The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870-1914

by

Peter S. Soppelsa

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History)
in The University of Michigan
2009

Doctoral Committee:
Associate Professor Joshua H. Cole, Co-Chair
Associate Professor Gabrielle Hecht, Co-Chair
Professor Richard Abel
Professor Geoffrey H. Eley
Associate Professor Dario Gaggio

Copyright 2009 Peter S. Soppelsa

For Jen, who saw me through the whole project.

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Contents

Dedication
List of Figures
Introduction: Modernity, Infrastructure and Everyday Life
Chapter 1: Paris, Modernity and Haussmann
Part One: Circulation, The Flow of Traffic
Chapter 2: The Dream Life of the Mtropolitain, 1872-1895
Chapter 3: Paris Under Construction, 1895-1914
Part Two: Hygiene, The Flow of Light, Air, Water and Waste
Chapter 4: Opening the City: Housing, Hygiene and Urban Density
Chapter 5: Flows of Water and Waste
Conclusion: The Fragility of Modernity
Bibliography

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Morice's Marianne on the Place de la Rpublique

Figure 2: The departmental commission's 1872 Mtro plan
Figure 3: A standard CGO horse-powered tram
Figure 4: CGO Mkarski system compressed air tram, circa 1900
Figure 5: Francq's locomotive sans foyer
Figure 6: Albert Robida, L'Embellissement de Paris par le mtropolitain (1886)
Figure 7: Jules Garniers Haussmannized Viaduct, 1884
Figure 8: From Louis Heuz's 1878 Pamphlet
Figure 9: From Louis Heuz's 1878 Pamphlet
Figure 10: Le Chatelier's 1889 Mtro Plan
Figure 11: 1890 Mtro plan from Eiffel and the North Railway Company
Figure 12: J.B. Berlier's 1892 Tubular Tramway
Figure 13: Two views of the Diatto system stud mechanism
Figure 14: L'Assiette au Beurres November, 1901 cartoon dangerous toys
Figure 15: The rue de Rivoli, June 30, 1899
Figure 16: The Arc de Triomphe overlooks a chaotic scene
Figure 17: Average rents by district, 1891
Figure 18: Number of Unclean Dwellings Service visits by district, 1877-1883
Figure 19: Ad for the Touring Clubs hygienic night stand, Hygea
Figure 20: Deaths from tuberculosis by quartier, 1913
Figure 21: Block of houses on the rue des Etuves slated for demolition in 1909
Figure 22: Houses on rue Aubry le Boucher slated for demolition
Figure 23: Cross-section view of a Mtro tunnel ventilation shaft, 1913
Figure 24: View from the fortifications to the Zone near Saint-Ouen
Figure 25: Le Petit Parisiens photograph of the shanties in Pantin without water
Figure 26: Improvised passerelle, Porte dIvry
Figure 27: passerelles on the rue de lHtel Colbert
Figure 28: Les Resigns (The Resigned), Lclair, August 1, 1911

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Introduction: Modernity, Infrastructure and Everyday Life

We tend to associate modernity with power, control, order, progress, durability

and mastery. We also associate it with Western cities in the grips of the twin historical
transformations unleashed by the nineteenth century: industrialization and urbanization.
We often hear that Western cities became safer, cleaner, healthier, more comfortable,
efficient and rational places to live in the nineteenth century because Europeans
judiciously applied reason, science and technology to organizing and managing everyday
urban life. While Europe underwent fundamental social, spatial and technological
changes (urbanization, industrialization and globalization), so the familiar story goes,
European ways of life became more civilized, rationalized, standard, advanced, efficient,
democratic, humane, or even universal.
But what would happen to this view of modernity if I told the story of a city in the
grips of industrialization and urbanization, whose leaders were anxious to improve life by
applying science and technology, which, however did not only become more rational,
more efficient and more humane in many ways, but also more complicated, more risky
and more fragile? What if that city was Paris, so-called capital of the nineteenth
century, capital of modernity and capital of the world? 1
In this study, I argue that Paris between 1870 and 1914, the scene of massive
1 (1) Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, from The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard, 2002), pp. 3-26; (2) David Harvey, Paris, Capital of
Modernity (Routledge, 2003); Patrice Higgonet, Paris: Capital of the World (Harvard, 2005).

2
work in infrastructural modernization, can help us uncover a different perspective on
modernity that highlights its contingencies, contradictions, complexity and fragility. 2
This study is about what I call the fragility of modernity, meaning the special
difficulties that confront cities dependent on increasingly complex networked
infrastructures which bind humans, technology and the natural environment in new ways.
Although we often hear that everyday life was transformed by science and technology in
these years (often called the Second Industrial Revolution), Paris's modernization from
1870 to 1914 is better characterized as uneven development. In 1900, Paris became the
worlds fourth city to open an electric-powered subway, but as late as 1928, 18% of its
houses did not enjoy direct to sewer drainage. 3
Parisian responses to modernization were equally uneven, expressing both
optimism and anxiety about technological change, and a number of never-completed
fantasies of perfecting, optimizing, and controlling humans, the city, technology, nature,
and their relations. 4 While Frances civilizing mission kept Paris planners, engineers and
politicians on a technological-determinist track that identified infrastructural development
with progress, results on the terrain of everyday life were quite mixed. Technical
accidents, bureaucratic inefficiency, and shortages of crucial resources like water and
affordable housing called this progress into question. In this study we will hear many
voices in Paris questioning the familiar narrative of infrastructural modernization as
progress, as well as many defending it.

2 This idea is inspired by a long line of critical theorists who stress the duality of modernity. Ideas
drawn from classic German theorists like Marx, Weber, Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin have been
retooled by more recent scholars like Raymond Aron, Marshall Berman , Jrgen Habermas, Detlev
Peukert and David Harvey.
3 Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (Yale, 1978), p. 208.
4 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (University of
California, 1992).

3
Infrastructural development did not influence everyday life in predictable ways.
As the Paris authorities used networked infrastructures to solve urban problems
(distributing water and power, public transportation, etc.), they increased the
heterogeneity, complexity and fragility of the city, helped reproduce social inequalities,
and increased the citys ecological impact. In this study, I show that what Parisians
recognized as urban modernity between 1870 and 1914, which after Haussmann revolved
around the application of networked infrastructures for solving urban problems, was an
increasingly heterogeneous and fragile assembly, vulnerable to disruptions of social
routine, technological function, and the forces of nature.

Provincializing Paris: Remembering Passepartout and Rothal

In 1872 Paris had a new republican regime. It was a time for national selfreflection. Parisians had spent the last year and a half sieged by the Prussians and then at
civil war with one another. Now as they rebuilt the capital, they looked to London for
inspiration. The Prefecture of the Seine was studying London's urban railways to imitate
them in Paris, while French ex-patriots in London wrote home with excited accounts of
the ride. 5 Meanwhile, Jules Verne was publishing Around the World in 80 Days as serial
fiction in Paris newspaper Le Temps. 6 The story opens in London that same year. In
1872, London was a jealously-regarded mirror of Paris's future, a city further along the
evolutionary curve of industrialization, a model modern metropolis. The capital of

Historian Hippolyte Taine, French ex-patriot in London, wrote a starry-eyed review of London's urban
railways for Le Temps, as we'll see in Chapter 2. Poet Arthur Rimbaud, also traveling in London that
year, wrote the throbbing prose poem Mtropolitain, which one critic has speculated was written about
his experience riding the city's railways. See: Michael Spencer, A Fresh Look at Rimbaud's
"Mtropolitain", The Modern Language Review, Vol. 63, No. 4. (Oct., 1968), pp. 849-853.
6 See Chapters I-IV of the free, public Wikisource version:
(http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours.

4
Victoria's empire was the world's largest city and the hub of the world economy, a global
cosmopolis. So Verne's story follows the networks of the British Empire. 7 Verne's
linchpinthe wager that Phileas Fogg can go around the world in 80 days, thanks to the
speed of locomotives and steamshipswas a question about how industrialized, steampowered means of transportation had changed time, space, and ultimately human life.
Verne's book was a textual tool for coming to terms with London's perceived
developmental leg up on Paris, for exploring the differences between England and France
(personified in the odd couple of Fogg and Passepartout), and for exploring the human
impact of industrialized means of transportation.
Verne portrays English gentlemen Phileas Fogg as cold, intensely cerebral,
mysterious and silent. He is young, wealthy, single, educated, eccentric but
intelligent, a thinker, punctual, meticulous, even obsessive-compulsive. Verne repeatedly
calls him mathematical and mechanical. His life is as regimented as timetable of
trains, his fortress house outfitted with all of the latest conveniences. Simple Frenchman
Passepartout, un vrai Parisien de Paris who comes to work as his butler, is unused to
such rationalization and shocked to find his room wired for electricity. 8 When Fogg tells
Passepartout about the wager, and asks him to pack their bags for a trip around the world,
slow-moving Passepartout, little experienced with industrialized means of transit, thinks
the wager is a bit fou (crazy).
Fogg is a timely representation of European urban elites in 1872. For bourgeois
actors, both the actual architects of industrialization (engineers, entrepreneurs,

7 London-Suez-Mumbai-Calcutta-Hong Kong-Yokohama-San Francisco-New York-London

8 The vrai Parisien de Paris was a popular image of the simple, working-class Parisian, fundamentally
local, tied to his or her neighborhood, often blinkered about what was going on in the rest of the world,
and decidedly non-modern.

5
politicians) and those upper middle class people who then had access to the benefits and
power of technoscience (Jules Verne, Hippolyte Taine, Phileas Fogg), the period from
1870 to 1914 could feel like an adventure, and industrialization an exciting current of
history to ride. They were right to be amazed by the new capabilities that technoscience
offered humanity. It is no surprise contemporaries spoke of a Second Industrial
Revolution. Thus Verne posited a hypothesis to be tested about how technology had
changed humanitys ability to master time and space. Readers perform the test while
following Fogg on his fantastic world tour.
But what of Passepartout, the working-class Parisian? His hair is rather blown
back by the tour, saying We travel so fast that I seem to be journeying in a dream. He
can't even understand why his watch is no longer in sync with the sun when they arrive at
Suez and refuses to wind it, claiming that the sun, not his faithful watch, is wrong. In
sharp contrast to the Londoner's obsessive futurism, Passepartout makes the Parisian of
1872 seem dim-witted, doe-eyed, backward. For Verne, Passepartout was an editorial, a
mirror held up to Parisians to vent his own futuristic fantasies and fears. But Passepartout
also teaches the reader that technology's ability to help humans master things like time
and space depends deeply on understanding how technologies work, giving these
technologies the right human inputs, and understanding how the human experience of
time and the workings of technology (the watch) relate to the natural world (the sun).
Another moment in the story suggests a gap in Verne's hypothesis. When Fogg
and Passepartout reach Rothal in India, their journey is suddenly interrupted when the
train reaches the end of the line. There is no station, and the passengers are abruptly
disembarked. Fogg is bewildered that the newspapers falsely reported that the railway

6
was finished. 9 In this unexpected turn, the railwayclear symbol of humanity's mastery
of nature, time and space, and a track along which the plot rollsis cut short. This
derailment teaches both Fogg and readers that technoscience's power to change human
life only reaches as far as the infrastructural networks on which it travels. Verne shows us
uneven development, and the cognitive dissonance it causes for Fogg, because from this
Londoner's Eurocentric point of view, living at the center of a global network, one
expected technological development to have cast a wider historical-geographical net.
Even in this triumphant tale of Fogg winning the wager thanks to modern technology
Verne had to admit the reality of uneven development.
Existing historical literature does not do enough to provincialize Europe, by
showing how technological development in Europe's colonies sometimes outstripped
development of provincial spaces in Europe 10 , or by exploring the multiple axes of
developmental inequality within Europe, between nations, between classes, between
regions, between town and country 11 , between men and women, or between different
parts of a single city, as I do in this study. Verne, like many of his contemporaries, was
keenly aware of uneven development, and invented Fogg and Passepartout to illustrate
the developmental differences between Englishmen and Frenchmen, bourgeoisie and
proletariat. Verne's era of increasingly competitive imperialism, capitalism and
globalization was also an age of increasing techno-nationalism. A race for development
was on, and for the bourgeois elites who had taken the reigns of European history in the

In a moment of wicked wit, Verne explains that The papers were like some watches, which have a way
of getting too fast.
10 Damen Salesa suggested this in his talk at the University of Michigan's Eisenberg Institute for
Historical Studies, The Future Ruins of London: Victorians, the British Empire, and the Wars of
Race, Jan. 24, 2008.
11 The classic example here is Eugen Webers Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, 1976).

7
19th century, jealous comparisons to neighboring countries and nationalist anxieties
accompanied any discussion of technological development.
Unfortunately, we have been telling ourselves stories like Fogg's since Jules
Verne's days without stopping much to remember Passepartout or Rothal. We have
forgotten the subtler parts of Verne's tale in light of Fogg's win. We are used to telling
ourselves stories of modernity based around industrial revolutions, in which
technoscience transforms human life, becomes a motor of history, and thereby becomes
associated with the future and with progress. Open any history book that covers the
period between 1870 and 1914, and you'll likely find mention of science and technology
transforming human life. 12 As if reading from Verne, historians describe a Second
Industrial Revolution during which transportation and communication technologies like
the railroad, telegraph, steam ship, automobile, electricity, telephone, radio, phonograph,
airplane, etc., contributed to globalization, fundamentally altering the scale (space) and
pace (time) of everyday life, the way we communicate, the way we produce and consume
goods to meet our needs. Artificial light lengthened the day, the bicycle transformed
individual mobility, mass transport allowed people to live farther from work, steam ships
allowed more people to travel the planet, to experience cultural others, to master
space, time and nature.
Everyday life, it is often claimed, became penetrated by or saturated with

12 See: (1) Hobsbawm's Age of Empire 1875-1914 , pp. 52-3. On p. 21, he writes it is roughly correct to
make industry a criterion of modernity. (2) Eugen Weber, France Fin-de-Sicle, pp. 51-82. This
conception is repeated in classical social and economic histories, like David Landes's The Unbound
Prometheus (1969) and kept afloat by thematically-oriented textbooks like Colin Chant et al., eds.
Science, Technology and Everyday Life 1870-1950 (Routledge/Open University, 1988) or David
Goodman, ed. The European Cities and Technology Reader (Routledge/Open University, 1999) and
even sometimes in certain corners of the history of technology: Mikael Hrd and Andrew Jamison, eds.
The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (MIT, 1998) or
Thomas Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg, eds. Modernity and Technology (MIT, 2003).

8
technology in new ways. Life became more technological, mediated by technology.
Everyday activities like cooking, bathing, or going to work suddenly began to require
more elaborate equipment, and to be impossible without it. Everyday life became
dependent on technology, socio-technical. This simple conception, of everyday life being
periodically revolutionized by technological change, has become one of the intellectual
fixtures of nineteenth century history. The French first heard this narrative from Georges
d'Avenel, whose multi-volume study of mechanized life, The Mechanism of Modern
Life (1896-1906) sought to analyze the history of industrial progress. 13 The narrative
entered the global academic canon in 1948 with architectural theorist Siegfried
Giedieon's mammoth study Mechanization Takes Command. I am not the first to pose the
question, but it is time to ask again: to what extent did mechanization take command? 14
Recent cultural and intellectual histories of technology have critiqued these
narratives, teaching that the idea of technology as a maker of history (under the rubrics of
the technological sublime or technological determinism) is a Eurocentric and
teleological cultural construction which often serves capitalist and imperialist interests.
They have unpacked the cultural meanings and political consequences of technology in
the modern era with both political and analytical force. They break the circuit between
mechanization and command, showing that weve been telling ourselves stories of
13 Georges Avenel, Le mcanisme de la vie moderne, vol. 1 (Paris: A. Colin, 1896), preface.
14 (1) Siegfried Giedeon, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford,
1948). Giedeon tried to show, in painstaking detail, the way that mechanization (involving
industrialization, rationalization and mediation) infiltrated and materially transformed everyday life. He
writes of tracing our mode of life as affected by mechanizationits impact on our dwellings, our food,
our furniture (p. vi), or: We shall inquire in the first line into the tools that have molded our presentday living. We would know how this mode of life came about, and something of the process of its
growth (p. 2); In their aggregate, the humble objects of which we shall speak have shaken our mode
of living to its very roots. Modest things of daily life, they accumulate into forces acting upon whoever
moved within the orbit of our civilization. He wanted to analyze the slow shaping of daily life (p. 3),
and show mechanization's almost inescapable influence over our way of life, our attitudes, our
instincts (P. 4); (2) For the more recent reference to Giedeon, see Neil Postman, Technolopoly: the
Surrender of Culture to Technology (Knopf, 1992), p. 40.

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technology helping humans to conquer things like time, space, disease, each other,
even nature itself since the 1870s. 15 These studies have taught us to question the place of
technology in society, culture and politics, helping to unpack narratives like those of
Verne, Avenel and Giedeon. This is a crucial lesson, but it implies a one-sided analysis of
technologys relationship to society, culture and politics. These scholars tend to leave
technology itself analytically untouched, blackboxed as historians of technology say.
They treat technology as an undifferentiated block that influences society and culture
from the outside, has cultural meanings projected onto it from without, becomes
taken up as an instrument in social and political struggles, or is socially (or culturally)
constructed.
Historians of technology help fill in the gaps by providing richly detailed accounts
of technological design and use that show how social, cultural and political factors
influence the design process. 16 But this tends to privilege design over use and technology
over practice in subtle ways, often telling us more about scientists and engineers than
about the people who use their innovations.17 Rather than seeing technology-in-use as

15 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge, 1986); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway
Journey (University of California, 1987); Michael Adas. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science,
Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell, 1989); Anson Rabinbach, The Human
Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (University of California, 1992); Peter Fritzsche,
Machine Dreams: Airmindedness and the Reinvention of Germany, The American Historical Review,
98 ( June 1993); David Nye, American Technological Sublime (MIT, 1994); Lisa Cartwright, Screening
the Body (University of Minnesota, 1995); Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (MIT, 1996); Rieger,
Bernhard. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945 (Cambridge,
2005).
16 Although some historians of technology fall into the trap of blackboxing society and culture as
relatively undifferentiated blocks, separate domains into which technologies have to be worked.
See: Mikael Hrd and Andreas Knie, The Grammar of Technology: German and French Diesel
Engineering, 1920-1940, Technology and Culture 40/1 (1999), pp. 26-46; Mikael Hrd and Andrew
Jamison, eds. The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939
(MIT, 1998); Misa, Thomas, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg, eds. Modernity and Technology (MIT,
2003); Hrd, Mikael and Thomas J. Misa, eds. Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities
(MIT, 2008). In the debate on national technological styles, this tends to caricature national cultures; in
the debate on technology and modernity it tends to historicize technology while blackboxing modernity.
17
Donald Reid, for example, provides excellent analysis of workers who operate technology, but does not

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David Edgerton recently called for, these studies show us technology in context, and
we hear more about the contexts impact on the technology than about the technologys
impact on the context. Too often, stories about users are only brought into the history of
technology in order to destabilize the designers point of view. So recent cultural
historians of technology thoroughly historicize practice but blackbox technology, while
socio-technical historians of technology often highlight the relationship between
technology and practice without giving the two terms equal explanatory power.
Inspired by the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and by French
Actor Network Theorys commitment to placing social and cultural practice on equal
analytic footing with technology and nature, I try in this study to develop a new method
for studying the relationship between technology and human practice empirically and
historically. By historicizing both technology and practice, and empirically investigating
how they shape one another in concrete, local settings, I hope to contribute to a project
started by cultural historians and historians of technologynamely, to unravel what
Thomas Misa called the compelling tangle of technology and modernity. 18

Theorizing and Historicizing Modernity

Modernity is an unavoidable concept for historians, because it bears on one of our
favorite questions: that of historical continuity and discontinuity. When Durkheim set out

analyze technologys users much, in Paris Sewers and Sewermen. David Barnes shows powerful
connections between the history of science, cultural history and the history of public health, but this
tells us more about the people who published on technoscience than about those who experienced it on
a day to day basis. See David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth
Century France (University of California, 1995) and The Great Stick of Paris and the NineteenthCentury Struggle against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins, 2006).
18 Thomas Misa, The Compelling Tangle of Modernity and Technology, in Modernity and Technology,
ed. Misa, Brey and Feenberg (MIT, 2003), pp. 1-30.

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to distinguish the basic social forms of his 'modern' epoch from those preceding it (which
he called primitive), he was making a claim to discontinuity, a claim to be living after a
world-historic rupture or break. Similarly, Baudelaire attempted to capture the essential
character of his own historical moment on a smaller scale by writing about street life in
Second Empire Paris. Durkheims historical rupture separated epochs, while Baudelaires
separated decades; Durkheims modernity was global, while Baudelaires was local. But
in both cases the claim to historical discontinuity was a reaction to life in nineteenth
century Paris, which seemed cut off from the past.
Detlev Peukert argued that marking particular moments as historical ruptures
(whether to begin or end a period) is a sensitive interpretive matter. One of the historians
most basic tasksdatingis thus fraught with hermeneutic risk. 19 For example, Eric
Hobsbawm suggested the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution as possible
founding ruptures for modernity. Choosing the Industrial Revolution makes modernity
seem fundamentally industrial, and England sets the pace: a high growth, high risk
economy, the din of machines, investment crazes, rapid proletarianization and
urbanization, the degradation of work, worker unrest, environmental pollutionthis is
the world of Marx, Dickens, and Zola. Choosing the French Revolution yields modernity
as the age of the liberal bourgeoisie, as it goes from Europes insurgent class to its ruling
class. Here France sets the pace, and the themes are overwhelmingly social-political: state
building, revolution, civil war, nationalism, enlightened reform, class formation, party

19 This means that dating requires an interpretive leap of faith. By the same token, it is fraught with
political risk, too. Peukert wrote, the demarcation of a period of history necessarily rests on a particular
conception of the period, explicitly underpinned to a greater or lesser extent by theoretical analysis,
such that analytical conceptions of [a] period are implicit in these different datings. Detlev Peukert.
The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Trans. Richard Deveson (Hill and Wang,
1987), p. 3.

12
formation, civil society and the public sphere, etc. 20
Peukert chose the belle epoch of the 1890s through World War I as Germany's
classical modernity. Thus modernity was characterized by big business, cartels and
interest group politics, the birth of modernist cultural production, the spread of mass
societal forms (mass culture, mass production, mass consumption, mass transit, mass
communication), fin de sicle decadence, the rise of organized labor, the crisis of
liberalism, electrification, etc. Enrique Dussel chose 1492, giving modernity a colonial,
imperial or global cast. 21 Other likely landmarks include the Renaissance, the
Reformation, the 19th century, the Enlightenment, the 30 Years War, or either of the two
world warsany number of dates, events, or periods that can be claimed as moments of
historical rupture. 22
Herein lies a problem. With so many ruptures to choose from, and remembering
Peukerts warning that the choice is sensitive, it becomes clear how arbitrary the choice
is. In light of all the different places and times claimed as 'modernity,' the concept seems
to be deconstructing itself, falling apart as scholars realize that there is no such thing as
modernity in general, only plural modernities. 23 These confusions about where and
when modernity can occur are joined by a more basic confusion about what modernity is.
In the social science tradition, modernity names an objective state of affairs, the social,
20 In Hobsbawms classic account of European modernity, the two revolutions of the late eighteenth
century (industrial and French) mark the epochal break. See The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (Vintage,
1996).
21 As he explains in his essay Debate on the Geoculture of the World System (online at:
http://168.96.200.17/ar/libros/dussel/artics/debate.pdf), in 1492 four phenomena arise at the same time:
1) World-System; 2) Capitalism (still mercantile); 3) Colonialism, 4) Modernity (as a cultural
phenomena of the management of Europe's 'Centrality' within the world-system), p. 240. See also:
Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the Other and the Myth of Modernity,
trans. Michel D. Barber (Continuum, 1995), also online:
http://168.96.200.17/ar/libros/dussel/1492in/1492in html.
22 David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Polity, 2002), p. 3.
23 Jeffrey Herf. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third
Reich (Cambridge, 1984), p. 1.

13
political, economic and cultural condition(s) of the industrialized, urbanized Western
world in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many historians continue to use the term in this
sense, as a social-structural backdrop for historical narratives. 24 For philosophers and
cultural theorists, however, modernity often denotes a subjective state of affairs.
Habermas links it with a consciousness of time, Foucault calls it an ethos, or the
attitude of modernity, Marshall Berman calls it a mode of vital experience, and Bruno
Latour calls it a project or mission. 25 Kate Lacey is right that the term modernity is a
notoriously slippery one. Rita Felski calls the modern a myth, the most pervasive yet
most elusive of periodizing terms. 26
This lack of analytic clarity contributes to awkward norms of scholarly practice
with contradictory effects. On the one hand, we use the term modernity as if its
meaning were self-evident or taken for granted, assuming that colleagues, students, and
readers already know what it means, when this is precisely what we ought to explain.
Here, too little has been said about modernity. On the other hand, the concept's analytic
instability has led scholars in a variety of disciplines (including philosophy, sociology,
anthropology, science, technology and society, comparative literature, cultural studies,
24 (1) Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982) is the most
well-known example, especially because Berman self-consciously thematizes the relationship of
modernism to modernity. More recent examples include: (2) David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity:
Critical Explorations (Polity, 2002), (3) Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture
in Fin-de-sicle Paris (University of California, 1998); (4) Mikael Hrd and Andrew Jamison, eds. The
Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (MIT, 1998); (5)
Bernhard Rieger's Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britiain and Germany, 1890-1945
(Cambridge, 2005).
25 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse(cited above); Foucault, What is Enlightenment? (cited
above); Berman, All That is Solid(cited above); Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (cited above).
26 Kate Lacey. Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945
(University of Michigan, 1996), p. 5. Rita Felski. The Gender of Modernity (Harvard/Belknap, 1995).
David Harvey and Patrice Higgonet have also discussed myths of modernity, see: Harvey, Paris:
Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2003); Higgonet, Paris: Capital of the World (Harvard, 2002).
Peukert adds, Modernization is a vague term, embracing a variety of shades of meaning; its
usefulness as an explanatory tool in history has been much debated. The Weimar Republic, p. 81.

14
and history) into attempts, both theoretical and empirical, to define the concept more
clearly. Here, too much has been said. The interdisciplinary dialog is dizzying. There are
now a bewildering array of characterizations of modernity to choose from, which are
sometimes overlapping and sometimes incommensurable, sometimes more situated and
sometimes more synthetic.

27

The concept is constantly troubled by anachronism, for it is possible to assess

when modernity began only in hindsight, by measuring the past against the present. If
we say that modernity began in 1789, for example, this is because we see something of
our contemporary world in the French Revolutionsomething the revolutionaries could
never have seen. So claims to modernity also evoke what Benedict Anderson called the
specter of comparisons, because they can only be evaluated by comparison. The concept
is relational, only meaningful when two different things are compared; there is no
absolute modernity, no most modernthere is only more or less modern. This causes
both methodological and political difficulties because comparisons of different
'modernities' cannot be value free: modernity is too often valued as an end in itself. 28
Two other political issues haunt the concept. First is the aging intellectual crisis
which pits modernists against anti-modernists, and which has led to post-modern and a27 Because the general literature on modernity is so vast, I will only list some works that strike me as most
influential and most interesting. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization (University of Minnesota, 1996); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
(Cornell University, 1989); Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (Penguin, 1982); Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? The Foucault Reader, Paul
Rabinow, ed. (Pantheon, 1984), pp. 32-50; Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, trans. Thomas McCarthy (MIT, 1987); Jrgen Habermas, Modernity versus
Postmodernity. New German Critique vol. 1, no. 22, Winter 1981, pp. 3-14 (Giddens reply to
Habermas follows immediately after in the same volume); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern,
trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard, 1993); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination
of Modern India (Princeton, 1998); Derek Sayer. Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and
Weber (Routledge, 1991); James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition have Failed (Yale, 1998).
28 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (Verso,
1998).

15
modern disavowals of modernity, or attempts to transcend it. 29 Second is the critique of
modernization theory as a chauvinistic attempt to rank societies on a hierarchy of
development, legitimizing imperialism and shoring up European claims to superior
civilization. Scholars in colonial and postcolonial studies have revealed the paternal,
Eurocentric, and teleological historical assumptions embedded in talk of modernity. 30
Because claims to modernity necessarily invoke a historical rupture, they are implicated
in the politics of history, i.e. the messy decisions behind including or excluding people
and events from archives and narratives. 31
Like recent cultural histories I seek to historicize modernity, tempering the
analytic and political problems of modernity as an analysts category with sustained
attention to modernity as an actor category. This means empirically investigating how
historical agents made their own claims to modernity in concrete, local settings rather
than passing judgment ourselves on how modern they were. Claims about modernity
should be the object of study more than the goal of study. 32

29 Latour recommended the amodern option, see We Have Never Been Modern (cited above). For more on
anti-modernity and post-modernity, see Habermas, Modernity versus Postmodernity (cited above) and
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University, 1991).
30 For example, see Appadurai, Modernity at Large (cited above) and Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000).
31 Gabrielle Hecht has dissected rupture talk as a device for cutting oneself off from an unfortunate past.
She has in mind something like what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls silencing the past: a politics of
denial, ideology, or cover-up. In this way, Germanys claims to newness and democracy after WWII cut
ties to fascism and genocide, while Frances Gaullist appropriation of the resistance for the entire nation
as a nation of resisters cut ties to Vichy (read: fascism and genocide). As Hecht and Shepard have
argued, France used an elaborate language of decolonization to hide their continuing colonial power
behind a post-colonial image. Across the Western world, rupture talk has declared the end of the Cold
War. See: (1) Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Beacon, 1995); (2) Gabrielle Hecht, Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial Power in
Africa. Social Studies of Science 32/5-6 (Special double Issue on Postcolonial Technoscience) Oct.Dec. 2002, 691-727; (3) Gabrielle Hecht, Globalization meets Frankenstein? Reflections on Terrorism,
Nuclearity, and Global Technopolitical Discourse. History and Technology 19/1 (2003), 1-8; (4) Todd
Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Cornell
University, 2006).
32 For useful (and concise) methodological discussions of analyst and actor categories, see: (1) Wiebe
Bijker. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT, 1995), p.

16
19th century European cities were the historical ground on which the concept of
modernity first bloomed. The textual and archival record is unequivocal: references to
modernity increased over the course of the 19th century, spreading on both academic
and popular levels. 33 The term became cultural currency for the first time during
Hobsbawm's age of capital (1848-1875) and age of empire (1875-1914). As such, it
bears the unmistakable mark of these two interrelated conditionscapitalism and empire.
The term expresses awareness of a metropolitan, European world transformed by
capitalism, industrial technology, urbanization and globalization. For Europeans
experiencing what they perceived to be massive transformation of their lives, the concept
of modernity did two kinds of work: it distinguished 19th century Europe from its own
past, and distinguished it from its colonies, justifying its superiority and legitimizing its
exploitation as civilization. As these kinds of chauvinistic distinctions were made
between the modern and the non-modern, technological development was constantly
invoked as a measure of modernity. 34 Jules Verne and Georges d'Avenel fit right in,
bringing us back to the relationship between technology and practice in narratives of
modernity.

48; and (2) Scott Spector. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz
Kafkas Fin de Sicle (University of California, 2000), p. 34. Examples of cultural studies that succeed
at historicizing modernity and treating it as an actor category include Mary Nolans Visions of
Modernity (Oxford, 1994) and Arnold Lewiss An Early Encounter with Tomorrow (University of
Illinois, 1997), in which Europeans look to the United States as a preview of their own imagined
modern, technological futures. See also: Bernhard Rieger's Technology and the Culture of Modernity in
Britiain and Germany, 1890-1945 (Cambridge, 2005).
33 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities; David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity; Bernhard Rieger,
Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany; Hrd and Jamison, eds. The
Intellectual Appropriation of Technology; Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic
34 Michael Adas. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance (Cornell, 1989). It is also important to note that modernity was also an idea exported by
Europe and the United States to the rest of the world, already very much at large, as Appadurai put it,
in the nineteenth century; see Modernity at Large. See also Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt,
Techno-Politics, Modernity (University of California, 2002).

17
Infrastructure and Everyday Life
In this study, I use the term infrastructure for the built environment and
networks of roads, rails, buildings, pipes and wires, systems for distributing power, heat,
light, and water. The terms utilities and public works are not far off. 35 These
networks and the built space they wind through are at the heart of my analysis. As I tell
the story of Paris's being equipped with new roads, railways, housing, water supply and
waste disposal systems between the 1870s and the 1910s, I will unpack familiar
technologically-determinist narratives of the Second Industrial Revolution by examining
the relation of these infrastructures to everyday life, the relation of technology and
practice.
My approach to networked urban infrastructures is shaped, first and foremost, by
a growing literature on urban technologies. 36 These studies show that various spaces and
practices which we recognize as essentially modern or urban are unthinkable without
certain technological supportsthere is no high density living without the apartment
building, no commute or traffic jam without roads, rails and vehicles, no power outage
without an electrical grid, no late train without a schedule. From this perspective,

35 There is another use of infrastructure, in which the word is recursively defined as whatever is needed
to make something else work: a support, necessity or prerequisite. Occasionally I use the term with this
much broader meaning, but it should be clear from context in which sense I am using the term. For
more discussion of the term, see Paul Edwards, Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social
Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems, in Modernity and Technology, ed. Philip Brey,
Andrew Feenberg, and Thomas Misa (MIT, 2003), pp. 185-225
36 Accordingly, this footnotes contains some of the work that has been most important in this study: (1)
Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins,
1983); (2) Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, eds. Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in
Europe and America (Temple University, 1988); (3) David C. Goodman, ed. The European Cities and
Technology Reader: Industrial to Post-Industrial City (Routledge, 1999); (4) Manuel Castells, The Rise
of the Network Society: Economy, Society and Culture (Blackwell, 2000); (5) Steven Graham and
Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the
Urban Condition (Routledge, 2001); (6) Mikael Hrd and Thomas J. Misa, eds. Urban Machinery:
Inside Modern European Cities (MIT, 2008). This last volume also contains a good, brief literature
review of this body of research on cities and technology, see pp. 14-15.

18
modern urbanism emerges as an extraordinarily complex and dynamic sociotechnical
process. 37 A smaller literature on underground infrastructures adds the important point
that networked infrastructures are often physically or socially hidden in the city. They are
physically hidden because planners deliberately embed them in other structures, behind
walls or underground, but they are socially hidden because they are made to run smoothly
and fade into the background, to become routine or taken for granted. 38 As many
historians of technology have pointed out, technological systems have a funny way of
disappearing from view. We stop noticing them when they function correctly, and take
notice only when they fail. 39 In other words, large technical systems can become
hegemonic, habitual, routine, worked into the patterns of everyday life. Studies of the
urban underground remind us that we have to uncover and reveal infrastructures, bring
them back into focus, to explicate how their correct functioning works in everyday
settings.
Following recent interdisciplinary studies of technology, I interpret technology
and social-cultural practice, human beings and the material things we live with, as
mutually shaped and shaping, co-constructed. 40 Infrastructure is indeed a support of

37 Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, p. 8.

38 (1) Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the
Imagination (MIT, 1992), see Ch. 3, Creating the Substructure of Modern Life, pp. 51-81; (2) Donald
Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Havard, 1991); (3) David Pike,
Subterranean Cities: The Worlds Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Cornell, 2005).
39 (1) Wiebe Bijker and John Law, eds. Shaping Technology and Building Society : Studies in
Sociotechnical Change (MIT, 1992), pp. 1-4; (2) Paul Edwards, Infrastructure and Modernity: Force,
Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems, in Modernity and
Technology, ed. Philip Brey, Andrew Feenberg, and Thomas Misa (MIT, 2003), pp. 185-225; (3)
Mikael Hrd and Thomas J. Misa, eds. Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities (MIT, 2008),
Introduction, p. 8; (4) Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, p. 22.
40 The most influential ideas for me come from the following: Thomas Hughes, The Evolution of Large
Technical Systems, Michel Callon, Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for
Sociological Analysis, and John Law, Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering, from The Social
Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (MIT, 1983), pp. 51-134; see
also Madeleine Akriche, The De-Scription of Technical Objects and Bruno Latour, Where Are the

19
practice, a determinant influence that both constrains and enables action, but it is equally
an outcome of practice, a form of material culture. For example, in the late 1890s, faced
with the coming 1900 Worlds Fair, the Paris authorities worried that the citys
transportation, water supply and sewage systems were already strained, lagged behind
international standards of development, and would not be able to accommodate the
crowds coming to the exposition. They tried to correct these problems with a flurry of
infrastructural development before 1900, but foreign visitors still found transportation
inadequate and summer drought brought water shortages, sewer malfunction and a
typhoid scare. Insecurities about national culture drove attempts to rebuilt national
prowess with technological development. 41 Thus, as material culture the new tramways
and additions to the water system were a product of techno-nationalist practice. But these
same infrastructures also shaped practice; when they delivered failure instead of success,
this ironically questioned the nationalist and civilizationalist narrative they were designed
to shore up. They were both shaped and shaping, a product of techno-nationalist practice
which then served to undermine that same practice.
To make sociotechnical study better at revealing everyday practice, we need to
pursue a finer-grained and more bottom-up approach, which balances analysis of both
design (innovation) and use (renovation) as sociotechnical processes. This is where
studies of everyday life can help, guided by scholars like Alf Ldtke, Henri Lefebvre and
Michel de Certeau. These scholars stress detailed, ethnographic analysis of day-to-day

Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts, plus the dialogue on methdological
vocabulary between the two authors following these essays, in Bijker and Law, eds. Shaping
Technology/Building Society (MIT, 1987), pp. 201-265; see also: Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites,
and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT, 1997, 1999).
41 This is already a well-known pattern in post-WWII French history; see Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance
of France and Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies.

20
practice, taking a bottom up view of big structures and large processes like
urbanization and industrialization from the point of view people who experience them in
concrete, local settings. 42 This focus on practice highlights social conflict and contested
meanings, watching agents navigate and negotiate systems. In Paris after the exposition,
from 1900-1903, Parisians had to use the fragile systems installed for the exposition on a
daily basis. Continuing water shortages and traffic accidents inspired increasing labor
unrest and user-driven critique of the failing transportation and water systems as threats
to urban efficiency, social equality, public health and public safety. By combining sociotechnical methods with the study of everyday life, I hope to reveal the infrastructural
entanglement of everyday practice, and the practices behind apparently autonomous
technical change (viewing technologies as they are made, used, and remade on a day-today basis). I do this empirically by watching Parisians negotiate the place of networked
infrastructures in their urban modernity.
This means recognizing that large technical systems like the Paris water supply
system or Mtro are also social and institutional systems. 43 Because they are operated
and used by large groups of people, they create new communities which include workers,
passengers and subscribers. Those who are excluded and remain 'off the grid' do not
enjoy equal access; hence infrastructural networks also help reproduce social
42 As David Crew puts it, Alltagsgeschichte questions accepted understandings of 'big structures' and
'large processes' 'industrialization,' 'bureaucratization,' and 'modernization' by deconstructing these
arid abstractions into the flesh-and-blood human beings whose conflicting ides and actions produced
history... Crew then quotes Alf Ldtke, who sums up nicely, social practice moves to the center of the
stage. David Crew, Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History from Below?" Central European
History 22 (Sept.-Dec. 1989), 394-407, p. 396; Geoff Eley explains that this focus on ...highly concrete
microhistorical settings...was not supposed to supplant but to specify and enrich the understanding of
structural processes of social change. See: Geoff Eley, Labor History, Social History,
Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everydaya New Direction for German
Social History?" Journal of Modern History 61 (June 1989), 297-344, p. 317.
43 Donald Reid's work on Paris sewer workers and Gabrielle Hecht's on nuclear power plant workers stand
out as examples of this kind of study. See Paris Sewers and Sewermen and The Radiance of France.

21
inequalities. 44 In conflict over what infrastructures were for, and who they should serve,
Parisians not only struggled to control these technologies, but also the mobility, water
and other resources that they provided. These systems also had to be funded, regulated
and operated by a competent public or private authority, and the question of which was
more competent often gave rise to heated political conflict. Public works projects, as we'll
see throughout this study, are not only commonly recruited into political conflict as
instruments of struggle, but also often themselves become important political entities. For
example we'll see how the Mtro helped build a local welfare apparatus in Paris, and how
tramways, the bus company and park space became contentious election issues.
I argue that the theoretical glue for holding together sociotechnical studies with
studies of everyday life can be found in Actor Network Theory (ANT). ANT is based on
the idea that much more is required to make technologies work than correct mechanical
function. John Law sums this up by saying that engineering is heterogeneous. 45 In
order to make a tramway work, for example, one must not only make sure the car, tracks,
and power source interact in precise ways, but also ensure that driver and passengers (the
human component) as well as other vehicles on the road (broader traffic networks)
behave properly. One must also secure funding, a staff of workers to build and maintain
infrastructure, a policy climate in which tramways may operate efficiently, and fairs that
riders can afford. These heterogeneous componentstram, workers, money, wires,
tracks, regulation, other vehicles, drivers, ridersform a network whose components

44 Graham and Marvin, using Bijker's vocabulary, called for a perspective on urban infrastructures as
congealed social interests. See Splintering Urbanism, p. 11.
45 John Law, Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: the Case of Portugese Expansion in Bijker,
Hughes and Pinch (see footnote immediately above), pp.111-134. Madeleine Akrich, The DeScription of Technical Objects in Shaping Technology/Building Society (cited above), pp. 205-224.
Akriche writes, ...technical objects participate in building heterogeneous networks that bring together
actants of all types and sizes, whether human or nonhuman, p. 206.

22
must be coordinated to make it work. The complexity of such networks underscores their
fragilitychanges at one point on the network affect other points. So correct function
varies with context. Function is relational. The purpose and capabilities of a technical
device (or system) depend on the humans, other devices, and wider context with which it
interacts. This theory provides a much more flexible and contingent vision of
technologies than we are used to. It forces us to recognize that historical actors other than
engineers make technological history. Especially important in this regard is the agency of
the users/consumers of technology. 46
Perhaps most radically, ANT includes natural components in heterogeneous
networks. This evokes environmental history and the importance of natural resources like
fuel, water and human or animal work. Let's return to the example of tramways. For
much of the 19th century, they were pulled by horses, agents in a technological system
that were neither human nor human-made. Pariss failing electric tramways in 1900-1903
were vulnerable to humidity; their conductors were sunk in the pavement and flooded
with rain. Pariss water shortages and sewer failures in the same era were caused by the
opposite problemtoo little water, caused by heat and drought. Paris's tramways and
water system depended on the amount of rainfall for proper function in different ways.
These examples show that horses and rainfall can have as much impact on heterogeneous
networks as putatively technological and human components can.
Just as ANT's reinterpretation of technology stresses fragility, complexity and
heterogeneity, highlighting user agency, so studies of everyday life stress the way that
46 Although theorists in ANT make this point often, the argument has also been made by other
practitioners of socio-technical study: (1) Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a
Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT, 1997, 1999); (2) David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old:
Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford, 2006). Edgerton calls for a history of technology
in use.

23
everyday people experience, influence, adjust to or subvert the social and cultural
patterns that structure their lives. Ldtkes vocabulary of Eigen-sinn (self-assertion) and
Certeaus language of getting by, making do, appropriation, bricolage, and
consumer production make the theoretical similarities clear. Certeau calls his work an
investigation of the ways in which usersoperate. 47 By using ANT to join
sociotechnical studies with studies of everyday life, I want to reveal how Parisians of all
kinds intervened in struggles over infrastructure. Technology was much too important to
be left to the engineers. In this study, we'll see journalists and politicians arguing the
technical details of tramway and water supply networks, contesting the engineer's
monopoly on technology, striking construction workers seeking better working
conditions and higher standards for construction, the urban underclass scrounging for
open water off the supply grid, and the Paris omnibus company trying to block railway
development.
ANT, like the history of everyday life, foregrounds the structure-agency
problematic without solving it, holding the terms in suspension and constant
investigation. It holds open the question of structure and agency as a dialectic. 48 We need
to look beyond one-sided analyses of the way that artifacts reflect the beliefs, desires, and
interests of the people who produce them, to recognize that artifacts also show the
47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California, 1998), see p. xi; Alf
Ldtke, The History of Everyday Life (Princeton, 1995). Kristin Ross explains bricolage as the
wrenching of everyday objects from their habitual context to be used in a radically different way, or
using the elements or terrain of the dominant social order to ones own ends, for a transformed
purpose. Kristin Ross, Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space Yale French Studies, No.
73, Everyday Life (1987), 104-120, quotes pp. 110 and 116.
48 In so doing, it approaches the theoretical projects of those social thinkers who try to reconcile structure
and agency in a more general theory. I'm thinking of structuration, from Anthony Giddens, The
Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. (University of California, 1984), and
William Sewell's A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American
Journal of Sociology, Volume 98, Number 1 (Jul., 1992), 1-29. Pierre Bourdieu tried to do something
similar with the concept of habitus in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, 1977).

24
imprint of those who consume them (the user), as the handle of a tool wears with age.
Scholars in ANT argue the actor is indeterminate, that the capabilities of people and
things depend on the people and things they interact with (I hit differently with a fist than
I do with a hammer). In Paris, hygienists and reformers knew this, designing improved
housing stock in hopes of making the working classes more comfortable, more
productive, more docile and healthier, less socially and biologically threatening. Cleaner
apartments would make cleaner workers. Thus artifacts like working-class apartments act
on a local, everyday level like what social scientists call structuresthey both enable
and constrain action, pushing it into patterns; they act back on their users and designers
(so the hand holding the hammer is calloused as the handle is worn). Artifacts show the
imprint of design and use, while agents show the influence of the artifacts around them.
Just like social and cultural practice, technology is shaped and shaping.
For my study of urban infrastructures, this means that Graham and Marvin's
complex and dynamic sociotechnical process creates both empowering and structuring
effects on city dwellers. In order to function, technical systems need the right inputs of
human work and the cooperation of nature. This leads city dwellers to seek new ways to
control people, technologies and nature. Urban governance becomes entangled with the
management of these heterogeneous networks or complex systems, and urban citizenship
entails using them. For everyone in Paris, using these systems on a day to day basis
required knowledge about what they would do given certain human and natural inputs
(which omnibus stations gave out transfers, which way was the exit in case of fire, which
taps distributed which kind of water, and how were humans and horses vulnerable to
electric shock in different ways?).

25
Madeleine Akrich coined the term scripts to refer to this user knowledge. She
wrote: like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the
actors and the space in which they are supposed to act. 49 To continue the theatrical
metaphor, scripts provide users with information about the action, characters and set of a
sociotechnical scenario. She argued that in order to make heterogeneous networks
function, designers not only create devices, but also write scripts for who should use them
and how, when and where they should be used. Technical scripts thus describe a normal
or routine use and user for technologies, providing cues about what to expect. Whereas
Akrich suggests that only technologys designers write scripts, I follow Michel de
Certeau in thinking that users write scripts, too. 50 The totality of user and designer scripts
forms a thin tissue of information, a user manual for the networked city, which is
constantly being re-scripted by both designers and users who want to control and use
technologies in myriad ways. When designs and uses become durably scripted,
sociotechnical routines can emerge, patterns of practice which become everyday. There is
no clearer example than the Paris expression Mtro-Boulot-Dodo (Mtro, Work, Sleep),
which puts the Mtro at the center of the daily grind. Scrips, then, have divergent
potentials: on the one hand, where users have diverse ideas about how technologies
should work, scripts become increasingly contested; on the other hand, where scripting
becomes routine, sociotechnical practice can become deeply interwoven with everyday
life. Along with Akrich and de Certeaus language of scripts, I use Wiebe Bijker's
49 Akrich, The De-Scription of Technical Objects, p. 208.
50 Michael de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Ch. 7 Walking in the City and Ch. 9, Spatial
Stories, pp. 91-111 and 115-131. These sections of de Certeaus book make clear that he thinks scripts
are written about many things other than technologies. Key for his analysis and for mine, he follows
Lefebvre in arguing that space is a social product, and his analysis of spatial scripts foregrounds the
way that users write these spatial scripts. This opens another important vein of influence on my work,
the critical geography of scholars influenced by Lefebvres post-Marxist and para-situationist
approach to space such as David Harvey and Edward Soja, Roger Gould and Kristin Ross.

26
notion of interpretive flexibility to bring out contest over scripts, and Henri Lefebvre's
notion of everyday life coalescing around rhythms and routines to analyze stabilizing
scripts. 51
Pariss networked infrastructures were rapidly transformed between 1870 and
1914, producing new users, operating in a context where scripts were still unwritten.
Bernhard Rieger has theorized a problem of knowledge or knowledge gap between
lay and expert understandings of technology in the Second Industrial Revolution, but this
implies that designers were relatively sure and confident of technical scripting, and that
users contested these scripts with their uncertainty. My research, however, reveals that
Parisians of all kindsusers and engineers alikestruggled to write scripts for the city's
new infrastructures in this era. Both designs and uses were not fully scripted. Hence to
study how these scripts were written, as Akrich put it, we have to go back and forth
continually between the designer and the user. 52 As I do this, we will see that
interpretive flexibility and contest over scripts were much more prevalent in this period
of technological innovation than were durable scripts coalescing around stabilized
routines. The city's new networked infrastructures destabilized old scripts and routines,
and often made forming new ones difficult. Both Akrich and Rieger analyze the scripting
process in terms of designers and users, but Akrich privileges designers and technology
51 Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT,
1997, 1999); Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and
Gerald Moore (Continuum, 2004). Some historians of technology make this sort of durable scripting the
hallmark of technological function, see Mikael Hrd and Thomas J. Misa, eds. Urban Machinery:
Inside Modern European Cities (MIT, 2008), Introduction, p. 12: To function, technologies have to be
domesticated into routines of daily life, incorporated into existing institutional arrangements, and
assimilated into prevailing cognitive and linguistic structures....In short, actors must appropriate them.
More on this appropriation process can be found in Mikael Hrd and Andrew Jamison, eds. The
Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 (MIT, 1998).
52 Akrich, The De-Scription of Technical Objects, p. 208-9. Akrich and I pursue this same task
differently, and for slightly different reasons. For her, technologies are scripted by designers, and we
must shuttle back and forth between designers and users to de-script them. For me, scripts are
constantly written and re-written by both designers and users.

27
over users and practice, while Rieger privileges the opposite. Building on these two
approaches, I try to historicize technology and practice as co-constructed by balancing
designer and user perspectives.

The Way Ahead

My first chapter confronts a rupture that often marks the onset of Pariss
modernity: Haussmann's ambitious urban renovations of 1853 to 1870. He first attempted
equipping Paris with comprehensive networked infrastructures, but this project remained
incomplete during his term in office and his lifetime. Strange, then, that both academic
and popular memory remember him for much more. 53 Inspired by recent Paris urban
studies that challenge Haussmann's hegemony, originality and modernity in various
ways 54 , I argue that much of what we call Haussmannization actually happened after
he left office, in the Third Republic. In order to understand the ongoing urban renovations
of 1870 to 1914, we need to better understand Haussmanns legacy for the Third
Republic.

In addition to his staff and a host of unfinished projects, Haussmann also

left behind three main legacies in 1870. First were new forms of government, through
which the state took responsibility for public works. This politicized networked
infrastructure and associated it with urban modernity. Second were new spatial forms
53 They remember him for having completely made over the city, having brought modernity to Paris, or
even inventing modern city planning itself.
54 (1) David Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (University of
Chicago, 1996); (2) La Modernit avant Haussmann: Formes de l'espace urbaine Paris 1801-1853,
ed. Karen Bowie (Editions Recherches, 2001); (3) David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity
(Routledge, 2003); (4) Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris Before Haussmann (Johns Hopkins, 2004);
(5) Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London
(California, 1999); (6) Sharon Marcus. Haussmannization as Anti-Modernity: The Apartment House in
Parisian Urban Discourse, 1850-1880. Journal of Urban History 27/6 (Sept., 2001), 723-745. These
studies dispute Haussmann's claim to rupture by showing his debt to and continuity with the urban crisis
of 1815-1848. Without this crisis, all of his urban renovation would have been unnecessary. These
studies rethink Haussmann's modernity by redefining what he started in Paris. My goal is to examine
Haussmann's relationship with the period after 1870, to redefine what he finished.

28
the iconic boulevards and a city wired for globalization, operating on an unprecedented
scale. Finally, Haussmann helped normalize a cultural framework of Paris as a sick city,
by referring to his city planning as surgery. 55 By using urban renovation to treat the
ailing social body, he connected public works and public health. This perspective flagged
traffic and hygiene as key urban problems, and remained quite popular in Third Republic
Paris, as I show in a brief intellectual history of the city as social body. In dealing with
these three legacies, public works in the Third Republic both built on Haussmannization
and strove to transcend it.
Chapters 2 and 3 form Part 1 of the dissertation, concerning traffic. In Chapter 2 I
use Bijkers concept of interpretive flexibility to examine the debate on Paris's
metropolitan railway from 1872 to 1895. My aim here is a fuller picture of how designers
write technical scripts. Examining Mtro plans and public debate from architects,
engineers, politicians, journalists and intellectuals, I call this period the dream life of the
Mtropolitain, in which the imaginary Mtro-to-be was called to do all sorts of different
things. 56 Revising the standard view of the Mtro's prehistorywhich holds that the
Mtro was debated for so long because of an administrative stand-off between the
municipal and national governments for control of the new networkI argue that there
were more parties to the debate than these two levels of governments, and more issues at
stake than simply which level of government would win control. 57 Parisians disagreed

55 Haussmann took up the nineteenth century's popular idea of the city as a living organism, whose life
consisted of circulation the flow of things like traffic, resources, capital and information. For a classic
analysis of this biological construction of Paris as a sick city, see Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes
and Dangerous Classes (Princeton, 1973), pp. 11-23.
56 The Mtro idea sparked prismatic technological fantasizing, which asked the railway to articulate the
cultural meanings of the underground, to define safe and unsafe, to guide different visions of city
planning, to solve the housing problem, and to show Parisians the meaning of politically and culturally
charged words like public works, general interest and Haussmannization.
57 One important force in this debate was the Compagnie Gnrale des Omnibus (CGO), whose

29
about where rails should go, what system of traction should be used, who the Mtro
should serve, how the Mtro should be funded, regulated and operated, and what the
Mtro's many meanings might be. The Mtro became a vehicle for debating oppositions
like national vs. local, public vs. private, politics vs. engineering, and liberalism vs.
socialism. Ultimately, I argue, dreaming the Mtro concerned much more than simply a
railway, giving Parisians a way to debate Haussmannization, networked infrastructure,
urban governance and modernity. 58
Chapter 3 examines user experiences of transportation networks during the
dynamic and difficult years from 1895 to 1914. Sparked by electrification, locomotion
now became available to Pariss mass public for the first time. This created new
communities of construction workers, operators and passengers who often saw these
networks in less certain and less positive terms than designers did. Faced with Mtro
construction, tramway electrification, the birth of mass transit, highly visible
transportation accidents and growing labor militancy, Parisians began to write scripts for
these new transportation technologies. So the user experiences of 1895-1914 contrast
significantly with the design dreams of 1872-1895.
Electrical technology gave rise to divergent scripts. While it was powerful and
bright, displayed as futuristic and progressive at the eras Universal Expositions, it was
also dangerous. New means of transportation increased both mobility and risk for
Haussmann-era contract gave it a monopoly on public transportation in Paris that didn't expire until
1910. The CGO often used its monopoly to try and block development of new railways, a narrative
which becomes an important thread running from Chapter 2 to Chapter 3. For versions of the standard
view, see Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change and Pike, Subterranean Cities.
58 Throughout this whole debate, I stress the under-appreciated tramway networks, a testing ground for
learning about light rail. While the Mtro helped Parisians intellectualize and fantasize about the new
phenomenon of urban railways, the tramways were a field of practical experiment in which to test new
ideas of urban rail. Hence the tramways were in a constant crisis, involving technical experiment,
financial failure and ongoing organizational overhaul.

