Kosman on Da Costa Meyer (2022)

Esther da Costa Meyer’s rich and compelling book looks closely at the project of urban renewal that permanently altered the face of Paris during the Second Empire, a project spearheaded by Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Central to Meyer’s approach is the claim that it is impossible to grasp the political and cultural significance of these changes without considering the varying impacts they had on different inhabitants. One must, she declares, focus on what Henri Lefebvre called “l’espace vécu” and consider how Paris was created and experienced by its inhabitants before, during, and after this period of transformation. To live in Second Empire Paris was to live through Haussmannization, but how Parisians experienced it and how much hardship it brought them depended, Meyer shows, on gender, occupation, location, and, perhaps most importantly, class. This effect is neatly distilled in the book’s title: Haussmannization divided Paris (within itself and from its peripheries) even as it sought to facilitate certain forms of connection and circulation, intra muros and between Paris and the provinces.

Meyer cites a “huge map in Haussmann’s office” and argues that it “helped to sustain the illusion that the city could be understood as a whole, offering a detached bird’s-eye-view impossible in reality and in stark contrast to the pedestrians’ more revelatory worm’s-eye perspective” (32). Meyer favors this “worm’s-eye perspective,” and although she includes important maps and diagrams she is careful to remind us that they are themselves particular constructions of reality (32). The book’s impressive command of sources, from drawings and historical records to first-hand accounts and literary passages, allows Meyer to illustrate effectively the experience of Parisians living through Haussmannization.

In structuring her account, Meyer wisely eschews a purely chronological order, opting instead for thematic chapters that illustrate in detail the process of change as it played out in different arenas. Chapter one describes the key figures of the era, placing particular emphasis on Napoleon III and Haussmann. But the book largely avoids a biographical approach, and part of this chapter’s work is to suggest why. The refashioning of Paris is often referred to as “Haussmannization” but Hausmann is, in Meyer’s words, an “easy target” (3); one might say the same of Napoleon III. They are arguably in large part responsible for this undertaking, but Meyer shows that it would be a mistake to give them all the credit or all the blame for what took place. Furthermore, some of the kinds of change that took place under their command can be dated back to before the Second Empire. Haussmannization did not emerge ex nihilo. But it was under Napoleon III’s auspices that the city was truly transformed into the “ville-spectacle” (39), the city-qua-product that Meyer analyzes in the subsequent chapters. Meyer introduces at the outset the concept of the city as a manufactured product, an “industrialized good” (2), one that could be consumed by a growing public. This framing is another reason it is vital to take into account the consumers, Paris’s inhabitants, with their diverse economic backgrounds and, increasingly, varied geographic origins.

Chapter two explores what was lost. Important buildings were razed, and those in charge of the projects seemed torn between a desire to destroy and a desire to preserve. The impact was as much symbolic as physical or spatial, as any reader of Victor Hugo will understand; what is perhaps most compelling here is Meyer’s demonstration of how the destruction and reconstruction of Paris altered its inhabitants’ relationship with the past. This destruction targeted particular regions of the city, as well as specific buildings and monuments, each with its own significance and link to a moment in French history. By delving into the meaning held by these places and monuments Meyer shows how effacing space effectively erased time as well. This was an opportunity for France to control how its political past was remembered (or forgotten), as in the destruction of the Rue Transnonain. Meyer is also careful to highlight the topographical features of Paris that were altered or erased, and to point out what these changes did to the perspectives and vistas that Parisians had access to. One result of all these changes was a sort of false nostalgia among many residents, a longing for a Paris that had never really existed; as Meyer notes, this last point echoes one made by T. J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life.

The remaining chapters (there are seven in total) are devoted to different elements of Paris and associated changes: streets, streetlights, and how the railroads shrank regional space; water, the reorganization of the Seine, and changing notions of personal cleanliness; the underground in all its senses–catacombs, sewers, and archaeological excavations; nature and the construction of green spaces; and finally, the periphery, namely what existed outside Paris once so much space had been swallowed up by the city and so many people had been pushed out by it. Meyer makes clear how every element, old and new, from sidewalks to burial to the natural world, was experienced differently depending on class and gender.

In a departure from many older accounts of Haussmannization, Meyer is careful to highlight throughout Dividing Paris the degree to which colonialism and colonization played an important and oft-ignored role in the remaking of Paris. She shows how the fabric of old and new Paris relied on various forms of colonizing gaze and practice. “To claim Paris as the capital of modernity,” Meyer writes in her introduction, “is to erase the contributions of other nations and cities that, often under the yoke of colonialism, contributed richly to the beauty of the French capital” (7). France’s colonial presence overseas and its attempts to transform empire into spectacle were evident in, for example, the newly built Jardin d'Acclimatation. In this context, however, the author also considers how the colonialist perspective was turned inward. As Meyer shows repeatedly, beggars, workers, and other members of marginalized communities within Paris were often regarded as foreign and in need of a “civilizing” influence.

Perhaps the only real gap in this comprehensive text is one that Meyer highlights herself and integrates into her argument: in writing about events that had so disproportionate an impact on Paris’s poor and working-class inhabitants it is often difficult to know precisely what their experience was, because they left relatively few written traces. Meyer includes such sources when they are available; she draws, for examples, on the memoirs of Martin Nadaud and accounts written by former ouvriers.  But there are even fewer accounts by working class women than by men. Meyer is thus obliged frequently to focus on what the negative impacts would have been on the lives of working-class citizens more broadly speaking: how the average worker would have been pushed out to the peripheries, how changes in sewer systems took longer to reach poorer Parisians and what this meant for them. In other words, in the frequent absence of specifichistorical figures through whose eyes to view the effects of Haussmannization on the poor, Meyer gives us a construction solidly based in her detailed research.

One of the many strengths of this important book is the combination of Meyer’s perspective as a historian of art and architecture with her attention to voices from the past. Dividing Paris presents the destruction, refashioning, and construction of Paris as events that altered forever the experience of living in Paris and what buildings, streets, and parks meant to those who inhabited and used them.