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.
From 1853 to 1869 Parisians put up with noise, dust and rubble.
Emperor Napoleon III gives the Baron Haussmann power over the outskirts of Paris (in 1859), Musée Carnavalet. The painting could as easily concern his appointment as ruthless overseer of the changes.
Coup d'état, December 1851; changes get seriously underway in June 1853, when the Emperor replaces a timid administrator with the Baron Haussmann and forces financing.
The metamorphosis begins 18 months after the coup d'état (of December 2 1851), the time to find a replacement (Haussmann) for a timid administrator, force financing, plan the new arteries and determine compensation for properties to destroy.
Principal transformations
- Giant arteries and and homogeneous, imposing buildings replace tumultuous neighborhoods' narrow streets and small houses.
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.
- Speculation and corruption bring new magnates: "Aristide Rougon swept down on Paris, on the day after December 2 with the flair of birds of prey that smell battlefields from afar."
The Kill, 1871 (A "curée" is the portion of game fed to hunting dogs)
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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.
Observing how the mutation
shows that the priority
was repressing future insurrection.
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