30
passengers. Hence designer scripts that identified new technologies with progress and
civilization vied with user scripts that suggested their barbarity. A series of tramway and
Mtro accidents from 1900 to 1903 taught users the darker side of infrastructural
modernization, the price of progress. It also taught designers that electrical engineering
and passenger safety had become tasks of governance. To oversee functional public
transport networks, the local government had to be technically competent, publicly
oriented, and concerned for public safety. Designers could not re-script these
technologies without considering the users point of view.
The question of whether private companies could be trusted to provide public
services defined the infrastructural politics of the era. Between 1905 and 1910 a wave of
construction worker strikes and public debate about how construction sites had
compromised the city flagged the issue of delinquent contractors. The public blamed
government contractors for wasting public money, doing shoddy work, and endangering
the public (both workers and riders), and blamed the government for not better choosing
contractors and enforcing its contracts. Here again a language of civilization and
barbarism emerged. As with Haussmann's public works, issues of financial responsibility
and managing the relationship between the public and private sectors flared up, as
Parisians debated whether the new tramways and Mtro were achieving the social and
technological progress that networked infrastructures were supposed to deliver. This
contention shows that a language of urban and infrastructural crisis emerged in Paris long
before the catastrophic flood of 1910 and the First World War. The city battered in 1910
and 1914 was already wounded. Scripts about the fragility of modernity were already
being written.

31
Chapters 4 and 5 form Part 2 of the dissertation, concerning hygiene. Continuing
the theme of infrastructural crisis, Chapter 4 deals with what I call opening the city, the
diverse strategies and fantasies for dealing with Paris's problems with housing, hygiene
and urban density. Pariss built environment was an especially strained infrastructure
throughout the 19th century, but the authorities never took responsibility for providing it
(it never became public works). The chapters first section deals with housing
shortages, housing reform and housing activism, showing that built space was a hotly
contested resource and political issue. I illustrate this further through reading of local
sources from Montmartre. While the avant-gardists around the Chat Noir cabaret
parodied the social-spatial relations and scripts of the Paris lodging house and fantasized
about liberating tenants, their anarchist-activist colleagues Pouget, Pennelier and Cochon
pursued clandestine move-outs, rent strikes and community organizing, building a
movement for tenants' rights and collective action.
The chapter then moves on to discuss Parisian desires for more light, air, open
space and green space. Building on the work of well-known journalist and critic Jules
Claretie, I show the gap between the ideal city and the lived city, and the multiform
practices of escaping the city which emerged to vent the pressures of urban life. 59
Parisians contrasted city life with the cleaner, greener spaces of the suburbs, provinces
and colonies, dreaming of more room to move and breathe. In 1896, utopian August
Fabre argued that skyscrapers could become cooperatively-owned worker housing
blocks, solving both the housing problem and the citys shortage of light and air. 60

59 Parisians physically fled the city through cycling, tourism and summer and weekend trips; they
imaginatively left the city through popular novels and avant-garde painting.
60 He argued that recent technological advances in garbage collection, heating, fire prevention and
elevators could clean up and moralize working class life, increase health and hygiene, access to quality

32
Inspired by the booming tuberculosis prevention movement, the Paris authorities
increasingly turned to slum clearance after 1894. While hygienists dreamed of
disencumbering and cleaning up public streets and sidewalks, hotel rooms and even
pieces of furniture, the local government aggressively medicalized urban space. By the
early 1900s, the authorities identified six neighborhoods in which tuberculosis was
particularly prevalent, marking them as lots insalubres (unclean blocks), and slating
them for demolition. 61 Considered along with other large-scale urban plans of the era 62 ,
this slum clearance campaign shows that Parisian awareness of urban crisis was scaling
up. Urbanism, or modern city planning, emerged in Paris from the growing need to
address the citys complex urban problems in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary way. 63
In short, urbanism was born of the multiform practices of opening the city, a fitting end
to four decades of struggle over the citys increasingly fragile built environment.
Chapter 5 revolves around the theme of nature's role in heterogeneous networks,
examining water in Paris from three angles. First, I consider water as a natural resource
and human need, examining Paris's overburdened water supply. Paris suffered numerous
water shortages between 1880 and 1911, almost always during summer heat. To
distribute enough water, the Water Service contended not only with drought and gravity,
but also with a press and public clamoring for more water, arguing that it was a need or a
housing, and access to fresh light and air. For Fabre, the solution to Paris's problems with housing,
hygiene and density was to harness the power of modern industry, bending its technological
innovation and expanding scale to new purposes.
61 This was the most proactive slum clearance plan since Haussmann, but authorities could not recruit the
money for expropriations, and the project stalled, not to be picked up again until the 1920s.
62 Here I have in mind campaigns for low-cost housing, public housing, tuberculosis prevention,
redevelopment of the fortifications, redevelopment of the lots insalubres, expansion of park space and
extension of the city limits. All of these new, large-scale projects for repairing Paris's nagging social
and spatial problems were hatched between the 1890s and the 1910s, interrupted by the First World
War, and not realized until the 1920s. Meanwhile, long-standing dreams of opening the city were
disappointed.
63 Urbanism sought to integrate diverse concerns: traffic flow, public health, architectural aesthetics,
social peace, public works funding, etc.

33
right and that it was the government's responsibility to provide it. Haussmann first
enclosed Pariss water supply, transforming it from a natural resource into what JeanPierre Goubert called an industrial product. So Parisians became increasingly
dependent on the governmentand on an industrial distribution networkfor this basic
resource. The 1906 example of shantytown dwellers on the city's periphery shows that
finding open water off the grid was increasingly difficult in these years.
Second, I consider water as a waste-disposal technology, connecting the story of
Paris's sewer development with the debate on Paris's ecological impact on the Seine. In
this era, Parisians developed an increasing awareness of humanity's power to manipulate
nature, for both good and bad: humans could both pollute and purify water. During
summer water shortages, there was often not enough water to flush the sewers,
contributing to the Great Stinks of 1880, 1895 and 1911. 64 As Paris's ecological
footprint expanded, the city came into conflict with its suburbs, other cities, other
provinces, the Atlantic, and ultimately Switzerland. Paris's growing appetite for water
and growing production of wastewater pushed the city's ecological impact out into a
widening field in this era.
Finally, I consider water as a force of nature, which always remains envirotechnical, just outside of human control, examining the Seine floods of 1876, 1883 and
1910. In 1910, floodwaters brought such dramatic physical damage and infrastructural
collapse that Parisians saw the fragility of their city and its networked infrastructures.
Floodwaters shut down or compromised all of the networks I discuss throughout this
study: buildings, tramways, sewers, the Mtro and the water supply. Because electricity,

64 David Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs
(Johns Hopkins, 2006), p. 237.

34
gas, fresh water and compressed air lines were bundled in Paris's sewers, they were
knocked out as the sewer system flooded. The city not only flooded laterally via the
Seine, but also from underneath, as rising groundwater infiltrated catacombs and quarries,
sewers and train tunnels.
The public took note of this, one handbill arguing The city of Paris brought you
the flood with its sewers. The fragility of these networked infrastructures, and the
inability of the city's engineers to master the forces of nature, called into question
narratives of progress through networking that Parisians had heard since Haussmann. The
press exploded, talking about the powerlessness of the engineers and the 1870 of
engineers, seeing the flood as yet another indictment of the authorities' mismanagement
of the city. As Parisians had learned since the 1890s from tramway and Mtro accidents,
delinquent contractors, and the housing and water shortages, networked infrastructures
could not only improve life in the city (reduce disease, improve standards of living, etc.)
but also bring new dangers, dependencies and fragilities. The flood showed Parisians the
heterogeneity of their networked city, teaching that humans, technologies and natural
forces had to be properly aligned to make the city function. Disruptions of social routine,
technological function or ecological conditions could shut down the city's daily life. The
flood showed Parisians the fragility of their urban modernity.

35

Chapter 1: Paris, Modernity and Haussmann

Public Works in Paris after Haussmann

Late one summer afternoon in 2005 I left the Paris Municipal Archives at the
Porte des Lilas where I was doing dissertation research and boarded the number 61 bus
bound for a friend's apartment on the boulevard de Mnilmontant. Sitting behind me were
a pair of middle-aged English women, tourists. My ears perked up at the sound of
English, and as we were passing the place Gambetta, whose most noticeable feature is the
stark, geometric 1992 fountain at its center, one of them sighed and said, oh, don't you
just love Haussmann! I chuckled to myself at the ridiculous anachronism of her
statement: wasn't this high-modernist fountain obvious evidence that the square had been
renovated more recently than Haussmann's term, 1853-1870? Giving in to a mainstay of
Paris localism, I thought to myself stupid tourists.
But I was wrong about them, and there was something historically important
behind my fit of historical snobbery. It served as a reminder that Baron Haussmann still
dominates historical memory of infrastructure in Paris, on both an academic and on a
popular level. 1 His ambitious program of public works is all too often credited with
having more-or-less completely made over Paris in the space of 17 years. The gross
shape of the city's street plan, the most recognizable classic architectural forms of the
1 This is especially true in mid-level stores of knowledge like guidebooks, websites, historical surveys
and encyclopedias. For example, see Martin Filler, Architecture View; Baron Haussmann, Urban
Designer Par Excellence New York Times, March 24, 1991.

36
Paris apartment house, the city's first comprehensive sewer system, first water supply
system, largest parks, and long-standing reputation as a capital of modernity or capital
of the world, even the origins of modern city planning (or urbanism) itselfalthough it
is a historical exaggeration, all of these are commonly credited to Haussmann. At the
very least, his is the most famous name in Paris public works; at most, he is credited with
making Paris what it is today, as if no one else intervened much in the fin de sicle or the
20th century.
The most complete source for reconstructing Haussmann's career is his memoirs,
which are consistently self-aggrandizing. His memory is larger than life because he
described himself that way, and historians have been careless enough to believe him,
mistaking his arrogance for fact. 2 Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a grand homme of
urbanism like LeCorbusier polishing your reputation, either. 3 But when narratives of
Paris history cast Haussmann as protagonist or hero, Haussmannization is cast as a
radical departure from the past, a dramatic rupture which rocketed Paris into modernity.
As one scholar put it, In a mere fifteen years the physiognomy of that city underwent a
complete transformation, a 'regularisation' (Haussmann) that is unique in European
history. 4
Such rupture talk is always suspicious, not only because it is easy for historians
to see that claims of rupture hide profound continuities, but also because rupture talk is
itself a subtle way of leveraging social power, of justifying human projects as forward

2 David Jordan, Transforming Paris (Chicago, 1995): Prologue, pp. 1-12. David Harvey said it well:
Haussmann's Mmoires, upon which most accounts have hitherto relied, are full of dissimulation.
Paris, Capital of Modernity, p. 9.
3 Le Corbusier. The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1929), trans. Frederick Etchells (Dover, 1987),
p. 257 for example.
4 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, p. 118.

37
thinking in various ways (e.g. as innovative, progressive, liberating or revolutionary), and
of influencing the way that events are understood and remembered. 5 Rupture talk applies
the politics of knowledge to the very stuff of historycontinuity, change and memory.
Rupture talk is also central to any discourse of modernity, modernity necessarily being
defined by a rupture with the past or tradition. This in turn implies that any claim to
modernity is implicated in the politics of history and knowledge. Claims to modernity
shift the chronological frame in ways that have deep political and epistemological
consequences.
In Paris, Haussmannization is often identified as the rupture that brought about the
city's modernity. The larger than life myth of Haussmann is thus crucial to upholding
myths of modernity in Paris. On this terrain the historian must tread carefully. As David
Harvey has recently argued, Haussmann badly needed his own myth of rupture, in order
to justify his creative destruction of old Paris as the best way to solve the urban crisis of
the 1830s and 1840s, to provide the Second Empire with a founding myth (the tag line
would have been something like rising from the ashes of 1848), and to co-opt or
dismiss various alternatives for thinking about the city that emerged in these same years. 6
Harvey's argument shows us how much our image of Haussmann, as maker of the great
rupture that brought modernity to Paris, is a product of Haussmann's own memorymaintenance, propaganda, and self-inflation. Being a modernist, a self-conscious
modernizer, Haussmann tended to whiggishly represent his own approach as progressive.

The term rupture talk is Gabriel Hecht's. See: (1) "Globalization meets Frankenstein? Reflections on
Terrorism and Technopolitics in the Nuclear Age." History and Technology, vol. 19, no. 1, 2003. (2)
"Rupture-talk in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial Power in Africa," Social Studies of Science
Vol. 32, Nos. 5-6 (October -December 2002), special issue on "Postcolonial Technoscience," pp. 691728.
6 Paris, Capital of Modernity, pp. 8-13.

38
Recent research in urban history like Harvey's has begun to chip away at
Haussmann's hegemony, arguing more generally that life in the city was modern before
his intervention (Karen Bowie and David Harvey), that piecemeal attempts at urban
renewal were made under his predecessor Rambuteau (1833-1848), and that his brand of
city planning was not as groundbreaking as it is commonly remembered to have been,
drawing heavily on Parisian ideas of urban renovation reaching back as far as Voltaire
(David Jordan and Nicholas Papayanis). 7 These approaches argue for Haussmann's
continuity with and debt to the period of the July Monarchy, showing that Haussmann did
not bring modernity to Paris, but instead responded to a modernity that had already
arrived between 1815 and 1848, mostly in the form of urbanizationa crushing flood of
immigrants, filling the city to bursting, unleashing overcrowding, infrastructural collapse,
epidemic disease, ecological damage, social unrest, even revolution. Paris was caught in
the well-known feedback loop between industrialization and urbanization which overtook
Europe in the 19th century. 8 It became a social whirlpool, exerting a centripetal force on
the rest of France, attracting more and more capital, goods, labor, migrants, and
information.
The urban crisis of the early-mid nineteenth century is already a familiar topic for
historians, unforgettably portrayed in Louis Chevalier's classic Classes Laboureuses,
Classes Dangereuses (1958), and captured in the English word Dickensian. Its most basic

7 (1) David Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (University of
Chicago, 1996); (2) La Modernit avant Haussmann: Formes de l'espace urbaine Paris 1801-1853,
ed. Karen Bowie (Editions Recherches, 2001); (3) David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity
(Routledge, 2003); (4) Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris Before Haussmann (Johns Hopkins, 2004).
8 On this historical-geographical phenomenon, see (1) David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus:
Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
(Cambridge, 1969), p. 51; (2) Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 and The Age of
Capital 1848-1875 (Vintage, 1996).

39
geographical or ecological condition was massive population growth in limited areas,
plunging European cities into an experiment in population density with dire
consequences. 9 From 1800 to 1850, Paris was the largest city on the European continent.
Only London was larger, but Paris was twice as dense. 10 In these years, the population
inhabiting the city's 3,402 hectares (13.12 sq. miles) doubled, going from 547,000 to
around 1.1 million. Average population density doubled, too, from about 42,000
inhabitants per square mile to about 84,000. 11 Far from representing a healthy, vibrant
growth, this population explosion was experienced in Paris as acute urban crisis, the
shock of modernity. Urban historian Bernard Marchand called his chapter on the boom of
1800-1850 Paris grandit trop vite: Paris grows [or 'grows up'] too fast. 12 While the
suburban areas around Paris expanded to make more room for new inhabitants, Paris
folded painfully in on itself, packing more and more people into the city limits, resulting
in what David Jordan has vividly described as a congested, chaotic, incoherent jumble.
In the center of Paris around Les Halles, contemporaries counted around 1,000
inhabitants per hectare (259,000 per square mile), leaving only 8 square meters of living
space per inhabitant. 13
The effect on the built environment was devastating. As Jordan put it, The old

9 The mega-capitals of Berlin, London and Paris all quadrupled in size between 1800 and 1900. The same
pattern holds for other major citiesAmsterdam, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Cologne,
Copenhagen, Dresden, Edinburgh, Genoa, Glasgow, Helsinki, Kiev, Krakow, Leningrad, Milan,
Moscow, Munich, Oslo, Vienna, and Warsawall of which were at least 4 times as populous in 1800
as they had been in 1900. Zurich's population expanded almost ten times. See B.R. Mitchell's European
Historical Statistics 1750-1970. New York: Columbia, 1978, pp. 12-15.
10 Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemicand How it
Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Riverhead, 2006), p. 9.
11 Bernard Marchand, Paris, Histoire d'une ville (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), p. 41, in general, see pp.
9-68. It is important to note that the same did not happen in the suburban areas outside Paris's walls.
Here the population exploded as well, many figures suggest multiplying by as much as four times, but
was able to spread out over a larger land area.
12 Marchand, p. 9.
13 Jordan, Life and Labors, 93.

40
center of Paris absorbed a good deal of this new population by dividing and subdividing
the existing housing until the smallest humanly inhabitable space, the garnis, or furnished
room, was created.... 14 In addition to subdividing existing housing stock, buildings were
expanded in the only directions they could be: either upward, awkwardly stacking extra
stories, attics and dormers, or by filling courtyards and any other remaining open space
between and around buildings with extra rooms. The peculiar crowded, twisted
geography of built space that resulted can still be seen today in certain central districts of
Paris, especially in the third, fourth and tenth districts. Here buildings appear to wind
around each other, stack on top of one another, and interlock in messy ways, leaving little
courtyard space for each building, but plenty of dead-end alleys and pedestrian-only
streets, often covered or crossed by parts of buildings (what the French call cits,
impasses or passages).
Finding a place to live in this crowded space was not the only problem Parisians
faced. The quality of housing was also a major issue. Many structures were old, rotting,
sagging. 15 Access to sunlight and fresh air was minimal on the lower floors of buildings.
Then there was traffic, which often moved slowly through the city's narrow, winding
streets. Direct routes were few and far between, and bottlenecks could form easily. But
the streets carried more than traffic. For centuries, Parisians had been dumping
household, commercial and industrial waste in the street, to be picked over by rag pickers
(chiffoniers) and recycled, to be collected and sold to farmers around Paris as fertilizer, or

14 Ibid., 96.
15 Housing inspections, by the government organs like the Commission on Insalubrious Housing or the
Cholera Commissions of the 1830s, often cited the humidity of buildings as a problem for structural
integrity and health and safety. See Andrew Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the
Social Question in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1999), pp. 21, 54.

to be pushed around with water and brooms.

16

41
Whatever was left was, in theory, washed

by the rain into the soil or into the river. By today's standards this waste disposal system
was inefficient, and ceased to work as soon as the population of Paris reached a certain
density. There was simply too much waste to process, and so smaller streets grew thick
with stinking sludge (boue). Basic infrastructures were decidedly overtaxed. As Jordan
described the effects of this rapid increase in population density,
All the basic urban services collapsed under this burden. Water, sewers, hospitals,
police, transportation, education, commercenothing functioned adequately.
Pedestrians and carts could no longer use the same space. Complaints as well as
demands and schemes for improvement issues from every quarter. Then came the
ghastly cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849...
...not to mention the revolutions of 1830 and 1848! 17
This scenery of urban crisis was the backdrop for the emergence of the social
question, a moment of intellectual efflorescence, public debate, and social critique, a
mood of reformism and utopian thinking in the 1840s. 18 The topic of this wide-ranging

16 This also included a small amount of whatever human waste didn't make it into the cesspit (not every
house in Paris had a cesspit), and a larger amount of horse manure, a product of the thriving taxi and
bus industry.
17 Jordan, Life and Labors, p. 96. Michael Wagenaar has spoken of an urban crisis in Paris. Due mainly
to overpopulation, the built environment and infrastructure were increasingly unable to meet modern
demands, and the authorities were confronted with the alarming state of public health, physical decay,
congestion, and increased pollution. See Conquest of the Center or Flight to the Suburbs? Divergent
Metropolitan Strategies in Europe, 1850-1914. Journal of Urban History, vol. 19, no. 1, November
1992, pp. 61-2.
18 Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, p. 71-73; Papayanis, Planning Paris Before Haussmann, pp. 62128. Cultural and intellectual histories have highlighted a boom in works of social commentary ranging
from the novels of Balzac and Hugo to communist and anarchist critiques (the most famous voices here
being Blanqui and Proudhon), and a wide variety of socialismsFourier and Saint-Simon, Louis
Blanc's The Organization of Work (1840), as well as well-known works by Flora Tristan and Etienne
Cabet. There were also liberal works like Villerm's study of working conditions in the textile industry,
or Frgier's conservative On the Dangerous Classes of the Population in Large Cities and the Means to
Make Them Better (1840). For more on Frgier, see Andrew Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease,
Government, and the Social Question in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1999), pp. 41-45.
This explosion of individual works was made possible by a a broad foundation of public debate and
intellectual social networks like the architects and engineers grouped around Cesar Daly's Revue
gnrale de l'architecture et des travaux publics. For more on Daly and his Revue, see (1) Sharon
Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (California, 1999),
pp. 159-165, and (2) Harvey, Capital of Modernity, pp. 80-85. Another such community of experts were

42
debate, typically called the social question, was actually many questionsquestions
about poverty and inequality, the family, hygiene, alcoholism, working conditions,
housing, spatial organization, industry, waste-disposal practices, public works, disease
control, prostitution, crime, liberalism and statism, reform and revolution, etc. It cannot
be stressed enough how central the city was in shaping this debate. Urbanization was a
recent and difficult phenomenon. Looking down from their offices, governors saw a city
growing in complexity, risk and danger by the day, a city that was hard to monitor, hard
to control, hard to keep clean, healthy, safe, orderly and productive. The top of the social
pyramid was awash in fear of the working classes as agents of moral decay, epidemic
contagion, physical degeneration, social unrest and revolution. Meanwhile at the bottom
were dangerous work and cramped quarters, filth, sickness, and competition with
thousands of neighbors while the cost of living rose. Above all, existing historical
research is unequivocal on this point: it was clear to everyonepress, elite and public
alikethat the city just wasn't working properly. In this age of rapid urbanization,
cholera epidemics, recurring revolutions, and the social question, then, it was ultimately
the city itself that came into focus as a topic of debate.
By tying Haussmann's urbanism closely to this context of urban crisis and debate
in the 1840s, recent historical research like that of Bowie, Harvey, Jordan, Marchand and
Papayanis has begun to bring Haussmann's posterity down to size. They demonstrate that
Haussmann reacted to Paris's modernity rather than creating it. Sharon Marcus has
recently argued that Haussmannization can be interpreted as a program of antimodernity, a series of attempts to attenuate or block the citys modernization,
the hygienists grouped around Parent-Duchtelet and the Annales d'hygine publique et de mdecine
lgale. For More on Parent-Duchtelet and his Annales, see Ann La Berge, Mission and Method: the
early nineteenth-century French public health movement (Cambridge, 1992).

43
specifically those aspects of modernity that Second Empire authorities found most
threatening: the intensification of uncontrolled, 'promiscuous' social intercourse,
epidemic contagion and political ferment in public spaces like the street, the common
parts of apartment buildings, meeting halls, cabarets, brothels, etc. 19 But we continue to
make classic historical errorsmixing up causes and effects, confusing the conditions
that created Haussmann for the conditions Haussmann created, or confusing Haussmann's
ideals with his results.
With the exception of Marcus's, these recent studies have one major bias: their
perspective on history looks back, drawing continuities between Haussmann's era and the
July Monarchy preceding it. This casts urbanism as a response to urbanization (like
Marshall Berman's account of modernism and modernity). In attaching the human
projects of urbanism to the more 'objective' process of urbanization, it guards against
enlightenment fantasies of humanity's total control of self and environment. 20 This sort of
enlightenment perspective makes human beings seem the masters of modernity, and
makes modernity seem fully legible (James Scott), makes it seem totalized,
rationalized, complete, planned, even intentionalthat is, makes it seem to be a human
project. With urban geographers like David Harvey and Matthew Gandy, I see forms of
modernism like Haussmann's city planning as urgent, risky, improvised, and incomplete
attempts to deal with modernization, attempted solutions to the problem of rapid

19 Sharon Marcus. Haussmannization as Anti-Modernity: The Apartment House in Parisian Urban

Discourse, 1850-1880. Journal of Urban History 27/6 (Sept., 2001), 723-745.
20 See: (1) Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Penguin,
1988); (2) Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming
(Continuum: 1997), especially Chapter 1, The Concept of Enlightenment, pp. 3-42; (3) James C.
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale,
1998).

44
population growth.

21

Harvey contests the idea that modernity could have come to Paris

all at once, insisting, as he has very forcefully throughout his career, that modernization
has always meant uneven development.
These recent urban histories revise our understanding of what Haussmann started,
challenging the claim that Haussmann's arrival in office, or the inception of his public
works, constituted a major historical break. But was there a break in history when
Haussmann left office in 1870? We must also look into the continuities between
Haussmannization and the Third Republic, as scholars like Marcus, Jones and Gandy do,
to discover what he finished. That is my purpose here. Haussmann's inflated historical
memory makes his urban projects seem holistic, complete, or totalized. This in turn has
encouraged scholars to ignore the massive amount of public works that happened under
the Third Republic, because the city appears to have been fully made over between 1853
and 1870.
Haussmann's plans did not even cover the whole city on paper. True, he mapped
the entire city, but his well-known vision of the city as a unified whole (a living
organism) had an awful lot of blind spots. Overall, more work was done in the city's
center than in the periphery, more was done on the Right Bank than on the Left, and more
work was done in the fashionable and growing bourgeois neighborhoods on the west side
of the city than in the working-class east. 22 Hausmmann's work also notably ignored
major hilltops around the city like Montmartre, Belleville and the Butte aux Cailles, also
working class areas. The class analysis of Haussmann's works is already very well
established. The number of people since Karl Marx who have used the term bourgeois
21 Gandy, p. 29.
22 See Jones, Jordan, and Harvey, as well as Bernard Marchand, Paris, Histoire d'une ville (Editions du
Seuil, 1993), p. 88.

45
to describe Haussmannization is so huge that the point barely needs mentioning.
The development of plumbing, both fresh water and waste water, is a clear
example. Piping proceeded much more quickly on the north-west side of the city, where,
conveniently, wealthy landlords could also pay to upgrade the smaller capillaries of the
pipe network, those that were considered parts of privately-owned buildings. As late as
1888, there were only 697 buildings in the city equipped with direct-to-sewer drainage
for toilets, while in 1895, there were 7,291. 23 This was still less than 10% of residential
buildings in Paris (which already numbered almost 72,000 in 1876). 24 In these same
years the number of subscriptions to city fresh water service grew from 56,920 to
69,249. 25 In 1891, when the municipal government discovered that residents in the
wealthiest districts of the city (the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 9th) consumed an average of 55-60
liters of water provided by the city per day, while people on the east side were consuming
14-19 liters, they made subscription to the city water service a legal requirement of
property ownership. 26 Connecting toilets to the city waste water system was made
obligatory three years later, in 1894. Piping started to become more comprehensive only
because the authorities of the Third Republic found the resolve to put pressure on
property owners in this way, while Haussmann did not. 27

23 Ville de Paris, Direction des Eaux. tude & Programme pour le complment de l'alimentation de Paris
en eaux de source et de rivire, rapport de l'inspecteur gnral (Humblot). 1896, p. 15.
24 Commission des Logements Insalubres, Rapport General sur les travaux de la Commission pendant les
annes 1870-1876 (Charles de Mourgues Freres, 1878), pp. 18, 36 (AP VO3 63).
25 Humblot (1896).
26 Memoire from Prefect of the Seine Poubelle to the Municipal Council, Apr. 2, 1890, plus several
engineering reports on the project of making subscriptions to the Water Service obligatory. For water
use figures, see annexes. AP VO3 220.
27 David Jordan, Transforming Paris, p. 275. As geographer Matthew Gandy put it, the flow of water in
Paris did not become modern, in the sense that we would now recognize, until after the fall of the
Second Empire, with new legislative developments in the 1890s... Matthew Gandy, The Paris sewers
and the rationalization of urban space, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (1999),
pp. 23-44, quote from pp. 23-4. See also: (1) Gerard Jacquemet, Urbanisme Parisien: la bataille du
tout-a-lgout a la fin du. XIXe sicle, Revue dhistoire moderne et contemporaine 26 (Oct. 1979), pp.

46
As this glance at Paris's water system showsand recent research on the 1830s
and 40s misses thismuch of Haussmann's public works remained unfinished in 1870,
not to mention in the 1890s. In terms of money spent, neighborhoods effected, and the
scale of constructions designed, the half-century after Haussmann witnessed more public
works, more physical transformation of Paris's basic infrastructures, than he did. Colin
Jones reports that more than three times as many buildings were erected between 1878
and 1888 as between 1860 and 1869, 28 while Bernard Marchand notes, haussmannism
witnessed its finest days after 1870. 29 As contemporary American observer Albert Shaw
put it,
...the public works that have been executed in the twenty years from 1875 to 1895
have in all likelihood cost a larger sum in the aggregate than those carried out in
the twenty years following the coup d'etat of July, 1851. The Haussmann
transformations were begun when Paris had only a million people and an area of
only thirteen square miles.... But in 1875 the authorities had to provide for nearly
two million people, a number that in 1895 was fast approaching three millions.
These last two decades have witnessed transformations less pretentious and not so
widely advertised, but touching more closely and deeply the lives of the people,
and ministering more perfectly to the best demands of modern civilization.
Services of education, of cleanliness and of health, on a vast and varied scale,
have occupied the administrative machinery that was once so engrossed with
boulevards and architecture. 30
Simply put, much of what we think of as Haussmannizationeven including road
developmentactually happened under the Third Republic, between 1872 and the 1930s.
Historical memory of Haussmann is distorted because we confuse what he started with
what he finished. He started the long, uneven process of modern infrastructural
development in Paris, but he by no means finished it.
Returning to where we started the chapter, it was this set of common
505-48 and (2) Roger-Henri Guerrand, La bataille du tout-a-lgout L'Histoire, Feb. 1983, pp. 66-74.
28 Colin Jones, Paris: the Biography of a City (Viking, 2004), p. 334.
29 Marchand, Paris, p. 140. Marchand is here invoking Francois Loyer.
30 Albert Shaw. Municipal Government in Continental Europe (1895), pp. 12-13.

47
misconceptions that came to light that summer afternoon in 2005 on the number 61 bus.
The British tourist behind me had committed a different and more instructive historical
error than I originally thought. Rather than mistaking the 1992 fountain for a Haussmannera original, she and her travel buddy had mis-dated Salleron's 1875 administrative office
(mairie) for the 20th district, which turns its grand, faux-Renaissance facade toward the
square, in good Haussmanian fashion. This new mairie finished Haussmann's plan for the
square originally opened in 1862. 31 1875 is also the year that Garnier's Opera was
finished, the crowning jewel in Haussmann's plan for north-west Paris, as well as the year
that Belgrand's 1861 plan for supplying the city with spring water (via the Aqueduc de la
Vanne) was finally put into permanent service. It was an easy mistake to make, one that I
have since caught myself making in Paris. Looking at the architectural surface of Paris, it
is very difficult to distinguish 1853-1870 from 1872-1895. New styles of building only
emerged over the course of the 1890s. 32
Our common bias in favor of Haussmann distorts historical understanding in
palpable ways. It blocks our view of Louis Napoleon's very real interest in urbanism. 33 It
also makes Haussmann seem a more innovative planner than he was, drawing as he did
on popular ideas of the 1830s and 40s (see Jordan and Papayanis). It neglects that his
supposed greatest areas of innovation were in no small part the work of others: streets
(Napoleon III), parks (Alphand), sewers (Belgrand). As Alphand himself put it,

31 At the time the place was called Place Puebla, for the city in Mexico where the French lost a battle
earlier that year.
32 David Jordan made this case very forcefully in Haussmann and Hassmannization: the Legacy for
Paris French Historical Studies 27/1 (winter 2004), special issue: new perspectives on modern Paris,
pp. 87-113. Thus goes for both Art Nouveau and a harder-edged modernism of the era, prefiguring the
new objectivity of the 1920s.
33 David H. Pinkney Napoleon III's Transformation of Paris: The Origins and Development of the Idea
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (June, 1955), pp. 125-134.

48
Haussmann often took on ideas he learned from others as his own. Most importantly,
34

it ironically blocks our view of his lasting influence on public works in the Third
Republic, and thus hides conservative forces at work in the new regime. The difficulty of
dating architectural forms in the city is an outward sign of the inner principles of Paris
governance. There was deep administrative continuity between the Second Empire and
the Third Republic, in spite of intervening regime changes. Haussmann's devoted
assistants Alphand and Belgrand took over the office of Paris Works (Travaux de Paris)
after he was removed from office, and helped see many of his plans through.
I agree with recent scholarship on the early nineteenth century that there was
substantial continuity between Haussmann and his predecessors, but I also agree with
Sharon Marcus, Bernard Marchand, Matthew Gandy, and Colin Jones that there was
substantial continuity between Haussmann and his followers. Haussmann managed to set
the agenda for urbanism in Paris, and indeed in France, for more than 100 years after he
left office. 35 This may have been for several reasonsbecause of administrative
continuity in the municipal and departmental governments before and after 1870-1,
because Haussmann's vision of the city remained compelling, and was the only
comprehensive vision to date, because Haussmann aggravated the urban crisis which had
been raging in Paris since the 1830s (because he correctly identified Paris's urban
problems, but designed poor solutions), thus making more renovation necessary, or
because the spatial forms he designed were so enormous, blocky and immobile that they

34 Quoted in Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Harvard, 2002), p. 10.
35 Several articles in the winter 2004 special issue of French Historical Studies called New Perspectives
on Modern Paris made this point rather clear. See Charles Rearick, Introduction: Paris Revisited (18), David Jordan Haussmann and Hassmannization: the Legacy for Paris (87-113), and Rosemary
Wakeman, Nostalgic Modernism and the Invention of Paris in the Twentieth Century (115-144).

49
36

tended to fix further spatial transformations , etc.

The imperial government took up public works as a response to the urban crises
of 1830-51, and these works were greatly interrupted by the crises of 1870-1, but this
only made the empire's unfinished response to 1830-51 seem more urgent. 37 The
problems faced by the authorities in Paris after 1870 were largely the same ones
Haussmann had confronted in the 1850s. Rather than solve the urban crisis that emerged
in the first half of the 19th century, Haussmann's public works aggravated it.
On a basic, demographic level, it is easy to see that Haussmann made little
difference in the process of Paris's population growth. The rate of growth established
between 1800 and 1850, which doubled the city's population, leading to crisis, was
repeated between 1860 and 1911. In 1860, Haussmann expanded the city limits to 30
square miles; the population of the annexed area doubled by 1911, reaching 2,847,229
with the greatest average density to date, 365 people per hectare (95,000 per square
mile!). 38 What Haussmann's works did do was move population around, draining the
center districts and increasing movement out toward the periphery. Rather than solve the
housing shortage, his gentrification of the center city resulted in more expulsions and
demolitions, as well as rising rents. Those who weren't kicked out were priced out. Rather
than slowing the flood of migrants coming to Paris looking for jobs, he created a huge
number of jobs in construction, encouraging more immigration, even though it was
increasingly difficult to find affordable housing. Rather than bringing social peace to the
city, Haussmann aggravated the main geographic lines of conflict: east vs. west, center
36 Eve Blau, The City as Protagonist from Shaping the Great City: modern architecture in Central
Europe, 1890-1937. (Prestel, 1999), p. 16.
37 The argument that 1848 is a more important turning point for understanding the curve of the 19th
century is the core of David Harvey's Paris: Capital of Modernity.
38 Commission d'Extension de Paris 1913 vol. 1 historique see annexes.

50
vs. periphery, Right Bank vs. Left Bank, etc. The city was more segregated and more
divided because of his public works, and many have interpreted the civil war of 1871 as
the revenge of the expelled. 39 Rather than solving the crisis of traffic in the city, he
simply created broader streets, more space in which vehicles could circulate. By all
accounts, more and more vehicles appeared to fill the vacuum. Then the city was battered
by German canons and sabotage of infrastructures, as well as by bitter street fighting.
When Napoleon III and Haussmann were finished, the need for infrastructural
development was greater than ever.
Haussmann ensured that the debate around the urban question and the social
question, which made his public works important in the first place, would remain central
to Paris life until the eve of the First World War and after. As Roger Gould has recently
argued, the Paris Commune is a gauge of how important urban issues were in 1871. 40
The issues which became sources of conflict that year included municipal selfgovernance and the city's high rents, the former inflamed by Haussmann's ruthless
sidelining of the municipal government, the latter by his gentrification of the center
city. 41 Gould's argument helps us see that Haussmann sharpened the lines of urban
conflict in Paris, and encouraged the working class to look to the state for someone to
blame for the city's problems. Haussmann had critics in his own time as in ours, and
having someone to blame for the transformations the city was experiencing was a
powerful explanatory tool. The monolithic myth of Haussmann the modernizer has been

39 (1) The phrase comes from John Merriman, The Margins of City Life (1991), p. 80; (2) Marchand, p.
114. (3) Roger Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the
Commune (Chicago, 1995), pp. 1-13; (4) David Harvey, Paris Capital of Modernity.
40 Roger Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune
(Chicago, 1995), pp. 1-13.
41 Ibid. See esp. p. 19.

51
used as much to build him up as to bring him down.
In addition to his former staff, and a host of unfinished projects, what else did
Haussmann leave to the Third Republic? There are three principle answers: (1) new
forms of government, through which the state took responsibility for public works,
thereby politicizing public works, (2) the specific spatial forms that Haussmann's crews
built into Paris, and (3) a model of city planning based in biological and medical imagery
(which I call the city as social body). The next three sections treat each one in turn.

Consequences of Haussmannization I: New Forms of Government

According to much recent scholarship, Haussmann's main innovation in public
works was making them happen at all. Parisians had been dreaming of renovating the city
a century before Haussmann's term in office, but only Haussmann finally accepted the
challenge of realizing the dream. Works on such an enormous scale were not cheap (the
usual figure is 2.5 billion francs), and so Haussmann financed them with debt-spending.
This brought the state into closer relations with major capitalists, riskily tying state
coffers to the ups and downs of the market. Haussmann also used the state to encourage
and steer development, giving out contracts for construction or operation of
infrastructural networks to private companies. This was accompanied by private
monopolization of many city services. Both the omnibus company and the gas company
were consolidated city-wide under Haussmann, and both were property of the Perriere
brothers.
This tendency toward centralization in business was equally evident at the level of
the state. There was a great effort at centralization of various types. Through railroad

52
development, Paris was made the financial, commercial, and industrial center of the
nation. Capital and population continued to collect in Paris as well. Napoleon III and
Haussmann also worked to consolidate state power, by limiting free speech, expanding
police power, and surveillance in the form of inspections, espionage, etc. They also
worked to accrue more and more power to Haussmann's office, to sideline the municipal
government, and to detach executive authority from the legislature.
This state formation was not merely, as Marx put it, a fattening of the state
apparatus, or a fetish for state powerthough both aspects are important to
understanding this regime. 42 The Second Empire also expanded the state's reach by
staking out new domains of governance: public health, public welfare, urban
infrastructure, etc. In other words, the state took on the social as a domain of
governance. 43 Far from the French liberal tradition, the Second Empire was primarily
statist in orientation. 44 More than Marx, we require Foucault in order to make sense of
these changes. Adopting these new domains of governance also encouraged the
continuing development of professional and technical expertise. The centrality of public
works meant that engineers trained at the cole des Ponts et Chausses were in high
demand; both Alphand and Belgrand held this degree. Overall, the basic intellectual
orientation of Haussmann and the Emperor was provided by Saint-Simonism, which
stressed combining the powers of technoscience, money and the state in the service of
modernizing development. By accepting public works as a public responsibility, the
42 See the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon from Robert Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader (Norton,
1999).
43 George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany
(Princeton, 1993).
44 Ann F. La Berge, Mission and Method; The Early Nineteenth-century French Public Health Movement
(Cambridge University, 1992); Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France
after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harvard, 1990); Andrew Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government
and the 'Social Question' in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1999).

53
Second Empire both politicized public works and connected urban modernity with
networked infrastructures.

Consequences of Haussmannization II: New Spatial Forms

Surely the most famous of Haussmann's works are the boulevards, one of his most
lasting contributions to Paris's history. While it remained unfinished in his career and his
lifetime, his street network created a template that the Travaux de Paris would continue
to follow into the 20th century. The gross spatial forms of the network are fairly complex,
but can be explained on three levels. The foundation of the plan was Haussmann's first
project, the grand croisse, a central intersection of two principle roads, the rue de Rivoli
(east-west) and the boulevards Sbastopol and St. Michel (north-south), which cut the
city into quadrants and provided direct access to Les Halles, the central market. This
established a new center for the city. 45 Fanning out from this central point, Haussmann
planned a second network of roads from a bird's eye view, connecting important plazas,
monuments, and buildings, especially train stations, with straight lines. This overlaid the
already messy map of old Paris with a complex web of larger roads, diagonals on the
urban grid meeting in star-shaped hubs. Third, Haussmann laid concentric circles of roads
and rails through the city, the interior boulevards, the exterior boulevards, and the chemin
de fer de ceinture (belt railway).
Construction of these roads and rails cut through existing neighborhoods in
radical and sometimes cruel ways. It is well-known that Haussmann referred to himself as
a demolition artist. Although he bragged about the service to public health he was
doing by removing slums like those on the le de la Cit, it was no coincidence that these
45 A new center which was, in one very important sense, off center: it was on the right bank.

54
slums stood in the way of his boulevards. He tended not to renovate, but to ignore or
neglect working-class neighborhoods. From an engineering standpoint, these broad,
straight roads were designed to do two things: to open up the city to the flow of traffic
(and thereby commerce and cavalry movement), and to act as vents, letting natural light
and fresh air into crowded working-class neighborhoods, feared for their filth, disease,
and revolutionary unrest. Pierre Pinon used the word dgagement (opening up) to
describe this process, calling our attention to Haussmann's hopes of decreasing density
(i.e. congestion) in the center citydensity of traffic, construction and population. 46
Haussmann also sought to regularize the city, straightening its crooked streets, aligning
monuments with lines of sight, and standardizing fixtures of all kinds (lightposts, park
benches, kiosks, etc.). The boulevards were monumental in their own right, sublime
swathes of open space cut (Haussmann said pierced) through the dense urban fabric.
Contemporaries never failed to note how wide and straight they were, a sharp contrast to
the tangle of narrow, winding streets that characterized medieval and early modern Paris.
In terms of architectural style, Haussmann embraced typical nineteenth-century
historicism, appropriating various styles of the past. His personal preference, at least as
far as street planning went, was for Napoleonic neo-Roman classicism, the deliberate
geometry and wide-open feel of Roman plazas. But he also appreciated reference to other
historical styles. The accepted style for district administrative offices (mairies), train
stations, and other buildings designed during Haussmann's term evoked the early modern
forms of Renaissance and Baroque architecture. This historical style provides another
vantage point on Haussmann's relationship to modernity. He is often credited with
bringing modern forms of construction to Paris, namely the iron-and-glass style
46 Quoted in Jordan, Haussmann and Haussmannization, p. 89.

55
associated with industrial buildings, train stations, and pavilions for world expositions.
Brick construction also increasing in this period. But these new building materials and
methods were often hidden behind facades of cut stone in the historical style. 47 This
process of hiding new forms of construction under historicist architectural forms suggests
an ambivalence toward modernity, an attempt to deliberately domesticate new
architectural forms by dressing them up in inoffensive, 'tasteful' historical kitsch, to
temper modernity with a coating of tradition. 48
Sharon Marcus has highlighted the way that sidewalks along the new streets were
furnished, relatively interiorized spaces out of doors, carefully staged for bourgeois
social relations, what we might call a theater of civilization. 49 Haussmann decorated or
landscaped (or embellished, to use the French term) his new streets with all manner of
benches, fountains, street lamps and gardens, in addition to various dicules (small
constructions)kiosks, advertising columns, bus stops, gardener's sheds, public toilets,
newsstands, etc. These sidewalk furnishings functioned as a sort of stage set, suggesting
that the same sort of mannered conduct expected indoors was expected outside as well. It
also drew social activities out into the open. Consumption, leisure and entertainment
became more and more outdoor activities, out of the dark corners of neighborhood bars,
small shops, the meeting places of civil associations, etc. Marcus's analysis is brilliant
precisely for bringing our attention to the subtle play of opening and enclosure in
Haussmann's sense of urban space, the intention to push the boundaries between public

47 See (1) Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete. Translated
by J. Duncan Berry (Getty Research Institute, 1996); (2) Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, pp. 171187; (3) Jordan, Transforming Paris, p. 193; (4) Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, p. 135.
48 Rosemary Wakeman, Nostalgic Modernism and the Invention of Paris in the 20th Century French
Historical Studies 2004 27(1), pp. 115-144.
49 Marcus, Apartment Stories, 140.

56
and private space, and the resulting tensions between indoor and outdoor spaces. Marcus
shows how Haussmann's architectural style can be read as an embodiment of both his
bourgeois, civilizationist values and his ambivalence about modernity.
Most famously, this decorative impulse played out in the regularization of facades
along the boulevards. Buildings were grouped in blocks (lots), the law stipulating that
they could be no more than 80 meters high (usually six stories), with all horizontal
elements (floors, windows, balconies) of neighboring buildings aligned. Each block of
apartments thus presented a more-or-less uniform facade on all sides, giving an
impression which is sometimes called rue-mur (street-wall) in French. If the furnishings
along the boulevards were parlor furniture for the drama of bourgeois life, the aligned
facade was the gross structure of the stage set itself. This coordination of street planning
and building design also served the civilizational ideal. The carefully planned and styled
surface of the boulevards presented Paris's public face to the world, while the street-wall
established borders demarcating the frontiers of Haussmannization, hiding the unrenovated sections of the city. On the scale of the entire city, this is clear along the
exterior boulevards, which separated the renovated city center from the much less
renovated periphery. 50 Very few new roads had penetrated the city's periphery in 1870.
As David Jordan noted, because all of Haussmann's north-south streets that cross the
river (except the Boulevard St. Michel), dead end at the Boulevard St. Germain,
everything to the south of the boulevard St. Germain turns its back on the rest of
Pariswhich is to say the majority of the Left Bank. 51
While the new streets marked off the unrenovated sectors of the city, uniform

50 See map in Colin Jones, p. 306-7. See also Map in Spintering Urbanism (2001), p. 54.
51 Jordan, Transforming Paris, p. 365.

57
facades also served to hide the unchanged interior of each block of buildings. As
Thophile Gautier put it in 1851, Haussmann's demolitions revealed all the ugliness of
the city beyond the renovations:
One had no idea how hideous Paris was, for so much was carefully hidden away
behind its boulevards, its river, and its fine streets. It is only after the cesspools
laid bare by the new construction that one becomes convinced of the need for all
this work, which is turning the city upside down to good purpose and making a
home for civilization. 52
So Gautier was as interested in civilizing the city as Haussmann was. He saw the
unrenovated parts of the city as an inspiration to further Haussmannization. But
republican critics of Haussmann like Flaubert and Zola saw the unrenovated city beyond
Haussmann's street-walls as evidence of Haussmann's failure to make real infrastructural
change for those who needed it most. To them Haussmannization seemed like giving a
sick city cosmetic surgery, hiding its problems behind a thin facade of splendid
renovation. Jordan uses words like hypocrisy, timidity, illusion and false to
convey their view of him. 53 In the early 20th century, one British observer saw right
through the facade of Haussmann's external boulevards, calling them shabby-gentile. 54
Franoise Choay noted the surface logic of Haussmannization, and Patrice Higonnet
added that his modernizing discourse was coherent in appearance only. 55
In addition to the boulevards, Haussmann decisively changed the spatial scale of
both thought and action in Paris according to Harvey. A brief look at some figures easily
proves his point. When the architect Hittorf met with Haussmann in 1853 and suggested a
new, triumphal avenue to connect the Arc de Triomph with the Bois de Boulogne, he

52
53
54
55

Quoted in Higonnet, Paris, Capital of the World, p. 86.

Transforming Paris, p. 364.
Frank L. Emanuel, The Illustrators of Montmartre (London: A. Siegle, 1904), pp. 4-5.
Higgonet, p. 170.

58
56

suggested it be 40 meters wide, while Haussmann wanted it 120 meters wide. This
monumental scale of construction characterized buildings in the Second Empire as much
as roads. The gallery of machines at the 1855 Exposition was over a kilometer long; the
main pavilion for the 1867 Exposition was 380 by 490 meters in area. 57 In 1860 when
Haussmann annexed large parts of the suburban areas around Paris, he more than doubled
the city's land area, from 13 to 30 square miles. Under the Second Empire, the national
rail network increased more than 10 times, from 1,931 kilometers of track in 1850 to
23,000 in 1870. Telegraph lines went from zero to 23,000 kilometers in the ten years
between 1856 and 1866. The number of omnibus passengers in Paris tripled, from 36
million in 1856 to 110 million in 1860. 58 The length of sewer pipe in the city nearly
quintupled, going from around 70 miles to around 350 miles. 59 Haussmann increased the
total length of roads in the city from 450 to 525 miles, according to his own count. 60 The
number of bricks entering the city increased ten times, from under 50 million in 1850 to
500 million in the late 1860s; similar numbers are available for the amount of cut stone
and quarry stone. 61 The old Paris was characterized by buildings 2-4 stories high;
Haussmann upped the norm to 5-6 stories.
It should be noted right away that this dramatic transformation in scale was not
merely quantitative. Haussmanization illustrates the old Hegelian-Marxist point that

56 Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity, p. 12.

57 Giedeon makes much of the size of Exposition buildings in his Building in France, Building in Iron,
Building in Ferro-Concrete, pp. 120-142. Harvey mentions the same, again on p. 12.
58 Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity, p. 109, 113.
59 Mathew Gandy, The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space, p. 30; Donald Reid, Paris
Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Harvard, 1991), p. 30.
60 Haussmann, Mmoires vol. 2 p. 512-513. Roger Gould provides slightly different figures, 450 to 535
miles, Insurgent Identities, p. 73. Figures regularly range from 80-90 miles of new roads built under
Haussmann.
61 Harvey, p. 135.

59
transformations of quantity give way at some point to qualitative transformations.

62

Harvey speaks often of Haussmannization's compression of space and time, an

intensification of circulation in the citycirculation of goods, information, capital, and
people. Haussmann started the process of wiring Paris for globalization, dramatically
increasing the size of markets in which Parisians could buy and sell. Railroads connected
the capital to a broader, national economy, making Paris more and more dependent on
provincial production, especially for food. This broadening of Paris's economic horizons
also opened Paris to imports and exports from other countries and continents, and to
international competition. One major sign of this was the department stores, which relied
more and more on an economy of scalehuge inventories, turned over consistently, at
low rates of return. Each sale didn't produce much profit, but the net effect was
enormous. 63 Other signs of Paris's widening relations with the world include expanding
tourism in the city and the international expositions. Haussmannization set off the mass
age in Parismass migration, mass consumption, mass production, etc. 64
Other transformative changes in scale included people living farther from their
places of work, and Paris's expanding ecological footprint. One correlate of rising
population, production and consumption was a dramatic increase in the amount of waste
Paris created. This had a positive effect of farmers who used Parisian waste as fertilizer,
especially along the sewage pipeline stretching from Paris to Gennevilliers for
irrigation in the late 1860s. But it also had an increasingly negative effect on water

62 Robert Carniero, The transition from quantity to quality: a neglected causal mechanism in accounting
for social evolution Procedings of the National Academy of Science 97/23 (Nov. 7, 2000), pp. 1292612931.
63 Michael Miller, The Bon March: Bourgeois Culture and the Deparment Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton,
1981).
64 For a clear statement of this argument, see Haussmannization from Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular
Realities, pp. 16-26.

60
quality for the suburbs downstream of Paris. Haussmann and company began to widen
65

the circle of Paris's ecological impact.

Another major spatial tendency of Haussmannization was infrastructural
bundling, creating infrastructural paths (roads, rails, etc.) which would then attract other
infrastructures (pipes, wires, etc.). Eve Blau recently wrote, The nineteenth-century
model for modernizing the old city (employed by Baron Haussmann in Paris, for
example) created a form that was fixed and static, not a model for change that could
accommodate growth. 66 Haussmann modified the city so that people and commodities
could move through it more quickly and easily. The existing city could thus
accommodate more traffic and commerce. But he did not plan a modular, expandable city
which would be sustainable under growth. He did not imagine that this expanded traffic
and commerce would further change the city's spatial needs and forms. His spatial forms
were historically heavy, as well, tending to restrict Pariss spatial system for the next
several decades, erecting physical and imagined barriers that one could not or did not
cross.
One can see these heavy, immovable forms getting in the way if one looks at the
struggles over how to equip Paris with a metropolitain railway (whether underground or
overground) in the 1870s-1890s. As David Jordan put it in his recent essay on the
consequences of Haussmannization:
Haussmanns ideas on getting about in the city were, even for the mid-nineteenth
century, primitive, limited as they were to walking and the private carriage. He
65 We'll see more about this in Chapter 5. See Donald Reid, The Irrigation Fields, from Paris Sewers
and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Harvard, 1991), pp. 53-70. See also: Gerard Jacquemert,
Urbanisme Parisien: la bataille du tout-a-lgout a la fin du. XIXe sicle, Revue dhistoire moderne et
contemporaine 26 (Oct. 1979), pp. 505-48.
66 Eve Blau, The City as Protagonist from Shaping the Great City: modern architecture in Central
Europe, 1890-1937. (Prestel, 1999), p. 16.

