Professor John Merriman:
Okay, today we're going to talk about Paris.
And in order to talk about Paris in the Belle
Époque--and the Belle Époque was not good for
most people in France, as we heard before,
but the image of that nostalgia infused a vision of Paris in the
Belle Époque is something that of course comes--really is
created, it's imagined,
after World War I. But in order to understand sort
of the cultural, and economic,
and political, and social dimensions of fin de
siècle of Paris, we have to back up and look at
the rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s and '60s by that man
dissed by my late friend, Richard Cobb,
as the Alsatian Attila, that is Baron Haussmann,
whose name I should've written on the board but didn't.
Some of you already know about him, but it's h-a-u-s-s-m-a-n-n,
Georges. And he only went back to Paris
three times after he left in financial scandal at the end of
the 1860s. And he lives until the early
1890s, but the great boulevards that became identified with
modern Paris and on which Emile Henry went on this little walk,
going out to kill, have to be seen in the context
of the rebuilding of Paris during that period.
And it was the largest urban renewal project in,
at that time, in the history of cities.
Really, the only ones comparable were the rebuilding
of Edo, that is Tokyo, after the Great Fire,
and London, at the time of Christopher Wren.
So, we back up even further to look at Paris in 1837,
just to give you a sense of what changed.
And the first thing you notice, particularly if you're
comparing it to London or to Berlin, is how small Paris was
and how small Paris still is. This is pre-1860,
so it's before the inner suburbs were annexed,
which included Montmartre out there, and Auteuil,
and all of the others. And those of you who've been to
Paris or know about Paris will see the Jardin de Luxembourg
there, which was very,
very close to the city limits at that time,
and then there is the Tuileries,
and then the edge of Paris there, the Arc de Triomphe,
which was begun by Napoleon and completed during the July
Monarchy. So Paris, a tremendously
overcrowded place--and the most densely populated parts of Paris
until mid-century were the Île of Cité,
that is the Island of Cite, c-i-t-e;
there's Notre Dame, and the Marais,
m-a-r-a-i-s, the sort of central Right Bank
districts; and their population density is
three times what it is today. And, so, the population of
Paris, which grows so rapidly, in 1851 is 1,053,000 people;
1861, a year after the annexation of the inner suburbs,
is 1,696,000; 1872 after the Commune
1,825,000, minus the 25,000 people slaughtered in the wake
of the Commune, during bloody week;
1881,2,269,00, and 1896 about two and a half
million people. And, so, European cities only
grow basically in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth
century through migration, because more people die in
cities than are born there--why? Because of unhealthy
quarters… The life expectancy in Lille,
for example, was about nineteen-years-old,
the same thing in Manchester. That includes infant mortality,
so that's a little bit skewed; but, still, cities are
unhealthy places. Old people, the miserably poor
people also go to Paris to try to find charity and ultimately
to die. Child abandonment,
infanticide and all the things that I mentioned
before--disease, the cholera disease rips
through Paris in 1832 and 1849, again in 1884.
So, basically cities, large cities replenish
themselves only through immigration, through much of the
nineteenth century. And, so, what happens is you've
got this sort of super, hyper overcrowding of the
central districts as immigrants from the north of France,
from Normandy, from the east of France,
also seasonal migrants from the Limousine who finally settle
Paris pour into these central districts and then gradually
head for the edge of the city. It's not until the 1880s that
you have the huge wave of Breton migration from Brittany;
and it's not just to Paris, also, but that comes later than
we're talking about. So, you've got your basic,
extraordinarily crowded city, the ranks of the poor,
above all, swollen by immigration.
The difference, one of the differences between
the nineteenth century and now, for example,
is in the nineteenth century most people, the people coming
into Paris were already poor, were poorer than the people who
were already there. Now, in the 1950s and 1960s
that changes, the 1950s and 1960s.
You have les jeunes couples, you have young
married couples, upwardly mobile,
who come to Paris with enough money that they've put together
to rent and then finally maybe to buy an apartment,
et cetera, et cetera. But you have a mass of poor
people, masses of poor people coming into Paris,
and Paris is unhealthy. This I put in,
this is rien à voir avec,
but this is--I've said before about how you just try to
imagine what things are like until you can see actually for
the first time--this is the first photo of Paris.
This is a daguerreotype; it was a primitive kind of
photo. You can identify this as the
Rue--as the Faubourg du Temple on the edge of Paris,
and this is 1837. But here is your classic sort
of image of urban poverty, urban squalor,
the kind of grey images of a street that no longer exists
because of Haussmann's rebuilding.
