The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange—the means of communication and transport—become for the costs of circulation.… While capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier.… and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time.
—MARX
The integration of the national space of France had long been on the agenda. But by 1850, “the implantation of the structures and methods of modern large scale capitalism rendered the conquest and rational organization of space, its better adaptation to new needs, imperative.”1 The amelioration of the interior space of Paris had, as we have seen (chapter 2), been sporadically debated and partially acted upon throughout the July Monarchy. By 1850, it had become imperative. Louis Napoleon was prepared to act on both counts. As early as December 1850, he spoke directly of the need to make every effort to embellish the city and ameliorate the living conditions of its inhabitants. We will, he said, “open new roads, open up popular quarters which lack air and light so that sunlight may penetrate everywhere among the walls of the city just as the light of truth illuminates our hearts.” On October 9, 1852, he signaled the forthcoming declaration of an Empire dedicated to peaceful works. “We have,” he declared, “immense uncultivated lands to clear, roads to open, harbors to excavate, rivers to make navigable, canals to finish, our railway network to complete.”2 The echoes of Saint-Simonian doctrine were unmistakable. On June 23, 1853, Haussmann took office as Prefect of the Department of the Seine with a mandate to remake the city according to plan.
Figure 34 As Daumier represents matters, the railroads contributed to the sense of chaotic rush and confusion in the city at the same time they integrated the countryside around Paris into the urban network. But timing was everything!
Power was now highly concentrated at the very moment when there was a nascent social and political system bursting to undertake the work and turn long-held hopes and visions into living reality. The surpluses of capital and labor power, so crushingly evident in 1848, were to be absorbed through a program of massive long-term investment in the built environment that focused on the amelioration of space relations. Within a year of the declaration of Empire, more than a thousand were at work on the construction site of the Tuileries; untold thousands were back at work building the railroads; and the mines and forges, desolate as late as 1851, were racing to meet the burgeoning demand. What was perhaps the first great crisis of capitalism was overcome, it seemed, through the long-term application of surpluses of capital and labor to the reorganization of the transport and communications system.
The achievements appeared remarkable, and the effects even more so. The railway network expanded from a few strands here and there (1931 kilometers, to be exact) in 1850 to an intricate web of some 17,400 kilometers in 1870 (figure 35). The volume of traffic expanded twice as fast as industrial output at the same time as it shifted to the rail system and away from other modes of transport (table 2). Although the imperial roads languished, the feeder roads to the rail system were increasingly used and improved. The telegraph system went from nothing in 1856 to 23,000 kilometers ten years later when it could be used not only for governmental purposes. “The supreme glory of Napoleon III,” wrote Baudelaire, “will have been to prove that anybody can govern a great nation as soon as they have got control of the telegraph and the national press.”3 But the telegraph also facilitated the coordination of markets and financial decisions. Prices of commodities in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux were instantly available, and shortly thereafter the same information could be had for London, Berlin, Madrid, and Vienna. Only with respect to ports and maritime trade did the emperor not live up to his promises, but this was more than offset by the surge of surplus French capital abroad. About a third of the disposable capital went to open up space in other lands.4 French-financed railroads and telegraph systems spread their tentacles down into the Iberian and Italian peninsulas and across central Europe into Russia and the Ottoman Empire. French finance built the Suez Canal, opened in 1869. The transport and communications system that was to be the foundation of a new world market and a new international division of labor was broadly laid out between 1850 and 1870.
Figure 35 The changing rail network in France: (a) 1850, (b) 1860, (c) 1870, (d) 1890.
Table 1 Internal Transport by Mode and Volume, 1852–1869
| Commodities (thousands of km/tons) | Passengers (thousands of passenger kms) | |||||||
| Year | Road | Canal & Navigable Waterway | Coatal Shipping | Rail | Total | Road | Rail | Total |
| 1852 | 2.6 | 1.7 | 1.3 | 0.6 | 6.2 | 1.36 | 0.99 | 2.35 |
| 1869 | 2.8 | 2.1 | 0.8 | 6.2 | 11.8 | 1.46 | 4.10 | 5.56 |
Source: Plessis (1973), 116.