61
had little or no sense of the importance of public transportation within the city,
although he could be imaginative about trains to, from, and around Paris. 67
This is a perceptive observation. The openings that Haussmann created by cutting
boulevards through the city were intended for pedestrians and relatively small, horsedrawn vehicles. So under the Third Republic, as city government, engineers, and
developers argued about how to equip Paris with an intra-urban rail network, they were in
a bind. To route tramways over the boulevards would no doubt disrupt existing flows of
foot traffic and horse-drawn vehicles, but they were the only spaces in the city large
enough to even consider putting tramway lines. In this sense, Haussmann's street network
was already out of date before it was finished. Three years before the Avenue de lOpra
was finished (1875) and six before the boulevard St. Germain (1878), the Council of the
Seine and the Municipal Council had already opened the question of urban rail
development. 68 Haussmanns boulevards were never intended to route trains, but they
were the only spaces in Paris large enough to do so. The developers of city rail were
stuck; Hausmsanns forms boxed them in. Even in 2004, David Jordan recognized,
Haussmanns city endures and is clearly identifiable because its itineraries are
reinforced by the Mtro. 69
So the paths of the city rail network developed between 1872 and 1914 tended to
follow, mimic, or mirror the paths cut through Paris by Haussmanns boulevardsthe
tramways on their surface, Mtro tunnels beneath. Major sewers also followed the path of
the streets above. Each sewer tunnel is marked with a street sign, showing the name of
67 David Jordan. Haussmann and Haussmannization: The Legacy for Paris. French Historical Studies
27/1 (Winter 2004), p. 96.
68 Rapport de la Commission Spciale sur L'tude des Chemins de Fer et Tramways d'Intrt Local a
tablir dans le dpartement de la Seine. Paris: Charles Mourgues Frres, Imprimeurs de la Prfecture de
la Seine, 1872 (AN F 14 9153).
69 Jordan, p. 112.

62
the Paris street above it, forming a two-story map of the city. These large sewers served
as channels for other things besides waste water: fresh water pipes, gas lines, telegraph
lines and pneumatic pipes for mail, later carrying telephone and electrical cables. The
spatial arrangement of these sub-conduits depended on the conduits they were routed
through, an early example of what is called infrastructural bundling today. 70
Haussmanns forms put up both material and symbolic obstacles to transforming Paris.
Materially, he cut wide channels of infrastructure into the city, which continued to attract
or bundle other infrastructures to them throughout the Third Republic. Symbolically,
because many Parisians remained loyal to the norms and principles of Hausmannization
well into the 20th century.

Consequences of Haussmannization III: The City as Social Body Public Works and
Public Health
One of the most enduring images of Haussmann is as a surgeon. Zola may have
used the image first, but Le Corbusier's use is more famous, glorifying Haussmann
because his whole work had the character of a bold piece of surgery. 71 Haussmann
inspired Le Corbusier's own plan to make a frontal attack on the most diseased quarters
of the city. 72 The image has been passed down and reproduced countless times since. 73

70 The best source on infrastructural bundling I've found is Graham and Marvin's Splintering Urbanism.
They discuss bundling on pp. 10, 35, 55, 68, 71, 175, 237, 257, 259, 264, 271, 274, 277 and 282.
71 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, p. 257. On Zola, see Jordan, Haussmann and
Haussmannization, p. 90.
72 Quoted in Papayanis, p. 253.
73 The following is a sample of such references: David Barnes, The Great Stick of Paris and the
Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (p. 50); John Rennie Short, the Urban Order: an
introduction to cities, culture, and power (p. 401); Malcolm Miles, Urban Avant-Gardes: Art,
Architecture and Change (p. 65); Arturo Almandoz Marte et al., Planning Latin America's Capital
Cities, 1850-1950 (p. 24); Pamela Gilbert, Imagined Londons (p. 104); Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction
of Place: the History and Future of the City (p. 90); Michael Parfect, et al. Planning for Urban Quality:

63
For my purposes, it is not the surgeon that is important, but the patient.
Haussmann's third contribution to public works in the Third Republic was to
normalize a certain way of imagining the city as a living organism. The implication of
this idea, as textual analysis of Haussmann's Memoires reveals, was an overarching
metaphor of city planning as medical science. Let's look closely at his vocabulary.
Haussmann called the demolitions on Ile de la Cit Paris's gutting (ventrement). He
refered to Alphand's Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes as lungs, whose green
space would allow the city to breathe. Roads were arteries, and were pierced through
the city, like medical instruments into flesh. Most striking is Haussmann's depiction of
Belgrand's sewers: The underground galleries, organs of the large city, would function
like those of the human body. Pure and fresh water, light, and heat would circulate
beneath the urban skin like the diverse fluids whose movement and maintenance support
life. 74 There is clearly a vision here of the city as a living organism, an urban body. And
for this organism's proper function, fluids had to circulate in healthy ways, matching
inputs and outputs, spreading life-giving nutrients and removing waste. For Haussmann,
Paris was a city of flows: flows of traffic, of light and air, of water and heat, of
commodities, labor and capital, of information. These flows had to be carefully managed
and balanced.
According to Schivelbusch, the concept of circulation was central to the
scientistic social notions of the epoch. This expressed itself in the biologization of

Urban Designs in Towns and Cities (p. 157); Donald James Olson. The City as a Work of Art: London,
Paris, Vienna (p. 142); Leonard Pitt. Walks Through Lost Paris: a Journey into the Heart of Historic
Paris (2006), p. 5; Spiro Kostof, "His Majesty the Pick: the Aesthetics of Demolition" in Streets:
Critical Perspectives on Public Space, Ingersoll et al., eds. University of California, 1994, pp. 9-22. See
p. 11.
74 Quoted in Jordan, Transforming Paris, p. 274, Goubert, The Conquest of Water, p. 67 and Reid, Paris
Sewers and Sewermen, p. 29.

64
social processes and institutions that is so typical of nineteenth-century thinking.

75

Viewing this scientism through a wider lens, Anson Rabinbach described a widespread
strategy of social modernity in the nineteenth century, which sought answers to social
problems in the rational application of science and technology. 76 Many scholars
(Schivelbusch, Jordan, James Scott) have stressed Haussmann's holism and rationalism,
his persistent fantasy of seeing the city as a whole (witness his comprehensive mapping
of the city), a complex system whose problems could be solved rationally. Schivelbusch
and Evenson have stressed that his was an engineering approach to city planning rather
than an architect's. 77 Haussmann and his cohort drew this scientism from Saint-Simon,
one of the guiding intellectual lights of the Second Empire (and the Third Republic, for
that matter). They sought to understand and master the city as a complex system, and the
most readily available heuristic in the mid-nineteenth century was the analogy of a living
organism.
Haussmann helped to popularize this vocabulary, and to cement its influence in
thinking about cities. His ideas were not influential for their originality, but for their
timeliness. As David Pinkney put it, Second Empire plans concerned with public health,
slum clearance, and traffic [fit] readily into the pattern of the urban reform and public
health movements of the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s in Britain, Germany, and France. 78
According to Papayanis, the ideology of circulation was already the dominant way of
imagining cities in 1840s France. 79 David Harvey argued that circulation and fluidity

75
76
77
78

The Railway Journey, p. 194.

The Human Motor, p.??
Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, p. 22; Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, pp. 181-3.
David Pinkney, Napoleon III's Transformation of Paris: The Origins and Development of the Idea
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Jun., 1955), pp. 125-134, quote p. 134.
79 Planning Paris before Haussmann, pp. 103, 118-9

65
were such popular concepts for understanding life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris
because 'modernity' had arrived. He notes that Balzac referred to Paris as a rushing
stream where daily life moved at a frenetic pace and time and space had become
compressed. 80 Dramatic population growth between 1800 and 1850 brought
spectacular increases in commerce, in traffic, in crowding, and in rents. The plausibility
of this notion was increased by an accident of the French language: the word circulation
is used for both the movement of fluids like blood through veins and the movement of
traffic on city streets. 81
In fact, the conception was much broader than simply city as body. Any large
human agglomeration could be referred to in this way, like the 'social body' or the 'body
politic'. What is crucial here is the homology between ways of understanding the city and
ways of understanding society. As early as 1829, Jean-Baptiste Say pointed out that this
idea had a long (Roman) history: civitas, city, society are synonyms. 82 In his liberal
political economy, the concept of organism was crucial:
Political economy is nothing other than the economy of society. Political
societies, what we call nations, are living bodies (sont des corps vivants), just like
the human body. They subsist, they live only by the play of the parts of which
they are composed, as the body of the individual subsists only by the action of its
organs. 83
For Say, the action of these organs consisted in circulation: One imagines that the social
body will be the livelier and healthier the more general and rapid the circulation of values
is. 84 This was the broader, social application of a key principle of liberal political

80 Paris, Capital of Modernity, p. 32.

81 Schivelbusch, the Railway Journey, p. 195.
82 Jean Baptiste Say, Cours complet d'conomie politique pratique, (Guillaumin and Cie, 1852),p. 1, in the
footnote.
83 Ibid.
84 Schivelbusch, the Railway Journey, p. 195.

66
economy, namely that economies are healthy when capital remains liquid, freely flowing.
Written between 1869 and 1875, Maxime du Camp's Paris, its Organs, its
Functions, its Life is probably the most famous example of this fluid, vitalist biologism.
In this study of his beloved capital city, he wrote, Paris being a giant body, I tried to do
its anatomy. 85 The study proceeds over several volumes to do just this. Du Camp
analyzes the city as an integrated set of functionally distinct organs like the post office,
the railroads, the telegraph and the Seine. This elaborate analysis was demanded, du
Camp argued, by Paris's exceptional speed, efficiency, scale and complexity. More than
anything, Paris was characterized by constant, rapid movement:
In my life as a traveler, I've seen many capitals, some being born, some growing
[up], those which are at the summit of their destiny, those that are dying, those
that are dead, but I have never seen a city produce an impression as enormous as
Paris or more clearly present the idea of an indefatigable people, nervous, living
with an equal activity under the light of the sun, under the glow of gas [lights],
panting for its pleasures, for its business 86 and gifted with perpetual
movement. 87
Years later, the groundbreaking sociologist mile Durkheim would describe
industrialized societies in fundamentally similar terms, as complex assemblages of
functionally integrated parts organized under the division of labor according to the
principle of organic solidarity. Durkheim often used the idiom of the social body and
social health, once remarking, For a society to feel itself in good health...the
development of all its functions must be regular, harmonious, proportioned. 88
The importance of this trend of understanding the human world physiologically
85 Maxime du Camp. Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions, sa vie dans la seconde moiti du XIXe sicle vol. 1
(Paris: Hachette, 1875), p. 8.
86 The French words is affaires, which suggests either commerce in general or the personal possessions of
each Parisian. Either way, it suggests an appetite for commodities.
87 Maxime du Camp. Paris: ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitie du XIXe Siecle,
vol. 1, p. 5.
88 mile Durkheim. Suicide et Natalit: tude de statistique morale, Revue Philosophique 26 (July-Dec.,
1888), p. 447.

67
cut across discipline and across politics. It was one of the most popular notions in Paris's
long nineteenth century, one of the most important ideas in the human sciences of the era.
J.B. Say was a classical liberal political economist, Durkheim was a solidarist republican
sociologist, du Camp was a conservative man of letters. It inspired Jewish philosopher
Henri Bergson, whose vitalist metaphysics preferred becoming to being, change to stasis,
as much as it inspired radical rightist and committed anti-semite Georges Vacher de
Lapouge. For Lapouge, the homology between biology and society was crucial; it
justified his Social Darwinism. In his 1894 article Laws of the Life and Death of
Nations, he argued that nations are born, live and die like animals and plants. A people,
a society are like organisms the seat of an incessant vital whirlwind. Lapouge saw the
body as a collection of cells in a constant process of reproducing and dying. In each of
these cells, chemical materials were constantly renewed. In social organisms,
phenomena are still more complex, but of the same order. 89 In this constant circulation,
this process of decay and repair, bad cells had to be removed and good encouraged to
flourish. Socio-biology led Lapouge down the path of racist eugenics.
At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Emile Zola turned this conception to
his own purposes. In his theory of the roman exprimental (the experimental or
experientiali.e. empiricalnovel), he portrayed the naturalist or social realist writer as
a doctor of moral sciences (docteur en sciences morales). In this view, society is an
organism, whose different organs are integrated (solidale). Like Durkheim, Zola was
concerned that the functional interdependence of these organs made such complex
systems fragile. He wrote: the social circulus is identical to the vital circulus: in society

89 Lois de la Vie et la Mort des Nations. Revue internatinale de sociologie (yr. 2, no. 1, Jan. 1894), p,
421 436. See pp. 421-2.

68
as in the human body, there is a solidarity which links the different organs to one another,
in such a way that, if one organ goes bad, many others are strained, and a very complex
malady arises. 90 For Zola, the job of the naturalist writer was to diagnose these social
pathologies.
This biologized view of city and society was crucial to Parisians because it gave
them a language in which to express the malady of contemporary urban life. As
Durkheim and Zola reveal, the obvious implication of seeing human agglomerations
(whether cities and societies) as living things was the notion that they could be in better
or worse health. Paris, as we have seen, was very sick. This imagery, of the city or the
social body as sick, was periodically recharged throughout the nineteenth century.
According to David Barnes and Catherine Kudlick, the cholera of 1832 was a major
turning point. 91 For Robert Nye, Eugen Weber, and Bruno Latour, it was military defeat
to Prussia in 1870 that brought on consciousness of sickness in the social body. 92 Both
views are correct. The imagery first emerged in the 1830s and 40s at the onset of Paris's
urban crisis, and received a significant re-energizing from the defeat of 1870 (yet another
example of how Haussmannization aggravated features of Paris's early nineteenthcentury modernity). In seeing the city as a social body, Haussmann helped to solidify
links between public works and public health, between hygiene and infrastructure, which
would continue to define Haussmannization under the Third Republic.

90 Quoted in Pagano, Experimental Fictions: From Emile Zola's Naturalism to Giovanni Verga's Verism,
London: Associated University Presses, 1999, p. 48.
91 Catherine Kudlick. Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: a Cultural History (University of California,
1996); David Barnes. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth Century France
(University of California, 1995).
92 Robert Nye. Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: the Medical Conception of National
Decline (Princeton, 1984). Eugen Weber. France Fin de Sicle (Harvard, 1986). Bruno Latour. The
Pasteurization of France (Harvard, 1988).

69
The Opening of the Avenue de la Rpublique: Haussmannization in the Early Third
Republic

July 13, 1891. It was the eve of Bastille Day, but the national celebration had
already begun in Paris. Outside his palace president Sadi Carnot boarded a carriage
bound for the Place de la Rpublique at twenty minutes to two, so as to arrive on the
hour. He was accompanied by the Minister of Education, Lon Bourgeois, and several
army officers. The driver's most direct route was to head east along the grands
boulevards, which head straight into the plaza, but there were also symbolic reasons for
taking this route on that particular dayit had been an important route for official
processions since it was built. 93 Parisians did not miss this political symbolism, turning
out by the thousands for the parade. The day's issue of Le Temps reported that the
president's convoy was greeted with great applause and cheering along its entire course. 94
Their first destination that day was the inauguration ceremony for a new avenue,
Avenue de la Rpublique, which was to be the final addition to the Place de la
Rpublique. This had long been an important location in the capital. It housed the northeast gate of Paris in the city wall built by Charles V in 1370, and was later the site of a
water tower (formerly called Place du Chateau d'Eau). Under Haussmann it had been
systematically connected by road with the north and east train stations (Boulevard de
Magenta), with the Place de la Nation (Boulevard du Prince-Eugne, today Boulevard
Voltaire), and with the Place de la Bastille (Boulevard Richard Lenoir). This made it an
important crossroads for street traffic, in the heart of what was then the most
93 Initially built between 1668 and 1705 under Louis the 14th, called the Nouveau Cours.
94 Le Temps, July 14, 1891. Another account of the day's events can be found in the Bulletin Municipal
Officiel, July 15, 1891.

70
95

industrialized part of Paris. Even today, Rpublique as it is known, remains an

important traffic hub for Paris's north-east quadrant. Wedged in a corner between the 3rd,
the 10th and 11th districts, the place is conspicuously networked. It is a point of transfer,
from one Mtro line to another, from one boulevard to another, from the inner ring of
boulevards to the outer ring, from one itinerary to another, from Paris's center to its
periphery. 96
Haussmann's street-planning was not only intended to streamline traffic flows in
the city. Roads encourage movement in a single direction, which helped increase the
speed and fluidity of traffic in Paris. But the directionality of roads can also make them
difficult to cross; motion along their axis is always smoother than motion perpendicular
to that axis. As a result they can be used as a kind of barrier, to separate certain parts of
the city from each other. Any infrastructural channel can do this: train tracks, a viaduct, a
highway, a pipeline, a canal. These channels do not, strictly speaking, physically prevent
movement, but function socially, as a barrier that everyone recognizes. 97 David Jordan's
discussion of Haussmann's street planning for east-central Paris suggests that Haussmann
realized this. The triangle of boulevards he constructed, with the Place de la Rpublique
at the top, and Bastille and Nation forming the base, both created new spatial barriers and
removed existing ones. It completed a barrier of boulevards on all sides of the
revolutionary Faubourg St. Antoine, a neighborhood that had long been a source of

95 By 1872 this meant the 2nd, 3rd, 9th, 10th and 11th arrondissements. See the map on p. 90 of Roger Gould,
Insurgent Identities (Chicago, 1995).
96 No less than five lines of the Mtro cross there, which is more than cross at most traffic hubs in other
sectors of Paris, even those based around railroad stations, which are important points of transfer
between Mtro, RER and grandes lignes.
97 As 110th street forms the limit of Harlem in New York City, or captured in the American expression
wrong side of the tracks. See Langdon Winner Do Artifacts have politics? from The Whale and the
Reactor: a Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1939.

71
protest and violence. At the same time, the Boulevard Richard Lenoir was used to remove
a barrier that Second Empire authorities did not like: a large section of the Canal St.
Martin, which had been used as a moat by revolutionaries in June of 1848. The boulevard
Richard-Lenoir was built over the top of a large section of the canal, enclosing it in a
sewer-like tunnel, bridging the moat, and giving the authorities more direct access to the
east side of the city. 98
Once Haussmann was done with the Place de la Rpublique, it formed a sort of
gateway to the north-east corner of Paris, providing street access to the 10th, 11th, 18th and
19th districts. It also separated this overwhelmingly working-class corner of the city from
the more bourgeois parts of the city to the west with a continuous barrier of boulevards
running north-south from the foot of Montmartre to the Bastille. Boulevards emerged
from the new, Haussmannized place to the north-west, west, and south-east, leaving the
north-east corner of the city untouched. It now turned its back on the working-class
north-east quadrant of the city. Its only street link with the 19th district was the medieval
Rue du Temple; until July of 1891, there was no road from the Place de la Rpublique to
the 20th; Paris beyond it was ripe for Haussmannization. During the bloody week which
ended civil war in May 1871, this sector of the city was the last bastion of communard
resistance (specifically the heights of Belleville).99 It was also a sector that had been
relatively neglected by Haussmann's public works. 100 There was the threat of the radical
working class to contain, and an industrial sector of the city that was not yet 'properly
98 David Jordan. Tranforming Paris, pp. 185-195.
99 See the map of the eastward-moving front in Harvey, Capital of Modernity, p. 307.
100 An important exception, from late in the Second Empire, is the park at the Buttes-Chaumont, which
transformed several depleted stone-quarries into a striking park, opening in 1867 for the World
Exposition, and credited to Alphand. The park is a fine piece of landscape architecture, centered around
a look-out point topped by a gazebo (belvdre). The gazebo sits at the edge of a cliff which drops into
the human-made lake below.

72
networked' to wider global flows of capital and labor. The place had been the focus of
two previous Bastille Day ceremonies. The first was in 1880, when the holiday was made
official as a national holiday and the plaster model of Morice's enormous statue of
Marianne was unveiled. The second was held in 1883 to unveil the final bronze version
(figure 1).
That summer day in 1891, the president was on his way to celebrate the place's
connection with yet another corner of Paris. Paris's street system being based on
concentric rings of boulevards, the new avenue constituted an important cross-town link
on the east side, connecting the inner arc of boulevards (the grand boulevards) with the
outer ring of boulevards. This link was made at the foot of the Pre Lachaise cemetery.
Here the new avenue took a turn, followed the cemetery's north wall and then continued
across the 20th district to the eastern limits of the city at Romainville 101 , connecting the
industrial center of the city with working-class areas in the 11th and 20th districts and the
nearby suburbs Romainville, Montreuil-sous-Bois, les Prs-Saint-Gervais, Lilas and
Bagnolet. 102
The festivities began when the president and company arrived at the plaza. They
were received by representatives of the three levels of government in Paris: Levraud,
president of the municipal council, Alphand, Director of the Paris Office of Works, Loz,
the Prefect of Police, Pan, president of the departmental general council, Poubelle,
Prefect of the Seine, Royer, president of the Senate, and Floquet, president of the

101 Today Porte de Bagnolet.

102 This was much longer than what is today called avenue de la Rpublique, which connects the place de
la Rpublique and the Pre Lachaise cemetary, crossing the northern part of the 11th Arrondissement.
Today the same road changes name at Pre Lachaise. The section that crosses the 20th is today called
avenue Gambetta between Place Auguste Metivier and Place Martin Nadaud, where it changes to
rue Belgrand and continues to the edge of the city at Porte de Bagnolet.

73
Chamber of Deputies. A table had been set up at the head of the new avenue, draped in
red and gold cloth, accented with tricolor flags and fasces, bundles of rods and axes
which had symbolized state power since the Roman era. The president was seated at the
place of honor, his guests on either side. An entire company of the republican guard was
there, their band included. After listening to speeches by Poubelle and Levraud, and
watching Alphand present awards to a handful of civil engineers on his staff who were
instrumental in planning and building the new avenue, the entire party boarded carriages
and led this new, larger parade the length of the new avenue.
Further along the parade route accounts become more colorful. As Le Temps
described it:
...poles are decorated along the avenue, holding long oriflammes [the French royal
standard or flag] suspended above the street by a chain, from which hang three
shiny ornaments. The houses are all decorated with flags. The scaffolds of
buildings under construction have been decorated with flags and garlands of
yellow lights. The effect is very picturesque....
Yellow lanterns were spread around elsewhere as well, in the branches of trees, on
the triumphal arches, on the rooftops. The chestnut trees have transformed into
orange trees, with enormous fruit.
The familiar scenery of east Paris was becoming strange and wonderful, elaborately
decorated, the streets flooded with people, giving way to surreal transformations. The
president's carriage rolled under successive triumphal arches erected by a group calling
itself the committee of inaugural celebration for the 11th and 20th arrondissements. The
first arch stood on columns 20 meters high. The frieze above was painted with a scene of
two women on a pedestal, holding a laurel wreath, the pedestal inscribed with a simple
signature: to Monsieur Carnot, the 11th arrodissement. The second was a similar
construction, but even larger, standing on four massive pillars and bearing the signature
of the organizing committee.

74

Figure 1: Morice's Marianne on the Place de la Rpublique. The picture was taken some time in the 1890s
(image Wikipedia commons).

The procession made a second stop for an inauguration ceremonythis time the
unveiling of a renovated school, the Lyce Voltaire, located where the new avenue

intersected the exterior boulevards at Pre Lachaise.

103

75
Minister of Education Bourgeois

delivered the inaugural address, and Floquet added a personal note, joking that when he
was a student at this same school many years ago it was in terrible condition, its walls
black with mold and humidity. There was a good deal of excitement around this second
ceremony. The crowd was growingand growing younger. Le Temps described it as
immense, joyous and unruly:
Over the entire course the crowd is immense; there are clusters of people on the
chimneys of houses. At a certain moment the security service was overwhelmed,
and the crowd, flooding into the street, produced a formidable push. Choral,
instrumental and gymnastic societies penetrated into the procession followed by
two or three thousand young people. It was not until the rue Oberkampf that they
could be pushed back.
This story of ceremonious speeches, excited crowds of onlookers, and a thick layer of
symbolic decorations (triumphal arches, yellow lanterns, standards, fasces, flags)
continued until the carriage finally reached the Porte de Romainville. Here the president
got out, took a quick look around, and then returned to the Place des Pyrnes, where he
dined at the mairie of the 20th district with the various administrators who had
accompanied him on his way. 104
The stated reason for all this pomp and regalia was the new avenue and the
renovated school, but it goes without saying that Parisians were also there to celebrate
several other things: the French nation, its honorable republican form of government, and
last but not least, the universal progress of civilization, both material and moral. The
proximity of Bastille Day, the unequivocal name of the new road, and a heavy dose of
ritual make it obvious that there was something deeply political going on here. Perhaps it

103 Today place Auguste Mtivier.

104 This account of the parade is taken from Dernire Heure: L'Inauguration de l'avenue de la
Rpublique, Le Temps July 14, 1891, pp. 1-2.

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is not evident to twenty-first century readers what political importance a new avenue
might hold. But it was apparently clear to the Parisians who decorated their
neighborhoods in preparation for the president's arrival, cheered him on so loudly as he
passed, broke through security to join his procession, even rushed his coach. As president
of the municipal council Levraud would put it that day: The Avenue de la Rpublique is
symbolic by the name it carries and by its function. But what was the new avenue's
function? What did this function symbolize? What work were roads supposed to do in the
city?
To answer these questions, we need to return to the Place de la Rpublique, and to
Prefect of the Seine Poubelle's opening speech. He began by noting that A city like Paris
is in a perpetual effort of transformation and growth; the spirit that animates it tends
incessantly to renew it.... This growth and transformation, he argued, had always held
important consequences for Paris's history, especially where material changes were
concerned. How many times, he asked the audience, had Paris's population growth made
its city walls crack? This was followed by a sketchy, but relatively comprehensive
historical overview of public works and urban development in Paris since the Roman era.
This first part of the speech is awkward, a tired summary of highlights from the official
version of French history, as one might find in an encyclopedia.
Poubelle was a better speaker when he turned to closer description of Paris's
current infrastructure, and with good reason. He had already been in office for 8 years,
and his career as head of the departmental authority in Paris had been distinguished by a
sustained effort at transforming the material infrastructures of the city, especially for
hygienic reasons. In addition to continuing in good Haussmannian fashion to open new

77
streets through Paris, there were sewer development, revised building codes, a new
system of trash collection (which famously led Parisian landlords to name garbage cans
after him), several additions to Paris's system of potable water distribution (new sources
of water, aqueducts, hundreds of kilometers of new pipes, new pump and filtration
plants), and significant attention to the ecological state of the Seine. Poubelle was
perhaps better equipped than anyone in Paris to reflect on why public works were
important for the mission of the Republic.
The "magnificent" avenue inaugurated that day, he explained, was about 4
kilometers longmore than a third of Paris's diameter at its widest point. It had taken
almost ten years to construct, at a cost of over 40 million francs (38 alone were spent on
expropriating the necessary land). He was quite explicit about its function(s):
Thanks to it, the east part of Paris finds itself equipped with a large thoroughfare
(voie de circulation) which shortens the distances between the place de la
Rpublique, the veritable industrial center of Paris, and the suburban communes....
Because of it neighborhoods where the working-class population, packed into
narrow and unclean little streets, was often decimated by epidemics, are today
cleaned up (assainis). In the 11th district, between the avenue Parmentier and the
boulevard de Mnilmontant, it has made a group of factories as dangerous for
workers as they are for the neighborhood disappear, and, in the 20th district [it has
made disappear] the sordid constructions of the rue des Poirriers, of the rue des
Oiseaux, of the impasse des Coudriers, of the passage Robineau and the impasse
Fanny-Benoit.
For Poubelle the avenue was not only an artery of traffic; it was also intended to
do specific social work. Like many of Haussmann's pioneering roads, this new avenue cut
through the middle of recognized spots of urban blight, in this case factories and
tenements that the city government deemed unsafe and unclean. It was as much a tool of
slum clearance as it was a tool of traffic planning. It was also intended to do hygienic
work: "following the formula, [to] bring air and light into these until now deprived

78
neighborhoods." The formula in question was famously applied by Haussmann as well,
the idea being that wider roads allowed neighborhoods to "breathe," so that essential
natural resources like light and air could reach them. A healthy city was an open city.
Hence the fetish among both Parisians and visitors in the 19th century for the uncommon
width of Haussmann's boulevards. Nineteenth century hygienists regularly proscribed
light and air as protections against the many dangers that lurked in urban shadows:
disease, vice, crime, immoralitymoral and physical degeneration. Poubelle was quite
frank in his evocation of the new avenue as a disease-control measure. The new avenue
also had aesthetic work to do, embellishing these lackluster working class neighborhoods
"with a very picturesque square, from which one discovers the most beautiful panorama
of Paris."
Perhaps most importantly, the avenue was designed to help steer the course of
urbanization, to influence the movement and settlement of working class populations in
the city. The avenue, Poubelle explained, facilitates access for the population to an
important part of the periphery where vast plots of land of lesser value are found, so
naturally indicated for the construction of clean and low-cost housing; already we see
them rising over the whole plateau which extends from the heights of Mnilmontant,
behind Pre Lachaise and up to the old quarries of the Buttes-Chaumont. This furthered
the spatial effects of Haussmannization: pushing working class populations and industry
out of the center of the city, thinning the population out, so that the center could be
further embellished, and properties there revalued, gentrified. Meanwhile new
development would be encouraged in the periphery. Poubelle explained,
In the new dwellings which are going to be constructed for them [the workers],
they will find more favorable conditions of economy and well-being, and they

79
can enjoy these without being obliged to move too far from their workshops; the
steam tramway voted by the general council will bring them yet closer, while a
very low special fare will permit them to take advantage of the salubrity of this
nice neighborhood, without an appreciable increase in charges.
Poubelle asked a lot from this new avenuethat it clear slums, that it improve
standards of living and housing stock for the working class, that it streamline traffic
flows, that it help encourage building and settlement in the peripheral areas of Paris, that
it beautify a neighborhood, that it allow light and air to circulate, that it make it easy for
workers to get to work, etc. Neither essentially architectural nor essentially
technological (engineering-based), the avenue was designed to act in a wide,
heterogeneous field where public works, public health, beautification, and traffic
planning were all tangled up. The avenue was a streamlined conduit of labor to the
workplace, a ventilation shaft, a landscaped public space, a spur to further development
of the periphery, a disease-control measure, a foundation for tramway tracks, and a form
of social welfare. Ultimately the avenue was an infrastructural response to the social
question, and a motor of progress. Its planning was an act of social engineering, giving
voice to the republican elite's social fantasiesof a cleaner, healthier, more comfortable,
more humanely provisioned working class, bought off with social benefits, gifts from
the state, an uplifted working class that was politically and biologically neutralized. This
was public works in the service of class-collaboration, class harmony and social peace. 105
Poubelle also stressed that this urban renovation was progressive, patriotic, and
civilizing. He gave a nod to president Carnot, who had recently visited working-class
houses in Paris to show his solicitude for anything that relates to the improvement of the
lot of workers. Poubelle continued,

105 Judith Stone, The Search for Social Peace: Reform Legislation in France, 1890-1914 (SUNY, 1985).

80
The most noble way to celebrate the national anniversary, is it not to take an
encouraging retrospective look at ourselves and our works, because it will lead us
to recognize that our efforts are not sterile and that each day we come closer to
that future which should assure for all the children of the common mother a more
equitable participation in the benefits of civilization, to the very fatherland of
those destined and worthy of the constant love of France for liberty and justice.
So the avenue was a fitting thing to celebrate on the eve of the national holiday
(symbolic) because it was doing the work of social progress that was supposed to lie at
the Republic's core, based on universal principles of equality and the mission to bring
civilization to everyone in the world, to humanity itself. Poubelle's speech was intended
to tell this story, a historical retrospective on the ensemble of progress accomplished by
our dear Paris, under the government of the Republic.
Seeing the material progress of Paris in its ensemble meant moving on to other
infrastructures besides roads. Poubelle's speech, like the parade that followed it, is
remarkable for elevating infrastructure, the development of built space, and the material
trappings of civilization to such heights. They were important not only for the smooth
or healthy functioning of the city's daily life, but also for the honor and glory of France as
a nation, for the Republic as a political form, and for the universal progress of
humankind. As he put it:
As important as the avenue inaugurated today may be, it is but one more artery in
the network of streets that, for twenty years, have renewed the physiognomy of
the capital. The ravages of war slowed this movement of transformation for some
time, but, from the moment that France began to recover, Paris put itself to work.
Works of general utility proceeded rapidly....
I won't undertake a long enumeration of all the transformations which filled this
useful and arduous period (cette utile et laborieuse periode). Each year had its
project, each arrondissement had its part. So much so that, even though Paris
offered the marvels of its Exposition to the world in 1889, Paris itself was the
marvel that visitors admired the most.
Equally crucial in Poubelle's speech was this twenty-year time-line, 1871-1891.

81
Poubelle took care to focus on public works after Haussmann's term, public works
carried out under the Republic and thereby ostensibly republican in character. But what
made public works under the republic different from public works under Haussmann?
As Poubelle put it, one of the most pressing preoccupations of both the
departmental and municipal governments in these twenty years had been the addition of
potable water, the evacuation and use of contaminated water. This involved tapping new
sources at some distance from the city, more than doubling the city's supply of water,
building aqueducts to carry this water to the city (the largest of which was more than 100
kilometers long), building enormous reservoirs to store the water, building pump stations
to draw water from rivers in the region and to pressurize water for distribution, and
outfitting the city street by street with smaller pipes (petite canalisation) to distribute the
water to buildings. The same infrastructural plan had to be constructed in reverse for
waste water, beginning with Poubelle's decrees of 1883-4 which required that every
apartment in Paris to have access to a toilet (whether shared or private), and required that
every toilet drain directly to the sewer, known as the tout--l'gout. These pipes would
drain into sewers built into the foundation of each street, collecting at low points and
flowing toward a set of 3 main collector sewers which carried waste toward the northwest of the city, where waste was dumped into the Seine (1860s to 1899) or transported
to water treatment facilities (thereafter).
Going into such great detail describing the progress of Paris's water system,
Poubelle was uncovering infrastructures that were less visible, and certainly less
glamorous, than Haussmann's boulevards. He descended below street level to expose for
his audience the less apparent but no less appreciable benefits of underground piping.

82
And in contrast to the new avenue's multiple purposes and multiple benefits, Poubelle
asked only one thing of the revamped water systemthat it prevent disease. He said,
typhoid fever has diminished and cholera knocked at the gates of Paris without being
able to implant itself there (a self-congratulating reference to the cholera epidemic of
1884). Where material progress in a broader sense was concerned, Poubelle went straight
to the heart of the matter: hygiene.
Poubelle had reason to be proud of his administration's work on Paris water
system, to dwell on the technical details, citing awe-inspiring figures about liters of water
and lengths of pipe. Though he gave the most time and attention to the water system, he
listed many other forms of material progress as wellrenovation of army barracks,
public markets, and warehouses, historical reconstruction of the original baroque city hall
(torched during the commune). District administrative offices (mairies) were renovated,
as were the Sorbonne, the national archives and the Ecole de mdicine. Five schools had
already been redone, and two high-schools were waiting to be inaugurated on Bastille
Day proper by president Carnot. Parks, historical buildings, museums, and exposition
halls were made over as well.
Poubelle was right that an awful lot of work had been done in Paris between 1871
and 1891. It started with continuing Hausmann's unfinished projects for renovating the
city and reconstruction after the conflicts of 1870-1, but the Third Republic also found its
own rationales for public works, rationales laid bare in Poubelle's speech. As he put it,
the Paris electorate has the most elevated and generous sentiment about the role of the
capital and it is always proud to lend its support to the government of the Republic for
anything that can contribute to the honor and the progress of all of France. In other

83
words, the infrastructural development of Paris, always understood as progressive, as
modernization in the honorific sense, was deeply entangled with the uplifting social
fantasies at the heart of French republicanism. Infrastructural development was, in other
words, tied to the civilizing mission.
There is a complex vision of city planning here. It involves the idea that lines of
transport (the avenue or the tramway to run on its surface) shorten distances and
increase mobility. But paradoxically when put into practice they served to lengthen
distances, to integrate the center and the periphery, to move the working classes out away
from the center of the city, and to encourage them to live farther from their places of
work. This distancing of home and work suggests that something like the functional
separation of cities into zoneswhat we call zoningwas also at work here. It also
reflects a much older nineteenth century notion that industry did not belong in cities. 106
There is also a budding environmentalism at work here. City administrators and
engineers were starting to think about the ecological impact of large human populations.
More than that, there was a sort of diffuse environmental determinism borrowed from the
human sciences. 107 The key idea here was that human well-being depends on the quality
of the environment in which humans live. This in turn suggested that the way to influence
human behavior and achieve social progress was through reform of our environment. In
city planning this often meant putting attention on infrastructure in order to solve social
problems. A key example here is the design of water inputs and outputs to improve water
quality, and thereby control water-born diseases like typhoid and cholera. So there is a

106 See Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey.

107 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey; Rabinbach, The Human Motor; Alain Cottereau's glissement
ecologique, plus Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, Marcus, Apartment Stories and Horne, A Social
Laboratory for Modern France.

84
fairly rich set, here, of different ideas about how to improve everyday life in the city
through planning and infrastructural development, a will to shape life by shaping its
material circumstances. And behind it all, there is the imperative of hygiene, the cleaning
up (assainissement) of the city.
Hygiene drove the use of roads to clear slums, it drove the idea of cleaning up
working-class life by housing the working classes in a greener environment, and it drove
the fantasy of separating out the different functional parts of the city, keeping residential
areas separate from industry. The most basic principle here was what we call standard of
living or quality of life. Alongside measures of material development (such as
industrialization), measures of hygiene like this were marshaled as evidence for claims of
civilizational superiority. As Dr. Brouardel put it in a brief reflection on the progress of
hygiene in France, is it not certain that one may judge the state of a country's hygiene, I
would almost say of its civilization, by the number of people it loses to smallpox? 108
This elevation of hygiene to a motivation of the first rank distinguishes public
works in Paris under Alphand (Director of the Travaux de Paris, 1871-91) and Poubelle
(Prefect of the Seine, 1883-96), from public works under Haussmann. Of course
Haussmann was interested in hygiene, but he was also interested in military strategy and
state power, in the flow of capital and labor and the growth of the industrial economy,
and in aesthetics and geometry. Much of the literature on Haussmann is dominated by the
question of which set of interests took priority for him (Benjamin, Jordan, Harvey,
Evenson, etc.). But bringing hygiene to the fore was the mark of Poubelle's age. Recall
American Albert Shaw's observation that

108 Brouardel, Preface to L'tude et les progrs de l'hygine en France de 1878 a 1882 (Paris: G. Masson,
1882), p. x.

85
...the public works that have been executed in the twenty years from 1875 to 1895
have in all likelihood cost a larger sum in the aggregate than those carried out in
the twenty years following the coup d'etat of July, 1851. The Haussmann
transformations were begun when Paris had only a million people and an area of
only thirteen square miles.... But in 1875 the authorities had to provide for nearly
two million people, a number that in 1895 was fast approaching three millions.
These last two decades have witnessed transformations less pretentious and not so
widely advertised, but touching more closely and deeply the lives of the people,
and ministering more perfectly to the best demands of modern civilization.
Services of education, of cleanliness and of health, on a vast and varied scale,
have occupied the administrative machinery that was once so engrossed with
boulevards and architecture. 109
As Shaw argues, the urban transformations of the early Third Republic may have been
less decorative, less pompous, and ultimately less visible than those of the Second
Empire, but they had more closely touched the lives of the people, actually changing
the texture of everyday life in the city. Daily life in Paris now more perfectly fit the
ideals of modern civilization.
After Poubelle was done speaking, Le Temps reports, M. Levraud got up to speak,
"examining the double character of the assainissement of Parismoral and physical."
According to Levraud, improving the material infrastructures of the city could attenuate
the social inequalities brought on by modernization. He said:
In the old Pairs, which is disappearing day by day, the classes of society were
more often mixed than they are in our days. In the neighborhoods reputed to be
the most aristocratic stood tall houses whose upper floors were divided into a
great number of lodgings destined for workers, the lower floors being reserved for
apartments of a more elevated price. The fortunate in life and the less fortunate
were thus brought together. There was more fusion, more contactvbetween
different social strata, and, if friction sometimes resulted from this, attractions and
sympathies resulted from it more often. Richness rubbed shoulders with poverty,
joy, sadness, ignorance, knowledge, and from this fusion of various elements in
the same crucible resulted the mentality (pense) of Paris: ardent, generous,
complex, but one.
Haussmann, he argued, changed all this:

109 Albert Shaw. Municipal Government in Continental Europe, pp. 12-13.

86
Recent public works have completely changed this situation. By the force of
things, the proletariat was little by little pushed from the center of the city and
from certain arrondissements to concentrate itself at other points. Today we know
rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. The unity of Parisian mentalities
exists less, we are particularizing ourselves.
In the face of this growing segregation and stratification, public works projects like the
new avenue had an important role to play: In diminishing distances, in facilitating the
rapidity of communications between the different parts of the city, we are attenuating this
fatal consequence. Levraud didn't foreground infrastructure as much as Poubelle did, but
his vision of its social and political purposes was the same. Like Poubelle, he displayed
his patriotic credentials in making a gesture to president Carnot, saying you accentuate
the character of social peace, union, and republican solidarity which emanates from this
popular celebration... This was the social function of public works that Levraud spoke
ofthat public works should attenuate the social frictions of class society, bringing all
social classes together under the sign of the Republic in social peace, union, and
republican solidarity. Public works, in other words, were held up on this day of
republican and national celebration as a means of social engineering, a way to separate
the good and bad features of modernity, and to strengthen the social body.
Poubelle's speech has been quoted several times since he delivered it. 110 The
following year (1892) the Paris city government reproduced excerpts from the speech in a
book-length treatment of the same subject: a glowing patriotic review of progress in Paris
public works, entitled The Social Work of the Parisian Municipality, 1871-1891. 111 These
two decades corresponded rather neatly with Jean-Charles Alphand's term as director of

110 It was reproduced in Dernire Heure: L'Inauguration de l'avenue de la Rpublique, Le Temps July
14, 1891, pp. 1-2, and in the Bulletin Municipal Officiel, July 15, 1891.
111 Le Mansois Duprey, L'Oeuvre sociale de la municipalit parisienne 1871-1891 (Paris: Imprimerie
municipal, 1892).

87
the Paris office of public works (from his appointment to his death), so the book served
as a fitting tribute to a man who had done so much to renovate Paris. The book was
jointly ordered by Poubelle and the Municipal Council, and organized by Le Mansois
Duprey from the Municipal Council secretariat.
Commenting on Poubelle's speech, Le Mansois Duprey wrote:
All of the works enumerated by the Prefect of the Seine have assuredly
contributed to the moral and material improvement of the conditions of life in
Paris. But some of them, such as the piercing of new streets, the construction of
barracks, markets, etc., constitute only the development of a city assured by a
municipality vigilant and concerned for the interests it represents, in view of the
incessant growth of the population. Others, on the contrary, have as an immediate
goal either assuring the material well-being of its inhabitants, the poorest in
particular, or contributing to the elevation of their spirit. Among those of first
importance are public assistance, clean-up (assainissement), hygiene, education,
fine arts and numerous special creations which don't exactly fit in any of these
major divisions. Its to these that this work is consecrated. 112
Parsing this passage carefully is crucial. First, he drew a tendentious distinction between
public works that constitute only the development of a city...in view of the incessant
growth of the population, and those which have as an immediate goal either assuring
the material well-being of its inhabitants, the poorest in particular, or contributing to the
elevation of their spirit. The former kind of public works were merely a question of
keeping up with a growing population, of meeting the most basic infrastructural
standards. The latter, uplifting kind of public works were the real focus of the book, those
which assured the material well-being of the poor, or elevated the spiritin other words,
those public works which constituted, as the title put it, a social oeuvre. For Le Mansois
Duprey, there were public works that met minimum standards, and there were
progressive public works that raised standards; his book was consecrated to the latter
kind.
112 p. x.

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Second, he further divided this uplifting kind of public works in two: those that
focussed on material well-being and those that elevated the spirit. Like Levraud
before him, Le Mansois Duprey was evoking one of the Republic's most repeated
mantrasas he put it, moral and material improvement of the conditions of life. He
organized the entire book around this dual formula. Part one concerned moral and
intellectual development, and part two the amelioration of the material conditions of
life: public health. The author admitted that this division is a bit arbitrary, because
The more educated man knows his real needs better, observes the laws of hygiene
with more care, in such a way that his health and well-being increase. From
another side, guaranteed by the extent of what is possible against sickness and
poverty, more vigorous and healthier; he has less bad thoughts and becomes
better. There is thus a sort of repercussion of the spirit on the body and vice-versa
(p. xii).
We ought not miss the way that material conditions of life are easily and vaguely
equated with public health here. Health was the end, hygiene the meansand hygiene
took the form of a material transformation of the built environment. So again, like
Poubelle and Levraud, Le Mansois Duprey put assainissement at the center of his
argument.
This dual formula, moral and material improvement (amlioration morale et
matrielle) embodied one of the deepest commitments of the Third Republic, and
expressed its peculiar anthropology. No scholar has done more to further our
understanding of this formula than Alice Conklin. Like Duprey, Alice Conklin divides
her work into chapters on material development and moral development, citing the
common formula repeatedly as a statement of French imperial intentions in West
Africa. 113 Add Eugen Weber's argument that this fundamental desire to improve (or

113 Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa

89
civilize) its subjects was not limited to France's approach to the colonies, we can see that
it was equally applicable to the lower classes in France. 114 But unlike Weber's study of
rural development, I'd like to stress its application in the capital city itself. In outfitting
the city with new pipes, roads and schools, Poubelle and company were continuing to
civilize the city.
The earliest use of this phrase I have found comes from E. Lajoulet's 1848 work
Moral and Material Improvement of the Condition of the Worker. A later example can be
found in Armand Baron's 1882 work Pauperism: its Causes and Remedies, wherein he
speaks of ...the voluntary contribution of bosses; its advantages even for them.
Sacrifices that the bosses have already freely imposed on themselves in view of the moral
and material improvement of the lot of their workers.115 There is also E. de la Hautire's
1895 study of government, The Consitution and Institutions. 116 In his discussion of taxes,
he argues that a standard liberal account of taxesthat they are justifiable as a prime
d'assurance, a minor insurance fee paid to the state for protectionignores the ways in
which taxes are used for basic services that benefit the entire population. He explains that
some small portion of taxes is always consecrated to public works, to education, to the
improvement (amlioration) of the material and moral conditions of the nation. The
state, he says, must put money towards these things, because of its civilizing and moral
mission. 117 When the Mtro opened in the summer of 1900, one journalist wrote I

(Stanford, 1997), pp. 73, 184, 240, 313.

114 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford,
1976), Conclusion, pp. 485-96.
115 Armand Baron, Le pauprisme : ses causes et ses remdes (1882): ...la contribution volontaire des
patrons; ses avantages mme pour eux. - Sacrifices que les patrons se sont dj librement imposs en
vue de l'amlioration morale et matrielle du sort de leurs ouvriers (Art. 7, pp. 233-256).
116 La constitution et les institutions (Garnier frres, 1895).
117 Ibid., pp. 115, 199-200.

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salute the Metro as an admirable agent of moral and material progress.

118

What Poubelle and Le Mansois Duprey did for Paris in reviewing its
infrastructural progress, Guizot did for all of Europe and ultimately the globe, reviewing
the progress of civilization itself. In his Course in Modern History, Guizot offered a
general tableau of the history of modern Europe, considered in terms of the development
of civilization, a general look at the history of European civilization, its origins, its
course, its goal, its character. 119 For Guizot, the definition of civilization was also dual,
moral and material:
Two facts are thus comprised by this greater fact; it subsists under two conditions,
and reveals itself in two symptoms: the development of social activity and that of
intellectual activity, the progress of society and the progress of humanity.
Everywhere that the external condition of man expands, vivifies, improves, there
the intimate nature of man shines with grandeur in these two signs, and often in
spite of the profound imperfection of the social state of affairs, humankind
applauds and proclaims [it] civilization. 120
There are two ways to read this argument. On the one hand, Guizot may merely replicate
Le Mansois Duprey's argument discussed above, which claimed a reciprocal influence of
the moral and the material. On the other hand, Guizot might be read as claiming a sort of
materialism or foundationalism. There is a whiff of determinism here, in which material
changes are prior to, and more fundamental than, moral changes. But either way, the
relationship between material development and moral development is given special
importance in thinking through the details of the civilizing mission. The sparkle (clat) of
enlightenment in the second sentence is much more important than working out the
precise relationship between the moral and the material. Both were necessary components
of civilization; the key was to strike a balance between the material and the moral (i.e.
118 Le Radical, July 19, 1900.
119 Guizot. Cours d'histoire moderne, p. 3.
120 Ibid., p. 19.

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infrastructure and practice).
With the conceptual coupling of the moral and material in mind, we can shed new
light on the two ceremonies held on July 13, 1891: the inauguration of the new avenue
represented material improvement, while the inauguration of the renovated school
represented moral improvement. Hygiene played a crucial role in both projects, as it did
in notions of civilization. The development of hygiene, as much as literacy, morality,
industry or Christianity was regularly evoked as a measure of civilization.
As the events of July 13, 1891 demonstrate, many of Haussmann's central
concerns were reproduced in the design of the new Avenue de la Rpubliqueslum
clearance, moving industry out of the center city, civilizing the urban working class,
beautification, hygiene, and the careful sculpting of traffic flows. The heavy symbolic
and political work expected of the new avenue also connected it with its Haussmannian
past, although this symbolic and political work was done in service of republican, not
authoritarian, ideals. As Levraud revealed, the radical party, of which president Carnot
was a member, had created its own myths of modernity and rupture. Unlike Haussmann's
public works, Levraud argued, which increased inequality and segregation in the city, the
public works of the Poubelle administration would attenuate the social ills of modernity,
bringing about moral and material improvement for all, both strengthening the social
body and making social peace.
The project also tested the limits of Haussmannization in some ways. The avenue
was not a Haussmann-era plan that remained incomplete; it was a plan that emerged
independently in the Third Republic, a continuation and reworking of Haussmannization.
Rather than turning its back on working class parts of the city, the Poubelle

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administration offered this new road as proof that it would work to truly uplift the
condition of the working classes in the city, renovate their neighborhoods, and to respond
to the city's housing crisis. The avenue also pushed the Haussmannian envelope of the
exterior boulevards, designed to further integrate the center city with the periphery and
suburbs. The avenue's design also integrated street planning and plans for mechanized
mass transit; 1891's dream of a steam tramway was realized in 1896 as a new electric
tramway. And just like the opening of the new avenue, this tramway's opening became an
occasion for celebration, in which a parade of experts took a ride along the new line of
infrastructure, making two stops to eat a lunch along the way. 121
These post-Haussmannian twists and turnsnow for Haussmannization, now
against it, freely appropriating and modifying Haussmann's urban ideasshow Parisians
coming to grips with the consequences of Haussmannization. By 1891, they had already
been doing this for some time. We can look back at some brief examples from 1872 to
flesh this out.
In January of 1872, only months after the end of Paris's civil war, Prefect of the
Seine Lon Say was overseeing the installation of ten new gaslights on the Place de
l'Opra, where the new opera house was still under construction. Conservative
newspaper Le Figaro called them brilliant New Year's gifts, writing, It was only just
barely that one could circulate last night in the streets, where gas [light] was almost
absolutely absent. We're talking about the center of Paris. How will it be in the fartherout neighborhoods? 122 The note of fear sounded in this question was clear. Security was
an important topic in post-Commune Paris, and street lighting an important 19th century

121 Le tramway lectrique de Romainville la place de la Rpublique, Le Temps, June 2, 1896, p. 3.

122 Faits-Paris, Le Figaro, no. 2-3 (weekend), Jan. 2-3, 1872, p. 2.

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security measure. For Le Figaro, the problem was that while the public, commercial,
high-traffic spaces of the center city were gradually being lit, opening the night to traffic
and making it penetrable for the authorities, it left what were commonly understood as
the most dangerous parts of the city (its margins) untouched. But if lighting was still
unfinished in the center, how long would it be until the periphery, which always lagged
behind, was fully equipped?
The following day, center-left daily Le Temps took a much more energetic stance,
questioning the Prefect's infrastructural priorities. 123 Le Temps was impressed with the
power and beauty of the lights; their glow was lively, intense, sustained and plentiful: it
has a light bluish tint which recalls electric lighting. If all of Paris were lighted like this,
the city would become a veritable fairy play, but:
why must the splendors of the place de l'Opra be like a lamp in a tomb? I'm
exaggerating on purpose, but everyone knows that the administration, in a
commendable attempt at economizing, claimed, as far as gaslights are concerned,
to reduce our capital to the bare minimum (la portion congrue).
What good was lighting the theaters at night, if the rest of the city languished in the
darkness of a tomb? The image was eerily appropriate in post-war Paris. While Le Temps
could agree that economizing was necessary in lean times, reigning-in gaslight
development was a step in the wrong direction for a city so little lit. It was not necessary
to light everything to the same degree, but the major arteries and their off-shoots, the
streets which put the principle neighborhoods into contact with one another, these should
enjoy integral lighting. 124 The lighting on the place de l'Opra was clatant (striking or
sparkling), but it was far from sufficient. The editorial insinuated that the Opra should

123 Chronique de Paris, Le Temps, Jan. 4, 1872.

124 que les grandes artres et leurs amorces, les rues qui font communiquer entre eux les principaux
quartiers, jouissent de leur clairage intgral.

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not have taken first priority, spelling out a basic principle of city planning: the heavier the
traffic in a given neighborhood, the more artificial light was needed.
Although Le Temps was generally more critical than Le Figaro, neither paper was
fully satisfied with Paris lighting system. Both suggested a future in which there would
be more gaslights, and the government, in this case the local government 125 , would
provide them. But the two papers took different views of the city. Le Figaro was
concerned about the periphery, Le Temps was concerned about the center. The editors of
Le Temps didn't particularly care if the peripheral neighborhoods were well litthese
areas, they argued, could be left to the bare minimum, because the flow of traffic there
was weak (faible) at night. They were more concerned that lighting in the center city
was not yet intgral, i.e. comprehensive. The editors of Le Figaro were more confident
that development of the center would come with time; their anxiety was directed at the
periphery, where they saw gaslight development not as a foreseeable future, but as an
open-ended question.
Le Temps also connected street lighting with street sweeping: Same observation
for sweeping: it is an easy enough fact to establish, that one no longer sweeps the streets
of Paris. This journalist noted puddles of liquid sludge which accumulate along the
edges of the sidewalks, a stinky, slippery mess which was a shame for a capital. Waste
125 The term local government here refers to both the municipal council and the departmental
government, both of which had an important hand in infrastructural development in the city. There is an
important problem here in the interpretation of political references in fin-de-Sicle sources. Journalists
often use the term Htel de Ville (City Hall) as a stand-in for local government. Sometimes this
phrase signified the municipal council, sometimes the departmental government, i.e. the Prefecture of
the Seine. Other times both organs of government were intended to be lumped together. A
contemporary with a more finely-grained political knowledge would be able to tease out these nuances
much more easily than I can in hindsight. For us, the source remains ambiguous. But given the political
importance of City Hall during the Commune, it is not difficult to understand just how complex and
loaded such a phrase could become. It is also plausible that many Parisians didn't fully understand how
the pair of governments which shared a building were different. For example, on May 4, 1872, Le
Temps referred to the Prefect's Special Commission on local railways as la commission municipale,
even though the commission was called by the departmental, not the municipal, authority.

