IV.2. FEAR, UNLIKELY PROMOTER OF URBAN GRANDEUR

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 upheaval terrorizes the privileged and explains the rapidity, extent and design of a unique transformation.

(From 1853 to 1869 Parisians put up with noise, dust and rubble.)

• Giant arteries and and homogeneous, imposing buildings replace tumultuous neighborhoods' narrow streets and small houses.

Background, Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, 1831; The Boulevard Montmartre in Spring by Camille Pissaro, 1897

• Huge places dot the center and east of the city, to assemble troops and isolate them from the public.

• Speculation and corruption bring new magnates: "Aristide Rougon swept down on Paris, on the day after December 2 [the day of Napoleon III's coup d'état] 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)

The much higher rents force many of the poor to move to outskirts, which lets the government control the center.

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Metamorphosis began as soon as the Emperor could replace a timid official with a ruthless appointee.*

* Coup d'état, December 2, 1851; the changes begin, May 1853. 

The City Museum relegates the insurrection to a table at the back of the floor and grants that official, the Baron Haussmann, a room to himself:

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Historians emphasize the inevitable modernization, and downplay or omit the military priority.*

*Two studies that do alude to it: Paris, Bivouac of Revolutions by Robert Tombs (1999) and The Invention of Paris by Éric Hazan (2001). But Tombs alludes to it only in passing (p.56) and Hazan does not call it overriding. 

Observing the mutation reveals it. 

In brief

• The metamorphosis seen up close

• Gifts of the repression

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Next,

The metamorphosis seen up close