MENU: 4.2. Fear: promoter of urban grandeur
AN OFFICIAL'S WIFE "TREMBLED EXTREMELY, FOR SHE HAD JUST HEARD, ON AN ORGAN, A POLKA THAT WAS AN INSURGENT'S SIGNAL"
-- Sentimental Education by Gustave Stendhal, 1869
June's unprecedented working-class insurrection terrorizes the privileged. It explains the arrival of the exceptionally autocratic Second Empire (1851-1870), whose first act is to forbid unions and that transforms the city in a way that facilitates crushing another insurrection.
The changes get seriously underway in June 1853, after the Emperor replaces a timid administrator with the dynamic Baron Haussmann. He forces financing, plans great arteries and determines compensation for properties to demolish.
From 1853 to 1869 Parisians put up with noise, dust and rubble and corruption.
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Main transformations
- Giant arteries and and homogeneous, imposing buildings replace the narrow streets and small houses of tumultuous neighborhoods.
Background, Liberty Guides the People by Delacroix, 1831 / The Boulevard Montmartre in Spring by Pissaro, 1897
- Huge voids dot the center and east of the city, to assemble troops and isolate them from the public.
- The much higher rents force many of the poor to move to outskirts, which lets the government control the center
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Historians emphasize modernization, which was inevitable in a town that was still medieval. They mention the military aspect as one factor among others, or not at all.*
*Two studies that alude to it: Paris, Bivouac of Revolutions by Robert Tombs (1999) and The Invention of Paris by Éric Hazan (2001). But Tombs mentions it only in passing (p.56) and Hazan does not call it overriding.
The next pages show the priority
of repressing future insurrection.
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