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in the streets was also a health and safety hazard, a problem linked to insufficient
lighting: In addition, as the municipal council well knows, we hold them responsible for
all the unseemly sludge stains and all the slips and falls taken in poorly lit streets.
Le Temps appealed to the misguided Prefect himself: Lighting and sweeping are
the two teats of Paris. M. Lon Say will pardon us for addressing this maxim to him. 126
The editors called out the Prefect early in his term in office, letting him know that
infrastructure was a priority for them, and that they would be keeping an eye on him. A
rather staged confrontation of press and government, perhaps, but there was something
more hidden in this imagery of the breast that feeds Paris. The editors of Le Temps
suggested that street life in Paris, the famed life of the boulevards, with all of its
connotations of circulation, communication, culture and commerce, could not continue at
a healthy clip, day and night, rain or shine, summer or winter, without being properly
nourished, as an infant draws life from its mother, through constant attention to
provisions like lighting and sweeping. Street life had to be maintained, and the editors of
Le Temps were letting the Prefect know that they knew this was his responsibility. In fact,
both newspapers used the word trennes, implying that the gaslights were gifts given by
the state. If this word suggested a note of gratitude, it also meant that the editors held the
state responsible and accountable to the citizenry in matters of infrastructure. The new
importance of public works was nourishing new forms of interaction between the public
and the state. Cracks were visible in the Haussmannian edifice even before it was
completed. And just like the Commune, these new relations between citizenry and state
were played out on the terrain of Paris, in a struggle to determine the shape and fate of

126Eclairage et balayage sont les deux mamelles de Paris. M. Lon Say me pardonnera de lui adresser cet
apophthegme.

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the city.
For both newspapers, gas lighting was crucially related to the flow of traffic,
circulation in French. Le Figaro wrote, one could barely circulate last night in the
streets, where gas [lighting] was almost absolutely absent, suggesting that the degree of
lighting could determine circulation. Le Temps wrote ...it is not necessary to light
everything to the same degree: the neighborhoods where circulation is weak or even nonexistent in the evening should be limited to strict necessity..., thus suggesting the
converse, that circulation should determine the degree of lighting. Would people go
where the lights were, or should lights be fit to where people were already? Should
infrastructure be designed to steer practice, or to serve practice? In spite of these
differences in perspective, the two newspapers could agree that there was some important
relationship between infrastructure and practice, and that deciphering it was an integral
part of making traffic in Paris flow more quickly and more smoothly.
Le Temps returned to the subject of traffic again in the days after Mardi Gras,
1872. A rare winter storm had dumped cold rain on Paris, threatening to freeze and
jeopardizing the city's roads, which were already in bad shape. 127 Post-war street
reconstruction was moving slowly, and the municipal council was preoccupied with the
poor state of roads. Director of Works Jean-Charles Alphand, meanwhile, had not done
much to improve the situation: M. Alphand alone remains passive in the midst of these
atmospheric movements: he gave them neither another sweep of the broom nor another
pan of asphalt. Alphand defended himself by explaining that his crews had to wait until
the temperature was warm enough to avoid all risk of freezing. Given that the method
used to clean the streets then, as now, relied on water, he had a point: sheets of ice hand127 Chronique de Paris, Le Temps, Feb. 16, 1872.

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made by municipal road crews would have been even more damaging to traffic than
taking no action at all.
Still, Le Temps wasn't satisfied, and didn't fully trust the Prefect:
I forcefully engage our excellent Prefect to keep an eye on all this....This year we
are going to begin, by way of fairly heavy taxes, the liquidation of the Empire: the
population cannot ignore to whom we owe these extra charges...(emphasis
added).
It was a clear reference to Haussmann and the Prefecture. The point was that in a city
with a budget as large as Paris's, and as many anxious taxpayers looking on, the basic
needs of street maintenance and public works more generally should be met. Le Temps
evoked a social contract, the exchange of taxes for basic public services, suggesting that
Prefect Say had better uphold his end of the bargain, because Haussmann had not. Le
Temps took up the republican cause of keeping public works public.
Weeks later Le Temps confronted Haussmann head on, opening a column with
We have come back somewhat to the pretended benefits of the Haussmannization of
Paris. 128 As Le Temps put it, while everyone recognized that opening new roads had let
light and air into deprived neighborhoods, many find that this upheaval, excessively
extended to all the largest and best constructed streets, touches on monomania and,
before even recognizing the price of these high fantasies, they find grave inconveniences
in it. Notorious financial difficulties aside, while it was intended to improve traffic
flows, Haussmannization ironically ended by disrupting traffic a great deal. For Le
Temps, the problem was the Prefecture's obsession with the geometry of the straight line:
That sometimes produced bizarre results, improbable acute angles or unbelievable
obtuse angles, streets cut up, slashed, where one cannot enjoy more than three
minutes of free sidewalk, unformed squares, or the absence of landmarks [which]
force the pedestrian into the most complicated topographic exploration.
128 Chronique de Paris, Le Temps, Mar. 8, 1872.

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Haussmann opened the boulevards to heavier vehicle traffic, forcing pedestrians
to seek refuge on the sidewalks, in order not to be smashed in the unbridled whirlpool of
cars. The result was crowded sidewalks, full of pedestrians afraid to cross these heavy
flows of vehicle traffic, pedestrians stuck waiting as if on a steep island with no coast,
stranded there something like deportation within a fortified area. This imagery placed
everyday Parisians in the shoes of the Communards exiled just months before to New
Caledonia. Haussmann had worked to more clearly define vehicle traffic and foot traffic,
routing them on separate networks (streets and sidewalks), increasing their speed and
intensity. This made them difficult to cross.
The perfection of the system has been realized on the Place du Chteau-d'Eau:
grand roads vomiting and absorbing torrents of pedestrians and vehicles wildly,
with no rule and beyond any direction. If one has the bad fortune to stray into this
wasteland in the evening, where the cyclone of vehicles runs wild, one is not
certain to make it home in the integrity of one's material person: remember that
they count on average two accidents a day, the official figure.
In his attempt to improve street traffic (vehicle traffic), Haussmann inadvertently struck a
major blow against pedestrian traffic. The street won out over the sidewalk.
While the press debated Haussmann's legacy in 1872, the Prefecture of the Seine
was beginning work on the city's new urban rail network, the subject of my next chapter.
Here we'll see journalists, architects, engineers and politicians imagining plans for Paris's
Mtro between the 1870s and 1895. In dreaming about the future Mtro, Parisians
struggled to imagine the city differently than Haussmann had and to cope with the
consequences of Haussmannization. This was a way to negotiate the meaning and impact
of public works in the cityhow should they function, how should they be regulated,
who should pay for them, who should they serve?

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Part One:
Circulation, The Flow of Traffic

Today the Mtro is one of the first things any visitor to Paris encounters, a system
I found in 2005 to be a ubiquitous part of the city's everyday life. The Mtro punctuates
the daily routine, hence the French expression MtroBoulotDodo (to the Mtro, to
work, night night). 1 Just as national rail networks contributed to the standardization of
time across Europe in the 19th century, today the Mtro helps organize the social and
economic life of Paris, separating work time from 'free' or 'leisure' time, and encouraging
traffic at certain times of day. 2 The Mtro also has discernible geographic or spatial
effects. First, the Mtro, like the tramways that preceded it and the RER (regional
express network) that followed it, has helped to tie the suburbs to the city, encouraging
longer commutes, meaning a longer average distance between the homes of Parisians and
the places they work, and thus contributing to the sprawling growth of the greater
1 The sense of dull compulsion in the expression makes the daily grind a good English translation. The
expression leaves out the Mtro ride home from work, but that is no less a part of the daily routine.
There are other common steps in the Parisian routine, like stopping in a caf to have a drink after work
or doing some quick grocery shopping before going home for the evening. Hence the routine might
more precisely be MtroBoulotCafMtroDodo or MtroBoulotMtroMarchDodo.
These are only two of countless variations.
2 For example through special fares at rush hour. At different historical moments, special fares have been
both lower than usual prices (as they were 1900-1910, to encourage use by the working class), and
higher than usual (today). Special prices are deployed strategically by the city government or the Mtro
administration, to offset costs and influence riders to use the trains in certain ways.

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Parisian agglomeration. As this pushes the homes of the working classes out away from
the center of the city, it continues a basic social-spatial tendency of Haussmannization.
Second, the Mtro's network of tracks overlaid the city with a map, a grid of coordinates
on which places and events can be plotted. Stations become anchors for neighborhoods,
communities and cultural scenes. This cognitive map of the city is even conveyed each
day to newcomerstourists, students, and immigrantsby the iconic Mtro maps
distributed for free at stations throughout the network. 3 Already in 1911 Kafka could
write, Because it is so easy to understand, the Mtro is a frail and hopeful stranger's best
chance to think that he has quickly and correctly, at the first attempt, penetrated the
essence of Paris. 4 For more than a century, the Mtro has been a powerful influence on
the organization of space and time in Paris.
The Mtro is also a fixture of Paris culture, used by Parisians everyday for any
number of purposes. The first Mtro line was opened July 19, 1900, while Paris was
hosting the Universal Exposition. Visitors riding the Mtro that summer not only enjoyed
the railway's speed and reliability, but also enjoyed the coolness of its tunnels, a welcome
relief from the heat of the streets above. Thus, it became an air-conditioning system. 5 In
the 1930s, the national government renovated certain Mtro tunnels to serve as bomb
shelters in case of war. This foreshadowed the use of parts of the Mtro, sewers, and
catacombs during the German occupation in World War II as a sort of underground

3 David Pike discusses this mutual semiotic implication of the map and the city for both Paris and
London. See Subterranean Cities, pp. 20-33. Anthropologist Marc Aug has argued that a similar spatial
logic allows the Mtro map to function as a memory machine, linking past events to the places they
occurred. See In the Mtro, p. 4.
4 From Kafka's diary, 1911. See: A Place in the World Called Paris, ed. Steven Barclay, forward by Susan
Sontag, illustrations by Miles Hyman (Chronicle Books, 1994), p. 43.
5 Le Temps, July 21, 1900.

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railroad for Jews and resistance fighters. 6 In the postwar era, the Mtro became a
favorite setting for French books and films, a convenient way for writers and directors to
evoke the labyrinthine complexity of the city, charged with deep symbolic meaning. 7
Today, abandoned Mtro stations serve as ideal destinations for urban explorers and
graffiti artists. Indeed, youth culture and local artists show a deep bond with the Mtro as
a symbol of what makes the city urban, and a grid of spatial intelligibility that pins
Parisians' identities to the places they live, work, or go out to enjoy the nightlife. The
Mtro has become iconic, hence the popularity of Guimard's wrought-iron station
entrances and the global recognizability of the Mtro's style of visual communication: the
circle M logo, the matching font (with every line number or letter inside a brightly
colored circle), and all of it printed on signs, maps, t-shirts, hats and other consumer
goods.
Mtro stations continue to be important spaces for advertising posters and street
performers. Homeless Parisians may sleep there; well-dressed Parisians may use the
Mtro to get out of the rain. It is also a place to eat, to make out with a lover, to beg or
pick pockets, to deal drugs, and to shop at impromptu markets. 8 Since its beginnings,
then, the Mtro has been much more than an electric-powered underground rail network.
Among other things, it has been a clock, a map, an air-conditioner, a bomb shelter, and a

6 See Nicolas Didon, Le meilleur abri de Paris: le rle du mtropolitain au sein du programme de
Dfense passive. From Mtro-Cit: Le chemin de fer mtropolitain la conqute de Paris 1871-1945,
pp. 153-164.
7 David Pike, p. 66. The chase scene in Melville's Le Samourai (1967) is particularly memorable. There
was also Queneau's 1959 novel Zazie dans le Mtro, adapted for film by Fassbinder in 1961. For a
general discussion of the semiotic importance of the urban underground, see Rosalind Williams Notes
on the Underground, and Rob Zaretsky's appearance on The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a radio program
from the University of Houston's KUHF. Zaretsky appeared in episode 1966, The Sewers of Paris,
available online at: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1966.htm
8 Thanks are due to Ken Garner for a lively discussion about the many uses of the Mtro in September of
2007.

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place to shoot film or write graffiti. It has become interwoven with society and culture in
countless ways.
The Mtro thus offers dramatic proof that technological systems (or even
individual devices) can be used in a variety of ways, and not only those ways intended or
foreseen by engineers. Historians of technology call this interpretive flexibility, the
ability for technologies to be appropriated, reinterpreted and used in various ways by
users. 9 But this importance of the Mtro, this all-over integration of the Mtro into the
city's everyday life, is a 20th century thing. Whereas today it is difficult to imagine Paris
without the Mtro, until 1900 it was difficult to imagine the city with the Mtro.

Historical Background: Transportation in Paris Before 1870

Before 1900, Parisians moved to the rhythm of different modes of
transportationhorse-powered cabs, omnibuses and tramways, steam-powered
riverboats, but most of all foot traffic. Walking remained the dominant mode of transport
in Paris (as in most other European cities) until well after 1900, and horses remained as
important a source of motive power for vehicles as steam or electricity. A number of
different human-and-animal-powered vehiclesrickshaws, coaches, horse-carts, and
sedan chairshad circulated in its streets since the 1600s, when Pascal famously argued
that the city needed a coach service.
During the massive urbanization of 1800-1850, coaches for hire boomed
alongside the population. With very little oversight from the state, numerous small
companies offering coaches for hire emerged. Hence the dizzying lists of names for

9 Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT,
1997, 1999).

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different kinds of coaches. 10 Coaches could be hired by the hour or hired for a single ride,
whereby different rules and rates applied. Some could be hailed at any point, others only
at a fixed place. According to Maxime du Camp, by the early 1870s there were two
important facts about these various coaches. First, everyone used themwhich is
rather an exaggeration, but rings truer for the upper-middle-class milieu in which he
orbited. Second, apart from gross divisions like which ones were powered by people and
which by horses, those with more or fewer seats, etc., he claimed that no one could tell
the different kinds of cabs apart.
Du Camp shows us something crucial, here. While this wide range of different
coaches might seem confusing to outsiders, for 19th century Parisians it was so familiar
that 'everyone' knew how to use the coaches, even if he or she couldn't understand all
their complexities. All coaches were required by the Police to carry cards (numros,
literally numbers), which served as menus of the different services and rates offered.
Any rider who couldn't judge the type of cab from the outside had the option of reading
the card once inside. The coaches were not organized with enough homogeneity of
equipment or fares to be considered a transportation 'network' or 'system' by our 21stcentury standards. There was too little rationalization and standardization. But it was
subject to more-or-less uniform regulation by the Police. What it lacked in uniformity at
the level of infrastructure, it made up for in simplicity at the level of practiceone got in
the cab, and then read the menu to decide what to order. The coaches were organically
integrated into other routines of city life. Hiring a cab from the menu was thus
10 Maxime du Camp lists: Citadines, Urbaines, Deltas, Cabriolets Compteurs, Luteciennes, Cabriolets
Mylords, Thrses, and Cabs. See Paris, ses Organes, vol. 1, p. 167. Transit historian Jean Robert lists
several others: Dames Blanches, Tricycles, Orlanaises, Diligentes, Ecossaises, Barnaises, Carolines,
Batignollaises, Parisiennes, Hirondelles, Josphines, Excellentes, Sylphides, Constantines, Dames
Francaises, Algriennes, Dames Runies, Gazelles. See Les Tramways Parisiens, pp. 19-20.

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comparable to ordering merchandise or food in a shop or caf. The coaches crisscrossed
the social and cultural life of the city, as the Mtro would come to in the 20th century. 11
The beginnings of centralization and industrialization in Paris's transport networks
date, predictably, to the Second Empire. Haussmann's first move, in preparation for the
1855 Exposition, was to work toward the centralization and standardization of the coach
companies. To this end, they were bought out by the Compagnie Gnrale des Omnibus
(CGO), a private company granted a monopoly on providing coach transport in Paris. 12
The CGO was also given exclusive rights to operate a horse-drawn tramway line, Paris's
first experience with a railway inside the city. Haussmann's second move was to laterally
connect the ten outer districts with a loop of two parallel rails, the chemin de fer de la
ceinture or belt railway, which ran in open trenches across most of its course,
constructed from 1852 to 1869. This beltway connected the various rails leaving Paris
from several major train stations (what in French are called grandes lignes, meaning the
large-scale national rail network), carrying freight as well as passengers. As tourist
guides began to recommend in the 1870s, it provided a convenient way to tour the ten
peripheral districts of Paris annexed in 1860. 13 It did not, however, connect all the train
stations, and provided no access to the center of the city inside the limit of the interior
boulevards. Here again, I argue that Haussmann did not upset the balance of forces in
11 For more on the Paris coaches, see Karl Baedeker, Paris and its Environs: Handbook for Travellers
(1878), pp. 23-25. One historian in particular devoted a large portion of his career to the coaches,
Nicholas Papayanis. See: (1) Un secteur des transports parisiens: le fiacre, de la libre entreprise au
monopole (1790-1855). Histoire, conomie et socit 5/4 (1986), pp. 559-572; (2) The Development
of the Paris Cab Trade, 1855-1914. The Journal of Transport History 8/1 (1987), pp. 52-65.
12 Hereafter CGO. To be precise, they had a monopoly on large, horse-drawn omnibuses, which were
drawn by 2 horses, and provided 20 places or more for passengers. There were still many smaller,
independently owned coaches for hire.
13 See: (1) La Cl des omnibus et tramways (Paris: l'administration de l'affichage, 1876); (2) Le Petit
Guide Parisien. Chemins de Fer, omnibus, tramways, renseignements practiques et historiques. Plan de
Paris. 3me Edition (Paris: Lassailly Frres, 1876); (3) Paris and its Environs: Handbook for Travellers
(Karl Baedeker, 1878).

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Paris, but rather suggested the directions that future development would take. His
conception of transportation was centered around the horse-powered omnibus network.
What few railways he installed in the city were either trials (the first tramway line), or
more geared toward national centralization, connecting Paris with the provinces for
strategic and commercial reasons (the beltway). He did not imagine that railways could
meet the local, day-to-day transportation needs of Parisians.
Yet the idea of a metropolitan rail network was already in the air. Looking back
over the history of the idea of the Mtro in the fall of 1883, the engineer Frmaux
suggested that discussion of the Mtro had begun in the mid-1830s, about the time that
France started to develop railroads at all. 14 The first published records of plans for
metropolitan railways come from 1837 and 1845. 15 Plans continued to emerge
throughout the Second Empire. 16 During the urban crisis of the 1830s and 40s, then, the
idea of a metropolitan network emerged in Paris as a possible solution to the problem
of traffic flow, but remained a historical path not taken. Instead, Parisians turned to
development of more and more horse-drawn vehicles, a trend which continued through
the 1870s and 80s with the expansion of Paris's horse-drawn tramways, notwithstanding
the newness of rails in the city.
This historical background is important for understanding that the Mtro's overall
integration into Paris's everyday life was not inevitable. In the beginning, it was often
difficult. The process of Mtro planning that officially began in 1872 occurred against the
14 J. Frmaux. Rapport de l'Inspecteur Gnral. Chemins de Fer Mtropolitain de Paris. Avant-Projet.
Rsultats de l'Enqute d'Utilit Publique. Sept. 12, 1883. AN F 14 9154.
15 See Papayanis, Planning Paris before Haussmann, Ch. 5 Planning the Paris Underground, pp. 201225.
16 We know that Arsne-Olivier was making plans in the 1860s (see Evenson, pp. 102-3). Larmanjat's
1868 plan for a monorail system is preserved in the Archives Nationales: Les Chemins de Fer D'Intrt
Local a un seul rail considrs au point de vue de leur construction et de leur exploitation conomique.
(Paris: Imprimerie de l'illustration, 1868), AN F 14 9189.

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backdrop of this already existing transport regime based in human and animal power,
which had become deeply ingrained in the life of the city over centuries. As a result, the
era of Mtro planning between 1872 and 1900, what Norma Evenson called the long
debate, 17 forms a relatively compact period of transition and experiment, one in which
Parisians accustomed to human-and-animal-powered transport imagined, debated,
negotiated, and finally planned how their city would be transformed by industrialized
mass transit. By 1900, the old animal-powered forms of transportation were fading, and
the new forms of mobility that emerged in the 1890sbicycles for individual travel and
electric-powered light rail, (streetcars, subways and elevated trains) for mass transit
were enjoying their first boom, as would the automobile, especially the autobus, after the
First World War.
In the next two chapters, we will see Parisians trying to write scripts for the novel
phenomenon of urban railways, as they slowly transformed a city whose nineteenthcentury scripts assumed a city of horse-drawn coaches.

17 Paris: a Century of Change, pp. 91-105.

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Chapter 2: The Dream Life of the Mtropolitain, 1872-1895

After 1872, the question of the Mtropolitain slept for a long time. 1

A technical system like the Paris Mtro is interpretively flexible; it can be used
for many purposes. But how can a technical system be used before it actually exists? This
chapter seeks to answer that question, not as paradoxical as it seems. From 1872 to 1895,
though the Mtro was not a reality, it already held a real place in the Parisian
imagination, a tool for imagining the city's future. Before the Mtro was an actual vehicle
for moving around the city it was a vehicle for dreams, imagination, fantasy and desire.
Nineteenth-century Parisians imagined using the Mtro for many things other than
transportation.
In the 1870s, Parisians debated underground Mtro plans to keep rails out of the
socially sensitive space of the street, but this put rails in the culturally sensitive space of
the underground. In imagining that the Mtro would add to existing, inadequate means of
transport, connect the city's train stations by rail, and carry information, commodities and
passengers, they debated the meaning of urban railways and their compatibility with
urban everyday life. In the 1880s, debate on the Mtro turned to elevated tracks, which
could keep Mtro trains off of the streets and become an integral part of the city's built
environment and street life. In this decade, Parisians on both the left and the right hailed

1 A letter of May 22, 1894 from engineers Vauthier and Deligny to the Minister of Public Works: A partir
de 1872, la question Mtropolitaine dormit longtemps. AN F 14 9154.

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the Mtro as an agent of social peace, which could diffuse class conflict. A
comprehensive urban rail network, it was argued, could help shape the spatial
development and organization of the city, facilitating motion in and out of the city,
thereby encouraging the working classes to live farther from the city center. The Mtro
was imagined as a tool for relieving urban density, and improving the quality, cost and
supply of housing. In the 1890s, Parisians arrived at the compromise of mixed systems,
combining underground and elevated sections, dreaming that the Mtro could revitalize
France's economy in this age of international competition, create work for Parisians,
serve as a showpiece for the 1900 Universal Exposition, and shed light on long-standing
debates about public works.
But dreams of the Mtro were not always happy. The idea of underground trains
connected the Mtro with long-standing associations of the Paris underground with
sewers, mines and catacombs (disease, danger and death), provoking denunciations like
ncropolitain and sewer train. 2 Conservatives worried that the Mtro would damage
Paris's cityscape and monuments, France's architectural patrimony. But the greatest
difficulties in imagining the Mtro were practical, not symbolic. There were five main
practical difficulties: (1) the financial problem of funding such a large project, (2) the
social and cultural problems of integrating railways into everyday life, (3) the spatial and
architectural problems of integrating the Mtro into the built environment, (4) the
technical problems of traction and construction, and (5) the Mtro's constant and
contentious entanglement with local and national politics. Behind these difficulties was a
2 The most famous example here is Hugo's Les Misrables. For more on this spooky field of meaning, see
David Pike, Subterranean Cities (cited above), Rosalind Williams' Notes on the Underground, and Rob
Zaretsky's appearance on The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a radio program from the University of
Houston's KUHF. Zaretsky appeared in episode 1966, The Sewers of Paris, available online at:
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1966.htm

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deeper question: were railways compatible with the city at all?
These difficulties were rooted in the historical newness of urban railways. To
capture the period from 1870-1900, any story of transportation and mobility in Western
cities must follow the rails. It is not public transit per se that is historically at issue here.
Paris's horse-drawn omnibus service, begun under the Second Empire, surely counts as a
public transit system. 3 New in this era was the attempt, made across the Western world,
to solve urban traffic problems by applying practices and technologies from the railway
industry. 4 This emphasis on railways marks an important historical shift. During the first
four decades of European railway development (c. 1830-1870), railways were used for
travel between cities, not travel within cities. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch brilliantly
illuminated in The Railway Journey, the industrial origins of railroads (i.e. English coal
mines) long stigmatized them as incompatible with the humane dwelling space of the
city. 5 Their danger, noise, speed, smoke and sparks also made them incompatible with
the social-cultural space we call the street. Street life moved at the speed of humans
and horses until the advent of urban railways, and was scripted by shared ideas of civility.

3 What I mean by public transit here is what the French call transports en commun, low-cost and highspeed transportation services available to a broad segment of the public, in which strangers travel
together in groups. In the next chapter, we'll see the emergence of a truly mass market for
transportation in Paris.
4 In the German-speaking world, the period of development spanned from Berlin's Ringbahn (1871-77)
and Stadtbahn (1882) to Vienna's Metropolitan (1898). In New York, the early 1870s witnessed both
Alfred Beach's pneumatically-powered subway and the elevated trains; by 1904 there was a subway,
too. San Fransisco's famous cable-cars date to 1873. Brussels and Milan opened new tramway lines in
1876. There was a compact period of foundational railway development in the 1870s across the Western
world. See David Pike, Subterranean Cities, p. 47. Railways provided the model for urban traffic
management again in the 1920s, when railroad signals were adapted to automobile traffic.
5 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, Ch. 11-12, pp. 171-187. Schivelbusch's reading of the dual
character of railway station architecture is particularly illuminating. Across Europe, from the 1830s-70s,
stations were typically located outside the center city. Their facades were made of cut stone in the
historical style, in an attempt to integrate them better into the fabric of the city, while the arrival halls
and other 'industrial' parts of the back of stations faced away from the city, and were made of iron and
glass, the standard of the era in industrial architecture. The stone facade thus hid the parts of the station
which were thought inappropriate for the city.

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These rules of civility set the terms of social peace in the public sphere and the
marketplace, a calm broken by the entrance of the railway.
There was also a technical incompatibility of rails and streets. Traditionally trains
stayed on track thanks to a mechanical 'lock' between grooved wheels and raised rails.
This meant that rails stood up above any surface on which they were installed,
encumbering roadways and potentially damaging the wheels of street vehicles. Until the
system was reversed, with the groove cut into the rail rather than into the wheel, so that
rails could be sunk in the street, roads and rails were technically conflicting. 6 In order for
railways to be successfully integrated into city life, both railways and the city would have
to change.
Far from a simple question of the kind of railways Paris needed, the questions
asked about the Mtro after 1872 concerned sewers, cemeteries, groundwater, street life
on the boulevards, commerce, traffic, Haussmannization, health, hygiene and safety,
noise pollution, architectural aesthetics and property values, among other topics.
Dreaming the Mtro was always dreaming the future of Paris, including its geographic
growth, population growth, social and cultural life, built environment, etc.it was a
remarkably heterogeneous affair. The Mtro was not overlaid whole onto the existing
urban fabric, but gradually woven into it. Parisians did not accommodate themselves to
the new Mtro only after 1900 as actual users; by then they had already been dreaming of
the Mtro for three decades. The social, cultural and political work needed to make the
Mtro fit into Paris's daily life began as soon as technical work began. This far-reaching
6 This invention, the so-called grooved rail is often credited to French Engineer Alphonse Loubat, who
designed one of New York's first tram lines in the 1830s, and won the concession to install Paris's first
tramway line in 1853, for the 1855 World Exposition. For more on this, see: (1) Norma Evenson, Paris:
a Century of Change 1878-1978, p. 80; (2) John P. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: the Rise of Urban
Mass Transport in Europe, p. 14.

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imaginative work was not a thin layer of cultural meaning projected onto urban railways
after their design in order to make sense of them. It was no 'mere talk,' but rather an
integral part of the design process. Imagination was necessary at this stage of railway
development, because the technologies and practices involved were so new. Designs
were still fresh, not yet solidified, standardized, or accepted. 7 The Mtro reminds us that
cultural meanings are not only projected onto finished technologies, but also built into
them.
Something similar can be said for technology and politics. Thanks to scholars in
urban studies like Norma Evenson and David Pike, we already a sense of the political
conflicts that enlivened the Mtro debate from 1872 to 1895. 8 According to the standard
account, the future Mtro became the object of a prolonged and bitter battle between the
municipal and national governments. The left-leaning Municipal Council imagined the
Mtro would meet the population's day-to-day transportation needs, while the center-right
national government supported a mixed-use system, for passengers, freight and mail,
serving as a centralized point connecting all the lines of France's national train network.
This caused a jurisdiction battle, in which the national government wanted the Mtro
legally defined as a chemin de fer d'intrt gnral, a general interest railway, or part
of the national railway network, while the Municipal Council wanted it defined as a
chemin de fer d'intrt local, a local interest railway, giving the municipal and
departmental governments more control.

7 Wiebe Bijker uses the terms closure and stablization to refer to this final stage in the design
process. See: Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Blulbs: a Theory of Socio-Technical Change, pp. 84-88.
8 Perhaps the classic version of this argument comes from Norma Evenson, The Mtro: the Long
Debate from Paris a Century of Change (Yale, 1978), pp. 91-105. David Pike's argument comes from
Subterranean Cities: the World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Cornell, 2005). Other important
re-workings of this basic narrative come from the collection of essays Mtro-cit: Le chemin de fer
mtropolitain la conqute de Paris, 1871-1945 (Paris Muses, 1997).

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This story of local-national conflict has become the standard scholarly account of
the Mtro's prehistory in the last 30 years. 9 It is not so much inaccurate as incomplete. I
argue that there are four main problems with it. First, it gives a political-reductionist
explanation of urban railway development, which short-changes the interest of
technological history in itself, making the Mtro a mere instrument in struggles that were
fundamentally political. Second, it neglects the political elephant in the room: the Paris
Commune. There is no arguing that the main axis of conflict here was local-national, but
scholars should have noticed that this reproduces the battle lines drawn by the 1871 civil
war. Struggles over whether the Mtro would be put to local socialist or national liberal
uses continued the civil war of the Commune in peacetime by other means, using public
works to solve the burning question of local or national government. These two visions of
the Mtro reflected two conflicting visions of Paris. It was the Communards vs.
Haussmannization all over again.
Third, the standard account ignores the fact, plainly visible in both archival and
secondary sources, that this conflict had more than two sides. It oversimplifies a conflict
that involved not only the municipal and national governments, but also the departmental
government of the Seine, the Council of State, the General Council of the cole des
Ponts et Chausses, the CGO, the national railway companies, a handful of civil
associations, a handful of journalists, the Paris Chamber of Commerce, and the broader
Parisian public. 10

9 In part this is due to the undeniable quality and cogency of Norma Evenson's work. But it is also due to
the fact that scholars continue to rely on Louis Biette's 1906 series of essays Le mtropolitain de
Paris, in which he foregrounds this conflict. Louis Biette, Le mtropolitain de Paris (Paris: Chaix,
1906).
10 Michel Margairaz, Le rseau mtropolitain et les pouvoirs publics: du compromis rpublicain
l'emprise technocratique. Mtro-Cit, p. 165.

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The fourth and final problem with the standard account is that it leaves the Paris
tramway networks out of the Mtro's history. Scholars have overlooked the fact that
when the Parisian authorities first asked the question of urban railways in 1872, they
discussed both tramways and the Mtro as possible solutions. The Mtro was the newer,
more controversial response, so it took some time to develop; horse-drawn tramways, by
contrast, were a non-controversial response. The CGO was already operating Paris's first
horse-drawn tramway since 1855, and adding more lines would not upset the city's
existing animal-based transportation regime. Hence, while Parisians took their time
imagining the Mtro, the authorities quickly approved the new tramways and started
construction in 1873.
While Parisians imagined the Mtro from 1872 to 1895, they were actually
experiencing urban railways in the form of horse-drawn, and later mechanically-powered,
tramways. While Parisians used the imaginary Mtro to intellectualize the question of
urban railways, they used the actually-existing tramways as a field of practical
experiment, a way to test different responses to the questionnew systems of mechanical
traction, new paving materials and rail designs, train cars, track routing, signaling
techniques, etc. The question of urban railways was worked out on two planes at once,
the practical everyday and the imaginary. If the difficulties of the tramways sometimes
cast the Mtro question in a somber light, the opportunity to test dreams of the Mtro on
the tramways ultimately improved the Mtro opened in 1900. By the same token, these
experiences doomed the tramways to failure. As I show in this chapter, the crisis in the
tramways plainly announced itself by 1895. Dreams of the Mtro, both dark and bright,
had their waking mirror in the tramways.

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In this chapter, I reintegrate the tramways into Mtro history, to reveal the
unevenness and contingency of urban rail development in Paris, which proved ready for
rails long before it was ready for mechanical traction. The tramways represent a
transitional phase between the animal-powered transportation of the 19th century and the
mechanized transportation of the 20th. Mtro dreams grew more urgent as the 19th
century drew to a close, as tramways and omnibuses were decreasingly able to satisfy the
city's growing demand for transportation. Parisians expected that their dreams could
become reality, and when this realization did not progress as quickly as hoped,
transportation became an increasingly politicized and contentious issue. The tramways
teach that entire transport networks can fail to become fully integrated into a city's
everyday life, even after many years of operation. Whereas the Mtro dug itself deeper
into Paris over time, the tramways came and went, neatly demarcated by 1855 and 1929
(or even more narrowly by 1872 and 1900). No matter how familiar the routines of riding
the trams became for Parisians by the early 20th century, Paris's everyday life never came
to revolve around the tramways as it would around the Mtro by that century's end.

Troubles Above and Troubles Below: the Beginnings of Paris's Mtro and Tramways in
the 1870s
Railway development was part of post-war reconstruction in Paris, healing the
wounds afflicted on the capital's railways by Prussian sabotage. 11 In January, 1872
Haussmann's successor as Prefect of the Seine, Lon Say inaugurated a special
commission to study local interest railways and tramways for the department of the

11 On national railway development under the Third Republic, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into
Frenchmen, pp. 195-220.

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Seine. 12 This marks the first governmental work on planning the rail network which
would henceforth be called rseau mtropolitain (metropolitan network), and
eventually simply Mtro. 13
Constantly evoking London as a model, the commissioners compared seven
railway plans, but none satisfied them. They had several concerns. First were the high
start-up costs, which would have to be offset by receipts to finance the project, but
receipts could only be roughly estimated and the massive debt inherited from
Haussmann's public works loomed. Second, the commission had difficulty considering
any form of mechanical traction besides steam locomotion, even though compressed air
and funicular (cable) traction were already available. This led down a path which deadended in the 1890s at electrification: trying to make the noise, smoke, steam and sparks
of locomotives compatible with city life. Third, they sought a system that would not
interrupt street traffic, which disqualified steam-powered tramways and elevated trains
like New York's. Finally, as they put it, the Mtro should not damage the beauty of the
Capital. These concerns and London's example predisposed the commissioners to accept
an underground network. Their report reveals tensions between deep-set cultural ideas
about the nature of the street, urban space, the public sphere, civility, etc., and the
practical/technical demands of a railway network. Locomotives didn't fit neatly into the
city they knew, and so they imagined routing the network under the city to bypass it. The
commission made few decisions, but recommended further study of London and its

12 This is an important term to parse. Legally speaking, railways fell into one of two jurisdictions under
French law: local interest, which put them in the hands of departmental or municipal authorities, and
general interest, which made them the charge of the national government.
13 Rapport de la Commission Spciale sur L'tude des Chemins de Fer et Tramways d'Intrt Local a
tablir dans le dpartement de la Seine. Paris: Charles Mourgues Frres, Imprimeurs de la Prfecture de
la Seine, 1872 (AN F 14 9153).

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railways.
As we've already seen, the commissioners were not the only Parisians looking to
London in 1872. Railways interior to Paris as Parisians called them were a
contemporary question and conversation often turned to London. 14 London was special
for several reasons: the world's largest city, it was also one the first cities to industrialize
transportation in the 1860s. 15 Its 1863 Metropolitan Railway was the world's first
subway. London was a model city for Haussmann and Napoleon III, and remained a
model for many Parisians because it excelled in the material trappings of modern
civilization, what the 20th century would call modern conveniences (which of course
depended heavily on the development of networked infrastructures). London was a dream
city for Parisians, an inspiration for the future Paris they hoped to create: a model modern
metropolis. 16 It is often said that Paris was the envy of the world in the 19th century
maybe so, but in 1872 London was the envy of Paris.
Center-left daily newspaper Le Temps published an anonymous letter from
London:
London is the city of railways. Not only is it connected by major lines to all parts
of the kingdom, as befits a capital; not only do its suburban lines open it, as in
Paris, to easy communication with the belt of towns and villages which surround
it, but, what is particular to London [is that] three of its major railways, the south,
14 F. Srafon. Etude sur les chemins de fer, les tramways et les moyens de transport en commun Paris et
Londres (Paris: Dunod, 1872). Srafon wrote that all the major cities of Europe seek to imitate
London, installing tramways or railways because In terms of transport facilities, London is the
premier city in the world... The same year, poet Arthur Rimbaud was living in London, and wrote a
famous prose poem called Mtropolitain, which one critic has linked to his experience riding the
London subway, see: Michael Spencer, A Fresh Look at Rimbaud's "Mtropolitain", The Modern
Language Review, Vol. 63, No. 4. (Oct., 1968), pp. 849-853.
15 Another example is New York, whose elevated trains date to 1868.
16 Arnold Lewis as argued that at the end of the nineteenth century, many Europeans looked to Chicago
for an early encounter with tomorrow. This city of the future, especially the tall buildings around the
Loop, was imagined as a time warp, a virtual museum of Europes own technological, industrial, and
commercial future, a glimpse of what urbanism might look like in the 20th Century. See: Arnold Lewis,
An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicagos Loop, and the Worlds Columbia
Exposition (University of Illinois Press, 1997).

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south-east and the west, pushed their stations into the heart of the city....and these
new stations are connected to one another by rail. Finally, an underground
railway, the Metropolitan, passes by these three stations and puts them in contact
with all the others. The great arc it inscribes in the interior of London is complete
and closed.
These new railways, with their numerous intermediate stations, singularly
facilitate entering and exiting London; but their principal advantage is to put the
most far-flung neighborhoods of this immense city in rapid contact with one
another. The interior circulation of London operates on this network of rails.
Instead of going on foot, by bus, or in a cab, one transports oneself from one
neighborhood to another by railway. 17
Unlike Paris, where transportation was still powered by humans and horses,
London had industrialized transportation, breaking the decades-old taboo on railways in
the city. Londoners solved the spatial and technical tensions between rails and streets by
routing trains on viaducts, in trenches and in tunnels, weaving them into the urban fabric .
This author focused on two qualities which made London's train network seem
particularly systematic: first, it was centralized, connecting London with all parts of the
kingdom, as befits a capital; second, the network was comprehensive, reaching all
parts of the city, its lines inscribing a complete and closed arc. This vision of London's
railways organized and coordinated to form a total system suggested a model of urban
perfection that Paris should work towards, a totalizing vision like Haussmann's. 18
The author assumed his readers would find two kinds of ennui in underground
17 Lettres de Londres, Le Temps, Jan. 8, 1872. Le Temps was founded under the Second Empire. In spite
of liberalized press laws which made the founding of an independent republican newspaper legal under
the empire, the editors often 'played it safe' with the censors by running anonymous columns. It is likely
that this letter was written by Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), famous for his 5 volume history of English
literature (1863) and historical work on the French revolution. Taine spent the better part of the year
1871 in England teaching at Oxford and avoiding the conflicts in France. A useful index to Le Temps
can be found in Tables du Journal Le Temps, vol 3 1871-1875 (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, 1968). In the appendices there is a list of editors and writers who contributed
anonymously to Le Temps; on p. 643 Taine is listed as the correspondent in England for the early 1870s.
18 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological
Mobilities and the Urban Condition (Routledge, 2001), pp. 49, 52 and 62. Graham and Marvin speak of
the notion of the ordered, unitary city, mediated by standard ubiquitous infrastructure networks,
calling this the modern infrastructural ideal or modern unitary city ideal. James C. Scott's Seeing
Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998) does
similar things with the concept of high modernism.

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trains. 19 First was the ennui of riding in tunnels filled with steam and smoke, where
visibility and air quality were poor; second was the ennui of riding in tunnels with no
daylight or view. As we will soon see, the author was right about these issues, as well as
others rooted in the newness and unfamiliarity of underground trains. 20 Indeed, a broad
cultural bias against the underground, with all of its associations of death, hell, and
sewers, was one of the most persistent sticking points in the process of imagining the
Mtro. At times the Mtro's dream life was nightmarish.
But not for this author. For him, London's shining example inspired a dream of
perfected Paris. In a utopian mode, the author detailed my dream for Paris, imagining
himself hovering over the city, reaching down to transform the urban fabric with a touch
of the [magic] wand, 21 drawing lines on the map of Paris from above, just as Haussmann
and Napoleon III did in the early 1850s. The author argued that traveling in underground
tunnels could be humane, so long as sufficient light and air could flow freely through
them. London's train stations provided a model of a humane space organized for the
smooth, comfortable flow of foot traffic. Overall such a system could achieve what
Parisians had been talking about for decadesstreamlining the flow of street trafficin a
way that left the scripts of urban living intact.
By July, 1872 the Prefect's commission finished a preliminary plan, and published
a map in Le Temps (figure 2). The plan centered around a limited central underground rail
network (shown in black on the map), powered by locomotive, which would connect to
19 The French word ennui can mean many thingsboredom, angst, discomfort, bother, annoyance, etc.
but it always carries a negative connotation, signifying humanity's dissatisfaction with its situation.
20 It is very difficult to determine historically whether this concern about underground trains was really a
widespread public opinion, or merely the perception of the engineers, journalists, and others who wrote
about the topic. But no matter which one is the case, this concern about underground trains was
expressed often enough by opinion-makers like engineers and journalists that it was, in fact, a major
cultural obstacle to reaching any consensus about rail design and development.
21 D'un coup de baguette...

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the Ceinture in three places (Montmartre, Boulogne, Porte d'Orlans), connect the major
train stations (except for St. Lazare and Montparnasse), and serve the north-south axis of
the grande croisse, the grands boulevards, and Les Halles. The rest of the city would be
served by horse-drawn tramways (represented by dotted lines on the map): on the eastwest axis of the grande croisse (the quays of the Seine), across most of the Left Bank, on
the exterior boulevards, and the radial lines connecting Paris with the suburbs.
Underground trains would bypass the center city, where traffic, monuments and
population were densest, while horse trams would travel on the larger streets in the
sparser periphery.
As we've seen, different rules often applied in the center and in the periphery.
Aesthetics was as big a problem as traffic. The historical and recently Haussmannized
center city was an outdoor trophy-case of France's architectural patrimony. Pride in the
beauty of their city prevented many Parisians from imagining street-level railways here.
In the periphery, on the other hand, traffic and monuments were sparser and property
values were lower. Rather than bypassing this space, planners dreamed of linking it with
both the center and the suburbs, to encourage its development. Both the center and the
periphery needed railways, but for different reasons. The commission of 1872 thought the
center needed a mechanically-powered underground railway, while the periphery needed
horse-powered street-level tramways.
While the new Mtro plan awaited a bidder (and one never came), three
concessions for new tramways were quickly gobbled up by hungry investors: (1) a north
network following major radial roads from the Right Bank into the northern periphery
and suburbs, (2) a south network which did the same on the Left Bank, also covering

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the southern arc of the external boulevards, and (3) an arc following the Right Bank
external boulevards, granted to the CGO (figure 3). 22

Figure 2: The departmental commission's 1872 Mtro plan (taken from Le Temps, July 29, 1872, p. 4)

22 Prfecture de la Seine. Tramways du Dpartement de la Seine: Cahier des Charges. Paris: Imprimerie
Charles de Morgues Frres, 1873. The carton AN F 14 9189 contains the cahiers for the network within
Paris and the north network.

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All three contracts specified horse power, a system often called chemins de fer
amricains (American railways) after the mid-19th century American boom in horse
trams. While Parisian dreams of underground railways modeled England, dreams of
tramways modeled the United States. France's jealous gaze at the anglophone world to its
west was tied to having its administrative, technological, military and economic pride
hurt by Prussia in 1870. Many nationalists suffered an inferiority complex, one journalist
writing: We won't forget that our great city, which has so often taken the initiative of
perfecting and embellishing [itself], has remained 25 years behind in adopting American
railways. 23 Construction began in 1873, service in 1874-5. 24 This was Paris's first
tramway boom, lasting until 1879 and continuing a long-standing pattern in the city's
history, of booms in transportation development leading up to Universal Expositions. The
first tramway boom was conditioned by fear of being embarrassed before an international
audience with out-of-date or inadequate means of transport at the Universal Exposition of
1878. Accordingly, the Exposition inspired Mtro development as well. 25

23 Communications et Avis Divers Le Temps, Sept. 6, 1872.

24 There is an invaluable collection of tramway statistics, with dates, in the Minister of Public Work's
office documents from 1894 (AN F 14 8588), hereafter Tramway Stats 1894.
25 Napoleon III and Haussmann worked toward consolidating the mess of coach providers under the citywide Compagnie Gnrale des Omnibus and the Compagnie Gnrale des Voitures in order to organize
service for the 1855 Exposition. See Nicholas Papayanis, The Development of the Paris Cab Trade,
1855-1914. Journal of Transport History 8/1 (1987), pp. 52-65 (see esp. p. 55). A whole host of public
works were undertaken in the 1860s in preparation for the 1867 Exposition: the park at the Buttes
Chaumont, Belgrand's unfinished sewer system and tour site near Alma, the petite ceinture railway, the
network of pneumatic tubes under the city for moving information and paperwork, and the rue des
Pyrnes, Haussmann's only attempt at cutting a new road through the eastern periphery of Paris. The
exception to this rule is the 1889 Exposition, which saw no major development of transportation
infrastructures. 1900 witnessed not only the opening of the Mtro, but also the planning of several new
tramway lines. The contracts given out for new tramways in 1876 are mixed in with Jean-Baptiste
Krantz's report from the 1878 Exposition. See: (1) Exposition universelle de 1878, Paris. Rapport sur
l'installation et la mise en mouvement; (2) Prefecture de la Seine, Tramways du Dpartement de la
Seine. Cahier des Charges. (Paris: Imprimerie Centrale des Chcmins de Fer (Chaix), 1876); (3)
Chemins de Fer de l'Exposition a l'Opra et au Palais-Royal: Memoire a l'appui de la demande de
concession (Paris: imprimerie centrale des chemins de fer (Chaix), 1876); Chemins de Fer de
l'Exposition a l'Opra et au Palais-Royal: Memoire a l'appui de la demande de concession. Paris:

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Figure 3: A standard CGO horse-powered tram (image wikipedia commons)

On a national scale, French tramway development stretches quite neatly from

1855 to 1929, with most growth between 1872 and 1914. Three successive booms are
evident: a boom in horse-powered trams between 1872 and 1884, a smaller crest in
mechanically powered trams between 1875 and 1889, and finally the largest boom:
electric-powered trams between 1890 and 1919 (including the Paris Mtro). 26 In the
period examined in this chapter, tramway development in the department of the Seine
followed a similar pattern. In 1894, Minister of Public Works Yves Guyot collected
comprehensive statistics on tramway development. From 1874 to 1879, 49 new tramway
lines were installed; 46 of these were horse-powered, 2 were steam-powered and 1 was
imprimerie centrale des chemins de fer (Chaix), 1876. All of the documents are bound as BN 4-V
Piece-340 in France's National Library.
26 Pierre Lanthier, The Relationship between State and Private Electric Industry, France 1880-1920 in
Norbert Horn and Jrgen Kocka, eds. Law and the Formation of the Big Enterprises in the 19th and
Early 20th Centuries. (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), pp. 590-603, see p. 593 for
tramway statistics: 1855-9: 1 horse tram; 1860-9: no trams; 1870-4: 3 horse trams; 1875-79: 10 horse
trams and 4 mechanical trams; 1880-4: 8 horse trams and 4 mechanical trams; 1885-9: 2 horse trams, 4
mechanical trams; 1890-4: 1 horse tram, 3 mechanical trams, 8 electric trams; 1895-99: 1 horse tram, 4
mechanical trams and 38 electric trams; 1900-4: 1 mechanical tram, 28 electric trams; 1905-9: 1
mechanical tram, 9 electric trams; 1910-4: 9 electric trams; 1915-9: 2 electric trams; 1920-24: no trams;
1925-9: 2 electric trams; 1930-4: no trams.

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electric. In the 1880s, only 5 new lines were installed (3 horse-powered, 1 pneumatic and
1 steam). From 1891-3, Guyot counted 16 new tramways; 10 were horse-powered, 2 were
pneumatic, 2 were steam-powered, 1 was electric and 1 was a funicular. Guyot's numbers
show us the first boom in horse trams, from 1874 to 1879, and just barely capture the
beginnings of the second boom, which started gradually after 1889 with various attempts
at mechanical traction, followed after 1895 by a surge in electrical traction leading up to
the 1900 Exposition. We will return to this surge in electrical traction in the next
chapter. 27
A tramway company first suggested mechanical traction for Paris's tramways,
seeking to cut costs. Horse traction was incredibly expensive, and mechanical traction
promised to be cheaper. As mile Gauthier would later put it, animal traction is the ruin
of the tramways. Thus all cities are preoccupied with replacing it with various methods of
mechanical traction. 28 Each tram required its own horses, which were worked hard and
vulnerable to disease; they often had short careers. So operators owned large numbers of
horses, which necessitated stables (i.e. land), veterinary care, food, and employees to feed
horses, tend stables, clean up manure, etc. 29
In November 1875 the North Tramways Company asked the Minister of Public

27 Source: Tramway Stats 1894. Archives Nationales, F 14 8588. One of the last things Minister of Public
Works Yves Guyot did in February 1892 before leaving office was to request information on tramways
from every department in France. The next several years were spent compiling materials sent in by the
Prefect of each department. All results were in by 1894. The 33 new tramway lines proposed in 1896
constituted a rseau de pntration which would complement the original tramway network of the
1870s. Most of the concessions went out 1899. See AN F 14 14999 and AP 25W 100, and see Chapter
3.
28 mile Gautier, l'Anne scientifique et industrielle yr. 39, 1895 (Paris: Hachette, 1896), p. 310.
29 For more on the cost savings of mechanical traction, see (1) Hector de Backer, Tramways: la traction
par chevaux et la traction par machines sur les tramways: aperu comparatif (Paris, Auguste Ghio,
1877); (2) John P. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: the Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe
(Princeton, 1976); (3) Alain Beltran and Patrice A. Carr, La fe et la servante: la socit francaise face
l'lectricit XIXe-XXe sicle (Paris: Belin, 1991), p. 77. By 1900 there were nearly 100,000 horses in
Paris.

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Works, Eugne Caillaux, for permission to modify their contract and power trams with
English engineer G. Palmer Harding's new steam engine. Tests began the following
spring and summer, with the Minister calling a special commission to compare three
systems of mechanical traction. 30 These were Mkarski's system of compressed air,
Harding's locomotive avec foyer, and Lon Francq's locomotive sans foyer. Mkarski's
motors were powered by cylinders of compressed air produced in a central plant then
distributed to trams. Cylinders hung from the bottom of the cars (figure 4). Mkarski
argued that mechanical traction would only work if tramways could switch the amount of
power used in an instant, for going up and down hills, and stopping and starting a lot:
The motor of tramways should therefore have as an essential mechanical quality a very
great flexibility. 31 The commission tested Mkarski's system from February to July,
1876 and was impressed by the power and maneuverability of the vehicles, but remained
concerned that the cylinders of compressed air might explode. Even so, the commission
granted permission to operate the vehicles on a trial basis from 1876-79. 32 The CGO
began to develop compressed air trams like the one in figure 3 after 1880. Pneumatic
traction enjoyed a modest career overall; Guyot's 1894 tramway statistics show that only
four of Paris's more than forty tramway lines were powered by compressed air. 33
The next system tested was Harding's locomotive avec foyer, a traditional
locomotive with a furnace on board for creating steam. Initial correspondence between
the Minsiter of Public Works and the engineers of the Ponts et Chausses was optimistic,
30 The Commission's work can be found in AN F 14 9198.
31 Socit des Ingnieurs Civils, Discussion sur L'emploi de l'air comprim pour la locomotion mcanique
par la procds L. Mkarski. Paris, Imprimerie Viville et Capiomont, 1876. See p. 3: "Le moteur des
tramways doit donc avoir pour qualit mcanique essentielle une trs-grande souplesse" (quote from a
speech by Mkarski reproduced in the pamphlet). AN F 14 9189
32 Second Dossier from the Commission on Mechanical Motors, 1876: La machine a air comprim
(systme Mkarski). AN F 14 9198.
33 Karl Baedeker noted 44 tramway lines in 1888 Paris, see: Paris and Environs (1888), p. 21.

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Figure 4: CGO Mkarski system compressed air tram, circa 1900 (photo Wikipedia commons)

one engineer raving that Harding's locomotive might cost half as much as horse
traction. 34 This would have been true, if not for further safety concerns. A year later, as
the Ministry approved the South Tramway Company's use of the Harding system on the
line from Montparnasse to Austerlitz, it specified one fatal condition: each train would
have only one motor car, piloted by two agents, a main conductor and an assistant. 35 The
Ministry was worried about fire, and intended the second employee to monitor the

34 First Dossier from the Commission on Mechanical Motors, 1876: Locomotive Avec Foyer (Harding),
AN F 14 9189.
35 Letter from Inspecteur Gnral des Ponts et Chausses Graeff to the Minister, Paris, July 10, 1876, AN
F 14 9189.

