine its interpretation solely within national narratives of government failure of this or that sort. This was a full-fledged crisis of capitalist overaccumulation, in which massive surpluses of capital and labor power lay side by side with apparently no way open to reunite them in profitable union. In 1848, reform of capitalism or its revolutionary overthrow stared everyone starkly in the face.
Figure 27 Daumier’s Nouveau Paris (1862) captures many facets of the changes that Haussmannization brought about. It reads: “How happy it is for people in a hurry that they have enlarged the means of communication.” The bourgeois studies his watch, the wife and child hesitate, the traffic is intense.
That Paris led the way and took the revolutionary path was not entirely fortuitous. And it was more than just that famed revolutionary tradition, which had the citizens of Paris put political interpretations on the least sign of economic difficulty, take to the streets, erect barricades, and proclaim their rights as the rights of man.1 For the other straitjacket that held the city down was a veritable eighteenth-century structure of social practices and infrastructures dominating manufacturing, finance, commerce, government, and labor relations, to say nothing of the still mainly medieval frame of physical infrastructures within which these activities and practices were confined. Despite all of the talk of urban renewal and occasional practical stabs at it during the July Monarchy, Paris had been overwhelmed. Chevalier writes:
In these years Paris looked around and was unable to recognize itself. Another, larger city had overflowed into the unaltered framework of streets, mansions, houses and passageways, piling man on man and trade on trade, filling every nook and corner, making over the older dwellings of the nobility and gentry into workshops and lodging houses, erecting factories and stockpiles in gardens and courts where carriages had been moldering quietly away, packing the suddenly shrunken streets and the now overpopulated gothic graveyards, resurrecting and overloading the forgotten sewers, spreading litter and stench into the adjacent countryside.2
While there was nothing unique about the accompanying human misery, degradation, disease, crime, and prostitution—common enough features within the industrial capitalism of the time—this ancient urban infrastructure was incompatible with the increasingly sophisticated and efficient capitalist organization of production and consumption emerging in the new manufacturing towns not only in Britain—France’s main commercial rival—but also in Belgium, Germany, Austria, and even certain other regions of France. For though Paris had enhanced its position in the international division of labor after the revolution of 1830, it had done so less through transformations in its systems of production than through piecemeal adaptation of old methods. A growing detail and social division of labor, backed by the special qualities of its output and the volume of its internal market, had been the basis of its manufacturing dynamism. Even its commerce—long far more important to its economic health than its manufacturing—was bottled up in congested streets, hindered by tolls and barriers of all kinds, and chronically inefficient in its mode of handling and distributing goods. To the degree that Paris had not moved effectively to meet the new and rather exacting requirements of capital accumulation, its agony during the crisis of 1847–1848 was double and more prolonged, its path to recovery strewn with all manner of particular obstacles, compounded by a political and cultural evolution that created nothing but doubt, confusion, and fear.
Figure 28 The streets of the old Paris, here represented by two Marville photos of the early 1850s, were narrow and inhospitable to movement, insalubrious (note the sewage perpetually draining on the streets) and lined with often crumbling buildings. Note how on the right, the advertisements for omnibus and railway travel promise another world of space relations to that with which the old Paris is encrusted.
Different segments of society saw the crisis quite differently. The craft workers, for example, armed with corporatist traditions, saw deskilling, loss of independence, dignity, and respect, fragmentation of tasks—and chronic insecurity of employment—all increasingly imposed by capitalist control of production and distribution, as the core of the problem. The February Revolution allowed them to put the question of labor and the right to work on the political agenda and to assert their right to be treated with dignity and respect, as equals in the body politic. The social republic, as we have seen, was as important to them as the political republic. In this they had a strange assortment of bourgeois allies, running all the way from small masters and shopkeepers, who felt equally threatened by the new systems of production and distribution, to déclassé radicals (journalists, artists, and writers, as well as die-hard Jacobin revolutionaries like Blanqui) and Romantic poets and writers (like Lamartine, Hugo, and George Sand), who believed in the nobility of work and labor within the relatively safe confines of a romanticized artisan tradition. Though the Romantics were quickly undeceived when they encountered real workers on the barricades, the social movements of the 1840s intersected with craft workers’ consciousness to generate, as we saw in chapter 2, a host of expectations as to how a nurturing social republic would work.
Such socialist sentiment plainly alarmed the bourgeoisie. Fear of the “reds” compounded their confusion as to how to represent, explain, and react to a political-economic crisis that demanded remedial action. Some saw archaic structures and practices of government and finance as the root of the problem, and sought to modernize the French state, liberate the flows of capital, and give greater impetus to the economy. Progressive elements in Paris had also long sought strong state interventions to rationalize and renew plainly failing physical infrastructures. But their efforts were stymied by other factions of the bourgeoisie, trapped either in a fiscal conservatism that guaranteed total paralysis at a time of severe economic depression, or by traditional rights to property ownership (largely absentee and rural) that seemed to offer hope of personal salvation in the midst of national ruin. Many of the landowners fled the city in 1848 and took their purchasing power with them. This helped plunge Parisian industry, commerce, and property markets even deeper into the mire of depression.