Whether or not all this would have happened, no matter what the regime, is debatable. This was, after all, the era of massive investment in transport and communications throughout the whole of what was then the advanced capitalist world, and France’s performance, following the initial burst of energy after 1852, barely kept pace with, and in some cases lagged behind, that of the other major powers. In a few instances, such as the Suez Canal, France could reasonably claim that its guiding vision and material help were essential to the projects’ completion. And there is general agreement that the particular mix of financial reforms and governmental policies, largely derived from the Saint-Simonian orientation of the Emperor and some of his close advisers (with Persigny at the Ministry of Finance in the lead), had a great deal to do with the spectacular boom of the period immediately after 1852. That there were limits to such a process of absorbing surpluses of capital and labor soon became apparent. The problem, of course, was that “productive” employment under capitalism has always meant profitable employment. Once the choicer and more lucrative segments of the railroad network were completed by 1855, followed by Haussmann’s first network of roads in 1856, the state had to find increasingly sophisticated ways to keep the work in progress. And by the mid-1860s, the whole process ran up against the realities of capitalist finance. For this was, make no mistake, a project undertaken not simply at the behest of an all-powerful Emperor and his key advisers (including Haussmann) but organized through and for the association of capitals. As such, it was subject to the powerful but contradictory logic of profit-taking through capital accumulation.
For example, the decision to put Paris at the hub of the new rail network, ostensibly for political and strategic reasons, made perfect economic sense to the degree that Paris was both the principal market and the principal manufacturing center in the nation. Agglomeration economies naturally drew new transport investments and new forms of economic activity toward Paris because this was where the rail links were most profitable. The effect was to open up Parisian industry and commerce to interregional and international competition. But they in turn also gained easier access to export markets. The position of Parisian industry and commerce therefore changed appreciably in relation to a shifting international division of labor. The costs of assembly of raw materials in Paris declined (the price of coal in Paris fell while the pithead price in Pas-de-Calais was rising); the effect was to make many of the inputs upon which Parisian industry relied correspondingly cheaper. The increased regularity, volume, and speed of flow of goods into the factories and out into the city markets reduced the turnover time of capital and opened up the possibility for big business operations in both production and distribution.
The revolution in retailing—the rise of the big department stores pioneered in the 1840s—and the shifting power relations between merchants and producers was in part a product of the new space relations.5 The Parisian food market was likewise relieved of close dependency upon local and often hazardous supplies, and increasingly drew upon provincial and foreign sources, provoking “a veritable revolution in consumption.”6 The vegetable gardens, orchards, and animal husbandry that had once flourished in the city had largely disappeared by 1870.7 The bourgeoisie could then look forward to fresh vegetables from Algeria and the Midi, and the poor could supplement their diets with potatoes from the west and turnips from the east. And it was not only goods that moved. Tourists flooded in from all over the world (adding to the effective demand), shoppers poured in from the suburbs, and the Parisian labor market spread its tentacles into ever remoter regions in order to satisfy a burgeoning demand for labor power.
The transformation of external space relations put intense pressure on the thrust to rationalize the interior space of Paris itself. Haussmann’s exploits in this regard have, of course, become one of the great legends of modernist urban planning.8 Backed by the Emperor and armed with the means to absorb surpluses of capital and labor in a vast program of public works, he devised a coherent plan to reorganize the spatial frame of social and economic life in the capital. The investments covered not only a new network of roads but also sewers, parks, monuments and symbolic spaces, schools, churches, administrative buildings, housing, hotels, commercial premises, and the like.