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equipment while the first employee operated it. But the cost of hiring two employees per
car largely outdid the savings of steam traction. By 1878, the South Tramway Company
was suffering from major financial difficulties, and founder G. Palmer Harding was
retiring his steam locomotives from service. 36
The final system examined by the commission of 1876 was Francq's locomotive
sans foyer, a steam-powered engine with no furnace, powered by metal canisters filled
with pressurized hot water (figure 5). Like Mkarski's system, power would be produced
in a plant at the end of the line, stored in tanks and distributed to cars. This system also
tested smoothly and was authorized on several lines.37 Francq knew that safety was a
primary concern for both the authorities and the tramway companies and tried to sell his
system as the safest alternative:
As the foyer [furnace] doesn't exist on this locomotive, the drawbacks of smoke,
sparks, soot, odor, the glow, the grill, the noise of friction or of exhaust from the
smokestack, are completely and absolutely removed. The metal no longer has
reasons for alteration; incrustations are no longer possible; there is no longer a
rigorous surveillance to exercise over the apparatuses of power or of security in
general. Finally, the dangers of explosion are definitively removed, and security
becomes complete, absolute. 38
The commission greeted Harding and Mkarski with worries about passenger
safety, but trams also had to share the road safely with other vehicles. Francq's system
provoked questions about whether new mechanically-powered tramways would frighten
horses with their noise, steam, sparks, etc., or blind horses pulling other vehicles, causing
accidents with horse-trams, omnibuses, coaches, or pedestrians. 39 These were not

36 See F. Srafon, La Verit sur les Tramways-Nord & Sud de Paris. Paris: Imprimerie de la Publicit,
1882.
37 Francq's system continued to be used in Paris right up to the beginnings of electrical traction, 1890-4.
38 Compagnie Continentale de Locomotion par la Machine Thermo-Spcifique, Prcis sur la Locomotive
sans Foyer. Paris: Boyer, 1875, p. 7. AN F 14 9189.
39 See Rapport from the 3rd subcommittee of the Minister's Commission, July 18, 1876. In: Third Dossier
from Commission on Mechanical Motors, 1876: Locomotive Sans Foyer (Lon Francq). AN F 14 9189.

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Figure 5: Francq's locomotive sans foyer. Note the separate engine car, equipped with a body catcher.
Image from Adolphe Schoeller, Les chemins de fer, les tramways, les chemins de fer lectriques (Paris: J.
Baillire et fils, 1902).

problems intrinsic to horse traction or mechanical traction, but problems rooted in mixing
the two systems. Could mechanical traction be used at street level without disrupting
street traffic? Could mechanical traction be effectively used in a city in which horse
traction was already so deeply entrenched? Could animal power and mechanical power
coexist? At this historical moment, engineers like Mkarski, Harding and Francq were
not ready to imagine a whole new system of traction for the special circumstances of the
city. 40 Instead they worked to adapt the traditional locomotive to these circumstances.
Other safety questions emerged, too. In a city which averaged 'two accidents a
day,' any way to make accidents less lethal was welcome. 41 Since February of 1876, the

40 Neither were the engineers at the Ministry of Public Works and the Ecole des Ponts et Chausses,but
electricity would provide this in the 1890s.
41 At least one engineer had argued years before that his plan for the Mtro would reduce the number of
accidents, by relieving traffic at street level. See: M. L. LeHir. Rseau des Voies Ferres Sous Paris
(Paris: Mmorial du Commerce et de L'industrie, 1872). BA 206329

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Prefect of Police had been reviewing designs for a chasse-corps (body catcher), a sheet
metal skirt to cover tramway wheels and prevent objects or people on the tracks from
going under oncoming trams (visible in figures 3 and 4). The daily press occasionally
produced lurid stories, to remind the public of the dangers of modern life. La Lanterne
wrote in May, 1879: We have already demanded body catchers for the tramways. Here
is yet another demonstration of their utility. The paper then told the story of a nurse,
carrying the little child she cared for, who was hit by a tramway on the Place du Chtelet.
Without the body catcher...the unlucky woman was literally cut in half. The little girl
was luckier: thrown from her nurse's arms, she rolled away from the wheels and
survived. 42
Progress in equipping trams with body catchers was slow and uneven after 1876.
The Ministry of Public Works received submissions for new body catcher designs and
citizen complaints through 1880. 43 In October 1877 an old man named Melon from
Neuilly, a west suburb, sent the Ministry a letter: Since the tramways have existed in
Paris and notably in Neuilly, accidents happen quite often, either by the fault of the
agents of this administration, or by the inattention of the public. Conductors sit on their
benches and read the newspaper, he claimed, when they should be paying attention to
passengers approaching the tram.
Melon referred to an important fact of tramway practice: until 1896, Paris
tramways, like the omnibuses before them, did not use fixed 'stops' or 'stations'
passengers could hail them and board anywhere along the line. Conductors were

42 La Lanterne, yr. 3, no. 770. May 31, 1879.

43 From the Archives Nationales. Carton F 14 14999 contains plans for Tronchon's Frein Protecteur
Tronchon, 1876. Carton F 14 9189 contains plans for body catchers designed by Folacci (1879) and
Marsillon (1880).

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officially required to stop trams to pick up passengers, but in practice they often just
slowed down. Hence the popular image in Parisian literary and visual culture of people
running to catch the tram. 44 Boarding passengers while trams were moving obviously
demanded the attention of conductors, who were also officially supposed to blow the
horn as people approached the tracks. As he didn't trust tram drivers, Melon suggested
equipping trams with body catchers and equipping horses' collars with little bells (petit
grelots). He did not realize that some trams in Paris already had body catchers as early as
1876, writing as if he was the first to think of the idea. Melon wrote again in 1878 to
complain that tramways west of Paris were still not equipped. When he finally wrote in
1879 to acknowledge that the tramways in his neighborhood had been outfitted, he
demanded remuneration for his idea to supplement his pension. This was the battiest
letter yet from the senile citizen, provoking the Ministry's curt dismissal. 45
In the fall of 1878, a tramway conductor named Vallet was sentenced to eight
days in jail for punching a complaining passenger in the eye. M. Dubard, a businessman
from Neuilly, told Vallet that he wanted to make a complaint, because Vallet had made

44 One 1870s Paris transportation guidebook was embellished with cartoons, little scenes of daily life,
including several where people ran for the train. La Cl des omnibus et tramways, (administration
d'affichage, 1876).
45 The Ministry forwarded Melon's letter to the administrators of the three tramway companies (North,
South, and the CGO), and each responded that body catchers were a good idea, but rejected the idea of
bells on the horses' collars. Both sides of this correspondence put Melon's complaints through the
proper channels only grudgingly; both sides saw him as a foolish old crank. The President of the North
Tramway Company admitted that his drivers might not always use the horn properly, but dismissed the
bells as bad for business and an annoyance to the public. Ruthier from the CGO rejected the bells
because they would produce a constant disagreeable noise for people living near the tracks, as did the
President of the South Tramway Company. The South Tramway Company also suggested that the bells
would not be loud enough to be heard by pedestrians amidst the noises of the street, and might
confuse tramway drivers, who would take the bells for a signal that demanded their attention. See: (1)
Letter from the President of the South Tramway Company to Rouselle, Chief Engineer for the Dept. of
the Seine, Oct. 27, 1877; (2) Letter from Ruthier of the CGO to Rouselle, Nov. 2, 1877; (3) Letter from
the President of the North Tramway Company to Rouselle, Nov. 7, 1877; (4) Letters from Melon to the
Minister of Public Works, Feb. 13, 1878 and Oct. 20, 1879; (5) Directeur des routes et de la Navigation
to Melon, Nov. 19, 1879. All of these letters can be found in AN F 14 9189.

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me run, i.e. not brought his tram to a complete stop for Dubard to board. Vallet rejected
Dubard's complaint, insulted his intelligence and his manhood, and finally decked him.
The Directeur des Routes et de la Navigation, Rousseau, wrote to the Prefect of Police:
As facts of this kind, just like the fairly numerous accidents which have happened
on various tramway lines, are generally being attributed, by the public, to a lack of
surveillance, I beg you, Monsieur Prefect, to examine well...what dispositions
might need to be taken in view of assuring an effective control of operation.... 46
Attached to his letter was an unidentified news clipping about the incident, dated Oct. 9,
1878 47 :
In this affair, we need to know if a tramway or omnibus conductor can honor his
duties and help people get on and off, and pay their fares; then again, maybe he
should, when he is on his stand, pay attention to those who give him the sign to
stop and thus spare the elderly, women and children the ennui and even the
danger of running after the vehicle. One sometimes sees people following one of
these large vehicles, at a run, for several minutes, making desperate gestures at a
conductor whose attention is wholly elsewhere. 48
The examples of Melon and Vallet show that tramway practice remained just as
new and unfinished during the first tramway boom as tramway technology. 49 There was

46 Letter from Rousseau to the Prefect of Police, Oct. 29, 1878. AN F 14 15000: Les faits de cette nature
de mme que les accidents assez nombreuse qui se produisent sur les diverses lignes de tramways, tant
gnralement attribus, par le public, un dfaut de surveillance, je vous prie, Monsieur le Prfet, de
voulois bien examiner, de concert avec M. l'Ingnieur en Chef du dept. de la Seine, quelles disposition
il pourrait y avoir lieu de prendre en vue d'assurer un contrle efficace de l'exploitation, et, le cas
chant de porter ces dispositions la connaissance des compagnies intresses, en les invitant tenir la
main leur rigoureuse excution. A Service du Contrl des Tramways was not created for the
department of the Seine until 1889.
47 Attaching a newspaper clipping to administrative correspondence, especially to justify claims about
public opinion, was common administrative practice in 1870s Paris. Secretaries in offices at various
levels of public works administration regularly kept press reviews, files of news clippings about
controversial infrastructural topics. These press reviews are the governor's way of keeping up with the
governed, which turns the press into the arbiter of public opinion, the governors relying on the press to
provide them accurate information about the public. Press reviews do give us historical access to public
opinion, but public opinion as paraphrased by the press, and then the government.
48 AN F 14 15000.
49 In addition to systems for mechanical traction, plans also poured into the Ministry of Public Works
concerning new rail designs, ways of making rails more durable, more rigid, cheaper, etc. These plans
are conserved in the National Archives. Carton F 14 14999 contains M. St. Yves's design of 1877.
Carton F 14 9189 contains Michaux's design of 1878 and Waddington and Ridley's design of 1879. A
company calling itself the Society for Compressed Air Motors wrote in to demand permission to
operate two new tramway lines specifically to serve the 1878 Exposition, but the proposal was rejected

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significant uncertainty about the basic materials and processes of the tramway (or more
generally light-rail) industry among engineers, operators and users. One contemporary
suggested that this uncertainty would work itself out in time: In effect horses are
frightened, but the education of horses happens in time just like that of humans. 50 Both
people and horses accommodated themselves slowly to the tramways. This uncertainty,
combined with the financial burdens of horse-traction, spelled trouble for the tramway
companies. So the first tramway boom was answered after 1878 with an equally
significant bust. As with any railway, tramway development depended on heavy initial
investment which could (ideally) be paid back later with ticket sales. Hence the presence
of big financial interests like the Socit financire de Paris, the Franco-Italian Bank and
several Belgian firms in the tramway industry, and ongoing talk of mergers and
acquisitions. 51 Paris's first tramway boom was a good, old-fashioned investment craze,
and when growth plateaued in 1878, the gamble didn't play out.
The crisis first struck the South Tramway Company, which was operating several
Harding steam engines on the Left Bank boulevards. Manning each tram with two agents
was simply too expensive; the years 1879-1881 brought 3 million francs in losses. 52 Soon
the North Tramway Company was in trouble, too. The legal problem behind this financial
trouble was the CGO's Second Empire monopoly on transportation in Paris. Because
the North and South tramways crossed from the suburbs into Paris, their 1873 charters
(F 14 14999), as was Mr. Harvard's plan for Portenses Vapeur, steam powered buses that would run
on the street rather than on rails (F 14 9189). In hindsight, it is plain to see that Harvard's idea was about
40 years ahead of its time; autobuses did not start to appear in Paris until the 1910s.
50 H. Blerzy, Etudes sur les travaux publics: routes, chemins et tramways. Revue des deux mondes 27
(1878), p. 657.
51 The real stars of international tramway finance in this era were Belgian. See Alberte Martinez Lopez,
Belgian investment in tramways and light railways : An international approach, 1892-1935, The
Journal of Transport History 24/1 (March 2003), pp 59-77.
52 F. Srafon. La Vrit sur les Tramways Nord & Sud de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie de la Publicit, 1882),
p. 17.

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specified that the CGO would build and maintain all rails within the city, and the
tramway companies would pay the CGO to use them. On top of small maintenance rates
per franc and per kilometer, the tramway companies also owed an indemnity for
privation of traffic and the partial abandoning of the rights conceded the Omnibus
Company by the city of Paris. 53 As public comfort with and demand for the tramways
increased in the periphery and suburbs from 1873 to 1879, the North and South
companies looked to extend their lines further onto the CGO's turf, in turn increasing the
amount they would have to pay the CGO.
This expense was compounded because the CGO's trams rode on rails without
entretoises, bars of wood or metal like railroad ties, which helped increase resistance and
keep rails evenly spaced. The CGO's Loubat-style (or American) rails were simply
sunk in the pavement, whether cobblestone or asphalt. As the CGO was responsible for
constructing tracks it installed them to its own standards. But these tracks did not match
the North and South Tramway Companies' cars, whose axles did not pivot, making them
vulnerable to smaller changes in the height and width of rails. The North and South
Tramway companies spent extra time, labor and money (according to one engineer, an
additional 2.25 francs per meter) retrofitting the tracks to their cars. Conveniently, the
CGO's trams had no trouble circulating on the modified tracks. 54
In spite of growing sales and ongoing talk of an anxious public clamoring for
more means of transport, use of the North and South tramway networks was not yet
heavy enough to finance initial investment or operating costs. Under such economic

53 Compagnie des Omnibus. Tramways dans Paris. Cahier des Charges (Paris: Ch. De Mourgues Freres,
1873), Article 22, pp. 12-13. AN F 14 14999
54 As the lingo of the era had it, the CGO's cars were derailable, while the North and South Tramway
Companies' cars were underailable. See Srafon 1882, pp. 5-6.

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pressure attempts to grow the network were doomed. In 1881 rising costs proved too
much for the tramway companies and a plan emerged for the CGO to acquire them. This
sparked controversy and a flurry of pamphlets in which vrit (truth) was an important
buzzword. 55 The whiff of Haussmannesque financial impropriety was unmistakable. As
Srafon put it, speaking of various plans for recombining failing and successful
companies, Each day sees another new combination, whose authors, little known in the
financial world, hide behind them speculators interested in staying in the shadows. 56
The authorities didn't support the merger any more than these outspoken pamphleteers,
and so denied the CGO's bid. The North and South Tramway companies went bankrupt in
1884, to be replaced by two new companies in 1887. 57
As the tramways rolled from boom to bust, new Mtro plans continued to emerge.
On November 23, 1875, the General Council of the Seine approved 30,000 francs for
further study of the Mtro question. A year later, Ponts et Chausses engineer E. Huet
and Paris Director of Works Alphand produced a plan for a series of lines radiating out
toward the Ceinture from a new central underground station beneath the Palais Royal.
The plan had one key technical detailits rails would be the same gauge as those of the
national railway network, whose trains could be called to circulate on the metropolitan
network. Accordingly, traction would be provided by traditional locomotives. Huet and
55 (1) Marsoulan. Vrits Ncessaires...! (Paris: Imprimerie Moderne, 1879); (2) Em. Lemoine. Etude sur
la Formation et l'Emploi des Capitaux Engags dans les Tramways-Nord & Sud de Paris (Paris,
Imprimerie de la Publicit, 1881); (3) Srafon 1882; (4) The pamphlet Observations prsentes au
Conseil Gnral de la Seine was published by a group of administrators from the two tramway
companies: Coste and Fourchault of the North Company, Wallut and Mercier from the South, and
finally Vidal, a member of both companies (Paris: Chaix, 1882).
56 Ibid., p. 22.
57 These were the Tramways de Paris et du Dpartement de la Seine (TPDS) in the North and the
Compagnie Gnrale Parisienne de Tramways (CGPT) in the South. See: Jean Robert, Les Tramways
Parisiens, pp. 29-30. Financial collapse in railway investments was a common theme in these years.
The stock market crash and well-known failure of the Freycinet plan in 1882 are perfect examples. See
Allan Mitchell, Private Enterprise or Public Service? The Eastern Railway Company and the French
State in the Nineteenth Century. The Journal of Modern History 69/1 (March 1997), pp. 18-41.

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Alphand intended their urban network to run mostly underground or more precisely in
a covered trench. In order to make locomotives work underground, they stressed that
tunnels and trenches would be carefully ventilated. 58
In their June 15, 1875 deliberation, the General Council of the Ponts et Chausses
had suggested that any Mtro plan should integrate the Ceinture, then operated by a
syndicate composed of the five major national railway companies. The council thought it
only logical that the syndicate should build and operate the Mtro, seen as an extension
of existing railways. The state would hand the national rail companies a profitable
enterprise so that Paris could become a workable plaque tournante (turning plate) for the
nation, where trains could switch from any one network to any other without leaving the
rails. 59 To seal the deal, the entire project would be legally declared general interest,
falling under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works, not the departmental or
municipal governments. As the Minister of Public Works put it that summer in a letter to
the Prefect of the Seine, emphatically combating the words 'local interest' in Huet's
project title: The establishment of a network of railways in Paris presents to an eminent
degree the character of GENERAL INTEREST. Because this network does nothing but
connect the stations of all the major general interest networks to a common center, its
concession should emanate from no authority other than that of sovereign power. 60 It
was a tautology: assuming a general interest purpose for the Mtro, the network should

58 E. Huet. Chemin de Fer d'Intrt Local du Dpartement de la Seine. Rseau Urbain. Rapport de
l'Ingnieur en chef des Chemins de fer municipaux (Paris: Chaix, 1876), pp. 5-6. Huet's plans of 187677 are also conserved in the National Archives, F 14 9153.
59 (1) Ibid., p. 27; (2) Karen Bowie, Paris, plaque tournante du rseau ferroviaire in Karen Bowie,
ed. La modernit avant Haussmann: Formes de I'space urbain Paris 1801-1853 (Paris: Editions
Recherches, 2001); (3) Alexandre Ossadzow, Les pres du mtropolitain: l'intervention des
ingnieurs Mtro-Cit (Paris Muses, 2001), pp. 57-72.
60 Letter from Minister of Public Works to the Prefect of the Seine, Versailles, July 12, 1876. AN F 14
9153

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be declared a work of general interest. In practice this would have meant a network with
largely commercial and military applications, which would carry freight, information and
passengers. Huet estimated the total cost at 159 million francs, 40 to come from the
municipality and 79 from the national budget.
The municipal council, dreaming of a local interest Mtro, saw the national
government's intentions and refused to even discuss the departmental council's plan. 61
Instead, the municipal council sent its own mission to study London in 1876, which
returned inspired to finance a local interest Mtro project on its own and cut the national
government out of the deal. These moves and counter-moves form the beginning of the
twenty-year stalemate between local and national authorities that forms the backbone of
the standard historical account of the Mtro. The next twenty years would indeed be
difficult ones for the Mtro, but Louis Biette's term sterile, which lingers in prehistories
of the Mtro is a misnomer; there was actually a lot going on in these sterile years. For
example, take the grande ceinture, a loop of rails around the outside of Paris put into law
in 1875 and opened in 1877. This new railway was clearly a way for the national
government to team up with the departmental government, outside the municipal
council's jurisdiction, to push through the long-discussed national turning plate plan,
with or without the Mtro. It was run by a syndicate of four major rail companies (North,
East, PLM and Orlans), as the General Council of the Ponts et Chausses had suggested
for the Mtro in 1875. This second beltway was a more or less direct response to being
snubbed by the municipal council in 1875-6; it was plan B, an alternate route to the
nationalist vision of the Mtro.

61 Max de Nansouty, La Question du Rseau Mtropolitain de Paris et le Projet de la Compagnie des

Etablissements Eiffel (Paris: Publications du Gnie Civil, 1891), p. 10-11.

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As the municipal and national authorities struggled for jurisdiction, architects and
engineers continued to imagine solutions for the special problems of underground trains.
In 1877 architect Louis Heuz published a plan for an elevated Mtro, following New
York's example. 62 Heuz imagined elevated tracks standing seven meters above Paris's
larger streets on slender wrought-iron viaducts. These tracks would form a roof over the
center of avenues and boulevards, creating a rue speciale (special street) for
pedestrians, protected from the weather. Heuz imagined that this space could be
embellished with lamps, benches, gates, or the classic iron and glass store fronts of Paris's
arcades. An elevated Mtro would relieve street traffic and improve pedestrian traffic,
ensuring what Heuz called a double circulation. It would be cheaper than cutting new
boulevards through the city, and would ensure No railways underground in the lower
parts of Paris, no more tramways on the interior boulevards.
Heuz argued that underground tunnels invited problems with groundwater,
sewers and the Seine, possibly making the Mtro vulnerable to flooding or polluting the
groundwater. Underground tunnels might also collapse parts of the city above, damage
monuments or bring down property values. Like many others, Heuz thought Parisians
preferred to ride in daylight and open air. He was moved by the morbidity of it all: For
the adjective mtropolitain, Parisians will soon substitute that of Ncropolitain, for a
railway obliging the public to descend by way of long staircases into veritable
catacombs! 63 Another Parisian used the term sewer train. 64 Here was the gothic

62 Louis Heuz, Chemin de Fer Transversal Air Libre Dans Une Rue Spciale. Passage Couvert pour
Pitons (Paris: A. Lvy, 1876 & 1878). There is record of one elevated plan before this, Arsne
Olivier's of 1868.
63 Ibid., p. 5. This pamplet is often cited as the origin of this pun. We'll see this vocabulary again in
Chapter 3, after the 1903 Mtro accident.
64 Quoted in Evenson, p. 93.

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scenery of the fin de sicle with a vengeance, reflecting deep-set public uneasiness about
the underground plans of the 1870s. 65
Like Alphand and Huet's 1876 plan, Rammell's 1878 plan for a pneumatic
underground railway sought to overcome the technical tensions between underground
railways and conventional locomotives, but Rammell did this by rejecting locomotives
altogether. Like Mkarski's tramways, Rammell's railway was powered by compressed
air, but rather than compressed air driving engine parts to create movement, tube-shaped
train cars with a screen at the back like...the sail of a ship would be pushed by bursts
of air in sealed tunnels. This system, Rammell boasted, avoided all the inconveniences of
the locomotive: no heat, no smoke, no steam, no noise, no vibration. Ingeniously,
compressed air could simultaneously solve the problem of traction and the problem of
ventilating tunnels. Rammell followed the example of similar pneumatic trains operated
in London and New York in the 1870s. 66
Heuz and Rammell designed solutions for the special problems of underground
railways: lack of light and air, which in turn made locomotives impracticable, driving the
search for other forms of traction (cables, compressed air, Francq's compressed steam).
These were not problems of a purely technical nature. With its florid language and
evocation of public opinion, Heuz' s pamphlet spoke in a voice not unlike that of Le
Temps in 1872, self-appointed mouthpiece of the public, speaking truth to the Prefect's
power. Planners (in this case an architect) could be just as emotive, as driven by meaning,

65 There are a number of good portrayals of this spooky cultural mood in the library of French history,
including Robert Nye's Crime Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of
National Decline (Princeton, 1984) and Eugen Weber's France Fin-de-Sicle (Harvard, 1986).
66 T. W. Rammell. Tramway Souterrain Propulsion Atmosphrique ou Pneumatic-Railway Systme
Rammell. Note sur une demande de Concession faite pour l'application de ce systme Paris (Paris:
Chaix, 1881). For more on New York's pneumatic railway, see Le Magasin Pittoresque 47 (1879), p.
168.

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and as politicized in elaborating plans for the Mtro as journalists were in writing
editorials; the Mtro was recruited into many different otherwise cultural or political
projects, many of which, like Heuz's and Rammell's Mtro plans, were never realized.
For many Parisians, dreams of underground trains called to mind a netherworld of
dangers cast out by civilization: waste, crime, disease, revolution, etc. So engineers
Alphand, Huet and Rammell had to combine competent technical design with sustained
argumentative assault on this field of meaning. As they recommended devices that could
make the underground saferartificial lighting, ventilation shafts and mechanicallypowered fansthey also assuaged public fears of the underground. Technological
problem-solving was never separated from the social, political and cultural task, as urgent
in 1879 as it was in 1872, of imagining how railways could be worked into the physical
fabric of the city, and into its culture, customs and daily routines. Tracks in the city, as
Schivelbusch called them, were still problematic. 67
Darker dreamers like Heuz knew that the public's fear of the underground ran
deep and tried to exploit it. Heuz's necrotic imagery, the taboos it broke, and the horror
evoked link his text with a broader climate of opinion not well conserved in the historical
record, in which everyone was talking excitedly about the Mtro, but few failed to note
some anxiety about what monumental changes the railway might bring to the city. We'll
soon see more anxiety in the 1880s. Railways, as a stand-in for all industrial technology,
often served the nineteenth-century as a demiurge of progress. Parisians were accustomed
to thinking of their historical situation as shaped by technological forces, motors of

67 For a good general account of the cultural work which always accompanies engineering, see Ruth
Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945
(Amsterdam University Press, 1999).

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history like the railway and the steam engine. 68 In the 1870s, the dream life of the Mtro
was prey to frequent and dramatic changes of scene: flights of utopian fantasy, morbid
expressions of fear, general hyperbole. This excitement and anxiety about underground
trains set the tone for debate in the 1880s, a decade in which elevated Mtro plans far outnumbered underground and street-level plans.

The Mtro, Politics and Urban Planning in the 1880s

We already know a lot about the 1880s; it has attracted more attention than any
other decade in existing literature on the Mtro's prehistory. This is partly because
sources for traditional architectural and engineering historydrawings, pamphlets and
correspondenceabound in the archive. 69 In spite of all this activity, however, the
standard account of Mtro history subsumes the entire 1880s under the stalemate between
the local and national governments. This may work from the state's point of view, but not
from the point of view of designers and users. While the authorities were caught in a
slump, architects, engineers and contractors continued to privately create plans for
submission to the authorities, and citizens began to form organized groups (which pushed
for an elevated Mtro, for example, or protested the Mtro altogether). The decade
opened with continuing optimism and imagination, a wide range of new visions and uses
68 French libraries contain a wealth of different 19th-century sources that turn the railway into a driver of
history. From example: (1) Famous popularizer of science and technology Louis Figuier led the way
with his Les merveilles de la science, ou Description populaire des inventions modernes, vol. 1 (Paris:
Jouvet et Cie, 1867); (2) Henry Fevre, La Locomotive: Posies (Paris: Flammarion, 1883); (3) Louis
Delmer, Les chemins de fer: petite encyclopdie populaire illustre (Paris: Schleicher Frres, 1899).
Delmer mentions Zola and Hugo as other Frenchmen who saw the railway as a force of history.
69 I can account for about 45 distinct plans for the Mtro produced between 1845 and 1897. 20 of these 45
were produced in the 1880s, a far more productive decade for imagining the Mtro than either the 1870s
or 1890s. And of these 20 plans produced in the 1880s, 11 were for exclusively elevated systems, and at
least 3 of the remaining 9 included at least some elevated component in a mixed system. These 45 plans
are either extant in the archives or cited in secondary literature. In 1902, engineer Adolphe Schoeller
claimed that there were close to 100 plans in total. See: Les chemins de fer: les tramways, les chemins
de fer lctriques (Paris: Librarie J.B. Baillire et Fils, 1902), p. 318.

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for the Mtro, but as the decade wore on the question of the Mtro and transportation in
general became more and more politicized. Parisians of many stripes grew impatient and
tried to intervene in the process of Mtro planning.
Following the bust of 1878-1881, there was a slump in tramway development
from 1882-1887. A new law on local interest railways (law of June 11, 1880), gave the
municipal and departmental authorities more control over railways deemed of local
interest, in hopes of resuscitating the boom. 70 But the bubble burst soon after the law
was passed and Paris saw no new tramways before 1887. The law's actual effect was to
add fuel to the fire burning between the municipal and national governments concerning
the Mtro. The law stated that any rail network remaining within the boundaries of a
single commune would be under municipal jurisdiction, while a network spanning
multiple communes would be departmentally controlled. 71 In Paris, this influenced the
routing of rails (the municipal council, for instance, imagined a Mtro network that did
not leave the city limits), and put the departmental authority in the middle of the ongoing
conflict between the municipal and national governments. The municipal council
struggled to keep its Mtro plans out of the suburbs, in spite of their constant demand for
more transport to and from the city. Meanwhile the national government courted the
departmental government by arguing their plan would meet suburban transportation
needs better than any purely municipal plan.
There were also attempts to break the stalemate. In 1882, the Prefect of the Seine

70 For the full text of the law, see: A. Doniol, La rglementation des chemins de fer d'intrt local des
tramways et des automobiles (Paris: Librarie polytechnique Ch. Branger, 1900), p. 241.
71 (1) Pierre Lanthier, The Relationship between State and Private Electric Industry, France 1880-1920
in Norbert Horn and Jrgen Kocka, eds. Law and the Formation of the Big Enterprises in the 19th and
Early 20th Centuries (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), pp.590-603; (2) Pascal Desabres,
The Parisian Subway, 1880-1900: A Local or National Intersest Line? On the Concept of
Globalization Business and Economic History On-Line 1 (2003).

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called an enqute d'utilit publique (investigation of public utility), a tightly scripted
process for collecting public opinion about prospective public works. 72 Registers were
opened for one month (February 15 to March 15) at the mairie of each district in Paris
and each suburban commune, where citizens were invited to present suggestions and
criticisms to a specially appointed commission of experts, landowners and local officials.
Plans for a network with the typical cross-inscribed-in-a-circle shape were drawn up,
with rails in the center underground and rails in the periphery on viaducts, and trains
powered by either steam or compressed air. Responses were very favorable overall. The
one registered criticism came from the CGO's President, concerned that the Mtro would
take his revenue, and thus violate his monopoly. 73 The CGO's notorious monopoly not
only allowed it to dominate the tramway companies, but also inspired periodic attempts
like this to block the Mtro's progress. The bloated, Haussmannian structure was founded
on horse-drawn omnibuses and tramways, hence its financial interest in preventing
competition from mechanically-powered alternatives. The CGO contributed to the
72 For a contemporary account, see The Nineteenth Century (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1892), p.
139-140: Every railway and tramway that is constructed in France has to obtain its sanction from Paris.
In cases of trifling importance that sanction may be given by the Council of State, but in all ordinary
cases a loior, as we should say, an Act of Parliamentis required. But, before that sanction is finally
given, no less than three separate local inquiries must have been held. The first, known as the enqute
d'utilit publique, is of a general character, and is held in the chief town or towns, as the case may be, of
the district concerned, by a commission 'composed of members selected by the prefect from amongst
the landowners, merchants, and representatives of the local authorities.' Notice of the commission's time
and place of meeting is widely published. A summary sketch of the proposed undertaking, with an
estimate of expense, and a schedule of the rates and fares proposed to be charged, is made accessible
beforehand to every citizen. Chambers of commerce, and even individual private persons, are invited to
criticise both verbally and in writing.
73 Chemins de Fer Mtropolitain de Paris. Avant-Projet. Rsultats de l'Enqute d'Utilit Publique.
Rapport de l'Inspecteur Gnral (J. Frmaux), 12 Sept., 1883. AN F 14 9154. Apart from these three
comments, the results of the enqute were unequivocal: Parisians were ready for the Mtro. Other
public works subjected to an enqute, like the sanitation measures of the 1880s and 1890s under Prefect
Poubelle, did not fare as well before the court of public opinion. In spite of how much such opinioncollecting measures could filter or distort public opinion, they provide the only archival evidence
available to corroborate the claims made throughout the late 19th century by journalists and engineers
that the Parisian public was constantly talking about and/or demanding a metropolitan rail network. As
usual, historians have very little direct archival access to public opinion; we have to tease it out of those
few opinions that were published or conserved.

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governmental stalemate as much as the local and national governments did. If historians
of the Mtro have been slow to realize this, nineteenth-century Parisians were not. 74
Parisians were able to imagine the Mtro long before they could realize a dream
of this magnitude. Year after year, scattered across published and archival sources, one
finds similar references to 'everyone' in Paris anticipating the Mtro, while new plans
piled up with little movement toward realizing them. If an organ of government created a
project, either no investors would demand its concession, or another organ of government
would veto it. If a group of investors created a project, an organ of government would
veto it. Because of Haussmann's heavy hand, expropriation of land for public works was
a sore subject. Many Parisians feared being evicted by a government buyout. If the
buyout was deemed for public utility (d'utilit publique), both landlord and tenants
would have to leave. Yves Guyot argued the municipal council's entire Mtro policy was
an attempt to protect landowning, taxpaying constituents (and their socially disgruntled
tenants) from expropriation. 75
Guyot also argued that politicians were hungry for sovereignty and displeased
with the power of engineers, because the opinions of Ponts et Chausses engineers were
an integral part of all public works administration. Guyot also accused engineers of
ignoring the legal and financial work required for Mtro projects. These multiple lines of

74 As we'll see in the next chapter in the case of Paul Vibert, 1896. It is also worth briefly giving some
more depth to the conflict between the city and the state. A 21st century member of the Ponts et
Chausses, Alexandre Ossadzow, reminds us that there were more than two positions in this debate (at
least at the very highest administrative levels). The Conseil Gnral des Ponts et Chausses, the highest
authority in France dealing with railways, had maintained since 1883 that the Mtro presented special
circumstances, neither local nor general, and so should be specially conceded to the city by the state.
Meanwhile, the Conseil d'Etat, the highest juridical authority in France, held that the Mtro was
definitely a general interest project. See: Les pres du mtropolitain: l'intervention des ingnieurs,
Mtro-Cit, p. 61.
75 Yves Guyot, Trois ans aux Ministre des Travaux Publics: Expriences et Conclusions (Paris: Lon
Chailley, 1896), p. 86.

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conflictgovernment vs. landowners, Parisians vs. national government, politicians vs.
engineers, government vs. CGOshow that Parisians were actively imagining and
debating the Mtro in the 1880s, so much that no consensus could be reached. As a
technical system, the Mtro's design was not yet stable or closed; it remained
interpretively flexible, all things to all Parisians. 76 As a cultural artifact, its meanings
were still unfixed, and as a political entity (a public works project), its regulation was still
unfinished.
So the stalemate was much more than a simple, two-sided legal-jurisdictional
tug of war. Alain Cottereau recently argued that the local and national visions of the
Mtro hid deeper concerns about urbanization and city life, a point the standard account
of Mtro history overlooks. Cottereau shows that the design choices made from 1870 to
1900 did not reflect purely technical concerns: Progressively, veritable choices of
urbanization and of modes of life were unleashed, under cover of technical arguments.
In the 1880s, the municipal and national camps considered how the Mtro might
contribute to the city's development as a whole, making what Cottereau calls choix
d'urbanisation (city planning choices) and choix de mode de vie (a choice of way of life).
Their two conceptions of the Mtro can thus be read for two different models of Paris. 77
The first model, supported by the increasingly left-leaning municipal council, was
based in extending the city center's dense urban fabric into the ten outer districts. 78

76 This vocabulary of closure, stabilization and interpretive flexibility as phases in technological

development comes from Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of
Sociotechnical Change (MIT, 1995).
77 (1) Alain Cottereau, Les batailles du mtropolitain : la compagnie du chemin de fer du Nord et les
choix durbanisation, in Mtro-Cit: le Chemin de fer mtropolitain la conqute de Paris, 1871-1945
(Paris-Muses, 1997), pp. 75-84; (2) Alain Cottereau, "Les batailles pour la cration du Mtro: un choix
de mode de vie, un succs historique pour la dmocratie locale," Revue dhistoire du XIXe sicle
(March, 2005), p. 89-151.
78 The municipal council moved steadily to the Left over the course of the 1880s. Pascal Desabres

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Cottereau calls this the dominant conception (meaning widely accepted by Parisians,
not the view of the dominant classes). This conception was more traditionally Parisian,
envisioning a city with dense population, mixed use of space (no zoning), and people
living near work (within walking distance). The second model, supported by the national
government, followed Haussmann in wanting to thin out the city center and extend the
city's residential space into the periphery and suburbs, to increase zoning and push the
working classes out of the center and farther from their places of work. 79
The first model envisioned renovating the existing city as living space for its
inhabitants, while the second model envisioned draining it of its inhabitants. The first was
more left wing (municipal socialism), the second more center-right (national liberalism);
the first concentrated more on public services, the second on private investment. The first
saw the Mtro as public works, meaning that it should be used and enjoyed by the
public, while for the second public works meant appropriate to the needs of the nationstate and therefore in the public interest. The first suggested that infrastructure should
serve existing social practice, while the second suggested that infrastructure should steer
practice. The national option was state-centered and technocratic, while the local option
domesticated the Mtro as an instrument of social mobility and equality. As in the
Commune, this conflict pitted everyday Parisians and the local government against the
Haussmannizing agenda of the national government.
These two models also recruited the Mtro to help solve another problem of the

connects this nicely with the administrative stalemate concerning the Mtro, in The Parisian Subway,
1880-1900: A Local or a National Interest Line? On the Concept of Globalization. Business and
Economic History On-Line 1 (2003), p. 3.
79 This urban vision was another borrowing from London. Janet Polasky, Transplanting and Rooting
Workers in London and Brussels: A Comparative History The Journal of Modern History 73 (Sept,
2001), 528-560.

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day, the crisis of housing. 80 The price of rents, the quality of working class housing,
development of the peripheral districtsmany questions about the politics, finance and
social-cultural consequences of infrastructural development that first opened during the
Second Empire flared up again in the early 1880s. 81 J. A. Thry, an engineer and partisan
of an elevated Mtro, wrote of
an unrest and an inexpressible anxiety in the Parisian population, due to the
expense of rents, to the hygienic conditions of the city, to the encumbering and
uncleanness of the center, to the insufficiency of, and the difficulty of moving
between, livable spaces located in the extremities of Paris....
For Thry, this unrest made metropolitan railways the most urgent among many other
creations being studied. 82 Several factors brought the price of rents, among other urban
issues, to the fore. Rents had already been contentious under the Second Empire and the
Commune, but now exiled communards were allowed to return to Paris (1879), arriving
just in time to witness rents inflated by the development boom around the 1878
Exposition. A revivified Left built new socialist and trade-union groups, buoyed by the
free press law of 1881, and talk of rent reform and rent strikes flared up. 83

80 Fore more on the housing crisis see Chapter 4.

81 For a brief political economy of the situation behind the crisis of rents, see Othenin d'Haussonville, La
vie et les salaires Paris (Paris: A. Quantin , 1883). In this pamphlet, excerpted from the April 15th
edition of the Revue des Deux Mondes, he wrote: Since two years ago [when] I noted (not the first,
assuredly) the deplorable conditions in which a great part of the Parisian population is lodged, the
question of rents has never stopped figuring into the preoccupations of many souls, p. 16.
82 J.A. Thry. Les Chemins Mtropolitains de Paris. La vrit sur l'excution et la dpense des Chemins
Mtropolitains Souterrains (Paris: Lambert, 1882). "Un malaise et une anxit inexprimable de la
population parisienne, dus la chert des loyers, aux conditions hyginiques de la ville,
l'encombrement et l'insalubrit du centre, l'insuffisance et aux difficults de communiquer vers les
parties habitables situes aux extrmits de Paris, fait diriger un extrme attention sur les Chemins
Mtropolitains la plus urgente parmi plusiers autres crations l'tude."
83 For a good general account of the boom in left-wing civil activity in late-nineteenth-century France, see
Kenneth Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1996) and
Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris 1850-1902 (Wisconsin, 1985), pp. 112-13. Shapiro
analyzed police records to show that the authorities were keeping an eye on all of this political activity,
noting that between 1881 and 1883, the rent strike was a common topic of discussion. As she put it,
heightened political activity among urban workers during 1879-83 was sufficiently disturbing to
authorities to draw public attention to housing problems. Srafon, one of the most widely published
voices of the era in this field, would write in 1885: ...the high price of rents is less redoubtable in

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Amidst the housing crisis, Parisians dreamed that the Mtro might help everyday
Parisians find better housing. The Mtro was also being recruited into the Third
Republic's booming debate on social reform and hygiene. One engineer explicitly
suggested that the Mtro might buy off socialists and other radicals: Concede the
workers a railway! 84 More often planners suggested that it could help steer the shape
and direction of the city's growth. Increased mobility would increase the population's
access to housing:
The centralization of commerce and the decentralization of inhabitants depend on
the good or bad disposition of rapid lines [of transport]. The more centers of
manufacturing are brought together, the easier commerce is; the more the
population disperses itself, the more it should find lodgings of better price, clean,
sometimes with gardens and always with promenades, in the neighborhoods
called eccentric, and even in the greater suburbs. 85
In this passage, Heuz evoked the national government's vision of an expanded,
globalized city, well-connected with other centers of population, commerce and industry
in the department of the Seine and beyond. This vision also incorporated long-standing
bourgeois fantasies of Paris cleansed of hygienic and revolutionary dangers, with a
neutralized working-class removed from the habitual sites of barricade building and
transplanted into brand new homes in a ring of suburban garden villages in the periphery
and suburbs. The city's core could be further developed as a center of commerce, finance,
administration, public buildings and monuments through which capital, labor, power and
information would smoothly flow. These flows would be animated by the Mtro,
enabling workers to live farther from their jobs, in the cleaner, greener spaces of the

London than in Paris, where it is becoming a veritable calamity for the less privileged class. Chemins
de Fer Mtropolitains et les moyens de transport en commun Londres, New-York, Berlin, Vienne et
Paris (Paris: Baudry, 1885), p. 79.
84 Anonymous, Deux Mtropolitains (Florence: Imprimerie Cooprative, 1882), p. 4. BA 206329(8)
85 Louiz Heuz (1878), p. 1-2.

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suburbs. This became one of the most repeated arguments of the 1880s. 86
These city planning choices thus asked the Mtro to help thin out the city
center, increase zoning, and increase working-class access to quality housing. The Mtro
was recruited for various social and political projects, which sucked it into the political
troubles of the early Third Republic: challenges to republican power from both the Right
and the Left, increasingly organized, mass action on the part of everyday Parisians, and a
Parisian public constantly crying out against conditions of urban crisis, inadequate
housing and inadequate means of transportation. The Mtro became a vehicle for urban
development, an object of technopolitical struggle among politicians, architects,
engineers, activists and citizens. Organized civil responses to the Mtro began to emerge,
a citizen reaction to the legislative stalemate of these years. Parisians became impatient
with the authorities, dreams of the Mtro diversified, and it became more and more
difficult to imagine a Mtro that could meet the diverse needs of several million people.
Those who wanted their vision of the Mtro realized would have to organize and fight for
it. Dreams of the Mtro were thus pulled away from the state and toward civil society.
1884 saw the founding of the Society for the Friends of Parisian Monuments, a
historical preservation society concerned that the Mtro would damage Paris's
86 The departmental administration of the Seine and the General Council of the Ponts et Chausses hoped
in 1883 that the Chambers could rule as soon as possible on the declaration of public utility of works
whose execution will singularly simplify the solution to the problem of low-cost housing, in procuring
for the working population rapid and economic transport facilities from the center of the city to its
periphery or to its suburbs (que les Chambres puissent prononcer les plus tt possible la dclaration
d'utilit publique d'un travail dont l'excution simplifierait singulirement la solution du problme des
logements bon march, en procurant la population ouvrire des facilits de transport rapide et
conomique du centre de la ville sa priphrie ou sa banlieue). See: Chemins de Fer Mtropolitain
de Paris. Avant-Projet. Rsultats de l'Enqute d'Utilit Publique. Rapport de l'Inspecteur Gnral (J.
Frmaux), 12 Sept., 1883, p. 23. The Milinaire Brothers repeated the mantra in 1885. With the Mtro,
the working class being able to transport itself rapidly and cheaply could thus live in better housing
conditions in the suburbs (La classe ouvrire pouvant se transporter rapidement et bon march
pourrait aussi se loger dans de meilleures conditions de loyer dans la Banlieue) 1885 Brochure, p. 14.
The Milinaire brothers' plans for the Mtro from 1883-6, like Frmaux's report, are conserved in the
Archives Nationales, F 14 9154.

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architectural patrimony. 87 Specifically, the Society was worried about structural damage
from rumbling trains and construction, the possibility of tunnels collapsing, and the
possibility of tracks disrupting monuments and streetscapes. The group waged an opinion
campaign against both underground and elevated plans.
Nothing more vividly or succinctly illustrates the Society's views than an 1886
drawing by Albert Robida, science-fiction author, then editor/illustrator in chief of La
Caricature. On June 19, 1886, Robida put his own drawing of The Embellishment of
Paris by the Mtro on the front cover of the magazine (figure 6). 88 Following a classic
Parisian convention, he represented Paris as a woman. For Robida, she was a queen,
wearing a five-point crown whose points morphed into the historical windmills on the
hilltops of Paris. Railways enter and exit her body, smoke pouring from her mouth, ear
and nose. The drawing evokes a specific moral outrage: a ladya queenhas been
violated. She is tangled in an inscrutable network of railways going over the tops of
certain famous monuments (the Tour St. Jacques and the Vendme Column), and cutting
through the core of others (the Htel de Ville). The Panthon has been as profaned as
lady Paris herself, turned into a transfer station pierced by intersecting rails and loudly
advertising its buffet (cafeteria). The message was clear: the Mtro would violate the
grande dame of Paris, in all her architectural splendor. Here was another turn for the

87 Evenson, 103-4; Evenson gives the founding date as 1885, which was the first year the Society
published a Bulletin. The year before Charles Normand published a manifesto: Socit des Amis des
Monuments Parisiens, constitue dans le but de veiller sur les monuments d'art et la physionomie
monumentale de Paris (architecture, peinture, sculpture, curiosits et souvenirs historiques). But Elise
Reclus addressed a letter to Normand September 24, 1879 calling him secrtaire de la Socit des
Amis des Monuments Parisiens, so the Society must have been in the works much longer. See Reclus's
Correspondance (Paris : Schleicher Frres : A. Costes, 1911-1925), vol. 2, p. 216.
88 Elizabeth Emery, Protecting the Past: Albert Robida and the Vieux Paris exhibit at the 1900 World's
Fair Journal of European Studies 35/1 (2005), pp. 65-85. See pp. 74-5. Emery reports that Robida's
drawing had a marked impact on the members of the Society for the Friends of Parisian Monuments.

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Figure 6: Albert Robida, L'Embellissement de Paris par le mtropolitain (1886)

nightmarish, expressing the conservative's or traditionalist's fear of and fascination with

modernity.
Along with its surreal, cartoon ugliness, there is biting irony behind the drawing's

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title. The word embellissement translates as both embellishment and beautification
(em-belle-ish-ment). It was one of Haussmann's buzzwords, and a common principle of
city planning: public works should embellish the city. 89 Robida mocked the idea, so
popular among engineers in the 1880s, that an elevated Mtro could actually help
beautify or embellish the city, adding meaningful architectural detail. 90 The irony plays
the image off of its title: the title speaks of beautification, but the image is not beautiful.
The Friends of the Paris Monuments and Robida represented a traditionalistconservative wariness of the Mtro. Indeed, wealthy, educated traditionalists, aristocrats
and academics were the only groups in Paris during the 1880s where one might find
opinions that were not merely skeptical of underground or elevated plans for the Mtro,
but skeptical of the Mtro in general. This segment of Parisians simply could not
comfortably accept the novel idea of tracks in the city.Ultimately, theirs was a losing
battle; with so many different dreams invested in the project, the Mtro was already a
foregone conclusion. 91

89 Nicholas Papayanis stresses that the word connotes both adornment and infrastructural amenities, see
Planning Paris Before Haussmann, p. 16. This suggests another dimension to Robidas critique, a sense
that the Mtro is not progressive, and will not add to the citys technical acumen any more than to its
cityscape.
90 This case was made, for example, in a Letter from Eugne Chardon, engineer and member of the
Society for the Friends of Parisian Monuments, to its President, Charles Garnier, Apr. 30, 1887. BN 8-V
Piece-6342. In this letter, Chardon protests that while it is often taken for granted that members of the
Society are opponents of the viaduct, he is a member, and not at all opposed to the viaduct, provided
that this routing allows us to conceive of this grand construction as an essentially artistic work (ce
trac permet de concevoir ce grand travail comme une oeuvre essentiellement artistique). Under the
right conditions, then, the viaduct can be a veritable work of art (le viaduc peut tre une vritable
oeuvre d'art). Chardon's main concern was the underground.
91 Norma Evenson collected the most sweeping statements to come out of this camp. As the realization of
the system approached, in 1895, a municipal councilor pessimistically predicted that, with our
Mtropolitain, all the life of the boulevards, the great arteries, will disappear. The merchants, the
manufacturers, the workers coming out of their offices and workshops will have but one objective: to
run to catch the train.... There won't be any more intelligent beings. There will be only animals. In sum,
with the face of Paris destroyed, the stores ruined, the small shopkeepers closing their boutiques,
intellectual life no longer existing,...there will no longer be a Paris. Possibly the most sweeping
statement of opposition to the proposed transport system came in 1889 from a member of the National
Assembly, Madier de Montjau, who insisted, The Mtro is anti-national, anti-municipal, anti-patriotic,

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Another organized attempt to steer Mtro development came from the Society of
Civil Engineers and their publication Le Gnie Civil. As of August 3, 1883, the society
campaigned for an elevated Mtro, joined by professionals like civil engineer Jules
Garnier, architect Louis Heuz and contractors the Milinaire Brothers. 92 In their March
2nd session that year, society member Revin identified two principle benefits of elevated
trains. First, they were cheaper and could bypass landlords and expropriations. Because
viaducts could only run on wide streets, space already owned by the city, no new
expropriation of terrain would be necessary. Second, the elevated option would damage
the aspect and the circulation of public ways as little as possible, a mantra that was to be
repeated again and again by partisans of both elevated and underground trains. 93 Elevated
trains also offered less restriction on traction than underground trains, thus easing the
ongoing struggle with mechanical traction, but they brought city planning choices of their
own. 94

and detrimental to the glory of Paris. (Paris, A Century of Change, p. 93).

92 They voted to formally get behind an elevated Mtro on August 3, 1883. Millinaire Brothers (1885),
cited above, p. 1-2.
93 Socit des Ingnieurs Civils de France, Mmoires et compte-rendu des travaux, vol. 1, first semester
(Paris, 1883), pp. 265-269. The Society made frequent comparative glances at other major cities. They
discussed Paul Haag's elevated plan, based on the urban railways of Berlin, from March to June, 1883
(Ibid, pp. 313-330, 614-617 and 635-6, and 775-781, respectively). In July, they turned to discussion of
New York's elevated railway and San Fransisco's cable cars (Ibid., vol. 2, second semester, July 6, pp.
9-27 and July 20, 33-42). The final decision was made Aug. 3, 1883. See ibid., vol. 2, pp. 166-196. This
decision has since been cited by many, including Jules Garnier (1884), the Milinaire Brothers (1885),
Norma Evenson (1978) and David Pike (2005).
94 Systems of traction, for both tramways and the Mtro, continued to be an important subject in the
1880s. The decade opened with J. Mareschal's Mtro plan, in which underground trains would slide
down sloping tracks by the power of gravity alone, to be lifted up again at the next station by elevators
(see Evenson, p. 104). 1881 witnessed the International Electrical Exposition in Paris, at which Berlin's
Siemens and Halske was allowed to operate a short section of electric-powered tramway from Concorde
to the Champs-Elyses. This was still cutting edge technology fit for an exposition, only two years since
the first time Siemens had publicly shown how electricity could produce locomotion, but it
demonstrated quite clearly how feasible electric traction was. See: (1) Souvenirs de l'exposition
d'lectricit: II La transmission de la Force distance (dynamos, tramways) Le Magasin Pittoresque
50 (1882), pp. 59-62; and (2) Dossier of materials on the electric tram at the 1881 Electric Expo, AN F
14 14999. That same year, engineer Chrtien penned a plan for an electrically-powered, elevated Mtro
(see Evenson, pp. 95-97). The Ministry of Public Works continued to receive plans from engineers in

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Unlike the underground plans of the 1870s, the elevated plans of the 1880s put the
Mtro back into the street, threatening to disrupt flows of pedestrian and vehicle traffic.
Familiar social, cultural and aesthetic problems resurfaced, too, as Parisians debated
whether elevated tracks could become pieces of Haussmannized street furniture. This
meant two things. First, viaducts would have to be stylized and sculpted to match the
architectural forms of Haussmannization, combining wrought iron with concrete, brick
and stone. Second, it meant that viaducts would have to be worked into the social scripts
that governed the street (figure 7), for example, Chardon's 1887 plan to turning viaducts
into shopping arcades. 95 Engineers dreamed of integrating an elevated Mtro into the
physical space of the city, as well as integrating it into everyday life, by linking it with
scripted parts of the daily routine like going to work, going home, taking a stroll, or going
shopping. As the Milinaire Brothers put it in 1885, the spaces under viaducts could have
many uses, such as kiosks for the sale of newspapers, drink-halls, police posts, a place
for employees to stow their tools, advertising columns, water closets, etc. They would
also provide refuge for pedestrians against traffic and the weather. 96 Engineer's drawings
can help us visualize these fantasies of social life under the viaduct (figures 8 and 9).
Elevated tracks also posed special problems for built space. There were two
popular ways of routing elevated tracks in the 1880s: first was to route viaducts over

their Bureau des Inventions (Inventions Office) for new systems of traction, including Montclar's gaspowered locomotive of 1882 and Vooght's funicular (cable) system of 1883. By far the most unusual
plan received by the Inventions Office was Duplessis's 1885 system for powering trains by water wheel
(see Letter from the Bureau des Inventions to Duplessis, Feb, 22, 1885, AN F 14 9189). This continuing
interest in traction shows that the tension between locomotives and the spaces of the city, both tunnels
and streets, was far from solved in the 1880s. Engineers were busy at work imagining ways of making
mechanically-powered vehicles fit better in the fabric of the city.
95 Eugne Chardon. Letter to M. Charles Garnier, Member of the Institute, and President of the Socit
des Amis des Monuments Parisiens, Apr. 30, 1887. BN 8-V Piece-6342
96 Milinaire Brothers, cited above, p. 1: "tels que kiosques, pou la vente des journaux, trinkhals, postes de
police, remise pour les outils de cantonniers, colonnes d'affichage, water-closets, etc."

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existing major arteries of traffic (boulevards, avenues, the Seine), second was to cut new

Figure 7: Jules Garniers Haussmannized Viaduct, 1884

arteries through the city specially for the tracks, as Haussmann had done for his
boulevards. For plans following existing arteries, slender wrought-iron viaducts were
usually recommended, while cutting new paths through the city was only necessary for
heavier installations like tracks on masonry arcades. In 1883 engineers at the Prefecture
of the Seine rejected the elevated plans of Heuz, Thry and Haag, on grounds that they
caused an uproar because they would require making major cuts through houses in the

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interior of Paris. 97 As Guyot suggested, the authorities hoped for a solution to the Mtro
question which would upset the center city and property owners less.

Figure 8: from Louis Heuz's 1878 Pamphlet

Figure 9: from Louis Heuz's 1878 Pamphlet

There was also the question of how much viaducts (and/or their construction)
might interrupt life on the surface of the city. Elevated rails would pass the windows of
97 Frmaux (1883), cited above, p. 25.

