Paris

views updated

PARIS

pre-revolutionary paris
revolution and empire
bourbon restoration and second empire
third republic
bibliography

When the French king Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) abandoned Paris for Versailles in 1682 the city drifted apart from the monarchy, following a destiny that would prove momentous for France. Although it was still governed by royal appointees, only the law courts, legal apparatus, and those who served them remained in the city. The rest of the government, the court, and a massive cohort of hangers on and those who catered to the king and his courtiers, followed Louis XIV to his enormous, sumptuous, self-indulgent chateau, gorgeously decorated and furnished, with an elaborate iconography—worked out by the king and Charles-François Le Brun—that made the palace the principal shrine of monarchical idolatry.

Once Louis had left his capital he seldom returned for the remaining thirty-five years of his reign and never again lived in Paris. His great projects and buildings—the grands boulevards that replaced the razed city walls, two triumphal arches, Les Invalides army hospital and hospice, the Place Louis-le-Grand (later and still the Place Vendôme), among others—had no sequel in the last three decades of Louis's long reign or those of his successors. After his last great public work in Paris, the eastern facade of the Louvre (designed by Claude Perrault in the 1670s) the king lost interest in Paris, lavishing his money and attention on Versailles. The short-lived regency (1715–1723) returned to Paris but contributed little to the city, and when Louis XV (r. 1715–1774), the great-grandson of Louis XIV, achieved his majority, the monarchy definitively departed Paris. The steady stream of royal projects that had endowed the city over the centuries with so many great buildings, dried up. His two successors would add some important embellishments—most notably Jacques-Ange Gabriel's Place Louis XV (where the guillotine would soon stand, today the Place de la Concorde), the Hôtel de la Marine and the Hôtel Crillon that anchor it, Charles de Wailly's Odéon theater, and the École Militaire (the last royal project before the Revolution)—but Revolutionary Paris was not physically much different than it had been in Louis XIV's day.

pre-revolutionary paris

Despite its many neoclassical buildings Paris remained a medieval city. The tangle of twisted streets was shared and contested by pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles; the few tallow lamps suspended by ropes cast the dimmest light; garbage, offal, and human waste were thrown regularly into the streets; mean hovels were attached like barnacles to the great buildings; the courtyard of the Louvre-Tuileries was filled with squatters and their animals; it was impossible to cross the city without navigating the patternless maze of streets; and an inadequate police force struggled to keep order. At midcentury (1749) Voltaire pleaded for urban renewal. He lamented the lack of public markets, fountains, regular intersections, and theaters, and he called for widening the "narrow and infected streets" and liberating the great buildings from the sprawl and squalor he contemptuously called "gothic." With his inimitable malicious wit he regretted that Paris had not had a fire like that of London in 1666, which would have cleared away the "dark, hideous" accretions of medieval Paris. Not until a century later would Voltaire's prayer for transformation be answered.

Population

Any number of factors set Paris apart from the court and the kingdom. It was far and away the largest city in France and although no statistics from the ancien régime are either accurate or reliable, the city's population increased significantly in the eighteenth century. By 1789 its estimated population was between six and seven hundred thousand, and its surface area was three times greater than it had been in Louis XIV's reign. Literacy rates were unusually high: 90 percent of men and 80 percent of women who made wills were able to sign them. Town criers no longer read out rulings of the law courts, they pasted them up on the walls for all to read. The elites no longer had a monopoly on written culture. By the mid-eighteenth century almost every parish had at least one free school for boys (half as many for girls), and most Paris children attended long enough to learn to read and write.

Paris was not a city of nobles, despite their domination of public life. A good modern guess is that two to six thousand noble families lived in the capital and made up about 3 percent of the population. They played an enormous role as cultural consumers, and theater, music, and art in Paris easily rivaled that patronized by Versailles. They also employed tens of thousands of domestic servants, another significant difference between Paris and its rival cities. This nobility too was changing from the old stereotype of proud ignorance and contempt for the charms of civilized domesticity that went beyond hunting and war. As the French Revolution approached, richly bound books began to appear in the background of noble portraits, displacing the heretofore dominant military accessories, and there were a growing number—well over a hundred—sizable noble libraries in Paris.