This is behind the Panthéon,
that is just sort of above the Latin Quarter,
and you see this ditch running right down the street.
It carried sewage. There were already sewers in
Paris, but it was terribly unhealthy--and you're thinking,
"oh, why?"--he says, "it's so crowded but where are
all the people, it looks like there's nobody
there." Well, in fact it's because it
took so long to expose photos that they're--as you look very
closely you can see some people. But another reason why there
are not a lot of people about or any signs of life is that this
has already been targeted for demolition,
and the people have had to move out of what was already a poor
neighborhood to find an even poorer one on the margins of
urban life. That was a photograph by
Charles Melville. And here we got the Louis
Napoleon, your basic picture of Louis Napoleon,
for once not at the opera trying to hit on the young
ballerinas, and the man in the middle is
Haussmann, who was not born in Alsace, but his family came from
Alsace and he'd been a law student in Paris,
and he was born in the more prosperous western part of
Paris. Again, that dichotomy between
prosperous west and more impoverished east is as
important as increasingly prosperous center,
over the long run of time, and the impoverished periphery,
more about that in a minute. So, in 1852 Napoleon spreads
out a map of a city he really didn't know very well,
Napoleon III does, and says, "I want you to build
me great boulevards." And, so, Haussmann,
who's prefect of the Seine, does that.
And it's a time when the wealthy got wealthier and the
poor did better, working class people did
better, but the gap between the rich
and the poor increased. So, now, if you're looking
later, in 1855 you see that the city had expanded but you still
have the wall around Paris and you still have these sort of
rural areas within the city. And one of the points of this
is that there's a continuing implosion of population into
Paris, and the eviction by high prices
and by demolition, with the rebuilding of Paris,
is going to push people out into the working class
periphery. Belleville, which I talked
about before, that's where Emile Henry says
"it's war between you and me now, baby";
La Villette; Montmartre here,
which was indeed still at this time fairly rural.
Oh well, you have to just all move your heads to see,
this is not a very interesting photo,
but--or it's not hardly a photo, but just to see the
difference between 1850 and 1900,
the growth of the suburbs. And so this all involved the
demolition of great hills. This was a hill at Trocadero,
which is right on the Seine, and it put tens of thousands of
workers--gave them something to do.
Now, the principle of this, of the planning itself,
and this impacts this course and the Paris of this course,
is really built upon classical principles associated with
absolute monarchs; and I call it the imperialism
of the straight line, in that if you think of a city
like St. Petersburg, built by Peter the
Great, or if you think of Madrid, built by Phillip II,
or you think of Berlin and Frederick the Great,
or you think of Versailles, a rather prosperous suburb,
they were power alleys down which you marched troops,
and very different than the kind of organic city that had
grown up from medieval origins, a city like Strasbourg or,
for that matter, Lyon, though Lyon has some
classical touches too in the Place Bellecour,
and all of that. But here, just to give you an
obvious and almost banal example, but I chose it because
you already know about the Avenue of the Opéra,
for reasons we talked about before, is that this is pure
imperialism with a straight line.
The problématique,
or the question, is how you get--you're going to
build this big boulevard, how do you get from the Seine,
basically--here's the Rue de Rivoli paralleling the Seine,
to where you're going to build this new, magnificent opera that
you saw before? Well, you don't have to be an
architectural genius, or Vincent Scully or someone
like that, you simply take a ruler and
then you tip off your friends about where the building's going
to go, so they make a lot of money,
and that's what Haussmann did, and then you plan the Avenue de
l'Opéra. And there are three reasons,
three, why Paris is rebuilt. First, to bring more light and
air to Paris, to make it a healthier
place--more sewers and all that; second, to free the flow of
capital, for capital, to help business.
It's not a coincidence that the big department stores that grow
up in the '50s and '60s are on the grands boulevards,
are on the big boulevards; and third, and I've alluded to
this before, how do you build a barricade across a huge
boulevard, how do you build a barricade
across the Avenue de l'Opéra?
The first barricades in Paris were in the late sixteenth
century. You know about the barricades,
at least some of you do anyway, of the French Revolution.
There are more barricades in 1830, there are more barricades
in 1851. You've seen photos of
barricades from 1871. And Haussmann says this in his
memoirs, "we want to create barricade-proof boulevards."
In World War II, in August of 1944,
the barricades that are built against the German troops are
built in neighborhoods often where you have narrow streets.