The conception of urban space that Haussmann deployed was undoubtedly new. Instead of “collections of partial plans of public thoroughfares considered without ties or connections,” Haussmann sought a “general plan which was nevertheless detailed enough to properly coordinate diverse local circumstances.”9 Urban space was seen and treated as a totality in which different quarters of the city and different functions were brought into relation to each other to form a working whole. This abiding concern for the totality of the urban space led to Haussmann’s fierce struggle, by no means fully supported by the Emperor, to annex the suburbs where unruly development threatened the rational evolution of a spatial order within the metropolitan region. He finally succeeded in 1860. Within this new and larger space he created a sophisticated hierarchical form of territorial administration—with himself, naturally, positioned at the top—through which the complex totality of Paris could be better controlled by an organized decentralization and delegation of power and responsibility to the twenty arrondissements. He built a mairie (city hall) in each to symbolize such an administrative presence to the populace. And he fought throughout, in the end not so successfully, to counter the privatism and parochialism of individual and local interests through legislation and rhetoric focused on the public interest for a rational and orderly evolution of space relations in the city.
Figure 36 Haussmann’s new boulevards at the different phases of construction.
Haussmann’s passion for exact spatial coordination was symbolized by the triangulation that produced the first accurate cadastral and topographical map of the city in 1853. And there is no question that it was Haussmann, and not the Emperor, who imposed the logic of the straight line, who insisted upon the symmetry, who saw the logic of the whole, and who set the tone for both the scale and style as well as the details of spatial design. But it was the largeness of scale and the comprehensiveness of plan and conception that were to assure Haussmann’s place as one of the founding figures of modernist urban planning. “Make no little plans,” urged Daniel Burnham many years later, and this was certainly Haussmann’s way.
But whatever else he and the Emperor may have had in mind—the creation of a Western capital to rival imperial Rome and celebrate a new form of Empire, the expulsion of “dangerous classes” and insalubrious housing and industry from the city center—one of the clearest effects of their efforts was to improve the capacity for the circulation of goods and people within the city’s confines. The flows between the newly established rail stations, between center and periphery, between Left Bank and Right Bank, into and out of central markets like Les Halles, to and from places of recreation (Bois de Boulogne by day, the grand boulevards by night), between industry and commerce (to the new department stores) were all facilitated by the construction of some ninety miles of spacious boulevards that reduced the cost, time, and (usually) aggravation of movement remarkably. Along with the Pereire brothers, Haussmann engineered the consolidation by merger of all the omnibus companies in 1855 into one private monopoly—the Compagnie des Omnibus de Paris—thereby increasing the number of passengers moved from 36 million in 1855 to 110 million by 1860. The new road system had the added advantage that it neatly surrounded some of the traditional hearths of revolutionary ferment and would permit the free circulation of forces of order if needed. It also contributed to the free circulation of air into insalubrious neighborhoods, while the free play of sunlight by day and of newly installed gas lighting by night underscored the transition to a more extroverted form of urbanism in which the public life of the boulevard became a highlight of what the city was about. And, in an extraordinary engineering achievement, a marvel to this day, the flows of water and sewage were revolutionized.
It was ruthlessly done and took time, money, technical skill, and Haussmann’s incredible drive and administrative ability to do it. No one can doubt Haussmann’s passionate and long-standing committment to improving the means of transport. Had he not, after all, in his very first appointment as subprefect of the remote rural commune of Nerac in 1832, bypassed the authority of the prefect and resorted to creative financing of dubious legality to leave the commune, some five years later, with several kilometers of paved local roads, new bridges, and a properly surfaced highway connecting to the main town?
