lecture 11, "paris and the belle epoque"
john merriman

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the belle epoque was not "good," for most people of France--the image of nostalgia for this period's France is really a creation of post-WWI France.

we have to look, of course, at the reconfiguration of Paris by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s (the "Alsatian Attila"). he only went back to Paris three times after he left in scandal at the end of the 1860s.

the great boulevards that became identified with modern Paris can only be understood during this "urban renewal" project--it was the largest, in history (only comparable were the re-building of Tokyo, after the fire; or London (when?)).

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pre-1860 Paris, the first thing you notice, of course, is its small size (prof is showing map). tremendously over-crowded place--and the most densely populated parts of the city were the Isle de Cite, and the Marais (central right-bank districts). their population density was three times what it is today.

in 1851: 1,053,000

in 1861: 1,696,000

in 1872: 1,825,000 (minus the 25,000 slaughtered)

in 1881: 2,269,000

in 1896: 2,500,000

European cities only grow in the first 2/3 of the 19th century through migration (otherwise more people die than are born--disease, infanticide, infant morality, etc.). large-cities replenish themsleves only through immigration. this produces a hyper-density in the central districts of Paris. it's not until the 1880s that you have the huge wave of Breton migration (from Brittany).

so you have an extraordinarily crowded city, the ranks of the poor swollen by immigration.

one of the differences between the 19th century and now is that the people coming into paris, then, the people coming into Paris were people who were poorer than those already there. this is different than middle-class immigration in the immediate aftermath of WWII (not well-explained...)

Haussman himself was born in the Western, prosperous parts of Paris (he was a law student there). in 1852, Napoleon the III orders Haussman to build him great boulevards--it was a time when the gap between the rich and the poor was increasing.

you see, as a consequence of the re-configuration/demolition of the centre and eviction by high rents, the flight of working-class populations from the center to the periphery (the growth, then, of working-class, poor suburbs).

the principle of the planning, itself, is built upon classical principles associated with absolute monarchs--"the imperialism of the straight line." if you think of St. Petersburg, Madrid, Berlin, or Versailles--there were power alleys, down which you marched troops. very different from the cities that had grown organically from the middle ages (Strasbourg, as an example).

the problematique, of course--how do you build this magnificent boulevard from point A to point B? you simply take a ruler, and barge through!

three reasons that Paris is re-built:

(1) more light and air--make it healthier

(2) to liberate Capital, for business--it's not a coincidence that all the major department stores sit on the boulevards.

(3) how do you build a barricade across the boulevards? Haussman says this in his memoirs--"we want to build barricade-proof boulevards"

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now, what about the people chased from the central districts?

if you rented (and almost everyone did), and you were kicked out, you were given the equivalent of about a day's wages, and that was it.

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freeing the flow of Capital, of course, was a "worthy goal", and it came with a massive exhibition in 1864, and a proliferation of department stores. and what this does, of course, is destroy local craftsmen/businessmen. (there are some dept stores already by the 1820s, and even before that, but it is the 1850s and 1860s that brings to Paris THE Department Store).

it creates jobs for working-class and peasant women (in terrible conditions, of course), and it attracts the rich to consume. in that sense a re-organization of the economy.

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Haussman is not a terribly interesting man--he's technocrat. but he was very good at what he did; he frees up the flow of circulation of Capital, etc. and there are visual effects of the reorganization--imperial order is re-inforced, in a sense.

but the effects on the Parisian poor were horrific, again; all of this makes the West-East/Center-Periphery contrasts more important.

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to be sure, there were boulevards in European cities, before Haussmann. but they had been built on the peripheries, mainly, on the outskirts (where walls once used to be). Vienna is an example of this. and there is some of this in Paris, too.

Renoire described the Boulevards as soldiers. (prof is showing pictures, at this point)

paintings portraying the anomie of boulevard life--the isolation of modern city-life. one can over-emphasize this theme too much, perhaps, but it's still critical to keep in mind.

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you still have traditional work done in Paris--so there is some conversion of old buildings into new industries, and there is some re-organization of work, in a sense (unclear, this point)

but prof is again stressing the marginaliztion of poor and working-class life (and culture). the contrast between what happened to the Western periphery and the Eastern periphery. the Western half of Paris was very different (though one shouldn't over-estimate this).

working-class industrial suburbs became the source of serious support for the communists during the 1920s and 1930s, partly because of how badly they were housed. and they become places feared by the center. the growth of these industrial suburbs is an important feature of large-scale industrialization (many of the "dirty" industries are forced toward the periphery--that's where the factories are, etc.)

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why are European suburbs so different from American suburbs?

in 1992, at the time of the Rodney King riots in LA, prof was writing an edited book on the "Red Suburbs" in Paris (and their identification with radical politics). and people on France kept asking, as they couldn't understand the concept of wealthy suburbs and poor interiors, as prevails in Paris.

in the early 1830s, one of Louis Phillippe's ministers called the industrial periphery the "cord that will one day wring our neck." fear of the periphery, not fear of the center.

in 1831 and 1834, silk workers from Lyon poured down into the city and were kept out of invading the center by Police. prof describing, as contrast, 1968 Detroit, and the riots and fire--one of the suburbs tried to change the street patterns so that the poor of the center couldn't come out to the suburbs.

how did this happen? the pattern is just the opposite--can't be exaggerated, but these spatial tensions do count for something.

Haussmann was part of setting this trend, ultimately--factory owners look for cheap labor on the periphery, prices in the center get higher and higher.

the sense of not belonging to the center, in a sense, offers hope to peripheral activism.