The overwhelming population, however, was working class, although it is difficult to find equivalent modern categories for the vast variety of jobs, skills, trades, and occupations. With the exception of the Marais area, where the elite of the legal system lived in splendid town houses, the east side of Paris was poor, the west side was rich. It is no accident that the great urban uprisings of the French Revolution came from the neighborhoods of St. Antoine and St. Marcel, on opposite sides of the Seine but in the eastern quadrant of Paris. From painstaking splicing of evidence we know the numbers of the poor were growing. The last great subsistence crisis in France was in 1709. Afterward mortality rates gradually fell, chances of survival improved for children, and life expectancy increased. In the Paris basin the population increased by 32 percent between 1750 and 1790, which meant in reality an enormous increase in the numbers of the poor. Between these extremes were the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, a middle class made up of professionals, rentiers (living on income from property and investments), and businessmen (both large and small), with a smattering of manufacturers.

Grandeur and misère

Paris produced a unique new literature in the eighteenth century, one which would have a vigorous life until the present day: books about the city. Most notable was Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris (1781–1789) and Le nouveau Paris (1793–1798), a sequel to the popular Tableau. These eighteen volumes contained, in no discernible order, the author's descriptions of the varied life of the city, contrasting the high and the low, the grandeur and the misère of the teeming capital—a theme that would be taken up by Honoré de Balzac in the next century—where walking was hazardous (there were more than twenty thousand carriages) and the mud of the unpaved streets was "filthy, black with grit," and stank with a "sulphurous" odor and the "tang of nitric acid" created by the domestic waste running in the streets. A "spot of this mud left on a coat will eat away the cloth," Mercier states.

What made Paris so volatile and unruly, so immune to control, was its size, the enormous difficulty of provisioning such a city, and the concentration of the poor and the working class in densely packed neighborhoods. The royal government (and then the Revolution) struggled to keep Paris fed with decent and affordable bread: the best recipe for riot was expensive and/or adulterated bread. The first riot of the Revolution began as small, spontaneous gatherings for self-defense and culminated in the attack on the Bastille. On 14 July 1789 the price of bread was the highest it had been in a century. The next important riot, the Women's March on Versailles (5–6 October 1789), which began as a market riot over bread prices, returned the king to Paris as a virtual prisoner and made the capital the epicenter of the Revolution. From then on Paris's central place and importance in France would be uncontested.

revolution and empire

When Louis XIV left Paris it was an unwalled city with a population of less than five hundred thousand living on twenty-five hundred acres. When Louis XVI was brought to Paris in 1789 it was again walled—this time in wood with fifty-two booths for taxing everything that came into the city (the hated octroi)—and had a population of more than six hundred thousand spread over seventy-four hundred acres. The attack on the Bastille was the first urban insurrection of the Revolution and definitively yoked the Revolution to Paris and its unique problems. The dreaded prison was demolished and successor governments would strive to put their mark on the hallowed ground where the sinister building had stood. During the Revolution the space remained empty. Napoleon I tried to erect a fountain in the shape of an elephant, which collapsed before it could be cast in bronze. The July Monarchy ultimately built the July Column, which still stands and contains the remains of some who fell in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Soon after the Bastille fell the National Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris, where the deputies would be under constant surveillance by the radical populace. The most characteristic aspects of the Revolution—the political clubs, the deliberations of the various elected assemblies, the organization of the city into forty-eight sections that represented local democracy, the urban mobs who overthrew the monarchy on 10 August 1792 and would continue to pressure and intimidate the new government—and some of its most famous acts—the prison massacres, the king's trial and execution, the purge of the Convention Assembly, and the Terror—were Parisian deeds. During its first years Paris and the Parisians directed the Revolution, shaped revolutionary politics, and provided the militancy that drove the Revolution on.