Yet the dramatic transformation of the interior space of Paris was by no means all due to Haussmann. The realignment of traffic movement from the principal axis of the Seine to multiple railheads, long debated during the July Monarchy (see figure 25), was less a consequence than a compelling condition for that work. Haussmann immediately recognized that it was a “necessity of the first order” to put the rail stations, now the principal points of entry into Paris, “into a direct relation with the heart of the city by way of large thoroughfares.”10 The Petite Ceinture railroad, which ringed Paris and gave such dynamism to suburban growth, also owed little to Haussmann. And, as we shall see, there were all manner of shifts in the operation of land and property markets, in industrial location and labor processes, in marketing and distribution systems, in population distribution and family formation, to which Haussmann was adjusting rather than leading. The reshaping of the interior space of Paris was, therefore, a response to processes already in motion. But it also became a spatial framework around which those very same processes—of industrial and commercial development, of housing investment and residential segregation, and so on—could cluster and play out their own trajectories, and thus define the new historical geography of the city’s evolution.
To his credit, Haussmann well understood his limited role. For though he had authoritarian powers and frequent delusions of grandeur, he also recognized that he had to liberate more than just the flows of goods and people from their medieval constraints if Paris was to be transformed. The force he had to mobilize—and it was in the end the force that mastered him—was the circulation of capital. But this, too, was a compelling condition present at the very birth of Empire. The surpluses of capital and labor power absolutely had to be absorbed if the Empire was to survive. The absorption of such surpluses via the public works that so transformed the interior space of Paris entailed the free circulation of capital through the construction of a particular spatial configuration of the built environment. Freed from its feudal straitjacket, capital reorganized the interior space of Paris according to principles that were uniquely its own. Haussmann wanted to make Paris a modern capital worthy of France, if not of Western civilization. In the end he simply helped make it a city in which the circulation of capital became the real imperial power.
The new space relations had powerful effects on Parisian economy, politics, and culture, and the effects on the sensibilities of Parisians were legion. It was as if they were instantly plunged into a bewildering world of speedup and rapid compression of space relations. The Second Empire experienced a fierce bout of space-time compression, and the contradictory effects of this (particularly with respect to space and place) were everywhere in evidence. The orientation of the new transport investments reemphasized, for example, the tendency toward centralization of administration, finance, economy, and population in Paris. It re-posed the thorny issue of the proper balance between geographical centralization and decentralization of political power within the nation, and it did it in such a way as to make the role of the commune in the construction of citizenship and political identities a vigorous topic of debate.11 Centralization was seen as a virtue by many. “Paris is centralization itself,” proclaimed the Emperor with pride; “it is the head and heart of France,” elaborated Haussmann.12 But this challenged the viability and meaning of local community even within Paris itself; political interests seemed to have less and less clear-cut geographical boundaries, and political identities based on territory had more and more to be asserted rather than just lived.
The problem of scale was not an issue only for Haussmann, the financiers and the bourgeoisie. The new internationalism of the workers’ movement sat uneasily with that desire and struggle for local autonomy which had so animated workers during the 1840s and which later on was to give the Paris Commune (with its absolute insistence on the right to local self-governance) so much of its specific political coloration. The coming unification of the world through monetization and commodity exchange was likewise celebrated in the Universal Expositions held in Paris in 1855 and 1867. In both cases the focus was not only on technological progress but also on the new world of spatial interconnections facilitated by modern networks of communication and materialized through commodity exchange. Hugo, in his essay in the Paris Guide of 1867, largely written for the Universal Exposition of that year, produced a simplistic panegyric to a unified Europe (of the sort that Saint-Simon had articulated in the 1820s), one free of national boundaries and expressive of a common culture, at the very moment when geopolitical tensions were on the rise and three years before the Franco-Prussian War wracked European unity and brought an end to Empire. The phantasmagoria of universal capitalist culture and its space relations incorporated in the Universal Exposition blinded even him to the significance and power of loyalties to and identifications with place.