The confused series of events that brought “that cretin” (the phrase is due to that impeccable bourgeois, Adolphe Thiers, rather than to Marx) Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to power, first as President of the Republic (elected by universal suffrage) in December 1848 and four years later as emperor, need not detain us unduly, since there are abundant and quite brilliant accounts elsewhere, beginning, of course, with Marx’s Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 and the Eighteenth Brumaire.3 Suffice it to remark that the questions of work and of a socialist response to the crisis were swept off the immediate political agenda in the savage repression of the June Days of 1848, when Parisian workers took to the streets to protest the closure of the National Workshops (the Second Republic’s response to the demand for the right to work). But subsequent elections indicated that democratic socialist sentiment was alive and well. Worse still, it appeared not only in Paris and Lyon (where it was to be expected) but also in some rural areas, reminding France that the roots of its revolutionary as well as its reactionary tradition lay very much in the countryside. In the face of this threat, the bourgeoisie broadly welcomed the hitherto exiled but populist Louis Napoleon’s election as President of the Republic in December 1848 and then submitted rather easily to the coup d’état of December 1851 and the declaration of Empire in December 1852.
Figure 29 A photo portrait, by Riffaut, Mayer, and Saint-Victor, of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.
The other threat to the social order derived from the destruction and devaluation of assets attendant upon the general economic crisis. Caught up in internecine struggles, no single faction of the bourgeoisie had the authority or legitimacy to impose its will. To the degree that Louis Napoleon appeared to be a compromise whom each faction thought could be controlled, he was put in a position where he could play off popular will, factionalism, and traditional loyalties to the Napoleonic legend (particularly in the army), and thus consolidate a very personal power. This left him to face up to the whole complex of problems of reform and modernization, control of the labor movement and its pretensions, revival of the economy, and how to exit from the profound economic, political, and cultural malaise in which France languished between 1848 and 1851.
The eighteen years of the Second Empire were nowhere near as “cretinous” or “farcical” as Thiers and Marx (from opposite ends of the political spectrum) had predicted. They were a deadly serious experiment with a form of national socialism—an authoritarian state with police powers and a populist base. It collapsed, like most other experiments of its ilk, in the midst of dissension and war, but its tenure was marked by the imposition of intense labor discipline and the liberation of capital circulation from its preceding constraints. But it was not evident then (any more than now) exactly which new social practices, institutional frames and structures, or social investments would work. The Second Empire was, then, a phase of striving for adjustment to a burgeoning and demanding capitalism in which diverse economic and political interests consciously sought this or that advantage or this or that solution, only to find themselves all too frequently caught in the unintended consequences of their own actions.
It was in such a context that the Emperor and his advisers sought to liberate Paris—its life, culture, and economy—from constraints that bound it so tightly to an ancient past. While certain immediate needs were clear, such as improved access to the central market of Les Halles, slum clearance around the city center, and improved traffic circulation between the rail stations and into the civic center—there were a host of other questions that were much more problematical. There were problems of ends and means; the proper role of the state in relation to private interests and the circulation of capital; the degree of state intervention in labor markets, in industrial and commercial activity, in housing and social welfare provision; and the like. There was, above all, the political problem of how to get the Parisian economy back on its feet without sparking the solid resistance of a still powerful haute bourgeoisie, feeding the insecurities of a middle class always under threat of marginalization in spite of its seemingly solid implantation, and pushing the workers to outright revolt. From this standpoint we have to see the Emperor as ultimately the prisoner of the class forces he began by seeming to outwit with such abandon and disdain. That he was able to get so far and do so much merely testifies to the tremendous upset generated out of the heat of 1848, an upset that affected not only economy and polity but also traditional ways of representing the world and acting upon those representations. Here, too, Parisian life in the period 1848–1851 was in total turmoil, a turmoil that affected painting (this was, after all, the period of Courbet’s breakthrough into an art world that could not comprehend what he was about), letters, science, and management, as well as industry, commerce, and labor relations. Only after all the tumult had quieted could the solid resistance to the authoritarianism of Empire begin.
Paris in 1870 was fundamentally changed from its condition in 1850. And the changes were far-reaching and deeply rooted, though not enough to prevent that other great event in Parisian history, the uprising that gave birth to the Paris Commune of 1871. But while there were continuities between the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, there was much that separated them. The eighteen years of Empire had bitten as deep into the consciousness of Parisians as Haussmann’s works had cut open and reconstructed the physical fabric of the city.