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houses, making noise, perhaps depressing property values or violating the privacy of the
indoor world. Engineers often designed viaducts slender enough to fit down the middle of
the boulevards without touching the famous chestnut trees planted along their sides,
leaving the planted promenadethe nexus of Paris street lifeunchanged. 98 If viaducts
were the right height (about 3-6 meters), the lines of trees might even block the view of
passengers into the houses they rode past, at least in the leafy season. Engineers proved
adept in the 1880s at such conceptual turnarounds. For another example, to the criticism
that the viaducts would prevent light from reaching the street below, making it somber,
an engineer might respond that it was not somber, but shady.
In 1887 the Society of Civil Engineers organized a new association called the
Ligue parisienne du mtropolitain arien (Parisian league for the elevated Metropolitan),
already the swan-song of the campaign for a fully-elevated Mtro, only three years after
it first coalesced. Meanwhile the authorities were looking to mixed systems combining
underground and elevated tracks (as in the 1882 enqute, or Minsiter of Public Works
Bahaut's plan of 1886). The Society of Civil Engineers failed to understand just how
deep Parisian attachment to the theater of street life built by Haussmann's crews could be,
and thus how effective the Friends of the Paris Monuments could be in their opinion
campaign. Many Parisians were uneasy throughout the 1870s and 1880s about their city
being spoiled by industrial infrastructures, even if they thought the city needed new
railways for practical reasons.
Moreover, for those in power, the call to 'save' Paris always meant a call to save
Haussmann's Paris, the rebuilt historical core of the city and the fancied-up bourgeois
districts to its west. Different rules held in the east and in the west, in the center and in
98 Examples include Chrtien (1882), Garnier (1884), Milinaire Bros. (1885) and Haag (1887).

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the periphery, for the Left and Right Banks, and for elevated and underground railways.
These cognitive maps of the city made mixed systems the only likely choice for a
workable Mtro. By 1889, even the Society of Civil Engineers was sponsoring Le
Chatelier's mixed system plan for the Mtro. The map of Le Chatelier's plan shows this
uneven geography, this divided city, quite clearly (figure 10). 99

Figure 10: Le Chatelier's 1889 Mtro Plan: (1) Gare de l'Est (East Train Station);
(2) Village of St. Paul; (3) Gare d'Orlans (Orlans Train Station);
(4) Esplanade des Invalides (plaza in front of Napoleon's tomb).

To make the map more legible, I have added four numerals marking the places
where the projected railway switches from underground to viaduct. If you connect the
numerals in order, two clear lines are produced which divide the city into sections. The

99 Projet de Chemin de Fer Mtropolitain pour Paris dress par M. le Chatelier, Ingnieur des Ponts et
Chausses. Notice par A. Flamant, Ingnieur en Chef des Ponts et Chausses (Paris, Publications du
Journal le Gnie Civil, Revue officielle technique des documents relatifs l'Exposition universelle de
1889, 1889). BA

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first line running from point 1 (the Gare de l'Est) to point 2 (Pont Louis Phillipe, just
behind the Htel de Ville) forms the limit of eastern Paris on the right bank, a sector in
which only elevated tracks were projected (shown as rectangular-dotted lines on the
map). The little-Haussmannized, working-class north-east sector of Paris would thus have
its street life upset by viaducts. The second line repeats the pattern on the Left Bank,
running from point 3 (the Gare d'Orlans) to point 4 (the Esplanade des Invalides). This
line divides the interior from the exterior districts on the Left Bank, establishing an
analogous line of inequality between center and periphery, here running east-west rather
than north-south. Again, elevated tracks were projected only outside this line. On the
other side of both lines, throughout the citys center and west, Le Chatelier recommended
underground tracks (shown as round-dotted lines on the map) which would bypass the
existing city, not to disturb its architecture or topography. In sum, the burdens of
infrastructureits complicated construction, which promised to upset street life quite a
bit, its noise, dirt, and rumble, not to mention its sheer bulkwere not evenly distributed
by Le Chatelier's plan, nor were its benefits. The map shows that the north and east
periphery already had access to the petite ceinture; as they were already served by rails,
Le Chatelier didn't plan any Mtro access from Batignolles to Bercy (districts 17-20 and
12), the long arc of Paris's working-class north-east.
Le Chatelier's plan is a convenient historical book-end for the 1880s, reflecting a
compromise among architects, engineers and administrators slowly emerging out of the
broad range of views circulating since the 1870s. Collectively accepted and recognizable
designs were starting to emerge out of the boom in diverse projects and plans. Rather
than seek a homogeneous system with uniform infrastructure, the discussion leading out

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of the 1880s and into the 1890s tended to be more and more centered around mixed
systems, which is how the actual Mtro ended up. Mixed systems could more gently
stitch large constructions like viaducts and tunnels into the existing fabric of the city.
They also had the advantage of being more-or-less modular, hence many engineers
recommended the Mtro be divided into sections which could be built one at a time, and
continually adapted to circumstanceswhich, again, is how the Mtro ended up. Le
Chatelier's map above shows this modularity: though it does not contain a line of rails on
the exterior boulevards of the Right Bank, this had been a popular place to imagine rails
since the 1870s, and it would not disturb the logic of his system in the least if it were
added.
The 1889 Universal Exposition and revolutionary centennial included a
Conference on the Mtro. 100 Le Chatelier summed up the current situation in his address:
This diversity in the conception and the considerable differences which result in
the proposed modes of realization have in no small way contributed to obscuring
the ideas of the great mass of the public about the significance of the word
Metropolitan, and in so doing, has slowed its execution. The powers that be,
themselves, did not escape hesitation, because there was uncertainty, even conflict
over the attribution of legal title.
Whether or not the Metropolitan is of general interest is a formality without
importance for the Parisian. What the population wants is that we finish with this
question... 101
Administrative stalemate, slowed development, an anxious public clamoring for more
100 This was the only Universal Exposition in Paris from 1855 to 1900 not preceded by a boom in
development of transportation infrastructure. Only three tramway lines went in in the department of the
Seine between 1887 and 1889 in preparation for the Exposition, two of which were in the suburbs, one
in Paris. Source: Tramway Stats 1894. Archives Nationales, F 14 8588.
101 La Question du Mtropolitain. Confrence a l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (extrait de la
Revue Scientifique). (Paris: Administration des Deux Revues, 1889), p. 9: "Cette diversit dans la
conception et les diffrences considrables qui en rsultent dans les modes proposs pour la ralisation
n'ont pas peu contribu obscurir les ides de la grande masse du public sur la signification du mot
Mtropolitain, et par cela mme, retarder l'execution. Les pouvoirs publics, eux aussi, n'ont pas
chapp l'hsitation, car il y a eu incertitude, parfois conflit sur l'attribution du titre lgal. / Que le
Mtropolitain soit ou non d'intrt gnral, formalit sans importance pour le Parisien. Ce que veut la
population, c'est qu'on en finisse avec cette question..." BA 206329(1bis)

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means of transport Le Chatelier trotted out all these fixtures of the Mtro debate in the
1870s and '80s in order to move beyond them. This kind of forward motion demanded
that Parisians turn from dreaming to planning, which could not happen without at least
some weak consensus about the future Mtro.
For Le Chatelier, 1889 was the moment. And he was right: discussion of the gross
spatial forms of the Mtro was more-or-less finished. The Mtro, everyone in Paris
foresaw, would have to upset street life in some way, whether during construction or
during operation, whether rails were underground or elevated, no matter where in the city
they went. And Haussmann's basic cross-inscribed-in-a-circle geography remained
relatively solid, with underground rails for the center city and elevated rails for the
periphery. By only imagining rails that followed existing streets, the expropriation issue
was quashed. Haussmann's boulevards and avenues were the only spaces wide enough to
accommodate rails, whether underground or elevated, without removing existing
buildings. For now, with the architectural and topographical decisions largely made, there
were three problems left to solve for the Mtro in the 1890s: traction, finance and
jurisdiction.
This same spirit of impatience guided the authorities as they worked to pull the
tramways out of their now decade-long slump. In spite of the financial restructuring of
the mid 1880s, with new companies taking over the tramway networks, there was still a
lot of financial strain in 1889, not to mention financial confusion. As the Minister of
Public Works put it in 1887, the financial rules laid down by the decree of March 20,
1882, specifying how the state could subsidize local interest railways, were often lost

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from view or poorly interpreted. 102 This government mismanagement was combined
with continuing problems in the tramway companies: missed deadlines, failure to honor
contracts, and roadways crumbling from wear and tear. As the struggling tramway
companies tried to trim the fat, they cut some of the meat from their operations as well.
Numbers of trams a day and agents employed sagged. Passengers waited longer for trams
as roadways were slowly rattled to bits. The companies steadily demanded to be bailed
out by the authorities. 103
In 1889 Minister of Public Works Yves Guyot tried to pull the tramways out of
their slump by creating more government oversight in the form of a new Tramway
Control Service (Service du Contrle des Tramways) for the department of the Seine,
which would make regular inspections. The service was composed of a team of
engineers, two Ponts et Chausses men to monitor general construction and operation of
the tramways and one mining engineer from the cole des Mines tasked specially with
inspecting systems of mechanical traction.
The most urgent issue facing the inspectors was the rails themselveshow should
they be set in the street, what materials should be used for paving, what damage did trams
do to streets? New designs for rails, paving, and the whole street-rail interface continued
throughout the 1870s and 1880s. 104 Even the most basic of urban light rail

102 La reglementation des chemins de fer tramways ... (1900), from the text of the Circulaire from the
Minsiter of Public Works to all departmental prefects, Sept. 26, 1887, pp. 257-8.
103 Bulletin Municipal Officiel (July 2,1885), p. 1311. In the discussion of Question de M. Guichard au
sujet du retard apport au pavage des rues de Flandre et d'Allemagne, Guichard blamed the conflict
between the city, the CGO, and the tramway companies over jurisdiction. In many ways, this conflict
ran parallel to the State-Department-City conflict over the Mtro.
104 Ibid. Another way that railways compromised the streets was the constant presence of horse manure.
For more on rail design and paving, see: AN F 14 14999 - dossier of materials, 1878-85, relating to the
case of M. Charles Delcourt, and his new design for tram tracks in cement. Also included is another
rejected design, the "rail universel" de M. Poullain de la Motte. Instead of this shape ( |---__|, looking
head on at the rail), Motte's rails were a broad, open V-shape. The wheels would no longer lock into the

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infrastructuresthe railswere still not fully stabilized or standardized by 1889. Rails
and streets, having previously been wholly incompatible, were slowly worked together.
This involved technical changes to both the rails (their shape, the nature of the 'lock'
between wheels and tracks) and the street (new paving materials like cement and asphalt).
In fact, the problem of integrating rails into the roadway was one of the principle
historical forces driving the long, slow transition in Paris from cobblestones (pavs) to
asphalt and cement paving. Whereas rails laid between cobblestones rattled the stones
apart over time, compromising both rails and roads, asphalt and cement hugged the rails.
These technical concerns at the new Tramway Control Service drove the search for a
physical and technical answer to the question of how railways could be integrated into the
fabric of the city.
By the end of the 1880s, the question of transportation had become heavily
politicized. As Le Chatelier explained, Parisians were becoming more and more
impatient with the authorities, who could not seem to transform the dream of the Mtro
into reality. The authorities knew this, as the examples of Le Chatelier and Guyot
illustrate. For those responsible for planning the Mtro that Parisians were so impatiently
talking about, it was beginning to feel like the capital had been sleeping on the job. It was
time to finish dreaming and wake up.

The Mtro and the Meaning of Public Works, 1890-95

As Htier, Chief Engineer for the department of the Seine, put it in 1890, We
don't have to establish the utility, one could say the necessity, of constructing a
track, but slide around in the groove, leaving more play. Indeed, the real engineering question in these
discussions of rails and paving was: more rigidity or more flexibility? The perfect rail, like the perfect
road surface, would balance the two.

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metropolitan railway in Paris. He said the same for the tramways: For more than eight
years now, we have recognized the urgent necessity of completing the network of
tramways which serves Paris and its suburbs so insufficiently. 105 There was a good deal
of frustration about the state of slump and stalemate which had stalled the Mtro question
since the mid 1870s. In the following years, engineer Paul Villain would publish plans
called The Mtro we can do (1891) and a Metropolitain that won't cost and won't
trouble anything (1892), while Guyot wrote that the best metropolitan is that which will
get done. 106 Another Parisian noted in 1891 that the philosophy of the Metropolitan is
done. 107 The perceived urgency of Paris's need for the Mtro was stronger than ever.
To get things moving, a second enqute d'utilit publique on the Mtro was
opened from July 15 to August 16, 1890. Again, a map of the proposed network was
published in Le Temps (figure 11). 108 This time the plan was proposed by two
cooperating companies, the North Railway Company and Gustav Eiffel's Compagnie des
Etablissements Eiffel, fresh off its successes at the 1889 Universal Exposition (namely
the Eiffel tower). The plan was for the North Railway Company to shoot its tendrils
deeper into the city, connecting the North Station with the St. Lazare Station, the East
Station, and Les Halles by underground rail. This network would link up with Eiffel's
new network for transfers at two stations: the Opra and Les Halles. Eiffel's network
consisted of a simple Right-Bank loop, following the quays of the Seine on the south and
105 Conseil Gnral de la Seine. Session de 1890. Routes Nationales et Dpartementales. Chemins de Fer
Mtropolitains. Tramways. Rapport de l'Ingnieur en Chef du Dpartement (Paris: Chaix, 1890).
Quotes, p. 57 and 78, respectively. AN F 14 15000.
106 (1) Paul Villain, Le Mtro qu'on peut faire (Paris: Grande Imprimerie, 1891) BA 206329(4); (2) P.
Villain and E. Mauger. Un Mtropolitain qui ne cote rien et ne trouble rien (Paris: Grande Imprimerie,
1892) AN F 14 9154; (3) Guyot, 1896, p. 84.
107 Quoted in Max de Nansouty, La question du rseau mtropolitain de Paris et le projet de la Cie des
Etablissements Eiffel (Paris: Gnie Civil, 1891), p. 4.
108 The announcement of the enqute came in Le Temps, July 18, 1890, p. 3, in the fait divers. The map
was published in the illustrated supplement to the July 21, 1890 issue.

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the grands boulevards on the north. The loop would run underground for most of its
course (Madeleine to Oberkampf), then switching to elevated tracks for the south-east arc
of the loop, where it connected the Vincennes Station (Pl. de la Bastille) with the Lyon
Station and the Orlans Station (today Austerlitz), here just kissing the shore of the Left
Bank for one stop.

Figure 11: 1890 Mtro plan from Eiffel and the North Railway Company.
The North Railway Company's network is represented by the thick, solid-black line reaching
from La Chapelle into the center city at the Opera and les Halles. Eiffel's network is the thick
dotted line running in a loop around the historical center of Paris. Le Temps (illustrated
supplement), July 21, 1890.

Along with the map, Le Temps published a full-page feature by widely-published

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popularizer of science Max de Nansouty. 109 Nansouty wrote to keep the public informed
about and engaged in the enqute, but he knew that the results would turn out more-orless like in 1882, because the utility of a metropolitan network in Paris is generally
admitted. For Nansouty, any Mtro had to do four things: (1) entail no financial risk for
the state, no guarantee of interest or subsidy for the contracted company, (2) connect
all train stations with rails, (3) show a general concern for hygiene throughout
construction and operation, and finally (4) use a mixed system, neither fully underground
nor fully elevated, which he called sollutioniste. The label sollutionist awkwardly but
memorably conveys the mood of urgency in the air, a will to get down to the technical
nitty-gritty and design a realistic Mtro likely to be approved by the public. The Mtro
problem had been poured over enough; now it needed to be solved.
Nansouty thought the plan submitted for the 1890 enqute met all these
conditions. He was already a booster for Eiffel. 110 Nansouty knew the Mtro would soon
be pushed through to realization, not because of Eiffel's brilliant plan, but because it was
time. At this moment, Parisians could not afford not to realize the Mtro; Nansouty
wrote, The question of Paris's metropolitan railway seems called to enter into a period of
realization very soon. Nansouty told the story of the Mtro's long debate, abandoned and
rediscovered again and again due to various struggles. But the public's interest was

109 Nansouty was associated with Louis Figuier's Les Merveilles de la Science series, a popular science
library, and was also long-time editor of Le Gnie Civil, France's premier journal of civil engineering.
He was an opinion maker, a science booster, and a national liberal who confidently assumed the pose of
a public educator in grand journalistic style. Nansouty was a regular contributor to La Nature, often
writing about railways and other means of transport. He also published many books, including:
Actualits scientifiques (1911), Les trucs du thtre, du cirque et de la foire (1909), L'anne
industrielle: dcouvertes scientifiques et inventions nouvelles en 1898 (1899).
110 Nansouty gave Eiffel's tower good reviews in 1889 and praised him again in 1891 with another essay
on his Mtro plan. See: La Tour Eiffel de 300 mtres l'Exposition universelle de 1889 (Paris: Tignol,
1889) and Question du Rseau Mtropolitain de Paris et le Projet de la Cie des Etablissements Eiffel
(Paris: Gnie Civil, 1891).

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unfailing, and the Mtro was assured of public favor. As public demand for mobility
increased, the tramways and omnibuses grew less and less sufficient to meet the public's
...aspirations to progress and the need, ever more pressing, of movement and activity....
Nansouty offered a new reason why Paris needed a comprehensive urban railway:
This mode of mass transit [the omnibus], which has rendered and still renders real
services to circulation, regardless of its numerous inconveniences, is destined to
become the tributary of a more intense and more active metropolitan circulation.
Movement leads to movement; the creation of a metropolitan network will not
diminish circulation by omnibus, just as the tramways and the steam-boats didn't
diminish activity in the older means of transport. Is it necessary to recall, in the
same order of ideas, that circulation on the national roads and the canals has not
stopped developing since the creation of the railroad? A new organ must also be
created; they are new forces that we foresee putting into play, without any
diminution, without even attenuation of those which exist and which cannot be
called but to develop themselves further.
This was not a vision of the Mtro calculated to relieve existing flows of traffic, so
common in the 1870s and 1880s. Nansouty dreamed the Mtro would create activity and
movement, producing more and faster flows of traffic. He dreamed of harnessing the
Mtro to the snowballing rhythm of development and progress, to pull France out of the
global slump known by economic historians as the first Great Depression, roughly
1873-1896. 111
It is no coincidence that this global economic slump lines up roughly with the 18year Mtro stalemate from 1877 to 1895. 112 As Louis Biette put it, For eighteen years
(1877-1895), the efforts of official action and private initiative remained sterile: an
absolute contradiction divided the [national] government and the city concerning the

111 Eric Hobsbawm, Ch. 2, An Economy Changes Gear, of The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (New York:
Vintage, 1989), pp. 34-55.
112 This periodization also lines up fairly well with the slump in Paris tramway development during these
years.

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legal character to attribute to this network. 113 These were also hard times for big
finance. Given the newness, risk, and uncertainty of the urban railway industry, it might
have been difficult to find investors to provide the needed start-up capital even without
the legal stalemate. Who can say whether the financial or the legal obstacle did more to
slow Mtro planning? As Biette's quote suggests, they must be taken together.
Nansouty's voice was quite different from the voices we have previously heard
from Le Temps. In 1890 Le Temps was no longer doing much left-republican posturing or
emphatically speaking truth to power about public works. The paper was no longer an
underdog in a political culture characterized by the lasting hold of clergy and aristocracy,
as it had been in the 1860s and 70s. By 1890, Le Temps's political outlook was shared by
the ruling class, under President Sadi Carnot, a left-leaning republican. Futhermore, there
was no critique of Haussmannization here; Nansouty wholeheartedly embraced it. In
1872 Le Temps criticized Haussmannization for creating heavier traffic in the city, and
imagined the Mtro as a solution to the problem. Now Nansouty, writing for Le Temps in
1890, imagined that the Mtro would do the opposite: creating more traffic, more healthy
circulation of capital, goods, people, information, etc.
Nansouty's views were echoed by the Minister of Public Works, Yves Guyot.
Guyot was an outspoken politician and well-published intellectual known for his hardline liberal views of society and economy. His is among the shriller voices in France's
liberal political mainstream in the 1880s and 1890s, constantly free-marketeering and
denouncing socialism. Like Nansouty he was an opinion maker and a science booster, but
he was also an administrator in the Haussmannian mold, an obsessive bureaucrat. He
served as Minister of Public Works from 1889 to 1892, later publishing a memoir-cum113 Biette (1906), cited above, p. 4.

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manifesto of his term entitled Three Years in the Ministry of Public Works. 114 Far from a
simple memoir, the book ...became a book of combat, as he put it, because he could not
keep the personal and the political out of it. It became a critique of French public works
administration, which he thought wasted time and money in development. The enormous
cost and scale of public works, for Guyot, made the private sector a more appropriate
agent of development. Only in the world of big business could Paris find enough capital
to realize projects like the Mtro. Only the private sector could maintain and operate such
a large system efficiently, leanly, with one eye always on the bottom line. If his
professional habits were Hausmannian, Guyot believed that Haussmann's debt-making
administrative bloat was inappropriate in this era of financial strain.
It is curious, then, that Guyot opened the book with a definition of public works as
all works undertaken for the end of common utility, which private owners could not do
with their own resources or without being authorized to occupy certain parts of the public
domain, to expropriate private property, and to collect taxes. Public works, by this
definition, meant: (1) works for the public's benefit, which (2) were undertaken by actors
from the private sector, who were (3) authorized by the state to use public resources in
construction, operation, and maintenance of the works, because (4) these actors from the
private sector didn't have enough capital themselves. The necessary resources could be
taken from the public because the works were ultimately destined to benefit the public. A
circuit would thereby be created between the public, the state and the private sector,
combining their different strengths: the public's taxpaying power, the state's taxcollecting and regulatory power, and the private sector's ability to temporarily mobilize
large amounts of capital and labor to get things done.
114 Yves Guyot, Trois ans aux Ministre des travaux publics (Paris: Lon Chailly, 1896).

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But this general definition of public works was contradicted by all Guyot's
specifics. His book discussed a number of public works projects from his terma new
water source for Lyon, the infamous canal from Paris to the sea, and finally the Mtro
under the heading public works and private initiative.115 Here, there was no sign of
the limited private sector from his general definition, yoked to the state and the public for
the resources it lacked. Turning to the Mtro, he cut the public out of the deal altogether,
arguing that any company demanding a Mtro concession should fund the entire project
using its own capital. Like Nansouty, he wanted no subsidies or guarantees of interest
from the state. Ideally, Guyot believed, the financial promise of collecting fares from
such a massive transit network would be enough to justify the weight of the original
investment.
There is thus a significant tension in Guyot's work: on the one hand he envisioned
a private sector which would remained tied to the state in good, Haussmannian fashion;
on the other, he supported keeping financial burdens and incentives in the private sector,
seeing this as a motor for economic growth and social progress. He affirmed the basic
liberal principle that the state should keep its hands off the market. But he also affirmed
the basic statist principles that only the public or the state could determine what was in
the general interest, and that only the state could authorize public works projects. This
conflict between liberal and statist views of economy, society and politics, was one of the
central political debates in France throughout the 19th century. 116 At the moment he

115 For more on the canal from Paris to the sea, see Chapter 5 and Anthony Sutcliffe, Rves parisiens:
L'chec de projets de transport public en France au XIXe sicle (Paris: Presses des Ponts, 2005).
116 Aisenberg's book Contagion is perfect example of a number of books in the history of French public
health which foreground this debate or dialectic. Ann LaBerge's work would be another example. This
is only one interesting corner of French social and political history, fields in which the liberalismstatism dialectic is commonly discussed.

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wrote, the tensions in Guyot's book mirrored the broader contradictions of society,
economy and politics in the Third Republic. Not only one the largest (failed) public
works projects of his term, the Mtro also gave Guyot an opportunity to reflect on the
meaning of public works, and the ins and outs of public works administration. The
Mtro debate became a vehicle for disputing broader questionsabout the role of the
public and private sectors in the Third Republic, about the meaning of the public in
republic.
Like Nansouty, Guyot dreamed that the Mtro would encourage the flows that
animated society and economy: [H]aving placed my ideal in scientific and productive
civilization, I considered that the whole economic life of a country depends on the facility
and the rapidity of the circulation of people and things.... 117 Existing omnibus and
tramways, for Guyot, were not fast enough, moving only 9-12 kilometers an hour
nothing compared to the 18 kilometers an hour enjoyed by London's City and South
London Railway (1890), the world's first electric-powered underground railway. 118 For
Guyot, the Mtro could accelerate the flows of traffic that would keep Paris's economy
healthy, just as railroads could for the nation as a whole. It was not only local, but also
national development that Guyot expected from the Mtro. He haughtily dismissed the
municipal council's local-centered Mtro plans as anti-patriotic: I've always considered
that the first responsibility of a politician is to put the general interests of the country
above the interests of his circumscription. 119
Guyot also wanted to keep Mtro development in the private sector because the
use of public resources entailed a social contract, a duty to use them responsibly
117 Ibid., p. 13.
118 Ibid., p. 96.
119 Ibid., p. 88.

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precisely the sort of social contract that had been broken by Haussmann. Guyot quoted a
founder of the French railways, Lafitte, who said Any means of transport is always
unpopular. For Guyot, Laffite's authority helped justify the vision of a bratty,
opportunistic, hypocritical public never satisfied with public works. The public never
takes account of the effort that the state puts into public works, he wrote. Let citizens
demand a new road or railway as loudly as they like, once the work is done, they
critique it. 120 The safer option for government, in Guyot's opinion, was to engage as few
public resources as possible, so that the public would not feel entitled to critique the
finished project. In this era when transportation infrastructures were increasingly
politicized, provoking the public was a bad idea. Guyot was more bureaucrat than
democrat; he just didn't trust the public.
Of course, the private sector didn't have a much better record than the public at
this moment in French history. Just weeks before Guyot took office in February, 1889 the
failing Panama Canal project had provoked financial meltdown and public outcry: a canal
half-finished, 1.4 billion francs lost, a workforce decimated by malaria and yellow fever,
and the ruin of 85,000 shareholders. It cast a pall over Guyot's entire term in office. 121 He
even claimed it hampered the search for start-up capital for Mtro projects during his
term, in spite of his work assembling an impressive list of partners to fund Eiffel's plan in
1891. 122 He discretely didn't mention Eiffel's involvement in the Panama Affair. Even

120 Ibid., p. 8.
121 In 1893, his predecessor Charles Baihaut was sentenced to 5 years in prison and a 750,000 franc fine.
122 The investors were lined up: Blount, president of the Socit gnrale pour favoriser le dveloppement
du commerce et de l'industrie en France; Dehaynin, vice-president of the Socit gnrale du crdit
industriel et commercial, who also signed on behalf of the Socit lyonnaise de dpts, de comptes
courants et de crdit industriel; Baron Reinach and Company; Donon, president of the Socit des
dpts et comptes courants; the Director General of the Crdit Lyonnais; Wlasto and Rostand from the
Comptoir national d'escompte de Paris; Einhorn and Picard from the Banque internationale de Paris,
and Clerc and Sienkiewicz from the Banque d'escompte de Paris. (Guyot, 1896), p. 89-90.

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though Eiffel was eventually exonerated of any wrongdoing, his connection with the
failing project could not have improved his chances of winning a concession for the
Mtro. 123
Guyot also favored the private sector because he thought the administrative
stalemate was rooted in deeper tensions built into France's system of public works
administration. As he saw it, engineers and politicians were constantly forced to work
together, but had radically different professional socialization and quite different
concerns. They routinely talked past each other. Engineers did not always understand the
delicacy of financing large works, and governors were hungry for sovereignty and
resented the continuing political power of the Ponts et Chausses. For Guyot, the
stalemate was only a symptom of these deeper problems.
National liberals like Guyot and Nansouty dreamed of harnessing the power of the
private sector to solve the administrative and financial difficulties holding back the
Mtro. They also dreamed of using the Mtro as an agent of international competition,
unifying the national rail network and increasing the speed and fluidity of circulation,
creating healthy, vibrant traffic. Movement would beget movement, development would
beget development, and capital would beget capital. Around 1890, the Mtro was an
artifact of what historians of technology call techno-nationalism, an instrument in the
international race for industrial and imperial development in the late nineteenth
century. 124 For the national liberals, the Mtro was not so different from the Panama and

123 Eiffel, by paying little attention to finance in a company that had already blown through 1.4 billion
francs, helped ensure the downfall of the endeavor. In 1887 Eiffel was called in to rework the project,
deeply in dept and only half complete. He insisted that the whole conception was flawed and went back
to the drawing board, replacing de Lesseps's original flat plan with a tiered canal regulated by locks.
This was geologically, hydrologically and technologically appropriate, but not financially feasible for
the company. Jean-Yves Mollier, Le scandale de Panam (Paris: Fayard, 1991).
124 For more on techno-nationalism, see: (1) Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in

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Suez canals, the trans-Siberian, trans-Saharan and Berlin-Baghdad railroads. It was
another agent of imperial globalization in the form of transportation infrastructure. 125
The left-wing, municipalist response to the 1890 enqute, predictably, projected a
different vision of the Mtro. Joseph Odelin, Municipal Councilor from the SaintGermain-l'Auxerrois neighborhood near the Louvre, published his own pamphlet during
the enqute to combat the liberal views of Guyot and Nansouty. 126 Odelin liked the North
Railway Company's part of the plan, but not Eiffel's. Everyone, he claimed, felt that the
Mtro ought to bring a recognizable improvement of the material sort to the working
class. It should issue from a well-formed socialism, responding, in principle, to the
needs of the greatest number. This was how to produce a work of general interest.
Odelin spoke openly of socialism, arguing that the Metro should be for the people of
Paris. For Odelin, the Mtro had to do four things: (1) relieve traffic congestion in the
city center; (2) expand the means of communication and locomotion; (3) permit the
poorest Parisians to live outside the city center (even outside the city limits), thanks to the
speed and affordability of the imagined means of transport; and (4) create work for
Parisians.
Western Society, 1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins, 1983); (2) Jeffrey Herf. Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984); (3) David Nye,
American Technological Sublime (MIT 1994); (4) Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France (MIT,
1998); (5) Hrd and Jamison, eds. The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on
Modernity, 1900-1939 (MIT, 1998); (6) Mikael Hard and Andreas Knie, The Grammar of Technology:
German and French Diesel Engineering, 1920-1940 Technology and Culture 40/1 (1999), 26-46.
125 The clearest statement to date of the Mtro's implication in globalization during the 1890s comes from
Desabres's 2003 article, cited above. For more background on infrastructural development and its
connection with globalization in Paris, see Harvey (2003), cited above. For more on globalization and
French imperialism, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and
Ideologies of European Dominance (Cornell, 1989) and Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The
Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997). Hobsbawm's Age
of Empire (cited above) remains a classic portrayal of this period. As far as primary sources are
concerned, there is no better example of this internationalist and developmentalist perspective than
political economist Paul Vibert's book La concurrence trangre, les transports par terre et par mer
(Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1896-7).
126 Joseph Odelin, Mtropolitain de pntration centrale (Paris: Chaix, 1890).

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For Odelin, recent plans would fail because they were out of scale. Municipal
Council plans were too big for Paris, both in size and in cost. Eiffel's network, by
contrast, was too small. It didn't cover enough of the city, and it didn't cover the right
parts. Many Parisians, Odelin reports, felt it was puny. It would have neglected the Left
Bank altogether, but for the Orlans Company's train station (today Gare d'Austerlitz). It
was less a Paris Metropolitan than a Right Bank of Paris Metropolitan, as he put it.
Others felt it was shady. It had earned the nickname the rabatteur of the North
Company, a slur which cast it as a parasite riding on the North Railway Company's
plan. 127 Odelin distanced himself from this view, making clear that We don't want,
therefore, to associate ourselves with the first recrimination formulated by this 'league of
the public good' which has placed Deputy Mesureur at its helm to chase Eiffel from the
Parisian templea glimpse of another civil association trying to intervene in the Mtro's
progress. 128
A more serious critique of Eiffel, Odelin argued, involved the plan's inequalities:
it neglected the Left Bank and it didn't open any radial lines connecting the center with
the periphery or suburbs, neglecting all the working-class areas of Paris and the

127 Rabatteur also means a man who makes unsavory business deals like a pimp, bookie, or scalper, giving
a sense of financial impropriety.
128 Odelin allows us into a glimpse of the witch hunt that followed the Panama Canal Scandal. The
religious imagery in his text, and the language of chasing Eiffel from Paris, hints at a language of
antisemitism that would crop up again in the pages of La Libre Parole in 1892. La Libre Parole was an
antisemitic newspaper started the same year by catholic journalist Edouard Drumont, who often spoke
in a populist language, denouncing the power of big business over the little man as fiercely as he
asserted that his right to free speech protected his virulent antisemitism. From its first issues, the paper
denounced big finance as a Jewish domain, using the Panama Canal scandal as its proof. Drumont's
insistent hate speech has been credited with fanning the flames that would become the Dreyfus Affair in
1894. It was this antisemitic critique in particular that Odelin tried to distance himself from. He was not
interested in chasing Eiffel out of Paris because of his implication in the Panama Canal affair. Drumont
published a lot of books around 1890: La France Juive devant l'opinion (1886), La Fin d'un monde
(1889), La Dernire Bataille (1890), Le Testament d'un antismite (1891). He also started an
association, the Ligue Nationale Antismitique de France, in 1890. See Jean-Yves Mollier, Le scandale
de Panam (Paris: Fayard, 1991).

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department. Odelin called for a Mtropolitain de pntration centrale, which would
encourage the radial movement of the working classes in and out of the city, ultimately
helping to improve their standard of living. 129 Borrowing the city planning ideas of the
1880s, Odelin saw the Mtro as an agent of progressive or socialist urban transformation.
Steering the growth of the city, it could give the working classes access to better housing
in cleaner, greener areas, save them time commuting, and even create work. It was an
agent of moral and material improvement. For Odelin, unlike Guyot and Nansouty, the
Mtro better served local, not national or global, development.
Odelin doubted that the Mtro alone could solve the hygienic problems and traffic
problems caused by Paris's density and congestion. It would need to be complemented by
a series of new roads, cut Haussmann-style through the densest parts of the Right Bank:
In addition, we propose...the piercing of already-begun major channels of
communication that Parisians have been waiting for and asking for for a long time
(boulevard Haussmann, avenue Ledru-Rollin, rue Aumaire, rue aux Ours, rue du Louvre,
etc., etc.). Odelin hoped to complete many major roads projected, but not finished, by
Haussmann. His pamphlet demonstrates that continued Haussmannization was pursued
alongside new, emerging forms of urbanism throughout late-nineteenth-century Paris. As
a general model of urbanism, Haussmannization could be both attacked and embraced by
Parisians on both the left and the right. One could freely appropriate elements of

129 Political economist Paul Vibert expressed the same view in 1896: And so, acting in this way, we
follow the English and American system, which is beneficial; one will no longer live anywhere but in
the countryside; the small employee will find his house, his cottage, the health and low cost that he
cannot find in Paris for his wife and his children; this is the capital point: railways, the Metropolitan
should serve solely to put Paris into contact with the banlieue, with the provinces, they should be
excentric and not concentric, as they have affirmed by virtue of I don't know what aberation. For
Vibert, the question was, of course, one of the direction of healthy flows; things should not flow around
Paris, but in and out of it. See: La concurrence trangre, les transports par terre et par mer (Paris:
Berger-Levrault, 1896-7), pp. 235.

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Haussmannization, and harness them for other causes, as Odelin did for municipal
socialism. In debating the future Mtro, Parisians were also stretching the bounds of
Haussmannization.
Odelin's pamphlet also helps us to see a surge in interest in working class hygiene
coming out of the 1889 Exposition. As engineer Paul Villain would put it in his 1891-2
plans for the Mtro:
You know that the whole redoubtable problem is for Paris to renovate, aerate and
clean up the enormous agglomeration of the old center neighborhoods, where the
infected little streets like the rues de Venise, de la Reynie, and de Brantme meet
each other in such great numbers, which are an affront to hygiene and a shame for
our capital. For this reason, we must give serious nourishment and a gauge to real
estate speculation, we must bring to the commerce of these neighborhoods the
activity which has long been far from them. And this cannot be done except by a
railway which will carry all circulation to the center. 130
For men like Odelin and Villain, the Mtro could shape not only the direction and
intensity of flows of traffic, but also flows of light and air, commerce and street life,
capital and labor. The Mtro, they hoped, would have manifold social-spatial effects,
helping to revivify, clean up and beautify the parts of the Right Bank core not yet touched
by Haussmannization.
Beyond the enqute, the early 1890s were characterized by increasing pressure
from the public to expand and modify tramway service. In the winter of 1892, the press
picked up a thread of discussion that had been circulating in Paris: the tramways ought to
be heated. As newspaper Le Rappel put it, The tramways and omnibus are a neverending subject. What improvements doesn't the public demand, whether in the time-table
130 Paul Villain and E. Mauger, Un Mtropolitain qui ne cote rien et ne trouble rien. (Paris: Grande
Imprimerie, 1892), p. 44: Vous savez tous quel redoutable problme c'est pour Paris de renouveler,
arer et assainir l'norme agglomration des vieux quartiers du centre, o se rencontre en si grand
nombres les ruelles infectes de Venise, de la Reynie, de Brantme, qui sont un dfi l'hygine et une
honte pour notre capitale. Il faut pour cela donner un aliment srieux et un gage la spculation
immobilire, il faut rendre au commerce de ces quartiers l'activit qui s'en est depuis longtemps
loigne. Or, cela ne peut tre fait que par le chemin de fer qui ramnera toute la circulation au centre.

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of trains, or in the renovation of cars? 131 This was about much more than heating. It was
about users beginning to react, as a group, to the chaos creeping into tramway
organization, as the tramway companies struggled to keep afloat. As Parisians became
more and more accustomed to using the tramways on a regular basis, a list of common
complaints began to emerge: agents were rude and/or didn't follow the rules, there were
not enough tramway lines, or enough trams running on existing lines, existing lines didn't
go to/from the right places, the interior of the cars was uncomfortable, the trams tore up
road surfaces, etc. References to cold or wet feet were not uncommon, an extra
discomfort added to the already tedious wait for the tram. 132
In hindsight, it is easy to see that these routine criticisms were well-founded. They
had inspired Guyot's reform of the Tramway Control Service in the preceding two to
three years, and were now inspiring socialist councilor Caumeau as he lead the charge in
the Departmental General Council for heated trams. Within 20 years, the tramways had
gone from a cutting edge transportation technology to an essential service that the public
expected to be available. The tramways had become politicized, too. In Anatole France's
1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret Paris we meet municipal councilor Raimondin, a radical
republican who lost the confidence of the electors, because he neglected the interests
of the neighborhood. He didn't even get a tramway, demanded for 12 years, and they say
he has sympathy for the dreyfusards. It is not likely, the narrator informs us, that he will

131 Le Rappel, Nov. 12, 1892: "Les tramways et omnibus sont un sujet intarissable. Que d'amliorations le
public ne rclame-t-il pas, soit dans le service des horaires, soit dans l'amenagement des voitures!" See
also: (1) Arsne Lopin Omnibus et tramways Le Radical, Dec. 7, 1892; (2) Le chauffage des
tramways le Parti National, Dec. 5, 1892.
132 See Guyot (1896), p. 96-7: without the Mtro, he explained, the Parisian "continues to wait for the
omnibus, feet in the water, the umbrella of each one russling against himself and others. He continues to
pay dearly and go slowly." See also Le chauffage des tramways Le Parti National, Dec. 5, 1892: Et
il m'a t donn d'avoir les pied gels dans les omnibus et les tramways dpartementaux...

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be re-elected. 133
The early 1890s also saw continuing tramway development, in the form of two
cable-cars (or funiculars), one climbing the hill at Belleville, the other the hill at
Montmarte. 134 As new lines of transit and new systems of traction were successively
applied in Paris, the distinction between existing means of transport (omnibus,
steamboats, and tramways) and imagined means of transport (the Mtro) was blurred. It
was not always easy tell, as I mentioned earlier with the example of the grande ceinture,
whether any one particular leg of an existing railway was considered part of the Mtro or
not. The Mtro was not built out of nothing, but rather was woven through a city already
crisscrossed by tramway lines and national rail lines. Hence Mtro plans often sought to
integrate existing tracks, stations and routes. 135 But engineers also made additions to
Paris's existing, rather heterogeneous transportation 'system,' like the 1891 funiculars,
which were entirely separate from the Mtro. Another instructive case is Jean-Baptiste
Berlier's tubular underground tramway.

133See the Project Gutenberg edition: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7268

134See: (1) G. De Burgraff, Tramway Funiculaire De Belleville Le Magasin Pittoresque 1890 (Yr 58,
ser. 2, vol. 8), pp. 318-322; (2) Louis Figuier, l'Anne scientifique et industrielle yr. 37 (1893) (Paris:
Hachette, 1894), p. 109-10. The Belleville Funicular was the work of engineer Fulgence Bienvenu,
who would later distinguish himself by drafting the initial plans for the Mtro. It served the north-east
quadrant of the city, so often neglected by new lines of infrastructure, opening for service in 1891 and
running from the Place de la Rpublique to the park at the Buttes Chaumont. The Montmartre Funicular
was approved by the municipal council in 1891, but opened for service until 1900. As they were
designed to increase mobility up two of Paris's steepest slopes, the main technical problem (as for any
funicular) was how to balance the weight of the car with a counter-weight. The problem of balance was
intimately tied to the problem of traction. In some funiculars (Montmartre, for example), traction was
produced by the counter-weight itself, which sometimes took the form of a large container of water. The
mass of water could be adjusted to the same weight as the car, and when both were hooked to the same
cable, the downward motion of the counter-weight would pull the car upward. In Bienvenu's Belleville
funicular, by contrast, each car was equipped with a grip (he used the English word), which hung
from the bottom of the cars, and was hooked onto a cable running in a shallow trench between the rails.
The cable was powered by a steam a steam engine in a plant at the end of the line (the top of the hill);
the loop was completed by another pulley on the Place de la Rpublique. In the water-weight system,
tram pulled cable; in the steam-powered system, cable pulled tramtwo converse responses to the
problem of traction on a steep slope.
135 They also sought to financially integrate existing companies.

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J.B. Berlier developed a plan between 1887 and 1892 to connect the Bois de
Vincennes with the Bois de Boulogne with a single, east-west transversal, running in
shallow tunnels across the center of the city (figure 12). 136 Cast in wrought-iron, they
would run just below the street. Trains would run on light-gauge tracks, both traction and
lighting would be electric. No plan had yet come so close to predicting how the first line
of the Mtro would end up looking in 1898-1900 (after all, Bienvenu's initial 1895 plan
for Line 1 was modeled after Berlier's work). Berlier was already well-known and
respected for his work in the 1860s and 70s designing the city's underground network of
pneumatic tubes for sending mail. In the 1880s, he tried to sell the city on a system for
flushing the sewers pneumatically, and was allowed to set up a trial system in parts of the
8th and 17th districts. 137 He was a devoted servant of pneumatic technology, and
experienced in working with underground tubes.
His Mtro plan was well received by the Municipal Council, who saw it as a
modest beginning for their vision of a local-oriented Mtro. Louis Figuier thought the
plan answered the Mtro question, and suggested that the broader Parisian public did,
too. 138 For anyone who was willing to envision the Mtro as a light-rail network, on a
smaller gauge than the national railways (say, a municipalist), Berlier's plan fit the mold
perfectly. But the word metropolitan appears nowhere in Berlier's project title,
136 This single line plan was Berlier's final version. Earlier versions included three lines, which can be
seen as A, B and C in figure 10. Line C corresponds to the route of this single 1892 line.
137 See Samuel Merrit Gray Proposed plan for a sewerage system, and for the disposal of the sewage of
the city of Providence (Providence Press Company, 1884), pp. 27-30, for nice comparative glances at
Paris, including details on Berlier's sewer system. See also: Compte rendu du Scretariat: Systme
Berlier, Pour la rception et l'limination des matires de vidange Journal d'hygine Vol. 8 #350 (June
7, 1883), pp. 282-3.
138 On the tubular tramway, see: (1) Louis Figuier, l'Anne scientifique et industrielle yr. 36 (1892) (Paris:
Hachette, 1893), pp. 211-20; (2) Louis Figuier, l'Anne scientifique et industrielle yr. 38 (1894) (Paris:
Hachette, 1895), pp. 171-174; (3) C. Carr, L'enqute sur le tramway tubulaire souterrain traction
lectrique La Lumire Electrique vol. 42, no. 41 (Oct. 10, 1891), pp. 72-80; (4) Chronique et revue de
la presse industrielle La Lumire Electrique vol. 33, no. 32 (Aug. 10, 1889), pp. 276-79.

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Figure 12: J.B. Berlier's 1892 Tubular Tramway. 139

tubular tramway. Prefect of the Seine Eugne Poubelle saw Berlier's plan as a tramway
which could be connected later with the future metropolitan. 140 This interpretive
flexibility gave his project appeal for both municipalists and national liberals. Political
economist and national liberal Paul Vibert, for one, was fine with the project. 141 He was
so convinced that the Mtro should complete the national railway network and be
operated by the national rail companies that no light-rail system like Berlier's could count
as a piece of the Mtro. Vibert welcomed Berlier's project, but only as another muchneeded addition to Paris's expanding means of transport. As he put it in 1896, it amounts
139 Source: Thomas Curtis Clark, Rapid Transit in Cities: I. The Problem, Scribner's Magazine
(May/June, 1892). pp. 567-578, map p. 573.
140 Conseil gnrale du dpartement de la Seine, Premire Session de 1892. Mmoires de M. le Prfet de
la Seine & de M. le Prfet de Police et procs-verbaux des dlibrations (Paris: Imprimerie
Municipale, 1892), p. 81.
141 La concurrence trangre, les transports par terre et par mer vol. 1 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1896-7),
pp. 231-242 and 254-282.

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to a simple electric tramway, very practical, which has nothing to do with the superior
interests that a Metropolitan should represent.... 142
Ironically, Vibert was cheering on the same plan pursued by the municipal council
whose approach to the Mtro he so vehemently criticized. He hurled any slur he could
find at the localist and socialist approach of the Municipal Council: antipatriotic,
criminal, reactionary, hateful. 143 The council's proposal for an elevated railway
running along the exterior boulevards, according to Vibert, was concentric, meaning
that it would shut traffic in Paris. Like Odelin, he thought the city needed an eccentric
network, to encourage radial flows in and out of the city, constantly taking in fresh
nutrients and sloughing off old labor and goods. Vibert simply overlooked the
implication of Berlier's tramway plan in the Mtro debate.
Regardless of whether Berlier's plan was or was not part of the Mtro, by the
summer of 1892 both the Municipal and Departmental Councils had approved it. 144 This
was the farthest any recent plan had gotten during the tramway slump and Mtro
stalemate, but Berlier could not recruit the necessary capital, and the enterprise lapsed.
Berlier's tube, as it came to be known, was one of the last unrealized plans produced
during the stalemate. But Berlier was luckier than all the others; his plan got a second life
in 1895 when Bienvenu modeled his plan for the first line of the Mtro on it.
As we'll see in the next chapter, 1895 was a major turning point, sparked by
electrification, which pulled the Mtro out of its stalemate and the tramways
(temporarily) out of their slump, making public transportation available to a mass
142 Ibid., p. 266.
143 Ibid., pp. 255, 261, 265.
144 Conseil gnrale du dpartement de la Seine, Premire Session de 1892. Mmoires de M. le Prfet de
la Seine & de M. le Prfet de Police et procs-verbaux des dlibrations (Paris: Imprimerie
Municipale, 1892), pp. 298-9.

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audience for the first time in the years before 1900. Until November of 1895, however,
the Mtro remained an imaginary railway at the center of a bitter administrative struggle
and a rich public debate. Between 1872 and 1895, what had dreaming of the Mtro done?
It had nurtured a prismatic technological optimism, showing the railway to be massively
interpretively flexible, and asked to do all sorts of things: to articulate the cultural
meanings of the underground, to define safe and unsafe, to guide different visions of city
planning, to solve the housing problem, and to show Parisians the meaning of politically
and culturally charged words like public works, general interest and
Haussmannization. There was disagreement about where rails should go, what system of
traction should be used, who the Mtro should serve, how it should be funded, regulated
and operated, and what its many meanings might be. The Mtro became a way to
articulate oppositions like national vs. local, public vs. private, politics vs. engineering,
and liberalism vs. socialism.
In contrast to the standard view of the Mtro's prehistory, which instrumentalizes
the Mtro as a tool of political struggle, I see these struggles as essentially
technopolitical. They were not only struggles to define or control a railway, but also
struggles for national greatness, social equality, urban renewal, or many other causes
embraced by Parisians from all walks of life. Accordingly, throughout this chapter,
engineers have had no monopoly on our sources; we read plans from architects, civil
engineers, state engineers, politicians, journalists, scientists, and contractors. Each one of
them answered the Mtro question in a biased, interested way and slid effortlessly from
technological to political topics, weaving a seamless technopolitical argument for how
the Mtro should or would impact the city's future.

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Chapter 3: Paris Under Construction, 1895-1914

Introduction: The Coming of the Exposition, 1895-1900

While the years 1872 to 1895 were spent dreaming where Paris's means of
transport are concerned, the years 1895 to 1914 were a sober awakening. In the last
chapter, we saw how late 19th century engineers, architects, intellectuals and politicians
imagined that railways would transform Paris, help answer the social question, and solve
long-standing urban problems. In the early 20th century, by contrast, they found that
industrialized means of transport could also cause new social and urban problems. While
1872 to 1895 was relatively sluggish for transportation development, 1895 to 1914 was
booming. Construction of the first Mtro networksix lines conceded in 1898 to the
Compagnie Gnrale de Traction (General Traction Company)spanned 1898 to 1910,
and the catastrophic Mtro accident of August 1903 inspired significant renovations of
station architecture, rolling stock and electrical equipment which continued until 1914.
The Mtro thus subjected the city to an all-over construction project for nearly
two decades. Tramway development followed a similar pattern: a boom of development
in 1899-1900 before the 1900 Exposition, the Diatto system accidents of 1900-1901 as a
turning point, and department-wide reorganization of tramway networks from 1902 to
1914. The two decades before the First World War were difficult years for Paris's
transportation networks, dotted by spectacular accidents, an uncertain day-to-day
operation of technical networks (which moved from improvisation to method, as one

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scholar has put it 1 ), a slow, ongoing overhaul of infrastructures, significant labor unrest,
and behind it all the impact of two innovations: electrification and mass transportation.
The development boom after 1895 was sparked by electrification, and
complemented by a major shift in social practice: locomotion became available to a mass
public for the first time. Hence we will meet some new characters in this chapter: the
workers who built and operated the Mtro and tramways, and the mass public who used
them for the first time. We will meet shopkeepers, day laborers, neighborhood women
and tram drivers, and examine their responses to the transformations of technology and
built space going on around them, as we pursue urban history and the history of
technology from below. From the history of everyday life, I borrow the project of
interpreting large structures, institutions, and processes from the point of view of the
ordinary people who experience them. Applied to a large technical system like Paris's
Mtro or tramways, this points to a study of construction workers, tram drivers and
everyday users, reminiscent of David Edgerton's recent history of technology-in-use. 2
These large technical systems were also social systems, which created new communities
of workers and riders, people who often saw the new means of transport in less certain
and less positive terms than the systems' designers did. The user experiences of 18951914 thus provide an important contrast to the design dreams of 1872-1895.
The pressure of the impending 1900 Universal Exposition finally transformed the
Mtro from a dream of Paris's future into something current, as Prefect of the Seine

Jean Tricoire, L'exploitation du mtropolitain: de l'improvisation la mthode, in Mtro-Cit, pp.

103-116.
2 This pithy formulation of the history of everyday life comes from David Crew. See Germans on
Welfare from Weimar to Hitler (Oxford, 1998), pp. 8-10. Technology-in-use comes from David
Edgerton's recent polemic The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford,
2007), pp. ix-xviii.

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Poubelle put it, in 1895. The Exposition also sparked tramway development, though
results here would be mixed. 3 The same year, retired military officer M.M. Petitjean
published The Great Works of Paris (Les Grands Travaux de Paris), an essay outlining
public works the city needed in preparing for the Exposition. Chief among them was the
Mtro. 4 Such works were needed, Petitjean argued, for the city to put its best foot
forward for foreign guests and remain a model of Western civilization, but also because
expositions were always good excuses for developing Paris (a historical pattern we have
already seen). The words grands travaux (major works) had already been used to
describe Haussmann's renovations, and would have suggested to contemporaries the
magnitude and seriousness of the proposed works. He continued:
Paris wants to go in advance, marching from conquest to conquest. After
pasteurization, vaccination, it wants light, electric traction, aerial navigation, etc.,
etc... And for its personal use, it demands to move more freely by means of a
Metropolitan; it wants more space, to breath more easily, it demands tearing down
these walls of Jericho, these inept fortifications which encircle it, which stifle it, it
wants to grow!
Paris wants to breathe the pure air of the atmosphere, to drink the clean water of
the Seine.... It regards with fear the bacilli of cholera and typhoid fever, holding
their positions at the gates of the city....
And what does France demand? It demands a grandiose Exposition, where it can
show, with its palaces, its chief works, its love of work and of science, and its
strong desire to live in peace with all nations who would march with it in conquest
of great discoveries, and thus collaborate in the improvement of our poor
humanity. 5

3 Conseil Municipal Le Temps, January 12, 1895, p. 3: speaking before the Municipal Council,
Poubelle explained that the Metropolitan project..., which was suspended for twenty years, has become
current again faced with the perspectives of the 1900 Exposition (Le projet de Mtropolitain, expliquet-il, qui tait pendant depuis vingt ans, redevient une actualit en face des perspectives de l'Exposition
de 1900).A May 21, 1895 letter from the president of the CGPT to the Prefect of the Seine mentions the
expo as a reason for moving along on tramway development. See Georges Drumont, Automobiles sur
rails (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1898), p. 167.
4 These were: (1) the Mtro, (2) another belt railway around the city, (3) direct-to-sewer drainage for all
domestic, commercial and industrial waste water, and (4) demolition of its outdated wall of military
fortifications.
5 Petitjean, 1895, pp. 9-10.