And, as so often happens with improvements in transport and communications, the effect was not so much to relieve congestion as to re-create it at a different speed and scale. The threefold increase in the number of omnibus passengers carried between 1855 and 1860 tells much of the story. Many of Daumier’s cartoons drawn in response the new forms of transport emphasize the rush and speedup on the railroads, in the stations, and along the boulevards; the intense pressure of overcrowding; and a shifting balance between private intimacies and public presences (see figures 19, 34, 37, and 38). Segregation by classes in the railway carriages and by “on top or inside” in the omnibuses allowed some separation, but it was hard to maintain any sense of privacy or intimacy in crowded railway carriages, no matter what the class of compartment. The railways revolutionized not only the materialities of space relations but also social relations, intimacies, and sensibilities.13 The incorporation of the suburbs and the remoter rural fringes into the maelstrom of Parisian life also meant that there was no place to hide from the process of urbanization, while the compulsion of the middle and affluent classes to seek leisure and pleasure in the now more easily accessible countryside was soon to become one of the great subjects of impressionist painting.
Figure 37 The increase in omnibus traffic along the boulevards did not diminish overcrowding and the inconvenience of travel within the city, at least according to this rendition by Daumier from 1856.
Figure 38 Railway travel had dramatic implications for the manner in which people could experience the public spaces of travel. It was particularly difficult to preserve any sense of intimacy, and many Daumier cartoons address that problem. An early attempt to protect upper-class passengers from contact with the mob by building isolated compartments was quickly abandoned when a traveler was found murdered in one. In this cartoon Daumier (1864) celebrates third-class travel because, though one might be asphyxiated, one would never be assassinated.
Speedup also expanded the spaces within which people, commodities, and ideas could move. This made it imperative to rethink and reengineer the urban process at a quite different scale. Not only did Haussmann and his aides have to adapt (and there is no question that in this they led the way). The financiers, commercial interests, and industrialists also had to adapt their thinking and find organizational means to work at grander geographical scales. Haussmann’s drive to annex the suburbs into his urban administration was symbolic of this shifting scale. Urbanists like Perreymond and Meynadier had, of course, pioneered this way of thinking in the 1840s, and had simultaneously managed to adapt a tradition of rationalizing urban space that went back at least to Voltaire and Diderot, to Paris’s chaotic and ever accelerating urban growth. Balzac, recall, had also set out to see the city as a whole, and in his celebrated ending to Old Goriot has Rastignac prepare to seize the city for himself as he contemplates it from the heights of Père Lachaise Cemetary. But Rastignac’s project is one of personal advancement.
Zola, many years later, reruns Balzac’s scene in La Curée (The Kill). Saccard, the great Second Empire speculator, dines one evening with Angèle on the heights of the Butte Montmartre. Looking down on Paris and imagining “it is raining twenty franc pieces” there, he gleefully observes how “more than one district will be melted down, and gold will stick to the fingers of those who heat and stir the mortar.” Angèle stares “with a vague terror, at the sight of this little man standing erect over the recumbent giant at his feet, and shaking his fist at it while ironically pursing his lips.” Saccard describes how Paris has already been cut into four by the Grand Croisée, and will be further slashed by “Navvie cuts” of the second and third networks, “its veins opened, giving sustenance to a hundred thousand navvies and bricklayers.” Saccard’s “dry nervous hand kept cutting through space,” and Angèle “shivered slightly before this living knife, those iron fingers mercilessly slicing the boundless mass of dusky roofs … the smallness of this hand, hovering pitilessly over a gigantic prey, ended by becoming disquieting; and as, without effort, it tore asunder the entrails of the enormous city, it seemed to assume the strange reflex of steel in the blue of the twilight.”14 Thus does Zola re-create the creative destruction of Paris as seen from on high and at the scale of the city as a whole. But now it is the speculator who grasps the totality with the ambition to carve it up and feed off the entrails.
The reshaping of space relations and the transformations in spatial scale that occurred were active rather than passive moments in the urban process. The actual organization of space through transport and communications is a first-order material fact with which all historical and geographical analysis must come to grips. The Second Empire revolution in space relations, both within Paris and beyond, may have had its roots in earlier phases, but there is no question that there was an order of difference between the pace of change, spatial scale, and geographical extension after 1852 compared to that which had prevailed before. How this revolution was accomplished remains to be explored.