And in 1968 it's the same thing. It was very hard to build a
barricade across the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
So, that's the first thing. And then you imagine you're
looking down--you're looking at Garnier's Opera,
which is going to rise out of the ground, the most expensive
building built in Paris to that point,
and then these houses, which were actually fairly
middle class buildings, have to be demolished.
So, you are in--you were sitting in a bulldozer looking
through the smoke, and then there is Garnier's
Opera being built, and there is Garnier's Opera,
right here. And, of course,
that square now contains probably the largest population
of pickpockets this side of the Spanish steps as American
tourists get off the metro there looking for American Express
with their wallets about to be soon to disappear.
But, and here you can look down and see--this is reversed but it
doesn't make the slightest bit of difference--you can see
that's the Place Vendôme, the column of which was brought
down in 1871 at Courbet's suggestion.
And, so, you end up with this, which you've already seen
before, the Avenue de l'Opéra,
and it was down here, the first bomb that Emile Henry
placed was down here at number eleven.
And, so, this is again a photo from 1900.
So, this is basically--there are a few automobiles racing
around; they're not racing,
the speed limit was three miles an hour;
but now, of course, you're a dead duck if you try
to cross there. There was somebody,
some general who was arrested, some scandal and he just had
testified, and then he wasn't thinking,
and he walked out into the street and was run over by a
bus. So, you really kind of have to
watch it there. But here's your pure sort of
Haussmann vista of Paris. And, of course,
the balconies, the sort of ornate balconies of
the Third Republic are something that one identifies with the
grandeur of modern Paris, the Paris of the Belle
Époque. Now, what about the people who
were chased from the central districts?
This is not a very interesting print, but it's still--it was
sympathetic to those people. Most people didn't own
apartments, they rented, and if you were kicked out of
your apartment in order to facilitate the building of these
boulevards, you were given the equivalent
of about a day's wages and that was it.
And here you have--this is part two, these are two lithographs,
and the first is called Haussmannization of--that
is the bulldozing of, the Haussmannization of
Paris, part one, where you see these people and
they've got everything that they have--they got their dog and
it's a sympathetic look at them; and this is part two,
and this is a pure Haussmann vista.
This is very near the Opéra,
this is the Church of Saint-Augustine,
which I think is just god-awful,
but here again you have again the imperialism of the straight
line. And this is the big commercial
district, this is where the big department stores are near
there, like the Gallery Lafayette,
and at this time the Grand Magasin d'Louvre,
and all these sorts of things. So that's what--that's the
principle of Haussmann. Well, you can hardly see that. So, if you were a bird flying
around up here then, or if you're in a balloon and
you're seeing the results of Haussmann, here again you've got
Notre Dame, which goes from the most
populated part of Paris, along with the Marais,
to the least populated part of Paris.
Why? And we talk a lot about the
State, but these state buildings or state constructions,
including the big hospital, Hotel Dieu, or the Prefecture
of Police are built on Cité,
and so the population departs. This over here is the Church of
Saint-Sulpice, which had one of the great
organs, and here this is the famous
market of Les Halles which was built at this time next to the
Church of Saint-Eustache, and it lasted until 1972,
and they wouldn't--and they tore them all down and built
this sort of miserable failure, three floors of crummy
electronics stores, and they didn't even leave one
so people--I sound like Scully but it's true,
they didn't leave just one so people could see what it was
like, what was the market. And I was lucky because the
first time I ever was in Paris, when I was a kid,
somebody took me down there in the middle of the night and you
could see the butchers drinking with very sort of
friqué, very prosperous clients eating
at a big table next to there. And it was fantastic,
it was the guts of Paris, it was the heart of Paris,
and they just destroyed it. And they had to move the market
out by Orly Airport because Paris is so big,
with eleven million people in the region now.
But it didn't make any sense to destroy them all,
it was such vandalism, just incredible,
and it came at the time of Pompidou, who said that "we must
renounce this outmoded aesthetic";
that is, anything that was beautiful and interesting,
and he was a patron of art, of modern art in all its worst
forms. But, anyway,
rien à voir avec.
But okay, here's the continuation of the Rue de
Rivoli which had been begun by Napoleon and it gives you major
access, that is west/east,
and as we'll see in a minute he also creates a north/south
access because--or axis, what am I saying?;
well, access, the same thing. So, that just gives you kind of
a view from the top. And here are these les
halles, this is the old market that was there.
And I was lucky because it was gone about two years later or
something like that. And I met a person who was kind
enough to lodge me, and to take me down to see
that. And it's just gone.
Now they have yet another plan to do something,
and it's just become this--oh well, ugh.