There was no time to build during the Revolution. The revolutionaries improvised, taking over abandoned palaces and ecclesiastical buildings for assemblies, committees, and bureaus. The radical Jacobins met in a former Dominican cloister, and the National Assembly met for a time in the royal riding academy in the Tuileries gardens. The Revolution planned to improve the capital and strip it of its royalist identity, but got only as far as toppling some statues, renaming some places and streets, and making the Plan des Artistes, a carefully drawn, accurate, and influential map of the city with radical proposals for new streets and an attack on the medieval tangle of Paris. This plan, the first such to consider the city as a whole, the first to propose cutting straight streets through Paris, the first to imagine a modern rather than a medieval city, would influence all the subsequent governments until the Second Empire, when a new plan superseded the Plan des Artistes.

Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon I, r. 1804–1814/15), who seized power in a coup d'état (1799), had grand plans for his capital. Like everything else Napoleon did, his transformations of Paris fell far short of his sometimes fantastic dreams. He imagined a city of ten million (the approximate population of Paris and its suburbs in 2005). In fact the population of Paris was about the same under Napoleon, who took the first census, as it had been during the Revolution. (The population did not begin its steady upward climb until 1817.) On the same scale of grandeur, Napoleon envisioned a gigantic palace for his son, the king of Rome, which was never built. Nor were most of his grandiose schemes built. Curiously Napoleon had no overall plan for the city. The many urban projects he undertook seem to have been inspirations or improvisations of the moment. But if he built in fits and starts he built a great deal. There were monuments to his glory: the Arc de Triomphe (unfinished at his fall), the Vendôme Column, the elephant fountain where the Bastille had stood, and the arch of the Carrousel (Louvre-Tuileries courtyard). He built the Bourse du Commerce (the grain exchange), the Bourse (the stock market), and a temple of peace (which became the Madeleine Church), as well as the rue de Rivoli adjacent to the Tuileries, the first east-west straight street in Paris, with its stately, arcaded buildings (left unfinished). He enhanced the Louvre-Tuileries, which became the imperial court (he never liked Versailles), and elegantly decorated the Malmaison (his home with Josephine) and St. Cloud (his preferred residence in Paris, now destroyed). He built the Ourcq canal, which improved Paris's water supply, as well as the abattoirs, a wine market, and two bridges over the Seine: the ponts Austerlitz and Jena. He was also one of the great Paris vandals, razing a number of churches and ecclesiastical buildings. He did little or nothing to protect the city's small and precious legacy from the Middle Ages.

bourbon restoration and second empire

After Napoleon, the city fell on spare times. The Restoration of the Bourbons (1815–1830), constrained by an enormous war indemnity, added only one significant Paris building: the Expiatory Chapel to honor the guillotined king, Louis XVI. The sluggish economic revival of the July Monarchy (1830–1848) allowed some building but it was piecemeal. Again there was no comprehensive plan for urban renewal. The population reached a million around 1846, but the timid bourgeois government was parsimonious and narrow-minded: the idea and practice of deficit spending was not realized until the 1850s. However, the cholera epidemics, especially that of 1832, persuaded everyone that Paris had to be cleaned up. The July Monarchy cleared the slums around the Hôtel de Ville, but cut only one important street, the rue Rambuteau: it foreshadowed the future. It was the first broad street cut in the center of Paris, through the dense urban fabric (next to Les Halles, the great city markets), and it was lined with new, uniform buildings. The regime also put in place all the legislation needed to condemn property for urban renewal, along with elaborate building regulations, and it made Paris the hub of the French rail system, just then being built, thus ensuring Parisian predominance in France.

It was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon I, who as Emperor Napoleon III (r. 1852–1871) undertook the enormous task of transforming Paris. His authoritarian government, directed by a man worshipfully devoted to his uncle's every dream and ambition (both real and imagined) created the modern city in the spirit of the first Napoleon. The new emperor appointed Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891), a tough, egotistical, efficient, and arrogant career bureaucrat, as the Prefect of the Seine. Haussmann translated the emperor's vague desires into urban realities, and put tens of thousands to work reviving an economy recovering from the bad harvests and stock market catastrophes of the late 1840s.

