"Imagining an Old City in Nineteenth-Century France: Urban Renovation, Civil Society, and the Making of Vieux Lyon," Journal of Urban History (OnlineFirst, January 30, 2017; forthcoming in print). (original) (raw)

Introduction [from Roundtable Reflection: The Past and Future of French Urban History]

2013

Long before 2008, when the world’s urban population surpassed the rural for the first time, cities and their populations have drawn outsized attention by all kinds of scholars—less for their unique individual histories than for their ability to represent the human experience. Giovanni Botero (1544-1617), musing on the variability of population growth over time, wrote in 1588, “Let us settle this question insofar as it concerns cities, however, because that will also settle it for the world as a whole.” To Botero the world does not hold cities; cities contain the world within them. Such a breathtaking claim of universality rests on the Aristotelian assumption that cities are a natural outgrowth of human nature: study cities and one will understand what makes people tick. And while scholars of the present may have a less rosy outlook on cities than did Botero, who saw reflected there both human and divine achievement, the universal quality of cities and their centrality for understand...

Urban Contingency and the Problem of Representation in Second Empire Paris

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1995

Charles Garnier's Paris Opéra (1861-75) and Baron Haussmann's contemporary replanning of Paris (1853-70) supposedly represent the Second Empire of Napoléon III. But this case study of the Opéra within the context of its quarter of Paris contradicts the usual assumptions that the monument and the city were either the inevitable products or the characteristic political expressions of the state. First, a chain of events dating back to the seventeenth century is reconstructed in order to demonstrate that the decision reached in 1860 to site the Opéra on the Grands Boulevards at the end of a projected new avenue was less the consequence of an imperial plan than the pragmatic result of the often contingent urban history of Paris. Second, the parallel and equally pragmatic evolution of the characteristic Parisian façade of a giant order on an arcuated base is traced from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in order to explain why Garnier's Opéra and Haussmann's surrounding buildings came to have the same form of elevation. Interpreted in light of both the Opéra's own ambiguous status as a state institution and the ambiguous nature of nineteenth-century bourgeois civil society, this evidence suggests that neither urban nor architectural forms are fixed in their meaning, but tend rather to adjust their meaning to the changing circumstances of their use. This article concludes that a city and its monuments find their meaning in the continuous process by which a city's inhabitants shape and experience their surroundings, rather than in the episodic political programs of the state.

Organic Urbanisms: The Birth of Modern Paris

Paris has long retained a status in the popular imagination as a revolutionary city, a city in revolt. This indelible reputation has its origins in the French Revolution and bleeds into the late nineteenth-century, across the July Revolution of 1830, the June Rebellion of 1832, the February Revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1872. Through the twentieth-century, this narrative contends, and indeed into the twenty-first, the people of Paris remained threateningly revolutionary (flaring up in soixante-huit) but were more or less effectively suppressed by a state and city that had learned from, and adapted to, those explicitly revolutionary years of the long nineteenth-century. At the center of this structural adaptation, within both the popular and academic imagination, are the urban transformations enacted under Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine. Not only are these changes understood as having been enacted in direct response to fears of barricade-building revolutionaries, but they are also thought to have fundamentally changed the landscape of Paris - creating the modern city that we know today. Though the Paris Commune appears to be perhaps the most obvious counter-argument to this anti-revolutionary narrative, occurring, as it did, after Haussmann's tenure had ended, it is difficult and misleading to take this revolution out of the context of the Franco-Prussian War and the resulting siege of Paris. More broadly, however, it seems myopic to frame the pacification of the Parisian population that ushered in the twentieth-century as merely a result of the material reality of a new urban landscape.

Listening to the Old City: Street Cries and Urbanization in Paris, ca. 1860

Journal of Musicology, 2020

The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.

Contents and Chapter One, Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution.

The great myth of Baron Haussmann is that 'modernity' began with his monumental reconstruction of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution argues that 'Haussmannisation before Haussmann' in the late 1700s also made Paris the capital of the eighteenth century. In particular, due to the persistence of the black legend of uninterrupted revolutionary vandalism, few historians have researched the construction of revolutionary Paris, yet if formed a core sector of revolutionary urban, social, labour and industrial policy. Allan Potofsky thus rehabilitates the vitality of building during the Revolution, and - while architectural and urban historians have often treated the history of construction through the exclusive optic of careers and tastes of architects and urban planners, or through the structure and aesthetics of buildings, streets, and cities – his book examines the social and political history of workers and entrepreneurs engaged in constructing the French capital, in the period, 1763 to 1815.

Neocolonial Urbanism?La Rénovation Urbainein Paris

Antipode, 2015

This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to "valorize", "secure" and socially "mix" estates. The paper highlights the political and neo-colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land-rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo-colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the "urban revolution" of 1968 (Garnier) and to the "anti-colonial revolution" of independence and anti-racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti-colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo-colonial aspects of the French state.

(2016) “Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Greater Paris” Antipode

Urban renewal in post-industrial districts: the example of Lyon Metropolis

Mazowsze Studia Regionalne, 2020

Urban renewal issues in France are very often discussed with reference to the demolition or renovation of large-scale housing estates. But these issues also concern former industrial areas which have their own distinct architectural, social, and economic difficulties. This article aims to present analysis of these differences using the example of two case studies in the Lyon metropolitan area, the second largest agglomeration in France. First, we outline the background of urban policy in France and Lyon in particular, together with mapping “priority geography” of urban policy in Lyon. Our two case studies, La Saulaie and Carré de Soie, are located in suburbs of the metropolis. Through our analysis of the social and spatial features of these two renewal projects which are currently under way, we demonstrate that urban renewal policies in France are multi-layered, and that the case of Lyon illustrates especially robust engagement on the part of local authorities. Tackling poverty and ...

Telling “Spatial Stories”: Urban Space and Bourgeois Identity in Early Nineteenth‐Century Paris*

The Journal of Modern History, 2003

Writing about Paris in 1835, the Englishwoman Fanny Trollope lamented: "You must remember. .. before the last revolution [of 1830],-how very agreeable a part of the spectacle at the Louvre and in the Tuileries garden was constituted by the people.. .. But now, till the fresh dirt. .. of the Three Days' labour be worn off, dingy jackets, uncomely casquettes. .. must all be tolerated; and in this toleration appears to consist at present the principal external proof of the increased liberty of the Parisian mob." 1 Mrs. Trollope's comment reveals her anxiety concerning the changes wrought in the people by the July Revolution, which ousted Charles X and replaced him with Louis-Philippe during three days of public protest and street fighting. In expressing this anxiety within a specifically urban context, linking the transformation of the popular classes to the question of urban mobility, Mrs. Trollope was also crafting a "spatial story." French theorist Michel de Certeau used the term "spatial stories" to emphasize the interdependency of textual narratives and spatial practices. 2 According to de Certeau, as individuals move through urban space, they craft personal itineraries that they infuse with meaning. 3 This meaning can be expressed to others through writing. Although they are highly personal, he believes that these itineraries, which he * I am extremely grateful to those who have read and commented on any of the many versions of this article. Thanks in particular to John Fairfield, Rachel Fuchs, Matthew Ramsey, and participants in the History Workshop at the University of Arizona. I also owe tremendous thanks to the anonymous readers of the Journal of Modern History.

"Imagining an Old City in Nineteenth-Century France: Urban Renovation, Civil Society, and the Making of Vieux Lyon," Journal of Urban History (OnlineFirst, January 30, 2017; forthcoming in print). (original) (raw)

Related papers