Okay, so again bringing- freeing the flow of capital,
of commerce, et cetera,
et cetera was a worthy goal indeed, and one of the things
that Napoleon III did was to celebrate France with these
expositions. And of course the idea of
having a big exposition is that of the Victorians,
the big one in 1851 at the Crystal Palace.
The first public toilets, by the way, as such things
were, in 1851 in London. And, so, Louis Napoleon has
other expositions. This one is 1854.
And, so, the principle of this is you walk down one of these
exposition halls and you look and you see paintings on the
right, you see the wonders of science
on the left, et cetera, et cetera;
and millions of people go. And that's the same principle
as the department store, isn't it, except that you can
buy what you see. And the department stores,
what they do is they destroy local commerce,
unless-- like boot makers and very skilled craftsmen are on
the boulevards near the department stores,
or provide essential services in working class districts.
So, the Grand Magasin du Louvre is here, you've all the space,
it becomes as Zola said the "cathedral of modernity," along
with the others. Now, there are the equivalent
of department stores in Paris in some of the arcades already in
the 18--not arcades in our sense,
but the arcades in the Parisian sense--in the 1820s,
and there are even sort of proto department stores exist
before that. But it's the '50s and '60s that
brings to London, and to Vienna,
and to Berlin, and to Paris the department
store, where you could buy forty different kinds of shawls,
cheap shawls to very fancy shawls.
So, it's going to attract not only ordinary people looking
occasionally for bargains. And, as I said before,
it's a form of--it creates jobs for working class and peasant
women who becomes sales clerks living in terrible conditions in
kind of dormitories and almost prison-like rules;
but it also brings the friqué,
the wealthy people will come in their carriages and have their
drivers await them when they go in and listen to people sing
Christmas carols on the stairs. And when electricity becomes
common in the 1880s and 1890s you have these dazzling displays
that change in the--along the streets,
and so they become really a site of tourism themselves.
And, so, here your basic idea is to create--the problem is how
do you get from--this is north, this is south,
and this is east, this is west--that there was no
way of getting anywhere. The two biggest streets in
Paris in terms of the most important ones were the Rue
Saint-Denis and the Rue Saint-Martin--please don't
remember these names. And, so, what they do is they
create the Boulevard Saint-Michel,
which is a disaster, here, and then--because
McDonald's and all this stuff, just awful, just terrible
zoning; and then here,
what became the Boulevard Sebastopol, the Boulevard
Saint-Denis that goes out to the railroad stations.
And, of course, Haussmann is often castigated
for having built the railroad stations next to each other,
without having anticipated the automobile, but how could he
have known about the automobile in the 1850s and '60s?
So, they complete the sort of star, the Étoile here,
which is the place, place of the Arc de
Triomphe, and creates--he finishes the Rue de Rivoli here,
and of course it's along that axis, as you saw,
that the troops come in May of 1851,
decimating those who resisted in these neighborhoods.
So, those are basically the plans that he wanted to do.
So, here we go. This is the Rue de Rivoli,
this is down its sort of completion, this is heading
east, and the troops move down this
way, and that, it just parallels the Seine.
This is the tower, the remaining part of the
tour of Saint-Jacques that is there.
And, then, now this is looking north and you're crossing
Cité now. This is where the police were,
at the Châtelet in the eighteenth century.
But the point is that you see in the distance the Station of
the East, the Gare de l'est. And so he's very successful.
In many ways he's not an interesting man,
Haussmann. I was asked to write a
biography of him once and I didn't do it,
I gave it to someone else. And of course Paris is the big
story. He was a fonctionnaire,
he was a technocrat, but he was very good at what he
did, from repress people to building boulevards.
And, so, this is a success there, it frees up the flow of
circulation, but it chases people like this--this is a pawn
shop that still exists, it's a municipal pawnshop,
it's exactly the same space where it was at this time.
And anyone who looked at this would know what the image is,
because these people are so poor they are about to sell back
their mattress. Remember what I said in
L'Assommoir that Gervaise dies like a dog on a bed of
straw, more or less. The last dignity that you had
was to still have a mattress, and when things got so bad that
was what went, the mattress.
And so these folks are tearing out--carrying mattresses to try
to get what they can from them. And then you've got the very
poor down-and-out being expelled to the periphery even more.
This is a place where people could get a little bit of food
from charitable organizations. This is in Montmartre.
And I just put this in, it's around the corner actually
from our apartment, but this is a classic kind of
Haussmann building, and architects had started to
sign their work on the première
étage, on the second floor.
So, this architect was called David and it has the date there.
