5.6. FEAR, UNLIKELY PROMOTER OF URBAN GRANDEUR

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 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.

Zoom

• From 1853 to 1869 Parisians put up with noise, dust and rubble and corruption. 

          

The Baron Haussmann and Émile Zola's novel The Kill (1871) ("la curée" is the remains of a hunted animal given to the dogs): "Aristide Rougon swept down on Paris, on the day after December 2 with the flair of birds of prey that smell battlefields from afar."

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Historians emphasize modernization, which in the still medieval town was inevitable. They mention the military aspect as one factor among others, or not at all.*

*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.

• Remaking the city

• Gifts of the repression

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Next,

5.6.1.

Remaking the city