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In short, for Paris to uphold its civilizing mission, it would have to further civilize itself.
To preserve its reputation as the City of Light (Ville Lumire), it would have to be
lavishly illuminated in 1900, a beacon of the electric century to come.
Petitjean highlighted infrastructures which had been sensitive for Parisians even
before Haussmann: transportation and sanitation. Nineteenth-century Parisians, especially
bourgeois ones, often worried their city was 'behind the times' in these areas. Yves Guyot
called it shameful that Paris didn't have a metropolitan railway in 1896. Transportation
was sensitive for several reasons. We saw in the last chapter that discussions of
transportation from the 1870s to 1890s were always framed by the presumption of Paris's
basic inadequacy in this area. Then there was 1889, the only exposition between 1855
and 1900 not preceded by a boom in transportation development. Many in Paris
remembered the event as an embarrassing international showcase of infrastructural
inadequacy. American social scientist Edmund James confirmed these fears in 1900, with
his review of The Inadequate Street Car System of Paris. Finally, Paris coach, omnibus
and tramway drivers rarely missed the opportunity to strike during a Universal Exposition
between 1855 and 1900. 6
The build-up to 1900 was no exception. There was a flurry of development (and
strikes) between 1895 and 1900. The departmental government passed out new tramway
concessions to encourage competition and challenge the CGO's controversial
monopoly, hoping to raise standards for service and equipment, jump-starting the move
to electric traction. They also hoped to increase the capacity of Paris's transport networks
6 (1) Guyot, Trois ans aux Ministre des travaux publics, p. 85; (2) Biette (1906), p. 5; (3) Edmund James,
The Inadequate Street Car System of Paris, Chicago Daily, Apr. 22, 1900, p. 51; (4) Nicholas
Papayanis, Proltarianisation des cochers de fiacres Paris (1878-1889). Le Mouvement social, No.
132. (Jul. - Sep., 1985), pp. 59-82.

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and reduce costs for both operators and consumers. But they were not always sure how to
balance technology, politics, and economics to make industrialized means of transit
available to the greatest number of people. The result was contracts with unreliable
companies, experimenting with cutting edge equipment, who put workers, passengers and
the city's investments into jeopardyas the accidents of 1901 and 1903 would later
reveal. For the tramways, progress was slow and crisis was never far. Tramway
companies were consistently unable to keep up with Parisian's growing need (real or
perceived) for more means of transportation, just as in the 19th century. In the early 20th
century, while zealous savants hyped electric traction as the predestined future of urban
locomotion, and the new, smaller tramway companies experimented with it, sometimes to
disastrous effect, the CGO held the reins of horse traction tightly, experimenting with
steam and compressed air, but resisting electricity. 7 It was hard to keep up with such
rapid technological change. Parisians had not yet come to terms with mechanized
transport when electricity's Second Industrial Revolution emerged.
There is no better emblem of the Second Industrial Revolution in Paris than the
Mtro. In 1895, the Prefecture of the Seine, Municipal Council and Ministry of Public
Works still vied for control of the network. But the Municipal Council finally broke the
administrative stalemate with a clever ultimatum: either the Mtro would be declared a
local interest railway, or the Municipal Council would withhold the 20 million francs it
promised for the 1900 Exposition. 8 The national government folded and Minister of

See the AMTUIR (Paris Museum of Urban Transportation) website, especially the page on the
General History of Urban Transports, http://www.amtuir.org/03 index htu gale.htm. Here,
AMTUIR outlines several systems (Rowan, Serpollet, and Purrey) of steam-powered tramways used by
the CGO between 1889 and 1914. See also Jean Robert, Les Tramways Parisiens, pp. 31-63, 115-160.
8 Guyot (1896), pp. 96-7.

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Public Works Louis Barthou pronounced the Mtro a work of local interest on
November 22nd, 1895. The Municipal Council quickly set up a Mtro planning
commission under socialist councilman Andr Berthelot. 1896 was full of decisions
about the gauge of tracks, the combination of elevated and underground installations, and
network routing. A municipal mission to Budapest in 1896 studied its new Siemens and
Halske electric-powered subway, also the showpiece of an international exposition. The
commission decided most of the Mtro's architectural and technological detailsa mix of
tunnels, trenches and viaducts, third-rail electric tractionby the end of 1896, and
network routing was finalized in 1897. By 1898 the Mtro was no longer dream, but
reality. Construction started in October of 1898, and the first network was completed
only weeks before the catastrophic flood of 1910. 9
This chapter has five sections. In the first section I deal with the social-historical
shift toward a mass ridership; in the second, I deal with electrification. These socioeconomic changes were closely connected with electrification. Like electrification, they
were jump-started in the mid-1890s by the impending 1900 exposition. Like

9 Michel Margairaz, Le rseau mtropitain et les pouvoirs publics: du compromis rpublicain l'emprise
technocratique. Mtro-Cit, pp. 165-168. In 1898, one author described the conditions that woke the
Mtro from its slumber: After having necessitated laborious studies and given rise to various
evaluations, which generally showed a certain skepticism, the metropolitan railway has finally left the
domain of legend. The law of March 30, 1898, in consecrating its existence, has made it a reality.
Victorien Maubry, Le Mtropolitain, Le Magasin Pittoresque 1898 (Series 2, vol. 6, year 66), p. 373.
The story of the Mtro's final planning by municipal engineers Huet and Bienvenu, as well as the
technical aspects of the Mtro's construction have already been documented by Michael Ossadzow and
other engineering historians at the cole des Ponts et Chausses, so I will not treat it in much detail,
here. Most of this historical work on the Mtro is fairly recent, coming out of the 100-year anniversary
of the Mtro celebrated in 1999-2000, and bearing the stamp of Paris's municipal government, archives
and museums. See: (1) Hallsted-Baumert et al., eds. Mtro-Cit: Le chemin de fer mtropolitain la
conqute de Paris 1871-1945 (Paris muses, 1997); (2) Jean Tricoire, ed. Le Mtro de Paris: 1899-1911
Images de la construction (Paris muses/RATP, 1999); (3) Claude Berton and Alexandre Ossadzow,
Fulgence Bienvene et la construction du Mtropolitain de Paris (Paris: Presses Ponts et Chausses,
2007), (4) Jean Trioire, ed. Mtropolitain: l'autre dimension de la ville (Paris: Hotel de Lamoignon,
1988).

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electrification, they were worked out by trial and error on the tramway networks, and
pursued by Parisian engineers and politicians anxious to modernize the capital. Both
transformations were intended to solve ongoing conditions of crisisfinancial,
technological and administrativewhich had plagued the tramways since the late 1870s.
The inadequacy of Paris's transportation infrastructures and the burdens of horse traction
had been common complaints since at least 1889, and after the CGO's attempt to block
new tramway development in 1891, the long-awaited project of expanding Paris's
tramway networks stalled. For the tramway and omnibus networksindeed the whole
19th Century system based around the CGO and its satellite tramway companiesthe
crisis of the late 1870s continued into 1895, even into 1914.
Section three deals with the problem of accidents from 1900 to 1903. For the new
mass public experiencing urban railways for the first time, accidents provided evidence
of the darker side of modern technology, showing up contradictions and gaps in the
ideology of technological optimism and progress. Users began to bridge what Bernhard
Rieger called the knowledge gap, the distance between expert and popular
understandings of technology during the Second Industrial Revolution. 10 But there was
also a gap between the confidence of engineering rhetoric and the difficulties of
engineering practice, here. We should not forget that these technologies were also new
and difficult for the experts, the railway engineers who, as Jean Tricoire so eloquently put
it, moved from improvisation to method between 1900 and 1903. New social and
cultural scripts had to be written for these new technologies, but this work was not always

10 Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945
(Cambridge, 2005).

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easy. 11 Paris's peculiar path through electrification lead to application of the Diatto
system for tramway traction between 1895 and 1900, a system which failed spectacularly
in the accidents of fall, 1900 to winter, 1901. Then came the Mtro's firey accident of
August, 1903, killing 84.
Around these accidents, a language of critique developed in the press and in
public, which questioned technological optimism by juxtaposing it with the dangers and
failures of modern technology. Due to the complexities of public works administration
(which relied on close ties between local government and business), journalists and other
purveyors of opinion often didn't know whether to blame the sorry state of Paris
transportation networks on the transit companies that violated their contracts, or the
government that was unable to enforce contracts in a meaningful way. A revolving door
between public and private sectors was itself part of the problem; charges of corruption
and neglect flew far and wide. In a similar vein, Parisians were not always sure whether
technology or human agency was more responsible for problems with transportation
networks. The era of accidents taught users to talk back to the authorities, and also forced
designers to recognize the user's perspective. The knowledge gap was closed slowly and
unevenly through negotiation and struggle.
Section four deals with labor history, especially the wave of terrassier strikes
between 1905 and 1908. The era of first Mtro network construction was also the era in
which a militant labor movement confronted French business and government with a

11 The term scripts comes from Madeleine Akrich, who defines scripts as visions of the world
inscribed in technological artifacts, scripts which suggest how artifacts should be used and interpreted,
which predict what kinds of people will use them, and in what ways. See The De-Scription of
Technical Objects, in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. ed.
Wiebe Bijker and John Law (MIT, 2000), pp. 208-209.

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rolling threat of general strike, in pursuit of demands like the eight hour work day. More
than a decade of construction required a lot of labor, and Paris transportation and
construction workers played an active role in the syndicalist movement. Mtro
contractors often failed to uphold the labor regulations imposed on them by the
government, a fact of which the budding syndicalist movement in Paris never tired of
reminding journalists and the Htel de Ville. This should remind us that transportation
(like public works more generally) had become a more contentious political issue in the
late 19th century, and more publicly visible. As urban railways were woven through the
city, the subject of public works became interwoven with broader discussions of the
public and the Republic. Thus, between 1872 and 1895, transportation was linked with
discussions about privatization and nationalization in the ongoing battle between liberals
and socialists in Paris. Between 1895 and 1914, transportation also became linked with
the topics of the syndicalist era: work, unions, strikes, sabotage, class conflict and
revolution.
The fifth and final section deals with construction, especially the social and spatial
problems of the construction-site. The decade of Mtro construction after 1898
effectively re-Haussmannized the avenues and boulevards, the Mtro ironically
encumbering the very flows of street traffic it was designed to lubricate. This upset life
on the surface of the city a great deal, troubling everyday routines and itineraries, slowing
traffic, and jeopardizing the capital's reputation. The city of chantiers (construction sites)
became strange and unfamiliar to locals. This was a cultural and aesthetic issue, as many
well-to-do Parisians found their torn up capital ugly and improper. It was also a national
issue, because important monuments, historical sites and tourist attractions were

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inaccessible. The city could no longer function as an effective national capital. But more
than anything else, it was a practical issue, a question of the city's smooth functioning. In
this section, the accent is on 1908-1914, and the ongoing dissent practiced by journalists
and the public, evoking the social contract implied in the idea of public works.
In this chapter, I want to show that the process of adjusting social, political, and
cultural scripts to fit new electrical technology rarely worked out as Parisians dreamed it
would in the late 19th century. What's more, technology had to change as much as
practice. It was a moment of transition. Parisians did the practical work of getting used to
mass transit as part of their everyday lives, while they did the political work of deciding
how infrastructures would be administered (publicly or privately, for example), and the
technological work of how to design safe, smoothly-running technical systems.

Mass Transit Arrives: the Ten-Cent Tramways

The period from 1895 to 1914 brought a fundamental social shift to Paris:
mobility for the average Parisian increased. 12 The transformation of the transportation
market into an economy of scale made purchasing transportation into a mass activity,
available to everyone in Paris, regardless of social class. Since the 1870s, Paris's
population had increased steadily from about 2 to 2.5 million people, horse traction had
proven less and less feasible in the face of ballooning demand, a discourse of citizen
demand had solidified, technological options had proliferated, and the dreams of
administrators and engineers had significantly grown in scope and scalemore lines,
more cars, more riders, more riders per car, more money saved, more money earned.
12 Mass sales of bicycles also began in this era, another important index of mobility for everyday people in
Paris.

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Technologically speaking, electric traction greatly increased the feasible scale of
transport networks. Economically speaking, transforming public transportation into a
mass market, an economy of scale, had the same effect. Contemporaries knew this.
Savants from railway engineer Lon Francq to political economist Paul Vibert argued in
the 1890s that Paris could only have means of transport appropriate to its needs, and cash
in on the long anticipated cost savings of mechanical and/or electrical traction, if a mass
ridership was cultivated. The financial problem and the traction problem had the same
solution: a change in scale. 13
A mass market for industrialized transportation began to emerge in the late 19th
century. 14 Take for example the growth of annual omnibus ridership from 1879 to 1883:
older, 28-seat omnibuses saw barely 1% growth, while newer, 40-seat omnibuses saw
closer to 50% growth. Ridership grew faster with larger vehicles; each place cost less,
each vehicle was more profitable. Newer modes of transportation also grew faster than
older; so tramway ridership grew faster than omnibus ridership. Between 1879 and 1895,
annual tramway ridership grew almost 300%; from 1895 to 1928, it grew around 400%.
Nothing grew more spectacularly than the Mtro, which was designed as a mass transit
network. From 1901 to 1910, first class ticket sales grew from just over 6.5 million to
almost 27 million (over 400%); second class, from 34.5 million to 164 million (closer to

13 John McKay argued very cogently in his classic Traways and Trolleys that electrification and
economies of scale worked hand-in-hand to bring mass transit to Europe in this era. Vibert, La
concurrence trangere vol. 2; Francq, Chemin de fer mtropolitain: recueil des articles publis dans le
journal le Mtropolitain propos de la traction du mtropolitain parisien (Paris: E. Bernard er Cie.,
1892).
14 The emergence of the mass market for transportation followed not far behind the emergence of other
emblematic modern mass markets, for example the mass circulation daily newspaper. See Vanessa
Schwartz, Spectacular Realities (University of California, 1998) and Gregory Shaya "The Flneur, the
Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860-1910," American Historical Review
109:1 (February 2004).

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500%). 15
Such growth would have been difficult for politicians and engineers to keep up
with even under the best of historical circumstances. Not only a result of population
growth, it was also a result of changing expectations and growing availability. More and
more Parisians wanted to use mass transport, as it became a more accepted, affordable
and accessible part of everyday life. More and more seats were available to a broader
public, even if there were never enough to satisfy the needs or desires of the entire
population. Politicians and engineers helped create demand for mechanized mass transit
before they could satisfy this demand, as they did with fresh water piping in this same
period. 16 Thus, what started in the early-mid 1890s as a project of adding several new
tramway lines onto the existing system became by 1900 a project for the complete
overhaul of the departmental tramway system. As Inspector of Public Works Lefebvre
put it in his 1898 report, It is not merely necessary...to complete the current organization
of mass transit in Paris and its suburbs, but more to completely transform it. 17
Unlike the municipal Mtro, these new tramways were largely the charge of the
departmental and national governments. According to an 1896 report, discussions about

15 The annual number of omnibus riders between 1879 and 1883 went from 45,762,451 riders a year to
48,326,597 on the older omnibuses, and from 45,485,981 to 67,047,395 on the newer. The annual
number tramway passengers grew from 58,370,878 (1879) to 75,419,772 (1883), and from 136,785,000
(1890) to 166,236,000 (1895). Either this happened in spite of the simultaneous crisis in the tramways,
or it was one cause of the crisis. 1928 was the peak year for tramway ridership, at about 700 million
rides that year. The 1930s would see the tramways in steep decline, replaced by the autobus. For
figures, see Jean Robert, Les Tramways Parisiens, appendixes volution du trafic, which compares
omnibus, tramway and Metro traffic in the long dure. Tramway and Omnibus figures for 1879-1883
come from: Variations dans le nombre des voyageurs et la recette brute. AN F 14 9154: statistics in the
dossier called Chemin de fer Mtropolitain: Notes Diverses relatives l'valutation de la dpense, midlate 1880s. Figures for 1890-95 come from: Jean Robert, Les Tramways Parisiens, p. 36. For Mtro
statistics, see statistics and accounting records in AP V1O8 13.
16 We will see this pattern again in Chapter 5 when we discuss the water supply.
17 Ministre des Travaux Publics. Rseau Complmentaire de Tramays du Dpartement de la Seine.
Rapport de l'Inspecteur Gnral. Dec. 8, 1898. AN F 14 15024.

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the new penetration network (rseau de pntration) or complementary network
(rseau complmentaire) began in 1894. This was a department-wide plan, designed to
connect Paris and its transit networks with the suburbs and other towns across the
department. Planners envisioned thirty-three new lines, half of them radial lines
connecting the suburbs with Paris, the other half constituting a purely departmental
network, an exterior beltway (ceinture extrieure) linking the suburban communes to
each other. 18
The complementary network was put to an enqute from June 4th to July 4th of
1896. Plans submitted for review included three important details. First, fares would be 5
centimes for trips outside of Paris and 10 centimes for trips in-and-out of Paris. This was
the cheapest fares had ever been. In 1878, for example, seats were between 15 and 50
centimes, depending on how far one traveled and whether one rode on the bottom level of
the tram (inside) or on the top (outside, known as the impriale). 19 Second, the longstanding omnibus-based practice of flagging down moving vehicles to board freely along
the line would be replaced with fixed stops. Third, the new lines would be powered by
non-animal sources, with the strong suggestion of electricity, and all existing tramway
lines would be transformed from horse traction to mechanical traction. 20
The enqute produced very positive reviews. Citizens across the department

18 The Prefecture of the Seine had a lot of help from the Ministry of Public Works and the Municipal
Council, channeled through the specially convened Commission mixte des omnibus et tramways,
which mixed general councilors of the Seine and Paris municipal councilors. See: Conseil Gnral de la
Seine, Rapport No. 13 (Dec. 9, 1896), presented by Gibert, councilor from Saint Mand (AP 25W 100),
and Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport No. 5 (Apr. 2, 1897), presented by Gibert, councilor from
Saint Mand (AP 25W 100).
19 Paris and its Environs (Karl Baedeker, 1878), p. 28. Although the interior/downstairs seating was
technically first-class seating and always more expensive, fashion, even in the middle class, dictated
that the impriale was the preferable place to ride.
20 Gauthier, Rapport de l'Ingnieur ordinaire. Paris, Nov. 18, 1896. AN F 14 14999

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generally approved of mechanical/electrical traction and fixed stops, but made various
additional suggestions: that the impriales of cars should be covered, that each tram
should be manned by two agents, that the trams should be electrically lit, that fares
should be lowered, that the system of transfers (correspondances) should be discontinued
or reformed, and finally, that special routes for the morning and evening rush hours
should be created for workers, or special discounted fares or fare-card subscriptions for
everyday commuters. Participants in the enqute were invested enough in the idea of a
new tramway network to tinker with the details of the authorities' plans.
Several comments motivated by health and safety singled out the practice of using
the rails themselves for the return of current as a possible source of electrocution. The
Water Company (Compagnie gnrale des eaux) agreed, warning that their pipes might
conflict with electric tramway equipment laid underground. Interestingly, this system had
already been accepted for the Mtro. The Compagnie gnrale Parisienne de tramways,
meanwhile, was hoping to electrify some of their lines by underground conduit
(canniveau), though the company's real ambitions were more based on the trolley: the
use...of the electric system with overhead wires wherever it can be admitted, or with
underground conduit in those parts of the interior of Paris where overhead wires will not
be accepted. 21
Parisians agreed with their fellows across the department. Each district of the
capital produced 5-20 observations, no more than one of them negative. The themes of
fare reduction, reform of the transfer system, and passenger safety were recurrent. The
21 Ibid.: "...prconisant en particulier l'emploi, pour les lignes exploites par la dite Compagnie, du
systme lectrique avec fil arien partout o cela sera admis, ou avec caniveau souterrain dans les
parties l'intrieur de Paris o le fil arien ne sera pas accept."

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familiar center-periphery geography was apparent here as well. For example, one
observer in the 18th district recommends the use of electric traction by underground
conductor for the center of Paris, and by overhead wires for the exterior boulevards. 22
Participation was heavier on the Right Bank than on the Left, and heavier on the west
side of the city than in the east. Responses from the working-class east (the 10th, 11th, 19th
and 20th districts) were unanimously in favor of the new tramways, registering no
comments or suggestions at all. 23 Parisian journalism and slang of the era called them
ten-cent tramways, suggesting the popular importance of their price, their accessibility
to everyone.
After decades of reiterating that Parisians constantly clamored for more and better
means of transport, there is irony and droll formality in the fact that the authorities still
held enqutes at all. The few hundred citizens who participated in the enqute of 1896
were a meager slice of Paris's population of nearly 3,000,000, not to mention the suburbs,
a fact which doesn't suggest great public interest in the processnor does it suggest that
the authorities tried to make the process accessible to the majority of citizens. 24 Enqutes
were legally required, of course, but their ever-positive results only confirmed what
everyone already knew: as newspaper L'clair put it, the public had so impatiently
anticipated the new tramway network for some time. As Gauthier wrote in an 1897

22 "prconise l'emploi de la traction lectrique par conducteur souterrain pour le centre de Paris, et par fil
arien pour les boulevards extrieurs."
23 The absence of comments from the east side might also mean that working class Parisians did not know
how to comment, or didn't feel empowered to comment. I thank Gabrielle Hecht for bringing this to my
attention. This does not, however, contradict the fact that all comments which were made by residents
of the east side were positive, votes in favor of the new tramway lines.
24 The enqute which finally approved the Mtro, May 16 June 16, 1896, turned up similar results in
terms of participation. 689 depositions were made, and 473 of these were an organized response en
bloc, repeating the text of a handbill printed by the Association of Paris Landowners. See Le
mtropolitain Le Temps, Nov. 21, 1896, p. 3.

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report, From all sides, they demand the expansion and improvement of our ways and
means of transport, as well as a reduction of fares. The General Council, Gauthier
suggested, should work in order to give prompt and legitimate satisfaction to the voices
of the populations in the department. 25
Contrary to Gauthier's hopes, deliberation on the ten-cent tramways dragged into
the first decades of the 20th century and was not finished in time for the 1900 Exposition.
A set of documents from the Ministry of Public Works shows that, of the 20 new
tramway lines conceded between June, 1899 and June, 1902, 17 were conceded in 1899
or 1900 in a last minute attempt to serve the exposition, but half were still not operational
in March of 1903. 26 After the 1896 enqute, it was three years before new tramway lines
were conceded, and many lines were still not built after seven years. Construction quickly
fell behind schedule. In November of 1902, Deputy of the Seine Coutant brought the
scandal of what he called the non-execution of contracts by the tramway companies
before the Senate. If this wasn't proof that private sector couldn't be trusted with such
contracts, he asked, what was?a question which prompted a heated discussion of
municipalizing Paris's transport services. 27 Coutant is an example of a small but growing
number of leftists around the turn of the 20th century who pushed for public ownership of
utilities (the gas company was another popular target for reform). 28 The deeper
questionof whether private companies could be trusted with public serviceswas
widely discussed at the time, and even many left liberals, who generally preferred private
25 "Les Tramways Dix Centimes" l'Eclair (Oct. 24, 1897); Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport No. 5
(Apr. 2, 1897), presented by Gibert, councilor from Saint Mand (AP 25W 100).
26 Tramways concds dans la dpartement de la Seine de juin 1899 juin 1902 (AN F 14 15024).
27 Journal Officiel de la Rpublique Franaise. Yr. 34, no. 317. Vendredi 21 Nov. 1902. (Sance du 20
Nov. 1902), pp. 2679-2893.
28 See Lenard Berlanstein, Big Business and Industrial Conflict in Nineteenth-Century France: A Social
History of the Parisian Gas Company (University of California, 1991).

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ownership to public ownership, began to doubt whether any private company could be
trusted with transportation in Paris. 29
Departmental councilors, radical-socialists and journalists had feared this sort of
contractual delinquency from the tramway companies leading up to 1900. The CGO had
set a bad example. In this age of rapid development, the CGO stood out for its
sluggishness. As the largest transit company in Paris and operator of many horse-drawn
trams and omnibuses, the CGO was always cautious in experimenting with new
equipment, still deeply tied to the 19th century's animal-powered urban ecology. The
CGO also clung stodgily to its 1860 charter and the 50 year monopoly that it granted.
Political economist Paul Vibert campaigned against the CGO before the senatorial
elections of 1896. Article 7 of the CGO's contract specified that if the adoption of a new
system would have as a result a notable increase in the net profits of operation, the
company will be obliged to include the public and the city of Paris in this advantage by
means of a lowering of fares.... But the CGO held back for decades, avoiding the switch
to mechanical traction, continually complaining to the authorities about the rising costs of
horse traction, the high cost of switching to mechanical traction, and clinging to its high
fares. If the CGO had tried to update operations in any way, Vibert charged, it had been
fragmentary, I would say almost infinitesimal, absolutely insufficient and under
conditions of bad faith. Vibert harped on the line from Saint-Augustin to the Cours de
Vincennes, where it [the CGO] placed only enormous vehicles that have the air of war

29 See the following: (1) "Les Tramways 0.10 centimes" l'Eclair (June 19, 1896); (2) Conseil Gnral de
la Seine, Rapport No. 5 (Apr. 2, 1897), presented by Gibert, councilor from Saint Mand; (3) "Les
Tramways Dix Centimes" l'Eclair (Oct. 24, 1897); (4) L. de Laere, La question des tramways, Le
Courrier Bleu de Neuilly-Boulogne (Oct. 17, 1897); (5) Stanislas Ferrand, Les tramways de la Seine
Le Btiment (July 10, 1898); (6) Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport No. 9 (July 2, 1898), presented
by Gibert (AP 25W 100).

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machines, even though it knows perfectly well that it was easy enough to establish
tramways with covered impriales, light, simple, graceful and able to pass down all
streets. Such design was as disastrous as it was defective. Vibert was right. The
CGO relied on expensive, clumsy and increasingly out-of-date steam and compressed-air
vehicles, the kind tested in the Prefect's special commission of 1876. 30
In 1897, suburban journalist L. de Laere sarcastically pretended to be unable to
distinguish Inspector of Public Works Lorieux from Senator and President of the CGO,
Cuvinot, in order to make a point about the revolving door between the public and private
sectors. De Laere also evoked Armand Grbauval, another prominent suburban journalist
and a revisionist socialist, who served on both the municipal and departmental councils in
the 1890s. In order to prevent under-the-table deals between government and the CGO,
Grbauval proposed formally in session that the Prefect of the Seine (then Justin de
Selves) should not be allowed to fraternize with Cuvinot even to drink a bock at the caf
of the national guard, until he declared the public utility of the complementary tramway
network. 31 Suburban bigwigs passed the torch of critique from one to the next, putting
constant pressure on Paris to connect city and suburbs. In the following year, Stanislas
Ferrand, architect and engineer, deputy of the Seine and editor-in-chief of the publication
Le Btiment (Building) would take up the torch.

30 Vibert, La concurrence etrangre, vol. 2, p. 83-84. See the AMTUIR (Paris Museum of Urban
Transportation) website, especially the page on the General History of Urban Transports,
http://www.amtuir.org/03 index htu gale htm. Here, AMTUIR outlines several systems (Rowan,
Serpollet, and Purrey) of steam-powered tramways used by the CGO between 1889 and 1914. See also
Jean Robert, Les Tramways Parisiens, pp. 31-63, 115-160.
31 For more about Grbauval, see Dictionnaire national des contemporains : contenant les notices des
membres de l'Institut de France, du gouvernement et du parlement franais, de l'Acadmie de
mdecine... sous la dir. de C.-E. Curinier (Paris: Office gnral d'dition de librairie et d'imprimerie,
1899-1919), vol. 5, p. 75-6. For this particular anecdote, see L. de Laere, La question des tramways,
Le Courrier Bleu de Neuilly-Boulogne (Oct. 17, 1897).

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Paris's first, longest-lasting and most powerful transit company was also its most
corrupt. Popular, left-wing and suburban complaints about the CGO inspired critiques of
public works aimed at various sourcesthe municipal, departmental and national
governments, the General Traction Company, the smaller tramway companies
throughout the period from 1895-1914. The CGO continued to be powerful, but was
always haunted by charges of corruption. The city had to wait until 1910, when its
agreement with the CGO lapsed, to see any movement of the company toward wholesale
electrification of its network (even though this switch was legally required as of 1896).
The CGO effectively waited out Paris's primary period of electrification.
In spite of all the rush and controversy of the late 1890s, and the pressure of the
impending 1900 Exposition, tramway reorganization continued through the First World
War. Documents from the Ministry of Public Works show that the subject of tramway
reorganization was a constant site of administrative work from 1899 through the
1920s. 32 The CGO didn't disappear until 1921, bought out by the municipal STCRP
(Socit des transports en commun de la rgion parisienne). Constant talk of
reorganizing the tramway networks between the 1880s and 1920s is in itself evidence
of the ongoing crisis of transportation in Paris. In the years between 1895 and 1914, this
crisis was connected with electrification.

The Agonies and Ecstasies of Electrification

France's first electric tramway opened in Clermont-Ferrand in 1890, the same year
the Socit franaise d'accumulateurs lectriques was authorized to test four trains
32 See the series F/14 in the Archives Nationales, cartons 15024 to 15030: Rorganisation des tramways de
Paris et du dpartement de la Seine. 1899-1920.

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powered by accumulators (or batteries) on the Madeleine-Levallois line in Paris. 33 The
failure of mechanical traction (steam and compressed air) to deliver the desired savings,
and the broader tramway crisis, made electricity seem a likely solution to the financial
and technical problems haunting the tramways and the Mtro since the late 1870s.
Engineer Lon Francq, already well-known for his system of compressed steam power,
published a series of articles between 1886 and 1892 recommending electric traction for
the Mtro. Francq argued that electric traction would be cheaper to operate, drive down
prices, allow more people access to public transportation, and pay off its high start-up
costs. At the same time it would be cleaner, solving the problem of ventilating Mtro
tunnels, and reducing the amount of horse droppings in the street. 34 Francq, like many
engineers and intellectuals of the era, saw electricity as something of a cure-all.
There was a palpable boost in the popularity, glamour, and awe surrounding
electricity as a sublime or magical force following demonstrations at the Paris expositions
of 1881 and 1889. In the 1880s, electricity became an important cultural object, a
prismatic signifier associated with cleanliness, speed and shrinking distance, as with
modernity, the future, progress and the 20th century. As historians Beltran and Carr put
it, electricity was a fairy (fe), in the French sense of an inspiration or muse, and a
servant, an all-purpose source of power, limitless in applications, which would
33 Louis Figuier, l'Anne scientifique et industrielle yr. 34 (1890) (Paris: Hachette, 1891), pp. 135-6 and
139-41. Siemens opened his first line in Lichterfelde, Germany in 1881.Across the English-speaking
world, from the United States and Canada to England and Ireland, electric-powered tramways were first
put into operation in the mid-1880s. The most famous was Frank Sprague's Richmond Union
Passenger Railway, in Richmond, Virginia, 1888. John Joseph Wright is credited with opening an
electric tram in Toronto in 1883. Joseph Barcroft was a well-known supporter of the Bossbrook and
Newry tramway line, the first electric tramway in Ireland in 1885. In 1886, the first electric tram
powered by hydroelectric generators was opened in Appleton, Wisconsin. For a good overview of this
Anglo-saxon lead in global tramway development, see John P. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, pp. 4051.
34 Lon Francq, Chemin de fer mtropolitain: recueil des articles publis dans le journal le Mtropolitain
propos de la traction du mtropolitain parisien (Paris: E. Bernard er Cie., 1892).

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revolutionize human life as steam had before it. Electricity also became a metaphor for
energy in general, for excitement, inspiration, drive and life. 35 Electricity inspired fear,
fascination and fantasy, as in Albert Robida's science fiction. Hence Le Figaro described
a meeting of striking omnibus workers as charged with electricity and Le Temps
greeted the news that the Mtro would be electrically-powered with a cheerful hail the
fairy electricity! 36
By 1895, many credited electricity with having won a decisive victory over other
modes of traction. Even the historical emergence of electrical technology seemed
somewhat magical. Popular travel magazine A travers le monde (Across the World) noted
how far it had come since Siemens's trolley demonstration at Paris's 1881 International
Electrical Exhibition:
Who could have foreseen, before these modest beginnings, seeming more curious
than really practical, the extraordinary development that we are witnessing today?
Electric locomotion emerged from Germany and was studied and rendered
practical in the United States, and now, thanks to the powerful impulsion it
received in America, it is establishing itself definitively in Europe and propagates
itself in all parts of the world.
Thus electric locomotion propagates itself with a prodigious rapidity, which
seems without equal in industry.
The global diffusion of electric traction was a universal development, the order of the
day. 37 The notion became commonplace. As Petitjean, writing about the Mtro that
same year, put it:
From the point of view of choosing a motor, it is evident that electricity, with its
35 See: (1) Beltran and Carr, La fee et la servante: la socit franaise face l'lectricit (Paris: Belin,
2000), (2) Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity
(University of California, 1992), (3) Christophe Prochasson, Les annes lectriques, 1880-1910 (Paris:
La Dcouverte, 1991), and (4) Shelley Wood Cordulack, A Franco-American Battle of Beams:
Electricity and the Selling of Modernity Journal of Design History 18/2 (summer, 2005), pp. 147-166.
36 La grve des omnibus Le Figaro, Apr. 24, 1895, pp. 1-2; Le mtropolitain urbain Le Temps, Apr.
16, 1896, p. 3.
37 Henri Monnory, La locomotion lectrique dans le monde A travers le monde 1 (1895), p. 93.

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innumerable resources, and the numerous forces it can put into action, will finish
by triumphing over steam, and that one day, maybe soon, all forces of locomotion
will be produced by electricity...
Paul Vibert returned to the idea in 1896a great national movement is taking shape
today and which will impose itself imperiously tomorrow, thanks to the truly miraculous
progress of electric traction.and Georges d'Avenel in 1905: The future and even
already the present belongs to electric traction... 38 This culture of identifying electricity
with the future and progress was well entrenched in Paris, reinforced by periodic
expositions, where electricity in its various applications was an important showpiece
since 1878. But behind this optimism and sense of historical destiny, electrical
technology was still new; there were very real practical questions about making it work.
Technologically speaking, there were three available ways to deliver electric
power to trains. 39 Most popular globally, and crucial during the dynamic period of
tramway development in Germany and the United States in the 1880s and '90s, was the
trolley system. In this system made famous by Werner Siemens and Frank Sprague,
current was delivered to wires suspended above the rails, and then picked up by the
trolley, a conductor mounted on a slender arm reaching up from the tram's roof to
contact the wire. Eventually the entire system was named trolley or trolley car after
the overhead conductor; the French used this English term, too. The second system, also
38 Petitjean, p. 19; La concurrence trangre, les transports par terre et par mer vol. 2 (Paris: BergerLevrault, 1896-7), p. 107; Georges d'Avenel, Le Mcanisme de la Vie Moderne v. 5 (Paris: Librarie
Armand Colin, 1905), p. 182.
39 Contemporary accounts of these various systems of traction are common in the published record, thanks
to the booming interest in electricity of the era. See, for example: Paul Dupuy, La traction lectrique:
tramways, locomotives et mtropolitains lectriques (Paris: Librarie de Sciences Generales, 1897).
Henry Martin, Production et distribution de l'nergie pour la traction lectrique (Paris: Librarie
Polytechnique Charles Beranger, 1902). Louis Barbillion, Louis-Charles Barbillion, G. J. Griffisch,
Trait pratique de traction lectrique (Paris: E. Bernard et Cie, 1903). John Hall Rider, Electric
Traction: A Practical Handbook on the Application of Electricity as a Locomotive Power (London:
Whittaker and Co., 1903). Francis H. Davies, Electric Power and Traction (London: Archibald
Constable et Co., Ltd., 1907).

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fairly common, was to bury conducting cables in the pavement between the rails and to
hang a conducting device from the bottoms of cars. This might be a trolley-like apparatus
dragging in a charged furrow (canniveau), or a dragging foot or ski (frotteur) picking
up current from charged plates in the street (contacts superficiels) or from a third rail, like
the Mtro.
In these first two systems, trams regularly received current from a power plant at
the end of the line. In the third system, trams were equipped with rechargeable
accumulators or batteries. As Paul Vibert explained, a battery the size of a top hat could
produce about one horse power. Most horse-trams used at least two horses, but two
batteries would not be enough. Railway engineer Mkarski observed in the 1870s that
tramways need access to a variable amount of power for stopping and starting frequently
and for climbing slopes. Making such headroom would require loading cars with extra
batteries. But batteries were heavy; installing more would ironically increase the energy
needed to drive the car, and increase wear and tear on the rails. Finally, batteries were
fragile and had to be replaced often. Their size, weight, fragility and limited capacity
made them by far the clumsiest available form of electric traction.40
Accumulators were the first type of electric traction attempted in Paris, and it was
not long before engineers realized their faults. Electricity was still a new, experimental
domain; older forms of traction remained in wide use. 41 In 1892-3, three lines terminating
at St-Denis north of the city operated by the Compagnie des tramways de Paris et du
40 La concurrence trangre, les transports par terre et par mer vol. 2 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1896-7),
pp. 134-137. See also McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, pp. 96-7.
41 On other forms of traction, see Tramway Stats 1894: Between 1891 and 1893, the TPDS and the CGO
opened 5 new horse-powered lines apiece. In addition to the Belleville Funicular in 1891, there were
also 2 new compressed-air lines opened in 1891 and two new steam-powered lines outside of Paris in
1893. In total, the tramway statistics that Guyot began to collect before he left office show 5 new lines
each year for 1891 and 1892, 6 lines in 1893. Of these sixteen new lines, ten were powered by horses.

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dpartement de la Seine (TPDS), were equipped with accumulator-powered cars.42
Already in 1893, the TPDS was in financial trouble. As the administrators of the TPDS
put it in an address to their shareholders,
We are therefore in an era of transformations, of uncertainties, of studies, and it is
for this reason that, faced with the mediocre results of fiscal year 1893, we request
that, at least provisionally, you leave the profits of 1893 in the account of Profits
and Losses, and do not augment our deficit in the eyes of our bankers.
In the summer of 1894, the TPDS asked its shareholders for financial relief again:
The increasing charges which weigh on our industry, the competition that we have
had with the railroads and other transport companies, the costly improvements
imposed on us by the situation, the high cost of [horse] fodder, have entailed for
us, for several years, aggravations in expenses which are not yet compensated by
a corresponding increase in receipts. 43
Key here is the phrase the costly improvements imposed on us by the situationa
reference to increasing competition from newer tramway lines, some of which were
mechanically powered. Expanding a horse-powered system to compete with a
mechanically powered one was as expensive and labor intensive as testing innovative
new equipmenteither way, keeping up with technological development and growing
demand for mass transit was not easy. The TPDS's Madeleine-St-Denis line actually
showed a profit increase after the application of accumulators. Still, accumulators were
no financial cure-all. The key was more capacity, more passengers per tram to make each
tram more lucrative. Accumulators could not deliver this without making trams heavier,
more fragile and more expensive.
Engineer Emile Vignes had already given up on accumulators altogether:
42 These were: (1) the line from the Opra to the porte de la Chapelle and St-Denis (place des Casernes),
(2) the line from the Madeleine to place Moncey and St-Denis (place aux Gueldres), and (3) from
Neuilly (porte Maillot) to St-Denis (place aux Gueldres).
43 Compagnie des Tramways de Paris et du Dpartement de la Seine. Assembles Gnrales
Extraordinaire et Ordinaire du 15 Juin 1894 (Paris: Chaix, 1894), pp. 15 and 5, respectively (AN
F/14/8587).

206
Traction by electric accumulators is incontestably the most expensive. Inadequate
returns, costly upkeep and renovation: to such a point that it is now recognized that this
mode of mechanical traction doesn't procure any serious savings over animal traction. 44
Although the failing tramway companies had been reorganized in 1887, the problems
facing the TPDS differed little from those which faced its predecessor the North
Tramway Company in the late 1870s. The trials of accumulator batteries (and other
mechanical and electrical systems) merely produced additional expenses on top of the
already difficult situation of horse traction. Accumulators solved neither the financial nor
the technical problems of the tramways.
It grew frustrating. In theory, engineers, politicians and economists had been
arguing since the 1870s, mechanical traction should offer major savings over horse
traction. Twenty years later, Paris had still not figured out how to put this theory into
practice. While electric traction would prove in the long run to be much cheaper than
other forms of mechanical traction, results in this era of ongoing experimentation were
mixed. So, for example, the administrators of the TPDS found in 1893-4 trials that steam
locomotion was more profitable than accumulators, bringing in five times the revenue.
From this experience they drew a more general (and generally incorrect) lesson, that
mechanical traction could be more affordable than electric. 45
There was, of course, the trolley. Its popularity on a global scale ensured that
Parisians knew about it, at least after 1881. We do not know who first suggested applying

44 Emile Vignes. La traction mchanique des tramways (Paris: E. Bernard, 1894), p. 8. As George
d'Avenel saw it in the early years of the 20th century, Traction by accumulators, - whatever their
system may be, - is, or so say the entrepreneurs in transportation who have abandoned them after much
experience, the worst of all, p. 182.
45 Compagnie des Tramways de Paris et du Dpartement de la Seine. Assembles Gnrales
Extraordinaire et Ordinaire du 15 Juin 1894 (Paris: Chaix, 1894), pp. 6-11. AN F 14 8587

207
it in Paris, but the idea was certainly controversial. Soon after the accumulator trials, the
Municipal Council raised what historian John McKay called a fury against the idea of
overhead wires in Paris. This became an issue because the tramway companies knew that
trolleys were cheaper to install and operate, and wanted to use them wherever possible
throughout the department of the Seine. Several tramway companies envisioned mixed
systems, with trams switching from accumulators in the center city to trolleys in the
periphery. 46 Some municipal councilors thought trolley-wires on the external boulevards
might be alright, but everyone agreed that the center city should remain inviolate. A few
councilors thought overhead wires should be prohibited throughout Paris, even in the
periphery. The council didn't begin to relax this stance until 1902, in the wake of a series
of electrocutions due to tramways powered by surface contacts, as we will see later in this
chapter. But when the council decided to allow trolleys on a limited basis, cries of pain
and anti-trolley outrage surged up, with one municipal councilor shouting in session that
if they ever install trolley wires in my quarter of the city, I will cut them down with my
own hands. 47 A contemporary engineer stated flatly that the establishment of electric
tramways supplied by overhead wires is, so to speak, impossible in major cities, because
of various reasons, the principle of which is the ugly aspect of the wires, which destroy
the aesthetic of streets.... The claim seems hyperbolic in hindsight, considering the
contemporary success of the trolley in the U.S. and Germany, but for Parisians of the era,
it could seem like brute fact. 48
We saw in the last chapter that the cultural, aesthetic and patriotic priority of
46 Paul Vibert, La Concurrence Etrangre vol. 2 pp. 73-75, Tramways 1896 enqute d'utilit publique,
47 McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, p. 86.
48 Paul Dupuy, La traction lectrique: tramways, locomotives et mtropolitains lectriques (Paris:
Librairie de sciences gnrales, 1897), p. 150.

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keeping Paris beautiful often challenged integrating railways into the city. This was most
evident in Parisians' commitment to keeping industrial transportation infrastructure
(whether elevated tracks, overhead trolley wires, or locomotives) out of the center city,
inside the grands boulevards. This attachment to Paris's cityscape (her physiognomy as
contemporaries put it) generated significant opposition to overhead wires, making Paris
an exception in France, where many smaller cities and towns developed trolley networks.
Paris also fit an international pattern. In spite of similar protest to trolley wires in New
York, Washington and Berlin, the United States and Germany were leaders in tramway
development in this era, because of the trolley's rapid diffusion in smaller cities. It was in
capital cities like Paris, Berlin and Washington that trolley wires were seen as
aesthetically crude. 49
The trolley was exotic in Paris for several reasons. In the 1880s, when the trolley
system was first being developed on a global scale, Parisian engineers were still
struggling with various forms of mechanical traction. In the 1890s, as networks of
electrical and telephone wires were gradually installed in Paris, they tended to be routed
underground, bundled with gas pipes and Berlier's pneumatic tubes in the sewers. Hence
electrical wires were hidden, not yet integrated into the cityscape. Paris's electrical
network remained quite limited until preparations for 1900 began. Electric tramway
49 A glance at comparative development is instructive. By 1889, there were 1,032km (645 miles) of
electric-powered tramways in the United States. Ohio and New York were the two leading states, each
accounting for more than 10% of the total length of lines. Boston was soon to follow with an addition
400km of electric trams (See Figuier (1890), pp. 136-7). In Europe, the boom in development came
later. From 1892 to 1902, France went from 37km to 1,995km; from 1893 to 1903, Germany went from
102km to 3,692km (See McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, p. 72). It is also useful to note that Paris was
not the only city in the Western world which witnessed opposition to tramway electrification: Berlin,
Brussels, Budapest , Dresden, Vienna and Toronto also experienced such opposition (see McKay,
Tramways and Trolleys, pp. 86-87), as did several cities in the United States including New York and
Washington (see Eric Schatzberg, Culture and Technology in the City: Opposition to Mechanized
Street Transportation in Late-Nineteenth-Century America, cited above).

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development of any sort was therefore a plus for the city, because by laying and wiring
new tracks, the tramway companies would help to ready the city for more general
electrification. In addition, because electricity was such an important theme of the 1900
Exposition, many exhibits needed to be wired. Preparing the city for the exposition thus
jump-started development of Paris's electrical network more generally. 50
The failure of accumulators, combined with local opposition to overhead wires,
left only one way for the Parisian tramways to be electrified: conductors sunk in the street
between the rails. Hence the majority of electric tramway development between 1895 and
1900, in the rush to prepare for the 1900 Exposition, was based on replacing horse
traction with surface contacts (English) or superficial contacts (French: contacts
superficiels) in one of several versions on existing tramway lines.
Most lines in Paris were fit with the Diatto system, patented by Italian engineer
Alfredo Diatto in 1894 (figure 13). 51 In this system, a ski- or shoe-like dragger
(frotteur) hung from the bottom of each tram, picking up current from charged plots,
cement boxes sunk in the pavement between the rails equipped with a stud or pin
(clou) device. Inside each box, an electrically-charged metal pin with a magnetized head
sat in a mercury bath to prevent it from conducting while at rest. As trams passed over
50 Beltrand and Carr, La Fe et la Servante, 188-189. Indeed, in this era of electrification, tramway
development both intimately depended on, and helped advance, the development of electrical grids
more generally. See: (1) Alberte Martinez Lopez, Belgian investment in tramways and light railways :
An international approach, 1892-1935 Journal of Transport History, March, 2003, pp. 59-77; (2)
Pierre Lanthier, The Relationship between State and Private Electric Industry, France 1880-1920 in
Norbert Horn and Jrgen Kocka, eds. Law and the Formation of the Big Enterprises in the 19th and
Early 20th Centuries. (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), pp.590-603. As Eric Schatzberg
has shown, electrification diffused much more quickly as a motive power than it did, for example, in
lighting. See Culture and Technology in the City, cited above.
51
Most, but not all lines in Paris were equipped with the Diatto system. The Dolter, Claret-Vuilleumier and
Vdovlli systems were also used. For more on these various surface-contact systems, see: (1) Louis
Barbillion and G. J. Griffisch, Trait pratique de traction lectrique (Paris: E. Bernard, 1903), pp. 451513, (2) Robert Henry Smith, Electric Traction (Harper, 1905), pp. 167-206; (3) Henry Marchal, Les
tramways lectriques (Paris: Librarie Polytechnique Charles Beranger, 1902), pp. 117-145.

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each plot, the pin was magnetically lifted out of its mercury bath by the dragger,
transmitting the charge. Diatto had solved the problem of how to de-activate the plots
while not in use, but he had not solved the problem of how to keep the plots from being
re-activated by other forces like rain, rust or physical damage to the contact apparatus.
His system was ingenious but fragile, based on a delicate moving apparatus, which often
malfunctioned, and was vulnerable to the weather and to short circuits. The system was a
better response to Paris's aesthetic problems than it was to Paris's technological needs
(here the trolley would have served fine).
While savants like Francq, Gauthier, Vibert and d'Avenel followed international
currents of opinion in seeing the rise of electric traction as a decisive victory over
previous forms of traction, a historically predestined development, other Parisians did not
share this view. Local knowledge collected by engineers and bureaucrats over the
preceding thirty years suggested that all forms of non-animal traction were difficult, and
that other technical systems (compressed air, steam and cables) were still available. 52 All
Parisians knew that aesthetic priorities were essential to the capital, whose reputation was
staked on its legendary beauty. Grooming the city for the Exposition unleashed
contradictory impulses in Paris: on the one hand, restless futurism and zeal for
infrastructural development, which suggested a need to violate the existing city, and on
the other hand, pride and vanity in the city's beauty, which suggested the need to preserve
it. In the rush to catch up with the perceived level of development of nations like
Germany, Britain and the United States in time for 1900, many different systems of

52 The Socit Gnrale d'Eclairage et de Force Motrice tried to revive compressed air with the PoppConti system in the 1890s, but again it proved short-lived. See Socit Gnrale d'Eclairage et de Force
Motrice, Tramways Pneumatiques Popp-Conti (Paris: Chaix, 1896).

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traction were simultaneously applied in Paris, mostly surface contacts a l Diatto, but
also several other versions of surface contacts, compressed air, steam locomotion, and
mixed systems.

Figure 13: Two views of the Diatto system stud mechanism, from La Nature, 1899. The drawing on the left
shows a cutaway of the plot situated in the pavement. The drawing on the right shows how a tram's frotteur
made contact with the plot.

On the one hand, it is easy to see in hindsight that some hasty engineering and
hasty business decisions were made in the rush to equip the city for the exposition. On
the other hand, the technologies involved were new and high tech, still unformed, as
were the public and private institutions needed to operate and govern the new mass transit
networks, and social-cultural scripts for how to use them. As the administrators of the
TPDS saw in the early 1890s, this was an era of experimentation, of restless futurism in
development, charting out new territory, taking risks. For investors, there were the

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financial risks of putting money on equipment that was, in many cases, still experimental.
For the government, there were opportunities for corruption across the public-private
divide, and thus the risk of legitimation crisis. Questions of jurisdiction and responsibility
abounded. But most remarkable in this era were the physical risks taken by the
increasingly diverse Parisians who came into more frequent contact with the new transit
networks in this era: construction workers, passengers, drivers. A new public got to
experience mass transportation, and in so doing, got their first real taste of electrical
equipment, and of the speed, fire, and electrocution that come with it.

Electric Misadventures and The Wrongdoings of Electricity: Everyday Operation

and the Problem of Accidents, c. 1900-1903
...this type of traction is recent; so we must give it credit for the inseparable difficulties of the
debut. 53
I know well that mechanical traction is destined to replace animal traction: 'the one kills the
other'. 54

Mtro line 1 opened July 19, 1900, three months into the Exposition. One
observer described ticket booths assaulted by visitors and Parisians alike, trains running
at double capacity the first several days. Contemporary newspaper accounts claim
everyone enjoyed the ride, noting its speed and affordability. Riders also enjoyed the cool
tunnels as a refuge from the above-average summer heat and found underground
installations clean and well litnothing like the dark and dank images of a ncropolitain
53 Msaventures lectriques, Le Temps, Oct. 19, 1900, p. 3.
54 Councilor Duval-Arnould, Dec. 15, 1900. See Bulletin Municipal Officiel, Dec. 16, 1900, p. 4081. Je
sais bien que la traction mcanique est destine remplacer la traction animale: "ceci tuera cela".

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circulating in Paris since 1878. There were many reasons for this enthusiasm. For
visitors, it was a fantastic, futuristic ride, the world's fourth electric-powered underground
railway after London (1890), Budapest (1896) and Boston (1897). For Parisians, it was a
taste of the transit network that would criss-cross their city and transform the way they
moved through it in the 20th century. 55
The Mtro was also symbolically important, a showpiece in the Exposition. Some
connected it with France's civilizing mission, one journalist writing I salute the Mtro as
an admirable agent of moral and material progress. 56 The 1900 Universal Exposition,
like those before it, was a celebration of industrialization as progress. It was a great openair museum, designed to teach visitors, among other things, that the development of
science and technology was a key to social and economic development, a motor of
history, a pillar of modern civilization. 57 The Exposition was a farewell celebration for
the century of steam and an inauguration of the century of electricitya second
industrial revolution on the horizon. Petitjean personified the coming century: My name
is the century of electricity, and I come to the world to continue the work of peace and
progress started by steam. Electricity was identified with progress and the future,
showcased at the Exposition in its many applications. Petitjean, again: It is thus in plain
social and industrial revolution that the great Exposition of 1900 will open its liberal
55 Glasgow's 1896 District Subway and Vienna's 1898 Stadtbahn are other contemporary systems, but
Vienna's was not fully underground , and neither system was electric powered (Vienna ran on steam and
Glasgow ran on cables). See: Le mtropolitain Le Petit Parisien, July 23, 1900, p. 2; Le Temps, July
21, 1900; "Smaller Crowd at Paris Fair" Chicago Daily, July 21, 1900, p. 6: "The Metropolitan
underground railroad commenced regular traffic today and has already proved popular. The coolness of
the tunnels is sought by the sweltering Parisians." It should be noted that it was an unusually hot
summer, a fact we'll revisit in Chapter 5 when we talk about water shortages.
56 Le Radical, July 19, 1900. Quoted in Elisabeth Hausser, Paris au jour le jour: Les vnements vus par
la presse, 1900-1919 (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1968), p. 37.
57 See Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus and Anne Rasmussen, Les fastes du progrs: le guide des expositions
universelles (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). These authors stress the pedagogical ambitions all the world's
fairs, not just those in Paris.

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doors to all nations. 58 As the Mtro was born in late-nineteenth-century dreams of a
more efficient city, so its inauguration was a spectacular end to the Mtro's dream life, a
dream come true.
But behind this optimism, the Mtro was troubled by technical errors and minor
accidentsshort circuits leading to fires, lighting failures, delayed trains and panicked
passengersevents which show how new and unfamiliar electric technology was for
both users and operators of the era. 59 Newspaper Le Petit Parisien tried to assuage public
fears, calling them little accidents without any seriousness, whose importance should not
be exaggerated. 60 Electrical technology was still volatile at this early stage of
development. Wires were not always well insulated, circuits not always well grounded. 61
As engineering historian Jean Tricoire has argued, day-to-day Mtro operation in its first
several years (1900-1903) was deeply experimental, moving slowly from improvisation

58 Petitjean (1895), p. 7.
59 See Le Petit Parisien, July 13, 23, and 26, 1900. There are a number of scholars who have already
produced excellent analyses of the difficult process of coming to terms with the powers and dangers of
electrical technology, across the Western World, between the 1880s and 1930s. Foundational in this
respect is (1) Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930
(Johns Hopkins, 1983). See also: (2) Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual
Culture (Unversity of Minnesota, 1995); (3) Edmund Todd, Electric Ploughs in Wilhelmine Germany:
Failure of an Agricultural System Social Studies of Science 22/2 (1992), pp. 263-281; (4) David Nye,
American Technological Sublime (MIT, 1996) and Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New
Technology (MIT, 1992); (5) Bernhard Rieger. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and
Germany, 18901945 (Cambridge, 2005); (6) Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves and
German Modernity (California, 2006); (7) Eric Schatzberg, "Culture and Technology in the City:
Opposition to Mechanized Street Transportation in Late-Nineteenth Century America," in Technology
and History: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Gabrielle
Hecht and Michael Allen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 57-94; (8) Michael Hrd and Andrew
Jamison, eds. The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology : Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939
(MIT, 1998).
60 Le mtropolitain Le Petit Parisien, July 23, 1900, p. 2. No passengers were injured, but at least two
Mtro workers were electrocuted. See Le Petit Parisien, July 13 and 23, 1900. See also: full record of
Mtro accident reports, 1899-1905 (AP VONC 129).
61 A point Andreas Killen has made in Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves and German Modernity
(University of California, 2006); see also Bernhard Rieger. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in
Britain and Germany, 18901945 (Cambridge, 2005).