As concerns the fate of the city, its delivery into Haussmann’s hands in June 1853, seven months after the declaration of Empire, was undoubtedly significant.4 Haussmann, as we have seen above (pp. 8–10), built a certain mythical account of its importance and fostered the perception of a total break with the past, with himself innocently implementing the Emperor’s will. There may not have been a total break, but there certainly was a turning point. Haussmann was a far more Machiavellian figure than he revealed in his Mémoires. He was ambitious, fascinated by power, had his own passionate commitments (including a very particular view of public service), and was prepared to go to great lengths to realize his goals. He derived an extraordinary level of personal power directly from the authority of Louis Napoleon, and he was prepared to use it to its utmost. He was incredibly energetic and well-organized, had a great eye for details, and was prepared to flout opinion and subvert authority (even that of the Emperor), skate close to the limits of legality, finesse finances by what we now call “creative accounting,” ride roughshod over the opinions of others, and make absolutely no concessions to democracy. He had long exhibited these traits, and almost certainly this is what made him so attractive to Louis Napoleon, compared to the fiscally conservative and democratically constrained prefect, Berger, who Haussmann replaced. Haussmann reckoned, correctly up until at least the early 1860s, that the Emperor would always back him up. He immediately sidelined the municipal council (that had so constrained the cautious Berger) and ignored the planning commission (he claimed he did this with the Emperor’s connivance but on this point, too, he plainly invented). He was, in short, an authoritarian Bonapartist, and he survived and thrived all the time Bonapartism remained intact. But as Bonapartism weakened and gradually gave way to liberalism in the 1860s, so Haussmann’s position also weakened, culminating in his sacrificial dismissal in January 1870, when a liberal democrat, Emile Ollivier, became Prime Minister.
What is so intriguing about Haussmann is that while he understood only too well the seriousness of the macroeconomic problem he faced in the context of the specific crisis of Paris as an urban economy, his response included intense and often excruciating attention to details. He closely monitored the design of street furnishings (such as gas lamps, kiosks, and even the design of those street urinals known as vespasiennes). He was obsessed with details of alignments. He angled the Sully Bridge across the Seine so that it brought the Parthenon into a direct line with the Bastille column, and in an extraordinary feat of engineering he moved the Victory Column so that it was centered in the newly created Place Châtelet. Even more bizarre was his insistence that the architect Bailly displace the dome on his Tribunal de Commerce so that it was in the line of sight of those moving down the newly constructed Boulevard de Sebastopol. A local asymmetry was created to produce a symmetrical effect at a grander urban scale.
By the time Haussmann was dismissed, the processes of urban transformation he had set in motion had assumed such momentum that they were almost impossible to stop. Haussmannization—as represented, for example, by the completion of the Avenue de l’Opéra—continued for many years after his dismissal. The continuity in part depended upon the strong and loyal team of talented administrators and technocrats he assembled around him—Alphand to do the parks, Belgrand to engineer the water and sewers, Baltard to redo Les Halles, architects like Hittorff to build monumental works, Davioud to create fountains. They all had strong personalities and talents, and after their initial (and sometimes continuing) conflicts with Haussmann, they came to recognize that they, too, could give free reign to their talents with Haussmann’s personal backing in the same way that Haussmann could give free reign to his with the backing of the Emperor. The fruits of the collaborations of these men are to be seen to this day. The park that centers the Square de Temple is by Alphand, the Mairie of the Third Arrondissement that faces onto it is by Hittorff, and the covered market alongside is by Baltard. The worth of these works had been so well proven, the reputations of the architects and administrators so well established, the logic of the unfolding of the urban plan so well entrenched, and the overall conception so well accepted that Paris developed largely along the lines Haussmann defined for the next thirty years or more.
By then, a new scale of action and thinking had also been defined that was difficult to reverse. This was nowhere better represented than in the transformation of Les Halles, because it was not simply a matter of the scale of individual buildings and of architectural style, but of a “new concept of commercial urbanism” that amounted to the production and engineering of a whole quarter of the city given over to a single function. The effect was to produce a whole new city texture. But then, Van Zanten argues, Haussmann seems to have lost his way: “In the early 1860s, when the initial projects of 1853 were finished or well underway, something happened—scale changed, focus was lost, coordination lapsed—as new projects were undertaken that were inflections, elaborations, and extensions of the original project. … which the amazing success of the first decade of work made seem possible, but that now got out of control and led to the financial crisis of 1867–1869 and thence to Haussmann’s ouster.”5 Haussmann may have aspired to and briefly achieved total mastery, but he failed to sustain it.
Figure 30 Portrait of Haussmann by Petit, and a cartoon representation of him, as “Attila of the Straight line,” armed with compass and set square, dominating the plan of Paris.