Haussmannization

The transformation of Paris was the largest urban renewal project in history, and so it remains. The street was the principle element and instrument of urban transformation, and a new word was coined: haussmannization

roughly means urban renewal by demolition. All his projects, except those streets in unurbanized western Paris, involved massive demolition. He cut great thoroughfares through the city, like saber-thrusts in the novelist Émile Zola's graphic image, razing whole neighborhoods to do so. His most radical project was the Ile de la Cité, the original cradle of Paris. He destroyed virtually all the housing on the Ile—it had become a slum—and left standing only official buildings and the great cathedral of Notre-Dame. So it remains, a kind of urban ghost town at night.

After carefully making the first accurate topographical map of the city, Haussmann divided the work into three réseau or stages, depending on their priority. The first projects were concentrated in the center of the old city, where he began by cutting north-south and east-west axes through the urban fabric to make the so-called grande croisée.

All the work was financed by substantial grants from the national government and municipal income (mostly from the octroi or internal customs duty on everything entering Paris), but there was never enough money, and Haussmann adopted some unorthodox financial expedients—most importantly deficit spending, at that time a radically new idea. He also invented other expedients that were dubious and probably illegal. He forced city contractors, for example, to give the city an enormous security deposit, which he then used for other projects, and even issued bonds based on future revenues. The city's debt, amassed by Haussmann, was not retired until 1929.

The new city taking shape within the old—some of which, especially on the Left Bank, was left intact—was quickly becoming one of the wonders of the Western world. The regular, rectilinear boulevards, lined with chestnut trees and stately apartment buildings whose height, distance from the street, ornamentation, and balconies were regulated by law, had many partisans, and still do. As impressive as was Paris above ground, Paris underground was even more so. Haussmann built an enormous sewer system, its channels and chambers following the streets above. After a long polemical struggle with the advocates of drinking water from the polluted Seine, he also gave Paris a new water supply, carried to the city by more than one hundred miles of aqueduct. The emperor had become enamored of parks and residential squares from his exile in England. Haussmann dutifully built parks throughout the city. The two largest, the Bo is de Boulogne (on the western edge of Paris) and the Bois de Vincennes (on the east) were described by Haussmann as the "lungs of the city."

Model city

Although Haussmann has been much criticized for his banal taste, disregard for the poor, neglect of some public services (especially schools), and his contempt for the medieval parts of Paris, he was also a man of vision. In 1860 he incorporated the surrounding townships, the so-called banlieue into Paris, thus nearly doubling the size of the city and immensely increasing its population. It is precisely here that the greatest growth and expansion of Paris has taken place since his day. He also proposed the novel idea of moving the cemeteries out of the city and serving them with a new rail line. This suggestion was rejected.

Whatever judgments one makes about the man and his work, he completed the transformation of Paris from a medieval to a modern city. He proudly enumerates, in his Mémoires, the kilometers of sewer pipe laid, chestnut trees planted, and new streets cut. But Haussmann's Paris is more than stone, infrastructure, and population control—the boulevard Sébastopol effectively divided Paris into east and west, and in the eastern part of the city (around the St. Martin Canal) he constructed one of his few strategic projects to quarantine street fighting. (Since the French Revolution street barricades had become the hallmark of urban insurrection.) Paris was, at least until the early twentieth century, the very type of a modern city, much imitated, much admired, and much visited.

Grumbling about the perpetual work site that Paris had become, resentment of the prefect's highhanded and callous manner and demolitions, and public complaints about the cost of the projects, brought Haussmann's dubious financial arrangements under attack. He was dismissed in 1870. Paris lived on and haussmannisme has remained the dominant form of urban planning until the present day.

The template of new streets and the architecture of the Beaux-Arts school lining those streets fixed the itineraries and the look of Paris well into the twentieth century. A few unique structures—the Eiffel Tower, for the World 's Fair in 1889 (the centenary of the French Revolution) and the Sacre-Cœur church (1909), originally built as a political deal to placate both the Left and the Right in France—broke sharply with the recent past, but there would not be, could not be, another major transformation of Paris until there was land to build on. With the destruction of the last military wall around Paris, built in the 1840s, land finally became available (1919), but only on the outskirts of the city.

