Park on Séginger (2023)

The subject of nature’s place in, and relationship with, the city has been a fruitful and complex area of investigation for the age of industrialization and urbanization. Far from being persistently supplanted, nature in cities served as social spaces of leisure and consumption; as manifestations of cultural movements and sensibilities; and as hygienic enclaves. In Gisèle Séginger’s edited collection, La nature à Paris au XIXe siècle: du réel à l’imaginaire, Paris—that nineteenth-century metropolis par excellence—is the laboratory in which she and other scholars interrogate these and related themes further. As stated in Séginger’s introduction, the fourteen short essays comprising this volume aim to analyze emotions and representations alongside historical realities. From actual gardens and greenhouses to novels, images, and metaphors, nature in its material and imagined forms is shown to reveal commentary on and aspirations for politics, social relations, and humanity’s future. The resulting volume does not necessarily break new ground on this topic, but instead presents focused deep dives into specific themes and urban developments that enrich our understanding of the era.

La nature à Paris au XIXe siècle is loosely arranged in chronological order, with essays that overlap in their temporal coverage. While some contributions address a specific political regime (e.g. the Second Empire) or publication, most of them center on a subject or development that transcends this kind of periodization. The collection begins with a broad overview of nature and gardens in early nineteenth-century Paris to introduce their enduring ties to sociability, consumption, public utility, technology, and urban health. In the opening chapter, Jan Synowiecki addresses entertainment and leisure in turn-of-the-century tivolis and jardins-spectacles; the economic importance of botany as instituted in the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle; and the Père-Lachaise cemetery and jardin de l’Élysée as demonstrative of both new aesthetic sensibilities and sanitary interventions in the city. Subsequent essays elaborate on this range of themes introduced by Synowiecki. Émilie-Anne Pépy discusses the cultivation of tropical plants as representative of economic growth as well as social status. Botany and natural sciences are shown to be rich fields of intellectual discovery, experimentation, and industry in Bénédicte Percheron’s two essays, involving the cultivation of new species and even artificial imitations of nature in public parks and World’s Fairs exhibits. In Bertrand Marquer’s study of mental asylums, the garden functions as a therapeutic space that facilitates patients’ transition back to society. 

The most evocative of these essays on the material realities of urban nature address their symbolic potentials. In Juliette Azoulai’s essay, the aquarium of the mid-to-late-nineteenth century is not only a form of colonized nature and a scientific laboratory, but also a theatre of morality that reflects society back onto itself. Similarly, Séginger balances her own analysis of Parisian greenhouses as spaces of technology, bourgeois sociability, and distinction with fin-de-siècle literary representations that associated them with notions of evil, temptation, and troubled psyches. Even after Second Empire efforts to control and order nature in all its elements, persistent evocations of the underworld attest to a return of the repressed in the social imaginary. We see this at work in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ romanticized depictions of the buried Bièvre river, alluded to in Carine Roucan’s essay, as well as in Louise Michel’s post-Commune representations of Paris consumed by a savage nature, studied by Claude Rétat. 

Refreshingly, this volume treats the Second Empire as just one episode in the city’s complex and changing relationship to nature, rather than setting it up as a climax. Not just urban gardens but greenhouses, plant nurseries, and aquaria predate, develop alongside, and continue beyond, the grands travaux of that era. Essays focused specifically on Haussmannization emphasize its limitations. In Nathalie Machon’s analysis of biodiversity, the urban “ecosystem” under Haussmann is a constrained and domesticated matter of hygiene and aesthetics. In a second contribution, Séginger revisits Maxime Du Camp’s Paris, ses organs, ses fonctions et sa vie (1869–75)—conceived in the heyday of Haussmannization and published during its demise—to highlight its Saint-Simonian prioritization of systems and public circulation over nature. 

This wide-ranging set of essays forms the groundwork for other contributions in the last third of the book that explore incorporations of nature into ideological visions of future society in fin-de-siècle literature. Patrick Matagne’s study of the writer Élisée Reclus uncovers a cooperative, socialist version of Darwinism at work in his depictions of the city as an organism. In Carmen Husti’s analysis of Émile Zola’s Trois Villes series, gardens of fecundity and honest labor function as utopian counterparts to a degrading urbanism that exacerbates social inequalities. In a fitting concluding chapter, Claire Barel-Moisan similarly reveals critiques of bourgeois artifice and inequities of access in nineteenth-century literary representations of nature. The fiction of Albert Robida, Jules Verne, and Zola becomes “un laboratoire pour repenser les usages de la ville, questionner les pratiques de la société contemporaine et expérimenter de nouvelles relations entre ville et nature” (137). As the book’s subtitle indicates, we have truly passed from the real to the imaginary.

As this summary may imply, the essays in this collection are exploratory rather than comprehensive, resulting in omissions in both topics and references. For example, a treatment of Romanticism throughout the volume would be highly fitting given the frequent discussions of nature alongside aesthetic sensibilities, such as the shift in preference for jardins à l’anglaise; its spiritual and moral dimensions; and the underworld and its macabre fascinations. Meanwhile, the book offers a limited bibliography that excludes some key recent scholarship on nature, ecology, and the city, such as Richard Hopkins’s Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris (2015), Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest Over Environment in Modern France (2016), and Antoine Picon’s Natures urbaines: Une histoire technique et sociale 1600–2030  (2024). Finally, as with many single-city studies, this book would benefit from addressing the question, “why Paris”? How did urban manifestations of nature here compare with those of other major cities? What does a focus on Paris reveal about this complex and contested relationship that perhaps might not emerge as clearly in other cases? These critiques notwithstanding, La nature à Paris au XIXe siècle presents numerous evocative themes and examples that enrich our understanding of urban nature in its physical and symbolic manifestations.