And these balconies are more ornate, really,
than the ones that they did in general, at the time of
Haussmann. These are more sort of Third
Republic ones. But these are some very
handsome buildings that lined--this is that line of
boulevard that lines the Rue du Temple.
Now, and here we've got--this is cracked, I'm sorry--but this
is the Station of the East. And when I see the station it
always gives me a twinge of sadness because in 1914 all the
people charging up to the station,
screaming, "à Berlin, à
Berlin," "to Berlin, to Berlin,"
and this is one of the, along with the Station of the
North, led the troops to the fronts,
from which many of them--most--well,
many of them, a million and a half never
returned. And also so many,
from these stations, so many Jews were rounded up by
the Germans, but above all by the French
police, in 1942 and 1943 were sent on their way to Drancy,
to the transit camp north of Paris, and then on to the death
camps. And again one of the themes is
that all of this makes this west/east division even more
salient, and makes the center periphery
contrast or juxtaposition even more important.
Louis-Napoleon has spent a lot of time in London.
He loved parks and so he has them work on the Bois de
Boulogne, to the west of Paris, fancy, feeding the--or
receiving people from the fancier quarters.
And these kinds of cafés-concert
along the Champs Élysées are part
again of this east/west dichotomy. And, then, that's not to say
that there weren't parks in the east.
This is the Butte de Chaumont, which is to the east,
and there's--apparently a lot of real high stakes boule
games are still played here. So, there were places.
Paris has very little green space compared to London and
Berlin. Berlin, twenty-five percent of
Berlin is green space and London's about the same thing;
Paris it's five percent. And, then, there's the Bois de
Vincennes which is out to the east as well.
But here is again--this is your image of the Belle
Époque. Here you've got carriages
carrying fancy people along, you have the kiosks selling
newspapers, you have trees,
you have these boulevards that had been created by Haussmann.
Now, to be sure now there were boulevards in European cities
before Haussmann. They tended to be on the
outskirts of cities, and they were built where there
had been walls, military fortifications,
in a way replaced ramparts that had been torn down.
The best example, and many of you may know this,
is Vienna with the Ringstrasse, which was really a creation of
the liberal period in Viennese history, in the 1850s,
and '60s, and '70s, and which was on where there
had been fortified walls. And in the case of Paris the
best example is Montparnasse. Boulevard Montparnasse is on
where there had been military fortifications but,
as Paris expanded, the fortifications had to keep
being pushed out. So, this is the Boulevard
Montmartre here in 1900, and then the next one is the
slide that--it will be a color picture--and this is Pissarro's
view of that same boulevard. And my great friend Bob
Herbert, the fantastic social historian of art,
actually found the place where Pissarro was looking out the
window to do this. Here again, it's an obvious
theme, but the light and the movement and the first painting,
what strikes you at the first glance, Paris was really,
the Paris of the boulevards were really made for the
Impressionist paintings. And the only working-class
impressionist painter was Renoir, and it was Renoir whom I
quoted the other day. He started out as a porcelain
painter in Limoges, painting porcelain,
and it was he that said that these boulevards reminded him of
the soldiers lined up for review.
Again, that's not a bad description of the imperialism
of the straight line. But it was these boulevards,
and its commerce, and its wealthy people that the
anarchists so much hated. And again here,
this is a place, and this is--I threw this in
for people that know something about Impressionist
paintings--this became an Impressionist painting,
and I didn't get the slide, kind of an important street or
intersection because the Impressionist collector and
painter Caillebotte did his Paris,
the Effect of the Rain, where he has bourgeois
couples crossing the street, near each other,
but having nothing in common with each other,
part of the anomie of the city; and it was a statement about
the sort of self-importance of the middle class.
And some of Caillebotte's other paintings involve views from
balconies in which the person is--the viewer or the main
subject of the painting is isolated from ordinary people
who might walk around below. And you can over-emphasize his
themes too much but it's still worth keeping in mind.
But here you have your basic Impressionist landscape,
and it was very much a creation of the rebuilding of Paris in
the 1850s and '60s, urban landscape.
So, again, this is a great example of the way in which not
all boulevards were created by the Alsatian Attila in Paris.
Some, as I suggested a few minutes ago, followed the routes
of the walls, and here's the best example one
could pick. This was, at the time of the
French Revolution, the city limits.
The two gates like this were called the Porte Saint-Denis and
the Porte Saint-Martin. And it was when Louis XVI and
Marie Antoinette tried to escape, and probably disguised
as retainers for some wealthy baroness,
they were able to get through this particular gate because the
guards were bourrés,
they were all drunk from having been at a wedding.
