Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870 by Esther Da Costa Meyer (review)

Abstract

Drawing on a rich collection of archival materials, photographs, illustrations, newspaper reports, memoirs, and literary sources, Esther da Costa Meyer asks: ‘How [...] can one do justice to the terrifying complexity of the urban transformation of Second Empire Paris — a city that, like all others, does not exist outside representations and thus exceeds any single author or methodology?’ (p. 9). The book’s striking cover hints at its critical approach. Eugène Moreau’s illustration of Paris’s new Boulevard de la Reine Hortense, embellished with gardens and fountains, is juxtaposed with detail taken from Félix Thorigny’s 1858 depiction of demolitions on the Left Bank. While urban reform in nineteenth-century Paris is often examined for its effects on dichotomized social and political categories (men/women; the affluent/ the proletariat; those living in the centre/ those displaced to the periphery; municipal authority/ the private sector), da Costa Meyer’s extensive study approaches Haussmannization as an act of ‘tense syncretism’ (p. 305), in which multiple identities, perspectives, and cultures are to be understood in relation to each other. Venturing beyond a focus on individual Parisian monuments and biographical scholarship, da Costa Meyer considers the dynamic interactions of class, age, gender, national origin, and language in the reconstruction of urban space. The book’s scope is vast, with urban renewal analysed in the context of saturation, revolutions, and epidemics in the first chapter alone. While the needs of the bourgeoisie are presented as one of the major driving forces of Paris’s transformation and the effects of segregation and marginalization are clearly underlined throughout, the book points to the need to avoid totalizing views and binaries if we are to apprehend the complex consequences of Haussmann’s reforms. Thus, working women, who often took jobs as domestic servants in the affluent western half of Paris, were ‘more highly sought where they were most poorly represented’ (p. 103), while those economically displaced to the periphery were nonetheless some of the most active participants in the physical construction of the new city. One of the most significant aspects of the study is the attention it devotes to the relationship between urban reform and geopolitics: imported works of colonial art in Parisian museums, new parks filled with exotic plants from across France’s empire, migrant labour, and the quelling of insurrection by the généraux africains are all discussed comprehensively, as is the annexation of Paris’s peripheral communities, itself a ‘brutal act of colonization’ (p. 305). Da Costa Meyer persuasively argues that if the renewal of Paris is to be understood in relation to the Second Empire, the very influences that shape and underpin it simultaneously undermine Eurocentric myths about the city’s status as ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ or ‘capital of modernity’. This landmark book, brimming with detailed analyses (and over 300 references in some chapters), is also an aesthetically pleasing one, containing 60 colour and 115 black-and-white illustrations. It offers a perceptive reassessment of the effects of urban reform in Second Empire Paris by bringing into dialogue a multiplicity of perspectives and voices, many of which have been overlooked until now.