third republic

Haussmann's disgrace, followed some months later by the German victory at Sedan and the collapse of the Second Empire, brought all his projects to a halt. Despite the Prussian siege of Paris and the horrendous bloodletting of the Commune, and the passionate resentment of the empire, its works, and the humiliations it brought on France, a number of the projects of Haussmann's third réseau were soon resumed. The Paris Opéra of Charles Garnier (1825–1898), the single most expensive building of the Second Empire, was completed and opened in 1875. A number of Haussmann's boulevards were similarly completed. Indeed haussmannisme continued long after its creator's fall, even after his death. One of the last Haussmann boulevards to be finished, ironically enough, was the boulevard Haussmann, completed in 1926. Walk down almost any of the new boulevards and it is difficult to distinguish the apartment houses of the Second Empire from those built thirty or forty years later. Young architects clamoring to be heard deplored the staid Paris of their fathers, the sclerosis of the Beaux Arts aesthetic, but haussmannisme held the city in thrall for decades. His legacy lived on.

It is striking that Haussmann's Paris, frozen in the old patterns and styles, should serve as the stage for some of the most innovative, daring, imaginative, and liberating art movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The impressionist painters celebrated the new city, with its distinctive boulevards and parks: Gustav Caillebotte painted his own neighborhood, around the new Opéra; Claude Monet painted the parc Monceau and the trains in the new Gare St. Lazare; Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted the boulevard des Capucines; Camille Pissarro did serial paintings of the boulevard Montmartre; Édouard Manet painted the new Opéra and the Gare St. Lazare. The brilliant efflorescence of the belle epoque unfolded in Haussmann's city: Marcel Proust's novels would be unimaginable without the Bois de Boulogne and the boulevards. Art nouveau, with its fantastic sinuosity, easily attached itself to Paris. The first Métro line was opened in 1900, on the Right Bank, and a number of Métro stations were designed by Hector-Germain Guimard (as well as a synagogue with an undulating facade, which still stands in the Marais), the father of the movement. Cubism, a contemporaneous development, did not contribute to urbanism or Paris street furniture.

By the turn of the new century, marked by the Paris World's Fair of 1900, the city had a population of nearly two-and-a-half million; the Third Republic had weathered, albeit desperately, the plague of political scandals and the Dreyfus affair; and the divisions in society, deep and poisonous, were engraved on the map of the city. The east end continued to be working-class neighborhoods, and would, with the surrounding communes, soon become known as the Red Belt, a voting bloc regularly supporting the French Communist Party. The banlieue, incorporated by Haussmann but largely undeveloped at the time, became another home of the working class, the poor, and left-wing

politics. It was here that massive urbanization, industrialization, and population growth took place. The city had been deindustrialized by Haussmann, now this policy was reversed. This centrifugal movement away from the center of old Paris by the poor and the working classes had been encouraged by Haussmann, who razed so much poor and marginal housing in the core city. The movement continued, and Paris became a city with a prosperous center surrounded on three sides—the western suburbs are wealthy—by potentially antagonistic populations (the contrary of most American cities).

The flowering of cultural life from about 1880 to 1914 masked much of the urban misery and tensions. After World War I the belle epoque appeared even more attractive and was retrospectively mythologized. But life in Paris, except for the happy few, was difficult in the decades before the war. Class antagonisms, always present, now had representation in the Chamber of Deputies (Jean Jaurès, the great socialist leader and orator, was elected in 1885 and again in 1893). Tuberculosis had reached epidemic proportions, and the city identified a number of îlots insalubres, which were declared unfit for habitation and destined for destruction. A wave of strikes between 1904 and 1907, both nationally and in the reindustrialized capital, accentuated the economic and social crisis, and war was in the air as Europe stumbled from one international crisis to another. The city itself had built no significant housing for decades, and the expanding population put extraordinary burdens on Haussmann's city. Nor had public transportation caught up until Paris began constructing the Métro system (rather later than London).

By 1900 Paris lagged behind many of the great capitals of Europe. Bedazzled by the belle epoque, the city had avoided its problems. Only a generation after Haussmann's Paris had captured the world's imagination as the very ideal of a modern city, it was being surpassed. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand's witty remark about the life of the privileged in the last years of the ancien régime comes to mind: "Anyone who did not live before the Revolution cannot understand the art of living." In the belle epoque, as during the ancien régime, Paris was elegantly poised on the edge of catastrophe.