And then the tax collected on what you brought into the city
passed right through this gate. You had to pay a tax on what
you brought into the city, more about that in a minute.
But you can see that these boulevards become extensions of
these walls that had once been there.
And in the case of the Porte Saint-Martin and the Porte
Saint-Denis, they are still there.
And of course the Porte Saint-Denis is going north to
the cathedral town of Saint-Denis,
or village of Saint-Denis, or small town,
which became an important center of working class
production, and subsequently of anarchism,
socialism, and ultimately communism, more about that in a
minute. Now, you still have traditional
work done in Paris, as I suggested when we were
talking about the garment industry,
and you still had cases where the father is literally the
foreman, and his family is working for him,
through sub-contracting, people working at what was a
rather large--no, this is an atelier,
this is not their home--well, you got pots and things hanging
around, a big roof. But, anyway,
it's in the eastern part of Paris, and in the northeastern,
and in the suburbs that you've got the conversion of old
buildings into industrial production,
and you have new industries perched on the edge of the city.
And this is the rue, the faubourg of
Saint-Antoine which at the time of the French Revolution was
beyond the Bastille, and it was lots of these people
who were cabinet workers who stormed the Bastille in 1789;
but again the contrast between center and periphery.
This is a somewhat sympathetic but also a little bit
condescending look at popular sociability in these cabarets
that I talked about the other day,
on the edge of--the perception, middle class perception of the
drunken commoner perched on the edge of urban life,
on the margins of urban life, drinking it up.
And these are really great. I put these next two in simply
to show you the difference between--or give you images of
the difference between what happens to the western districts
of Paris, on the edge,
and those of the east. Now, this is the east,
on the very edge, and these are sort of rural
looking houses, with slanted roofs like that.
This is the laundry of combat, so this is a real kind of
socialist image from the turn of the century.
This has got to be right before World War I.
How do we know that? Because this is something of
the métro, and the first metro opened
along the Seine, paralleling the Seine,
on July 14th, 1900, for the exhibition;
it's now the line that goes to Île-de-France all the way
out to Vincennes, to the east.
And then the lines were subsequently extended out.
So, this is probably about 1912,1913.
But this is still kind of a--these are industrial suburbs
that have been created by both the industrial conglomeration of
Paris, the availability of land and of
capital on the outside of Paris, and of a workforce,
of a very transient but still massive workforce there.
And then if we go off in the other direction,
on the edge-- and this would be what the equivalent now of the
seventeenth arrondissement--I reversed this but it doesn't
make the slightest bit of difference--you see that this
building is sort of a solidly artisanal,
lower-middle-class building that reflects the fact that in
many ways the western half of Paris,
including even the western periphery, was very different.
I say that with some--once you get the image that all the
suburbs in the west were like Versailles, Argenteuil for
example. Five people broke into the
Musée d'Orsay over the weekend, and for some--whatever
reason, they're all drunked up,
poked a big hole in Monet's great The Bridge at
Argenteuil painting, which is really kind of amazing
damage. But Argenteuil was a place
where you had leisure, you had sailboats,
you had people of means. You no longer had vineyards at
all but you also had industry. And Monet, the painter Claude
Monet, his depictions of Argenteuil, you have the smoke
stacks become just part of the scene and it's a very neutral
kind of look at smoke stacks, not clearly differentiated even
from these sailboats, sort of in the regattas and all
of that. But Monet, as my friend Bob
Herbert, who pointed this out, Monet when he lives at
Argenteuil, he gets tired of that,
he gets tired of kind of the contradictions of capitalism and
industrialization and he longs for this non-urban
paysage, this non-urban scenes to paint.
And what does he do? As you all know he moves to
Giverny; Giverny along the Seine,
and a railroad track runs right through his backyard and he
never paints it, not once.
What he does is he creates this kind of idyllic rural scene of
lily pads and ponds. And it's a wonderful experience
to go there, if you're not trampled by the 40,000 tourists.
You can imagine this is someplace where someone lived,
and ran up and down the stairs, and had fun,
and then went out and got away from the sort of industry of
Argenteuil. But, anyway,
he was moving on to a different stage.
