MENU: 5.6. FEAR & URBAN GRANDEUR
AN OFFICIAL'S WIFE "TREMBLED EXTREMELY, FOR SHE HAD JUST HEARD, ON AN ORGAN, A POLKA THAT WAS AN INSURGENT'S SIGNAL"
-- L' Éducation sentimentale ( "Sentimental Education") by Gustave Stendhal, 1869
June's unprecedented working-class insurrection terrorized the privileged. It explains the arrival of the exceptionally autocratic Second Empire (1851-1870), which forbade unions immediately and as soon as it could, transformed the city in a way that made crushing future insurrection easier.
The changes began in June 1853, when the Emperor replaced a timid administrator with the dynamic Baron Haussmann. He forced financing, planned arteries and determined compensation for properties to demolish.
From 1853 to 1869 Parisians put up with noise, dust and rubble and corruption. The transformed city is the one we know today.
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Mutations with military goals
- 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, to assemble troops and isolate them from the public.
- The much higher rents force many of the poor to move to outskirts, letting the government control the center.
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Historians emphasize modernization, which was inevitable in the rapidly growing yet still medieval town. They mention the military aspect as one factor among others, or not at all.*
*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 mentions it only in passing (p.56) and Hazan does not call it overriding.
The next pages show the priority
of repressing insurrection.
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