How is the story of this massive transformation of Second Empire Paris to be told? A simple and direct narrative of historico-geographical change might suffice. There are, in fact, several excellent extant accounts that do just that.6 But how are we to build that narrative without a proper understanding of the inner workings and relations of urban economy, polity, society, and culture? How can some vision of Paris as a whole be preserved while recognizing, as Haussmann himself so clearly did, that the details matter? Dissecting the totality into component parts runs the risk of losing track of the complex interrelations that intertwine. Yet we cannot understand the whole without grasping the details, without appreciating how the component parts, the fragments, worked. I shall take a middle course and try to understand the historico-geographical transformation of Paris during the Second Empire in terms of a series of intersecting and interlocking themes, none of which can properly be understood without the others. The problem is to present the interrelations without lapsing into tedious repetitions. I must here put a burden upon the reader, to try to keep the themes in perspective as part of a totality of interrelations that constitutes the driving force of social transformation in a given place and time.
Figure 31 Paris, decked out as a beautifully garbed, imperious-looking woman, ungratefully spurns Haussmann in 1870, according to this rendition, in spite of all his magnificent gifts to her.
The themes collect together under certain headings. I begin with space relations, in part because I think it important to put the question of the materiality of space relations and their social consequences in the very forefront of analysis, if only because it is so often relegated to the position of after-thought. I do not mean by so positioning it to privilege it in the overall analysis, but if some privilege attaches to position in an argument (which is invariably the case), then why not accord the production of space relations that privilege, if only for a change? The following three themes—finance capital, the propertied interest, and the state—link together as part of a theory of distribution of the social product into interest, rent, and taxes. Putting considerations of distribution before those of production might appear a little odd, but there is, as Marx commented, “an initial production-determining distribution,” which has great significance for understanding how capitalism works. In this case, the positioning largely follows from the facts that the new space relations (both external and internal) were created out of a coalition of the state, finance capital, and the landed interest, and that each had to go through a painful adjustment to the other to do what had to be done in the way of urban transformation. The state is, of course, more than just a facet of distribution (though without taxes it would not get very far), so other aspects of state action, legitimacy, and authority are taken up here as well as in later sections where appropriate.
Production and labor processes are then examined. Shifts in technique, organization, and location were tied to changing space relations (the rise of a new international division of labor and the interior reorganization of Paris) as well as to credit, rent costs, and state policies (thus illustrating how distribution and production interlock within an urban context). But producers also need labor as a prime productive force. This brings us to consider the Parisian labor market, with its multiple facets of population growth, immigration, wage rate determination, mobilization of an industrial reserve army of unemployed, levels of skill, and attitudes toward work and labor organization.
The participation of women in the labor force was important and controversial. To the degree that they occupied a bridge position between the labor market and the reproduction of labor power in the home, their position in Parisian society as a whole deserves explicit consideration. This provides a sociological context for considering the reproduction of labor power in its long-term aspects. That process occurred largely outside of Paris because the provinces fed the Parisian labor market with immigrants during the 1850s and 1860s. This leads us to consider how class relations were reproduced and subjected to social control within Paris through structures of consumption and of spectacle. From this perspective it becomes easier to reflect upon the mutually reinforcing realities and conceptions of community and class in a society where both were undergoing radical transformation.
Figure 32 Haussmann’s attention to detail was extraordinary. Here, on the left, he combines new gas lighting with a vespasienne (a street toilet for men). The photo on the right captures the mix of street detail (the gas lighting) and the passion for both the straight line and uniformity of construction style (in this case on the Boulevard de Sebastopol). Marville’s hundreds of street photos of the period are a wonderful source of detailed information.
Figure 33 Haussmann’s passion for alignment made him insist that Bailly change his design for the new Tribunal of Commerce. The cupola was displaced toward the side of the building to create a symmetrical effect with the tower of the Conciergerie when viewed from the Boulevard Sebastapol. Symmetry of the building is sacrificed for symmetry of the city as a whole. The photo is by Marville.
While cities have often been regarded as artificial constructs engineered according to human wants, needs, desires, capacities, and powers, it is impossible to ignore their implantation in an ecological and “natural environment” in which questions of metabolism and of a “proper” relation to nature are clearly posed. The cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849 had, for example, sharply highlighted the problem of urban health and hygiene. These issues were seriously addressed in Second Empire Paris. Questions of science and sentiment, and of rhetoric and representation, are then taken up to try to uncover what people knew, how they knew it, and how they put their ideas to work socially, economically, and politically. I am here looking to reconstruct ideologies and states of consciousness, at least as far as these were articulated and are recoverable for present consideration. This puts us in a better position to understand what I call, in the final section, the “geopolitics of an urban historical geography.” I envisage, then, a spiral of themes that, starting with spatial relations, moves through distribution (credit, rent, taxes), production and labor markets, reproduction (of labor power, class and community relations), and consciousness formation to set the space in motion as a real historical geography of a living city.