And, so, what you get on the edge of Paris,
the west, is this. This is the Avenue of the
Grande Armée. So this is beyond the Arc de
Triomphe. And now this is going out to
Neuilly which is a very--right on the edge of the Bois de
Boulogne, which became a very,
very prosperous suburb, and certainly still is,
that's for sure. And what you had on the other
side of the east was very different, in the north and
northeast was extremely different, it wasn't like that
at all. And, so, what happens when
you--the images that I showed you before of those big arcs of
triumph that--in which you--in which I said the king had
escaped through, trying to get out of France
during the French Revolution. And I said that you paid on
what you brought in. And just in conclusion,
for the last seven minutes, I'm going to talk a little bit
about a theme that's rather interesting,
and that's why European suburbs are so different than American
suburbs--more about that in a minute.
But the walls around Paris, when they lost their military
purposes, still had a fiscal purpose which was to provide a
means of collecting taxes on what you brought into town.
And this wall, or this taxing apparatus,
is called in French the octroi,
o-c-t-r-o-i. And I love these little
buildings. You can see some near Nation,
Place de la Nation, and other--in Thar-cor,
in the Loire, there's a fantastic one,
you see them all over the place, and they're just
beautiful. Sometimes people live in them.
But this lasts, this isn't something that
disappeared in 1850 or 1900, it lasts till World War II.
And thus that's the big way that municipalities were able to
raise any money at all, since basically wealthy people
didn't pay taxes, and that's why--it's a very
regressive tax, it's like a huge sales tax,
and France is nothing if it's not full of regressive taxes,
since the value-added tax is twenty-one percent,
and on electronics and stuff like that it's thirty-three
percent. So, you're taxed on what you
buy, and since poor people have less money to buy things it
really is totally unfair. But the origins of this system
is in the octroi, and this is one of those
actually fairly rare photos that I know of,
of what it was like in your sort of diligence,
your coach here. This was called an
imperial because people rode on the top,
and you're leaving Paris, or you're entering Paris,
it doesn't matter at all, but the point is that you were
controlled, day or night,
when you went through. And on the edge of Paris are
created these working-class industrial suburbs that are
feared by the center, and during the 1920s and 1930s
become major sources of support for the Communist Party,
because people, most of the people who lived
there were extremely badly lodged,
and the Communists do very well because of the mal-lotis,
that is people who are badly lodged,
and they provide services to poor working families that in
other municipalities simply one did not have.
And if you go to something like the Fête de
l'Humanité, which is the big Communist
party, every year, a big boom,
a big--which means a big party, full of speeches and all of
that, you could kind of go from one
booth and have your oysters in the Finistère booth,
and then go have paella in the Catalan booth,
and then have goat's cheese in the Ardèche booth,
et cetera, et cetera, and Beaujolais in the
Rhône booth, et cetera, et cetera.
But the association between working-class people on the edge
of--on the margins of the big city and radical politics is
terribly important in the '20s and '30s,
and even much later than that. And this is a town called
Corbevoie, which is north of Paris, and they all have streets
called something like the Rue Maurice Thorez,
who was a miner who was a leader of the Communist Party,
following the dictates of Moscow,
alas, in the 1930s. Many of them still have an
Avenue Jean Jaurès, for obvious reasons.
But it's this growth of all of these industrial suburbs that is
one of the important sort of concomitants of large-scale
industrialization, and the identification of the
urban periphery with industrial work.
Many of the so-called dirty industries, chemical production,
soap production, things that smell,
are forced out of the center and onto the periphery.
And so that's where the factories are,
that's where the cheapest labor is to be found--more about this
in just a second, I'll just finish this off with
a Monet of Argenteuil; again, this one does-it's not
the Pont d'Argenteuil, if I'd had time I would have
gone to get that one, the painting was just ripped by
vandals over the weekend. But, again, the extension of
the sort of prosperity to the west is obviously the Normand
coast because the turbo trains are already going to the Normand
coast, Deauville is not far away,
Etretat and these kinds of places are there.
And so that's an extension of this west/east dichotomy,
that people from eastern Paris or from the northern suburbs are
not going to Deauville, for the weekend,
they're not the kind of people who are going to be painted by
Berthe Morisot. But, so, these spacial
concomitants or aspects even continue to the planting of the
Parisian flag on the Normand coast;
and again, that's a subject for another excellent book by my
friend Bob Herbert. Now, I want to finish off,
I want to get some more light so I can see you all.
How to do this, how to do this in five minutes?
I'll do this in the following way.
In 1991--was it 1991? Or 1992, at the time of the
Rodney King riots, was that 1992?
Rodney King was an Afro-American in L.A.
and the police basically just beat the hell out of him,
and they're acquitted, and it led to some very
difficult times in Los Angeles, with lots of riots and lots of
anger. And we were doing,
a bunch of us, an edited book on the Red
suburbs, on precisely this and working class suburbs and their
sort of identification with radical politics.
And people in France kept asking me, they couldn't
understand the concept of wealthy suburbs and impoverished
people, minorities living in the center
of cities. And finally they stopped--even
press, well I could write something--not because of me,
but I just wrote something, an epilogue,
trying to explain why it is that in Europe things are
different. Now, and it's not entirely so.
After all, Versailles was a suburb.
In the early 1830s one of the ministers of Louis-Philippe went
to him and said, "Sir, these factories that
you're allowing the prefect of police to tolerate on the edge
of the city, will be the cord that wrings
our neck one day." Fear of the periphery,
not fear of the center. In 1831 and 1834,
Lyon, the suburb of the Croix-Rousse,
the silk workers, poured down the hill,
defending their rights, with signs that said "Live Free
and Die Fighting," and the middle-class National Guard set
up their guns to--right at the edge of the city,
to keep the suburban people from invading the center.
That's very, very different,
isn't it? Limoges the same thing,
they put up barricades, the workers in the suburbs,
that differentiated their space with the center.
It is amazing, amazing kinds of continuity,
these sort of mutual fears. In Detroit, in 1968,
when I was a kid, or was it 1967,
I went to a Tiger game and we came out of the Tiger game,
double-header with the Yankees, and the city was on fire,
and it was the riots of Detroit.
And much of Detroit is still decimated, has never recovered
from that, never, despite the Renaissance Center,
and the occasional success of the Tigers, and all good things
like that. And one of the suburbs of
Detroit tried at one point to change the street patterns so
that they, that is the poor people from
the center, could not come out to Grosse Pointe,
or Farmington Hills, or one of those elegant places.
And I remember that very, very vividly.
Now, why did that all happen, why?
And we talk--and two years ago we had these big riots in France
in the suburbs, and it began in
Clichy-sous-Bois, and all over the place;
some were exaggerated and all of that, and Sarkozy spun it out
of control by calling them scum, the people that live on the
periphery, they're scum, "racaille,
ils existent, la racaille," and all this
stuff. It was just pas possible.
How did this happen? What happened is that the
people unwanted by the center were--and Haussmann was part of
this--rejected toward the outside where,
with the dilapidation of American center cities--a good
part of Philadelphia, most of Detroit,
New Orleans, San Francisco and Beacon Hill,
and we can find exceptions to that--but the pattern is just
completely different. You had the Viennese Army
firing large shells at the working class suburbs,
at the working-class housing on the outside of the city.
It's just the opposite. When you think of suburbs you
don't just think of Darien or you don't just think of Grosse
Pointe, or Hillsborough,
California, or very fancy places in other places.
But it's very different, and the pattern is just the
opposite, just an incredible difference.
One can exaggerate this too much, but these spatial tensions
count for something, and the margins of urban life
in France, and particularly around Paris were really--the
periphery became the domain of people who really couldn't
afford to live in the center. And that's an increasing
problem in Paris today is one neighborhood after another
becomes more and more expensive. Now it's the^( )eleventh and
twelfth are out of control, the^( )thirteenth is out of
control. And three million people may
live in Paris, but you've got another eight
thousand people living in this urban agglomeration,
and creating these attempted cities that are going to be
magnets of their own; it's been an utter,
utter failure. But Haussmann was really part
of that. And people building factories
seek a labor force, they seek more space,
they want to have their factories outside of the customs
barrier, so they're not paying taxes on
what they bring in to use in their factory.
So, that's just a very short explanation for why European
cities, and European suburbs in particular,
the whole sense of a suburb--despite the kind of
pavillon of Saint-Remy-les-Chevreuse and
places like that in the sort of wealthier parts of the Parisian
periphery, there's still a contrast there.
And even the image when you say, in French you say,
you come from the quatre-vingt-treize,
you come from ninety-three, that means Seine-Saint-Denis,
and that--for them that's the image of the ninety-three
license plate is that of the periphery,
of people who are thought to be marginal by the center.
But, as I've argued in other places, including some of my own
writing, the sense of not belonging to the center creates
a type of solidarity that helped the communists in the 1920s and
'30s, and hopefully helped people,
as the government has undercut the attempts of suburban people
to create voluntary associations that will offer hope to all
these people. Wait till you watch La
Haine, the film, later on, it's incredible.
Well, some of this starts with Haussmann.
We went a long way today, from the Alsatian Attila all
the way to Clichy-sous-Bois, two years ago.
But I hope that the larger points were clear.
And from that we move on to imperialism on Monday,
have a fantastic weekend. See ya.