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to method. 62
The new century was no easier for the tramways. In January, 1900 construction of
the new Bourse-Opra line was stopped by angry neighbors protesting the barbarian
tramway (tramway des barbares). Le Temps, self-proclaimed ally and echo of the
protesters, said the tramway would spoil the neighborhood's beauty, encumbering the rue
du Quatre-Septembre and threatening Haussmann's iconic place de l'Opra. 63 Urban
historian Grard Jacquemet, however, argued that protesters more likely feared the new
tramway would enable the barbaric working poor of east Paris to invade their upscale
bourgeois neighborhood. In fact, more than one line in Paris was called tramway des
barbares, and this phrase was joined by others like murderous tramways (tramways
meurtrires, 1900) and criminal tramway (le tramway criminel, 1910). 64 Such
everyday epithets are glimpses of the user's perspective in transport history, evidence that
Parisians were not always happy with the development of industrialized transport, and
recognized the darker side of modern technology. At times the material trappings of
62 Jean Tricoire, L'exploitation du mtropolitain: de l'improvisation la mthode, in Mtro-Cit: le
chemin de fer mtropolitain la conqute de Paris 1871-1945 (Paris musses, 1997), pp. 103-116.
63 Hausser, Paris au jour le jour, p. 15. See also Le tramway de Romainville Le Temps, Jan. 11, 1900, p.
2, and Le tramway de la rue du Quatre-Septembre Le Temps, Jan. 18, 1900, p. 1. The editors of Le
Temps agreed that this tramway line was barbaric, mostly because it threatened the beauty of the place
de l'Opra, and declared their newspaper the echo of this bourgeois neighborhood campaign against
the tramway.
64 Grard Jacquemet, Equipement Urbain Belleville de 1860 1914 in Paris et Ile-de-France:
Mmoires publis par la Fdration des Socits historiques et archologiques de Paris et de l'Ile-deFrance, vol. 33 (1982), p. 249.Ren Martial reported that the epithet was used for the tramway line
from Montrouge to the Ecole Militaire. See: Le mouvement de population dans les villes Annales
d'hygine publique, industrielle et sociale, ser. 11 n. 10, Oct. 1933, p. 562. Albert L. Gurard
sugggested the same in his l'Avenir de Paris (Paris: Payot, 1929), p. 211. These references to the
tramway line from Montrouge to the Ecole Militaire contrast with references like those of Elisabeth
Hausser and Grard Jacquemet, who found Parisians using the epithet for an east-west tramway line
operated by the Compagnie des Tramways Est, running from Romainville to the Opera. This is the same
tramway line singled out by Ernest Levallois in 1910 as a tramway criminel. See: Paris Propre!
(Paris: Edouard Cornly et Cie, 1910), pp. 5-40. Poet Hughes Lapaire used the term tramway des
barbares to refer to a tramway in the Berry region of central France, which he thought would spoil the
beauty of the area. See: Le Berry vu par un Berrichon (Paris: Librarie Universitaire J. Gamber, 1928), p.
16.

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modernity seemed more like barbarism than civilization.
June of 1900 alone brought 125 injuries and 3 deaths on the tramways. In late July
Le Petit Parisien observed it's decidedly a series, later reviewing more than a dozen
accidents in July and August under the headline the murderous tramways. 65 Most of
these accidents were collisions involving mechanically-powered trams. Le Petit Parisien,
again: They make us talk about them too muchand in such an upsetting manner
these tramways with mechanical traction, whose creation was welcomed with such favor
by the Parisian population. That summer, several pedestrians were run over or hit by
trams, one canister of compressed air exploded, and a group of passengers panicked after
their tram derailed. Finally, the improperly charged plate of a tramway powered by
surface contacts shocked a dozen coachmen and electrocuted one horse to deatha grisly
preview of events to come in the winter of 1900-1901. 66 Accidents were so frequent that
humorist Pierre Wolff quipped there is at least one tramway accident per day. 67
The accidents continued in the fall of 1900, when Le Petit Parisien wrote it is
undeniable that the new mode of mass transit with which we are afflicted constitutes a
public danger. The problem, the editors argued, was that mechanical and horse-powered
vehicles shared the same streets and same rails, writing: Tramways and carriages could
never mix well. The one excludes the other. Such were the difficulties of uneven
development. Horse-traction, unsuited for the speed and intensity of modern traffic, was
becoming obsolete, while mechanical traction, with its higher capacity and speed, was

65 Le Petit Parisien, Oct. 5, 1900, p. 1; Rencontre de Tramways Le Petit Parisien, July 24, 1900, p. 3;
Les tramways meurtires, Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 22, 1900.
66 Le Petit Parisien, July 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 22, 24, and August 1, 5, 8, 13, 16, 22, for 1900.
67 Quoted in Hausser, Au Jour Le Jour, p. 39. For August 15, 1900, Hausser wote: Collision de tramways
place Clichy; 30 blesss lgers. Suivant la formule de l'humoriste Pierre Wolff, "il y a peine un
accident de tramway par jour."

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unsafe in crowded spacesunsuited, Le Petit Parisien argued, for major cities at all.
Recent accidents had resulted from the very existence of tramways with mechanical
traction in cities where circulation is too intense. 68
On October 11th, fifteen young men attacked a horse tram, beat two employees
and stole the tillperhaps a protest, perhaps a robbery, perhaps both. The same day a
Mtro train stopped at the Tuileries station and the conductor opened the door to find it
on fire. 69 Like the last fire, this was caused by a short circuit. The Mtro's first collision
was October 19th; two trains crashed near the Concorde station. Twenty-nine passengers
received minor injuries and one driver was badly injured. Parisians fanned the news into
a roaring blaze of rumors, claiming hundreds of passengers had been injured. Prefect
Lpine announced again in the press as he had in September that he understood citizens
were upset about recent events, quickly revised Mtro signaling rules to prevent further
collisions, and opened an investigation on the tramway accidents. Investigators concluded
that recent tramway collisions had been caused by speeding drivers making up for time
lost on busy routes. 70 Naturally, faced with so many accidents, many wanted to discuss
responsibility. But police investigators only repeated what journalists for Le Temps and
Le Petit Parisien had already said, resorting to facile finger-pointing, blaming the drivers.
Other contemporaries blamed the companies that operated the tramways, especially the

68 La marche des tramways Le Petit Parisien, Sept. 8, 1900, p. 3; all quotes from Les tramways
meurtrires Le Petit Parisien, Oct. 5, 1900, p. 1.
69 An unconscious young man was carried from the car and transported to the hospital; the authorities
were concerned about his condition, but unable to identify him. See Un tramway pris d'assaut and Le
feu au Mtropolitain, Le Petit Parisien, Oct. 12, 1900, pp. 1 and 3, respectively. Months later, Le
Temps reported that some tramway lines were attacked so often at certain points in the periphery that
these routes were shut down at night, provoking the ire of passengers, and prompting the Prefect of
Police to post officers on trams. See La police en tramway, Le Temps, Dec. 13, 1900, p. 4.
70 Le mtropolitain et les tramways Le Petit Parisien, Oct. 25, 1900, p. 2.

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CGO, for incompetence, corruption, and overburdening employees and equipment. 71
Hindsight reveals other causesthe newness of electrical technology, the absence
of solid social-cultural scripts for its use, and the necessity for engineers and operators to
improvise at this stage of uncertainty. 72 Electrical technologies were dangerous for
drivers, passengers, pedestrians and horses. Contemporaries saw that electric traction was
being applied in social and spatial contexts already strained by Paris's extreme urban
density. Drivers had a difficult job not only because they navigated crowded streets, but
also because they operated cutting edge equipment whose design and use were not yet
fully scripted. The climate of ideas is equally significant. Blaming the drivers was a way
for those committed to the progressive, civilizing potentials of new technologies to cover
up their risks, to avoid cognitive dissonance with the technophilic ideals presented at the
expositions (i.e., it was not technology which was to blame, but human agencyhow
technology was improperly used). Indeed, squaring the obvious dangers of the new
technology with the nineteenth century's culture of technological optimism was one of
the most difficult cultural-intellectual challenges of the second industrial revolution in
general, and of the universal expositions in particular. 73
While engineers and intellectuals defended new technologies, drivers and riders
were slowly learning about them individually and collectively, through experience and
discussionand they proved much more wary of the new means of transport. 74 In late
October, Le Temps noted that the city's electric tramways were starting to strongly
71 For example, see Paul Vibert's critique of the CGO in the second volume of La Concurrence Etrangre,
1896. A similar critique would be visited on the Mtro Company by l'Assiette au Beurre and La Croix
after the accident of 1903.
72 Hence Jean Tricoire's formula from improvisation to method.
73 Bernard Reiger, Technoloy and the Culture of Modernity
74 The string of accidents continued in November. See: Collision de tramways, Le Petit Parisien, Nov.
4, 1900, p. 1. Accidents sur le Mtropolitain, Le Petit Parisien, Nov. 11, 1900, p. 3.

219
interest the public...and with reason!, because of a disquieting phenomenon:
In effect, for some time, on the routes of tramways of this type which stretch
extensively across Paris, one frequently notices that a horse has been knocked
down, that a passerby received an electric concussion; this is happening much too
often according to people, extremely numerous, who fear being electrocuted,
while not paying attention, by setting foot on one of these plots with which we
have equipped certain streets and boulevards. 75
The plots, of course, were a technical peculiarity of tramways powered by surface
contacts, in this case the Diatto system. The editors of Le Temps knew this, arguing that
the surface contact system and was regularly malfunctioning. Perhaps theoretically
plots only delivered current when a tram passed over them, but in practice everyone
knew that they often remained charged after a tram had passed: the theory may well be
very correct, the designs may well be very convincing, [but] the facts are there: they have
received shocks. 76
Eight more horses were electrocuted by surface contacts in December (figure 14).
Like Le Temps, departmental councilor Duval-Arnould blamed the Diatto system. While
journalists were critiquing engineers, politicians were becoming engineers. In his
statement to the departmental council, Duval-Arnould showed a limited understanding of
electrocutions, but engaged in relatively sophisticated discussion of the workings of
surface contact plots to justify his claims. 77 His statement pins him to a certain moment

75 Msaventures lectriques Le Temps, Oct. 19, 1900, p 2. La question des tramways lectriques
commence intresser fort le public... et pour cause! En effet, depuis quelque temps, sur les voies de
tramways de ce genre qui s'tendent intensivement travers Paris, on constate frquemment qu'un
cheval a t culbut, qu'un passant, ou une passante, a reu une secousse lectrique; cela se produit
beaucoup trop souvent au gr des gens, extrmement nombreux, qui craignent d'tre lectrcuts en
posant, pas distraction, le pied sur un des plots dont on a garni certaines rues et certains boulevards.
76 Ibid., p. 3: la thorie a beau tre trs juste, les dessins ont beau tre trs convaincants, les faits sont l:
on reoit des secousses.
77 He marveled at the fact that horses were killed by walking on plots, while humans were not. He did not
recognize, as we would today, that horses were more vulnerable to shock because they wore iron
horseshoes, which make good conductors.

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in the cultural-intellectual history of electricity, an era in which Europeans from all walks
of life worked to close Rieger's the knowledge gap through experience and experiment.
But Duval-Arnould's statement also complicates Rieger's concept, showing that there are
shades of meaning between lay and expert understanding. Was this professional politician
a technical expert, or was he speaking on behalf of himself or his constituents as lay
tramway users? 78

Figure 14: L'Assiette au Beurres November, 1901 cartoon dangerous toys (joujoux dangereux) depicted
the danger of contemporary transportation technology from the user's point of view. The cartoon depicts a
tramway colliding with a private carriage, an automobilist running over a pedestrian, and a horse being
electrocuted by a tramway plot (from l'Assiette au Beurre 35, Nov. 30, 1901).

Duval-Arnould apologized for his digression into considerations of a technical

order, promising to keep it simple and brief so that neither he nor his audience would be
drowned. He uncovered three technical issues. First, as Le Temps suggested, the
conducting pin or nail (clou) which ideally rose from its mercury bath to contact the
78 Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 18901945
(Cambridge, 2005).

221
conductor (frotteur) on the bottom of trams often remained engaged after trams passed,
leaving plots improperly charged. Second, as tramway companies began to notice the
electrocutions over the course of the summer and fall, they spent weeks equipping trams
with a second dragging foot (frotteur), designed to ensure that plots were no longer live
after trams passed. Ironically, these safety devices started short circuits of their own,
setting off small electrical fires which damaged plots, only making electrocution more
likely. Third and finally was the problem of moisture; the small cement box which held
each surface contact device was buried in the pavement and could fill with rain water,
another invitation to short circuits. 79
Duval-Arnould knew that the Seine Council's job was understood to be politics,
not engineering. This was not just a matter of rhetoric, custom or manners. Unlike the
recent string of tramway collisions, these electrocutions could not be blamed on the
drivers (i.e. human agency). Rather, they were obviously the fault of engineers, or of
flaws in the technology itself. But because the administration had ordered the tramway
companies to move to mechanical, especially electric, traction after 1896, it accepted the
responsibility of regulating these technologies. This was an important moment in stateformation; electrical engineering became entangled with governance. The safety of
electrical traction was no longer a subject of public concern at which the Prefect of Police
could throw legislationit had become an urgent task of governance, drawing in the
municipal and departmental councils, who engaged in increasingly detailed discussions
not only of society, economy and politics, but also of electrical technology itself, in an

79 For the December 15th session, see Bulletin Municipal Officiel, Dec. 16, 1900, pp. 4081-4096. See also
Rapport de l'Ingnieur ordinaire, Paris le 25 Dcembre 1900. Both sources can be found in AN F 14
14999.

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attempt to keep everyday passengers safe.
Behind the question of whether human agency or technology caused accidents,
another factor lurked: the weather. As socialist councilman Armand Grbauval put it, no
one knows how the surface contact system will behave with snow and rain. January,
1901 proved to be a snowy month, with disastrous consequences. Thirty-four more horses
were electrocuted, and the Prefecture of Police was plunged deeper into its study of the
problem. The Diatto system was not a good match for Paris's humid climate, its intense
circulation, or its continuing reliance on horse power (especially CGO tramways and
omnibuses). The system was popular in Paris for two reasonsits relatively cheap and
simple construction, and its modest profile, flush with the pavement and thus not harmful
to Paris's legendary aesthetic. 80 These were important qualities for a system rushed into
application to prepare for the Exposition. But the system that looked good on paper was
disastrous in practice. The Diatto system accidents served as a breaking point, throwing
the companies that used itmostly the East Tramway Company and the Left Bank
Tramway Companyinto a crisis not unlike that of the late 1870s. Eventually the entire
department of the Seine was thrown into a dozen years of systematic tramway
reorganization, from 1902-1914.
According to a Municipal Council study of 1903, the Mtro alone was the scene
of several hundred accidents in which Parisians were injured between 1900 and 1903.
The same study showed tramways in the department of the Seine to be slightly less

80 As McKay argued in his classic comparative study of tramways, it was economic and aesthetic
concerns above all which shaped the patterns of tramway adoption across Europe in this era. See
Tramways and Trolleys.

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dangerous in these years, killing 112 and wounding 937. 81 The Mtro accounted for more
injuries, the tramways for more deaths. While the Diatto accidents of fall 1900 to winter
1901 were a turning point for the tramways, the Mtro had its turning point, and was
thrown into a full decade of architectural and technological overhaul between 1903 and
1914, in the accident of August 10, 1903.
That evening, the worst accident to date occurred on the Paris Mtro. As it rolled
east along the elevated tracks of Line 2, following the arc of the external boulevards,
Train 43's engine short circuited and caught fire near the Barbs station. All passengers
were evacuated, and after repeated attempts Mtro employees were unable to put out the
fire (in part because they repeatedly tried to put out an electrical fire with water). So the
employees scrambled to move the burning train safely to the end of the line at Place de la
Nation with a push from the next train, number 52. In the commotion, the employees
neglected to lift Train 43's ski-like dragger (frotteur), which collected current from the
third rail, thus feeding more current into a motor already mangled by electrical fire. As
the train rolled on, fire soon overtook the body of Train 43, which was, in the typical
style of the era, made of heavily varnished and painted wood, making it a convenient
incendiary device.
Minutes later fire spread to Train 52 and the two burning trains stalled at the
Mnilmontant station, where Line 2 was now underground. The crew fled the train. The
twelve burning cars quickly filled the tunnel between Belleville and Pre Lachaise with
smoke and melted the wires carrying electricity to the tunnel lights. This coincidentally

81 Municipal Council report on the Accident of 1903 (city printers no. 61), pp. 32 and 37. For the Mtro,
there were 379 accidents in 1900-1901, 464 accidents in 1901-2, and 496 in 1902-3, for a total of 1,339.
These are yearly totals, including both employee and passenger injuries.

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set a terrible trap for Train 48, loaded with extra passengers left behind by Trains 43 and
52, which was just arriving at the Couronnes station to find it pitch black and full of
smoke. In the panic that ensued in the station, which only had one exit, more than 70
passengers asphyxiatedsome because they were waiting in line at the ticket window to
demand their money back, and refused to evacuate when urged by employees, others
because they tried to escape the fire at the dead end of the platform opposite the exit, and
found themselves trapped. Satirical magazine L'Assiette au Beurre depicted them, eyes
wide with fear, trampling one another and clawing at the back wall of the station. The
next day's body count was 84.
For the authorities, engineers and the Mtro company, the accident taught many
things. 82 First were architectural lessons: that railings should be light, easy to get around
or under, that entrance and exit gates should swing both ways, to avoid restraining
crowds of pushing people, that furniture in stations should be kept to a minimum, and
important pieces like benches should be fixed to the floor and stand clear of major paths
of foot traffic, that exits should be clearly marked with lighted signs, that wires for
lighting should not run along the roof of tunnels, that tunnels should be more generously
ventilated, and that stations should have more than one entrance/exit. Second were
electrical lessons: that circuit-breakers should be more numerous and more accessible,
that the third rail should be covered, that an emergency lighting system should be set up
on its own, separate circuit, but most of all that all current to a section should be shut off
in case of emergency. They also learned the material lesson that everything involved in
82 Tricoire's article provides a convenient summary of all these lessons. The original lessons can also be
found in the Municipal Council's accident report of 1904: Rapport au nom de la Commission du
Mtropolitain sur l'accident du chemin de fer Mtropolitain du 10 aot 1903 et sur les amliorations
apporter l'exploitation, prsent par Flix Roussel, Conseiller Municipal (1904).

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the Mtro's operation, as much as possible, should be made from non-flammable
materials, especially metal. This applied equally to stations, other underground
installations, and trains themselves. Finally were a series of lessons about
communication: that panicked passengers might need guidance, hence the decision to
post emergency instructions in all stations, to equip stations with emergency alarms, and
to make emergency exit signs more visible; and that employees dealing with a crisis
situation would need expanded real-time communication between stations, hence stations
were more generously wired for telephones. Rules governing the system were overhauled
as well; new standards were set for how many trains could circulate on a given line per
hour and how close trains could get to one another, emergency procedures for employees
were rewritten.
Most of all, for the authorities, the accident taught the importance of keeping the
user's point of view in mind. The Municipal Mtro was indeed public worksin
providing means of transport to the public, the Municipal Council also accepted the
responsibility to keeping the public safe. Hence the Mtro would have to be redesigned
and redesigned for the user. The accident allowed engineers and bureaucrats to see the
network through the eyes of passengers, not only providing a powerful counterexample
for how the Mtro should operate, but also illuminating how passengers experienced
Mtro stations and cars, and how they behaved in them. The accident, in all of its
spectacular horror, forced engineers to rethink their designs based on the exigencies of
practice. It brought infrastructure and practice into new relations, as the authorities reworked the Mtro to manage the risks faced by passengers in the decade after 1903.
Mtro ticket sales declined by half the day after the accident, and when news of

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the Paris accident reached London, a similar panic broke out on the subway there. The
event sent shockwaves of fear and panic through a broad Western public dealing with the
newness of electrical technology. Catholic newspaper La Croix saw the accident as an
indictment of electrified modernity, suggesting that the hellish fire was heavenly
retribution for the hubris embodied in the Mtro. La Croix also criticized the company
responsible for operating the Mtro as notoriously beneath its task (notoirement audessous de sa tache). Centrist Le Temps made sober suggestions about how Mtro
operation could be modified to make such accidents less likely: getting rid of third rail
traction, making train cars from fire-resistant materials, and increasing ventilation of
tunnels. Le Temps also reflected at some length on the similarities between the 1903
accident and the notorious Bazar de la Charit fire of 1897, a reference which shows how
some Parisians framed this accident in terms of other emblematic large-scale, modern
catastrophes. 83
The most strident response came from sharp-tongued magazine of left-wing
political cartoons L'Assiette au Beurre, which ran a whole issue called Le Mtro-Ncro,
resurrecting Heuz's term ncropolitain. With their typically wicked wit, the cartoonists
of L'Assiette au Beurre demonstrated the wider cultural resonance of the event, its
feeding back into broader popular fears of modern technology, including automobiles
(one of the magazine's favorite targets) and hot-air balloons. They also mocked the easy
equation of electrical technologies with progress: in another cartoon, the story of a man
running up out of the flaming Mtro asking for light, which appeared in several
83 La Catastrophe du Mtropolitain, Le Temps, Aug. 12, 1903, p. 2; La Catastrophe du Mtropolitain,
Le Temps, Aug. 13, 1903, pp. 1-2. La Catastrophe Le Temps, Aug. 14, 1903, pp. 1-2; Cri de douleur
and Le Mtro en feu La Croix, Aug. 12, 1903, p. 1; Lendemain de catastrophe La Croix, Aug. 13,
1903, p. 3.

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newspaper accounts, was spun into a parable about the failures of modern electrical
technology and the triumph of ancient ones like candles and lanterns. Like La Croix, with
which it had very little in common, L'Assiette au Beurre took the General Traction
Company to task for cutting costs and endangering the public. But while La Croix
blamed modern technology for the dangers of contemporary urban life, L'Assiette au
Beurre blamed modern capitalism. The accident was a vehicle for fears about the dangers
of modernity and a prop for critiques of capital and the State. 84
The accident broke through the solidified crust of the dominant technophilic idea
of the Mtro. It added fuel to the fire of popular fears, reservations and doubts about
electrical technology, and, by extension, about the dangers of modernity. The London
Times thought the accident unusual, because Parisians were already so loyal to the
network. The Metropolitan now forms part of the daily life of many thousands of
Parisians. Its lines had completely changed the mode of living of the working
population. The public got accustomed to this new means of locomotion in an
amazingly short time. Thus, it was Parisians' love for and devotion to the Mtro which
made the accident so traumatic. The accident challenged the otherwise hegemonic notion
that the Mtro was a technological advance and a practical convenience, causing friction
between attitudes about, and the realities of, the network. It was not easy for Parisians to
accept the accident's indictment of the system they had grown so quickly to love. 85

Labor, Politics, and Paris Transit in the Syndicalist Era

Just as expanding access to public transportation put a mass public in regular
84 L'Assiette au Beurre 125, Aug. 22, 1903.
85 The Fire on the Paris Underground The Times, Aug. 13, 1900, p. 3.

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contact with electrical technology for the first time, so it created new communities of
transit workers as well, who were confronted with the difficulties of new electric lightrail technologies on the job. The era from 1895 to 1914 is often identified by historians as
a foundational period for the development of the French labor movement. In these years,
the Paris transportation sector was an important point of genesis for this budding
movement. In the last section, we saw how users responded to the difficult conditions of
public transportation in this era; in this section, I consider the perspective of workers.
Paris omnibus workers went on strike in April and May of 1895, and it became a
cause around which radical republicans and socialists rallied together, critiquing the CGO
monopoly and calling for change in the Paris transit networks. 86 This synergy between
radicals and socialists would eventually lead to the creation of the Parti Radical in 1901.
The omnibus strike also inspired politics of more radical varieties, both left and right.
Marxist-Guesdist leader Paul Lafargue compared the CGO's labor practices to slavery,
charging that the company's horses had it better than its workers. Anarcho-syndicalist
Fernand Pelloutier used the strikers as strawmen in a series of 1895 articles, knocking
over these reformist socialists negotiating with the local government as he laid out his
vision of a truly revolutionary general strike. 87 At the time, Pelloutier was secretary of
the Fdration des Bourses du Travail (Federation of Labor Councils), which joined that
86 Liberal Le Temps complained that left-wing papers La Justice and La Petite Rpublique were fanning
the flames of this radical-socialist campaign. See: Socialistes et Monopoles Le Temps Apr. 28, 1895,
p. 1.
87 Paul Lafargue, L'idalisme et le matrialisme dans la conception de l'histoire (1895), online:
http://www marxists.org/francais/lafargue/works/1895/00/idealisme htm. Thanks to the zeal of
contemporary anarchists for preserving their tradition, and making this knowledge publicly available
via the internet, one can read Fernand Pelloutier's piece L'anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers (1895)
on line at the Bibliothque Libertaire (http://kropot free fr/Pelloutier-anarsynd htm) and his piece La
situation actuelle du socialisme (1895) on Pelloutier.net, histoire du syndicalisme rvolutionnaire et
de l'anarcho-syndicalisme (http://www.pelloutier net/dossiers/dossiers.php?id dossier=189). These
articles originally appeared in Les Temps Nouveaux.

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same year with the Fdration nationale des syndicats (National Federation of Labor
Unions) to form the Confdration gnrale du travail, or CGT, France's most prominent
labor union. In the Belle poque, the CGT became the institutional core of France's
dynamic anarcho-syndicalist movement, and Pelloutier one of its most recognized
voices. 88 On the right, proto-fascist Gustav le Bon saw the striking omnibus workers as
victims of their own herd mentality, a perfect example of the power of rabble-rousers
(meneurs) for his antidemocratic theory of crowd behavior. 89 The strike became a pinhole through which debates over labor and the social question could be focused.
Striking workers did not only pursue collective action to win more pay, shorter
hours, or more humane conditions from their employers. When omnibus drivers who
wanted to work during the strike approached the depot at Place de Clichy one morning
they were blocked by striking workers who informed them that there was no work,
because the strike was general. In their meetings the drivers' union called for a general
strike in which other sympathetic workers of all professions would join. In these
meetings, Le Figaro reported, the atmosphere was terribly charged with electricity, even
before any orator had spokenanother glimmer of electricity's darker side. Le Figaro
claimed that Parisians were too stricken by the lack of omnibus service to have enough
sympathy to join the picket lines (but then, this right-wing paper was not particularly
sympathetic, either). Other transit workers, however, got the message: tramway drivers,
cab drivers and railroad workers from the grandes lignes joined the strike. The Paris

88 Kenneth Tucker. French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1996).
89 Gustav le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (originally 1895, this edition, Paris: Felix Alcan, 1905), p. 74:
Pendant une grve des employs d'omnibus Paris, il a suffi d'arrter les deux meneurs qui la
dirigeaient pour la faire aussitt cesser (During a strike of the Paris omnibus employees, it sufficed to
arrest the two rabble-rousers who were leading it to make it stop quickly).

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transportation sector was an important contributor to France's syndicalist movement more
generally. 90
Soon violence erupted. On the east side near Pantin, strikers attacked two trams
and knocked them over, passengers and all. Strikers hurled rocks at trams running from
Aubervilliers to the Place de la Rpublique, wounding two passengers. Amidst the
fighting, one police officer was wounded and twenty strikers were arrested. Le Figaro
snidely quipped that ambulance drivers would not be available to carry away all the
people wounded in the strike's violence, but bicycle sales would soar. 91 Tension around
the CGO was mounting. The following year, 1896, saw political economist Paul Vibert
campaigning against the CGO before the senatorial elections, often evoking the radicalsocialist alliance in his speeches. 92 This was the same year that the Ministry of Public
Works ordered the CGO to transform existing horse-powered lines to mechanical
traction, in keeping with Article 7 of its charter.
The Mtro construction and renovation of 1898-1914 was also an important
theater of syndicalist activity. By 1898, the Municipal Council decided that the city
would oversee construction of what they called the Mtro's infrastructuretunnels,
trenches, viaducts, stationsand then concede operation of the network to the General
Traction Company, which was responsible for rails, rolling stock, day-to-day operation
and maintenance, paying the city a share of its annual profits. At the end of the contract's
term (1933), the entire network would revert to municipal ownership. This arrangement
left the municipality a good deal of influence over standards for wages, hours and
90 Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France 1830-1968 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 115 and p. 150.
91 La grve des omnibus Le Figaro, Apr. 23, 1895, pp. 1-2;La grve des omnibus Le Figaro, Apr. 24,
1895, pp. 1-2; Nouvelles la main Le Figaro, Apr. 25, 1895, pp. 1.
92 Vibert delivered the speeches collected in La Concurrence Etrangre, vols. 1-2, 1896.

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benefits. It kept the hands of big finance and the railway companies off of the major
works, and held the General Traction Company to the same standards as municipal
employees. Like Haussmann's grands travaux, the primary works for the Mtro required
an organ of local government to hire a large number of laborers, who were typically
overseen by private contractors. But unlike Haussmann, the turn-of-the-century
Municipal Council had a more robust conception of the welfare state. In both work for
the city and for city contractors, the Municipal Council upheld rather high employment
standards.
For General Traction Company employees these standards included: (1.) biweekly
paychecks, at a minimum wage of 150 francs/month, or 5 francs/day for temporary
employees, (2.) a ten-hour work day and six-day work week, (3.) ten days/year of unpaid
vacation days, (4.) full salary during periods of military training or service, full salary
during illness for at least one year, full salary up to complete hospitalization in case of a
work accident, (5.) accident insurance paid entirely by the company, (6.) full compliance
with government health and safety standards, and (7.) job security or tenure for any adult
worker, male or female, having completed two years of service.93 For its time, this work
contract was extremely generous. The gesture toward gender equality, the creation of a
job-tenure system, vacation and paid leave particularly stand out. American social
scientist Edmund James thought the contract important enough to publish a research note
about it in the American Journal of Sociology, writing, The conditions which the city
imposed upon the company in regard to the treatment of its laborers and employees are
extremely interesting, and indicate the high-water mark attained by modern cities in this

93 Biette (1906), p. 9.

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respect. The work contract followed the spirit of the national law on accident insurance
of April 8, 1898, which made employers responsible for any accidents resulting from
working conditions themselves. 94
The Mtro, then, was more than just a political trophy won by radical republicans
and socialists in the Municipal Council. It was also a vehicle for municipal socialism, an
institution which could be governed according to socialist principles, an instrument for
building a local welfare state. This local welfare state flourished in part because the
radical-socialist projects of the municipality met with approval from radical and socialist
segments of the national government. This was the energy which would lead to the
formation of the Parti Radical in 1901. This moment is significant for two reasons. First,
because it challenges the common argument that France 'lagged behind' other nations like
Britain and Germany in developing a welfare state. 95 The work contract that governed the
Mtro was a leader in its time. Second, because it changes the scale of discussion,
showing that the growth of the welfare state can be measured not only at the national
level, but also at the provincial and local levels.
Expanding the local welfare state was one way the left-leaning municipal
government responded to the pressure of syndicalism. But it also granted the workers'
movement a foothold which would allow it to challenge the authorities and demand
further benefits. A feedback loop was created between state and civil society which
created both conflict over working conditions and a growing welfare state designed to

94 Edmund James, Conditions Relating to the Treatment of Employees and Laborers Imposed by the City
of Paris Upon the Company to Which the Metropolitan Road Was Leased The American Journal of
Sociology 5/6 (May, 1900), pp. 826-828.
95 Philip Nord, The Welfare State in France, 1870-1914. French Historical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3.
(Spring, 1994), pp. 821-838.

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calm this conflict. This supports the idea that large technological systems can become
important political organs for national and local governments, powerful means of
organizing basic strands of the social fabric like work. In the half-century before 1914,
public works put technology into intimate contact with the social question, as large
technical systems were applied as Haussmannesque solutions to the special problems of
large populations.
But even the Municipal Council's generous labor contract had to be enforced, a
problem which led terrassiers, pick and shovel workers who moved earth for the city
works, to go on strike during 1898, within the first three months of Mtro construction.
While the city was legally responsible for Mtro construction, it hired private contractors
to build sections of the network. Like the struggling tramway companies, the CGO and
the General Traction Company, these private contractors came under increasing public
fire in the years before the First World War as corrupt private interests betraying their
mission of providing public works. The syndicalist movement was one important carrier
of this critique.
In October of 1905, the terrassiers' union informed the Prefect of the Seine that
their employers, contractors hired by the city to construct sections of Mtro tunnels, were
violating the terms of their labor contracts. They gave the Prefect six weeks to examine
their claims about wages, health, hygiene and safety conditions, but he did nothing, and
rudely snubbed them in late November when they showed up at his office. They decided
to strike immediately. What good were the Municipal Council's generous work contracts
if the Prefect wouldn't enforce them? The strike continued into January of 1906. Along
the way, all the usual scenery of the syndicalist era was in place: skirmishes with the

234
police, tensions between skilled and unskilled workers, as well as between strikers and
those who stayed at work, and a healthy helping of sabotage. So Le Journal reported in
January, 1906 that when skilled workers tried to return to work after several weeks of
strike, unskilled terrassiers flooded their worksite with water from the Seine to block
them. Fighting then broke out between the two groups of workers. Tensions were running
high. 96
The skilled workers going back to work were called tubistes, men who worked
inside giant, pressurized wrought-iron tubes called caissons, used between 1905 and 1907
to dig tunnels under the Seine so that the Mtro's Line 4 could cross the river. 97 The work
required terrassiers to move earth and pour cement, and also mechanics to readjust the
tubes each time they were moved. In addition, such sealed, underground spaces had to be
lit, which demanded electricians. The tubes' seals were not perfect, so worksites were
often damp, which, as we saw with the Diatto system, was often a problem for early
applications of electricity. Small groups of skilled and unskilled workers were thus
packed together in close quarters, damp, dangerous and cold. In 1907 when the
compressed air rushed quickly out of a badly-sealed tube, it created a vacuum that
collapsed the tunnel behind it, trapping five workers in a flooding section of tunnel and

96 La nonchalence de M. de Selves La Lanterne, Nov. 24, 1905. La grve des terrassiers, La Petite
Republique, Nov. 24, 1905. Numbers of workers on strike vary in the news. Sympathetic left-wing
paper l'Humanit counted 20,000 strikers, while the more mainstream Le Petit Parisien counted only
3,373, see article titled La grve des terrassiers in both papers from Nov. 25, 1905. See also La grve
des terrassiers Le Journal, Jan. 11, 1906.
97 See: Le caisson du Mtropolitain Je Sais Tout vol. 7 (Aug. 15, 1905), p. 338. In 1909, the ParisOrlans railway was also extended under the Seine, by a special process of freezing hunks of earth with
an air compressor, and removing them as blocks. For more on the technical curiosities of tunnel
construction, see Le Mtro de Paris: 1899-1911 Images de la construction (Paris muses/RATP, 1999),
pp. 124-141.

235
killing them. 98
Such accidents, fortunately rare, were the unfortunate consequence of risks built
into the technique of digging tunnels in pressurized tubes. Tubistes had accepted these
risks, and were contractually entitled to extra compensation because they worked under
especially taxing conditions. But the strike of 1905-6 brought something altogether
different to public attention: health and safety violations resulting not from normal
working conditions, but from improper working conditions maintained by contractors
cutting corners. Structures were not being built to specifications. Newspaper Le Matin
told of cement walls five centimeters thick, instead of the required sixty centimeters, and
other walls in which cement had been unlawfully replaced with cheaper rubble stone
(moellons). This made it more likely that tunnels would flood or collapse, wasting the
municipality's investment, and endangering both workers and future passengers. Workers
also complained of unclean, unsafe and unhealthy work environments, heated by smoky
coal-burning stoves and poorly ventilated. 99
Under pressure from syndicalists and sympathetic journalists, the Minister of
Public Works, Gauthier, agreed to inspect the faulty works in question himself on
January 25th, 1906, accompanied by two reporters from Le Matin and a terrassier for a
guide. What they found were repeated violations of rules for materials and building
standards, several flooded worksites, sometimes with water streaming in through cracks
in the walls or ceiling, and one hole in a tunnel's roof which led up into a forgotten

98 See a Note from the office of the Service Technique du Mtropolitain, approved by Bienvenu, Dec. 24,
1907 (AP VONC 129).
99 Les malfaons, Le Matin, Jan. 16, 1906; Les malfaons du Mtropolitain Le Matin, Jan. 26, 1906.
For more on health and safety in worksites, see Au Mtropolitain, l'Humanit Aug. 16, 1907;
Questions Parisiennes: l'Hygiene et le Metropolitan La Patrie, Aug. 16, 1908; l'Hygiene au
Metropolitain l'Humanit, Sept. 3, 1910.

236
section of sewer, a major hygienic violation. There was so much water that Gauthier
evoked Venice. In early February, a section of the road surface on the rue de Chabrol
collapsed into the poorly constructed tunnel below it. Entire lots of Mtro construction
would have to be redone and, as a sewer worker man-on-the-street put it in an interview
with Le Matin, it is the Parisian taxpayers who pay. 100
Here was more flagrant non-execution of contracts in the transportation sector.
1905 opened a historical season of strikes. The summer of 1906 saw the famous CGT-led
general strike for the eight hour workday; terrassiers struck again in the summers of 1907
and 1908. 101 By the summer of 1908, many sections of Mtro construction were stalled,
behind schedule, or shut down by the authorities or by contractors. Terrassiers began to
face layoffs and lock-outs. Fear of a general strike was never far off. In the summer of
1908, newspaper L'Intransigant argued that with gas company workers already on
strike, Parisians should pay close attention, for perhaps tomorrow it will be electricity,
then mass transit. 102
We cannot ignore the possibility that worker radicalism (strikes, slowdowns,
sabotage) slowed development in this period, though it would only be one among many
causes, including contractor corruption, bureaucratic excess, etc. It is difficult to say
whether faulty Mtro works were more a result of employer negligence and corruption, or
a result of worker sabotage. But we must also consider the power of perceptions.

100 Gauthier's evocation of Venice was an eerie foreshadowing of an idiom which would later be used to
describe Paris during the 1910 Flood. See: Les malfaons du Mtropolitain Le Matin, Feb. 6, 1906.
101 Bulletin Municipal Officiel, July 9, 1907, p. 2918 (AP VONC 110).
102 Quote from La dsorganisation des services publics L'Intransigant, Aug. 18, 1908. For more on
1908, see: Entrepreneurs et Terrassiers, Le Sicle, Aug. 19, 1908; La crise du batiment, l'Action,
Aug. 21, 1908; Entrepreneurs et terrassiers l'Aurore, Aug. 22, 1908; Pas de Lock-Out! Le Radical,
Aug. 22, 1908; Chez les terrassiers l'Aurore, Aug. 23, 1908 (all articles collected as a press review in
AP VONC 131).

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Development was actually proceeding faster than ever before, while growing public
demand and the ideology of progress made it seem too slow. Contemporaries complained
of slow or unacceptable development because they had high expectations, because there
was such enthusiasm for modernization (and/or fear of falling behind the times). The
widespread idea that demand for transportation was ever-growing continued to shape
perceptions through 1914.
It is no surprise that the season of strikes from 1895 to 1914, along with growing
worker organization and radicalism, was also an era in which a broad left opposition,
including radical liberals, bourgeois socialists and syndicalists, managed to co-opt the
mainstream republican language of progress, hygiene, civilizationmoral and material
improvementand turn it to their own ends, be they reform or revolution. They sought
to keep the public in public works, critiquing companies like the CGO and the
General Traction Company for violating their contracts, critiquing the authorities for not
better enforcing contracts, even critiquing the practice of handing out state contracts to
private companies in the first place and calling for public ownership. Some, like the
Marxist Paul Lafargue, had long since dismissed public ownership as state capitalism.
But the Second Empire habit, still practiced by many companies (and none more than the
CGO), of greasing the revolving door between the public and private sectors, continued
to provoke radical-socialists and those farther left into sniffing out Haussmannesque
corruption. 103
Against this shared backdrop, of course, were conflicts within the left, as workers
mobilized to use the generosity of the radical-socialist government against itself (not
103Paul Lafargue, La communisme et les services publics, L'galit, in two parts: June 25 and July 2,
1882.

238
unlike the republicans who used Napoleon III's generosity under the liberal empire to
bring down his regime in the 1860s). 104 Hence L'Humanit's ongoing critique, c. 19051910, of terrassier working conditions as unsafe and unhygienic, conditions which would
have contractually entitled the terrassiers to extra pay like tubistes received. L'Humanit
pushed at the distinctions between skilled and unskilled, normal and dangerous work,
disputing the very definition of work on behalf of workers. There was also conflict
between those on the left who considered development of transportation infrastructures to
be progressive, and demanded that progress be made more accessible to everyone, and
those further left who began to question the value of transportation development on a
deeper level. L'Assiette au Beurre's ongoing critique of automobiles, tramways and the
Mtro, 1901-1911, for example, suggests that a segment of the far left saw many modern
means of transportation as just more of the same social and political system they
resented. In the form of public works, technology could be critiqued as just another
appendage of an already questionable body like capitalism or the state. The fact that the
government had accepted the responsibility, at least in principle, of providing
transportation for everyone in this era meant that transportation was pulled forcefully into
conflicts between classes, between state and civil society, and between different political
groups in Paris: liberals, socialists, syndicalists, etc.

Construction Sites, Circulation and the Embarrassment of Paris

In spite of growing worker radicalism, contractor negligence and public
contention, a lot of work was done in the period between 1898 and 1914. A majority of
104 Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France
(Harvard, 1998).

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the Mtro's first networkabout 24 of 41 kilometerswas constructed underground. 105
To keep land costs down, the Travaux de Paris routed tunnels under boulevards and
avenues, where the city already owned the property, thanks to Haussmann. Major streets
were also the only open spaces in the city large enough to accommodate such large
installations. Underground installations took two forms: tunnels, excavated and then lined
with cement, and covered trenches, dug out and then reinforced with walls and vaulted
roofs of metal, cement, brick and stone (the so-called cut and cover method).
Construction thus upset life on the surface of the city a good deal. Covered trenches
required removing the entire roadway, and underground works required large pits for
worker and equipment accesseither way, a major obstruction for surface traffic. The
city at street level became an ever-changing landscape of scaffolds, detours, and pits. As
novelist Jules Romains wrote, The scaffoldings of the subway, which rose up all over
the place like fortresses of clay and planks...had ended up strangling the streets, blocking
all the intersections (figure 15). 106
Complaints that Mtro works upset street life, especially commerce, were also
common in this era. Many shopkeepers wrote to the authorities seeking financial relief
for decreased business. In their estimation, Mtro construction simply made it difficult
for customers to get to their shops. 107 Mtro scaffolds and pits often blocked sidewalks,
cutting off the common link between walking through the city and stopping into stores to

105 Le mtropolitain Le Temps, Mar. 26, 1896, p. 3.

106 From Les Hommes de la bonne volont, quoted in David Pike, Subterranean Cities, p. 51 and Rosalind
Williams, Notes on the Underground, p. 79.
107 In 1904, a group of shopkeeprs on the Rue de Rennes organized to complain en masse to the Travaux
de Paris about the loss of business occasioned by construction of Metro line 4. Several other groups of
merchants, for example one on the Rue Raumur, also organized to demand indemnities between 1900
and 1910. Their complaint letters are conserved in AP V1O8 15 and VONC 78. Complaining
shopkeepers are also mentioned in Les Embarras de Paris Le Radical, Aug. 29, 1908.

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shop. Mtro construction upset temporal relations in the city as much as it upset spatial

Figure 15: The rue de Rivoli, June 30, 1899 (looking east toward the Htel de Ville). In the foreground,
workers are building the vaulted ceiling of the station at Chtelet, the final step before relaying the road
surface. One can see how little of the street is left open on either side of the construction site. 108

relations, challenging routines and itineraries, filling the streets with obstacles and
detours. Scripted everyday practices like going to or from work, taking a stroll or window
shopping had to be re-scripted.
Flneurie and the promenade were among the most compromised of all cultural
practices. Key monuments (the Opra, the Madeline, the Louvre), streets (the grands
boulevards, the avenue d'Italie, the boulevard des Capucines) and squares (Opra,
Rpublique) were no longer easily accessible, familiar itineraries were blocked. As

108 BA Metro Photos, Carton 1. No. 107 (BAVP G/107): No. 142 - Line 1, Lot 5 - 30 June 1899 - Station
Chatelet, construction de la vote.

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newspaper l'Aurore put it, It's a perpetual encumbrance. Detours upon detours. It's
existence in zig-zag, while La Libre Parole wrote For promeneurs, its always an
intercepted passage. 109
Contemporaries often said the same of vehicle traffic. Hence newspaper Le
Radical: Currently in Paris it is materially impossible to make a direct trip in a vehicle.
One must...take interminable detours. Le Radical continued:
Everywhere streets are blocked off, roadways have been gutted, sidewalks are
smashed up. Everywhere and all at once they have turned Paris upside-down.
Circulation is difficult, and the inconvenience caused for those living nearby is
considerable. From all sides complaints are rising.
The writers at Le Radical had three groups in mind. First, business owners protested
because it is becoming more and more difficult to enter into their shops. Second, coach
passengers complained that routes had become more circuitous, which, combined with
the new kilometric counters recently required for all coaches, made rides more expensive.
Third, foreign tourists were furious to encounter nothing but construction sites, and to
take fiacre rides through a bunch of little streets which were not included in their
intineraries. 110 Le Radical claimed the discontent was justified and general. The
deplorable situation boiled down to losses of money and losses of time. 111
Besides upsetting traffic and other patterns of everyday life, Mtro construction
literally shook the city, resulting in physical damage of various kinds. Hence Paris

109 Les Embarras de Paris l'Aurore, Aug. 23, 1909; Les Travaux de Paris: on n'en finira jamais! La
Libre Parole, Aug. 22, 1909; Les Propos du Lanternier La Lanterne Aug. 18, 1909 (VONC 129). See
also Un muse, une bibliothque et un lyce menacs d'un chantier, Le Matin, Aug. 25, 1911 (VONC
131).
110 Accordingly, the office papers of the Travaux de Paris contain a number of formal requests from
tramway companies and the CGO to modify their itineraries in order to create detours. For example, see
letter from the President of the CGO, Cuvinot, to the Minister of Public Works, Jan. 9, 1899 (VONC 78
contentieux concerning the Mtro).
111Les Embarras de Paris Le Radical, Aug. 29, 1909.

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Figure 16: The Arc de Triomphe overlooks a chaotic scene. A Mtro tunnel in progress under the place de
l'Etoile collapsed on December 11, 1899. Here, workers and engineers survey the damage. The two figures
standing on the rim at the back of the photograph are members of the photographic crew that took the
picture. 112

archives today contain a modest collection of official complaints made to the Municipal
and Departmental Governments concerning damages to propertymostly cracks in
walls, ceilings and floors. 113 Occasionally a section of the underground would completely
collapse, as it did at the Place de l'toile in December of 1899 (figure 16) or, as we
already saw, on the rue de Chabrol in 1907. 114

112 BA Mtro Photos No. 182 (BAVP L/182): No. 303 - Line 1, Lot 8, 11 Dec 1899 - accident de l'toile
113 Metro related complaints (contentieux) can be found in AP VONC 78 and V1O8 15.
114 The Bibliothque Administrative de la Ville de Paris has an extensive collection of photographs
documenting the Metro's construction. I am grateful to librarian Agnes Tartie who gave me access to
this collection and shared her wisdom on the subject in the spring and summer of 2005. She explained
that the credited photographer, Daniel Lieferman, is not a known historical figure. But the travaux de
Paris obviously thought that the construction of the Mtro was important enough to document, because
it hired someone to take these photographs. To document similar public works, especially road works
and building demolitions for further Haussmannization of the city, the travaux de Paris hired the Union

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Apart from social and spatial problems, Mtro construction also inspired
complaints about hygiene. On the one hand were local complaints about the hygienic
condition of particular spaces, specific worksites, especially Mtro tunnels. For example,
newspaper La Patrie complained in August, 1908 that air in the tunnels was stinking
and unbreathable. While passengers only had to endure brief stints in the bad air, La
Patrie urged readers to think of workers who spent all day underground. In 1910, leftwing newspaper L'Humanit reviewed a decade of Mtro construction, claiming
sickness and death have claimed 3,000 victims in 10 years. 115 Such hygienic
complaints were made on behalf of workers and passengerseither way, they were
always tied to the Parisian cultural tradition of seeing the underground as suspect, dirty
and dangerous. As in the 1870s, ventilation remained a central concern. 116 On the other
hand were hygienic complaints of a more global nature, which bemoaned the dirtiness or
messiness of the city under construction. In 1911 newspaper Les Nouvelles reviewed
many construction sites scheduled to open in the near future under the heading the
cleanliness of Paris (la toilette de Paris). 117 Complaints of this sort were particularly
common in bourgeois papers like Le Temps, and tended to see construction in west-side
Haussmannized neighborhoods as particularly offensive.
Photographique Franaise, a worker-run photographic cooperative. Existing plates and prints of the
UPF work commissioned by the city are now housed in the Archives de Paris. See Paris la rue, un
autre 1900 (Paris Muses, 1999). Liferman may well have been a member of this collective. More
examples of UPF photos of the Metro can be found in the collection of the Archives de Paris, series
D10S9, cartons 6-20. The Press of the City Museums of Paris published a selection of these photos in
Le mtro de Paris: 1899-1911 Images de la construction (Paris Muses, 1999).
115 l'Hygine et le Mtropolitain La Patrie, Aug. 16, 1908; l'Hygine au Mtropolitain l'Humanit,
Sept. 3, 1910.
116 For examples of discussion about ventilation of underground spaces, which as we have already seen,
began in the late 19th century, see: (1) Dr. Charles Vibert. La Catastrophe du Mtropolitain (Extrait des
Annales d'Hygine publique et de Mdicine lgale (Paris: Librarie J.-B. Baillire et Fils, 1905), and (2)
J.B. Thierry, author of tude sur le Mtropolitain de Paris: ses installations intrieures, ce qu'elles sont
ce qu'elles devraient tre (Paris: Librarie Polytechnique Charles Beranger, 1907).
117 Affaires municipals: la toilette de Paris Les Nouvelles, Aug. 9, 1911.

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In 1909 newspaper L'vnement complained about construction disrupting
bourgeois life in the fancy, Haussmannized neighborhoods around the Opra, specifically
on the Boulevard des Capucines, which it called a sacred place, a place which should
have been open for visitors, which was instead an inaccessible place. L'vnement
pleaded on behalf of bourgeois valuesthe city's important aesthetic, the possibility of
taking a walk in the neighborhood, and the neighborhood's important national landmarks:
And all this a few paces from the Madeleine! The article is filled with detailed
descriptions of the construction workers' carelessness, the way they left their tools strewn
around after work. The author shows a real obsession with cataloging and describing
worker's tools as if listing offenses, as if these dirty things of work were not acceptable
parts of public life, but rather shameful, inappropriate clutter, something to be hidden. 118
The road surface was not finally laid on the refurbished Boulevard des Capucines until
more than two years later, in September of 1911. 119 Another news story told of a group of
lumberjack women (bcheronnes) on the avenue Niel, concerned women who cared for
their neighborhood so deeply that they began sneaking into messy construction sites early
in the morning to tidy up. 120 They were called lumberjacks for picking up wooden tools
and wooden paving stones.
No site in Paris was more stigmatized than the place de l'Opra. Due to the plaza's
symbolic importance, and the complex layers of infrastructure underneath it, which
centered around the triple-decker underground crossing of Mtro lines 3, 7 and 8, the

118 Le Paradis de Capucines, L'vnement, June 19, 1909.

119 Affaires Municipales Les Nouvelles, Aug. 9, 1911; La Capitale Sabote l'Intransigant, Aug. 5,
1911 (VONC 131).
120 Les bcheronnes de Paris L'Intransigant, Sept. 30, 1911 (VONC 131).

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Opera worksite was opened and re-opened in 1903, 1905 and 1910. 121 The plaza's
repeated unearthing became an obsession. As Le Matin put it in 1909, They are going to
gut our dear old place de l'Opra one more timewe don't count anymore. She must be
made for that. A year later, L'Intransigant repeated the joke, pretending to have lost
track of how many times the square had been dug up, and then expressing disbelief: The
place de l'Opra is no longer anything but an immense hole! 122 Many newspapers called
the work-sites a spectacle, La Libert reporting that a crowd gathered at the place de
l'Opra work site each day simply to watch the construction. 123
Le Temps spoke of Paris under demolition, claiming the city had not looked so
bad since the Commune: And while waiting [for construction to finish], we witness the
most abracadabra-like incoherence in the organization of works. Why had the road
surfaces around the Opra been repaved three times? Couldn't the layers of underground
works (Mtro, gas, sewers, etc.) be coordinated so that all works could be completed
before the roadway was finally laid? The cause of this incoherence, Le Temps argued,
lay solely in the lack of coordination between administrative services. As L'clair put
it, The administration paves, unpaves, repaves. It blocks, unblocks, and re-blocks streets.
There is no overall program, no unity of direction. 124 It became a common complaint.
L'Intransigant called it disorganization, while Le Radical expressed a palpable despair
that there was no end in sight, no telling if or when works would be finished. La Libre

121 Max de Nansouty, Causerie Scientifique: Sciences Appliques: Le grand trou de la place de l'Opra,
Le Temps, July 31, 1903.
122Petits Paradoxes de Paris Le Matin Aug. 18, 1909 (VONC 129); La place de l'Opra n'est plus qu'un
trou immense! L'Intransigant, Aug. 25, 1910 and Partout des Trous L'Intransigant, Sept. 2, 1910
(VONC 131).
123Paris ventr La Libert, Aug. 26, 1909; Petits Paradoxes de Paris Le Matin Aug. 18, 1909
(VONC 129).
124Paris en Demolition Le Temps, Aug. 19, 1909; Paris-Chantiers, l'Eclair, Aug. 6, 1911.

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Parole added Travaux de Paris: we'll never finish them! 125
Behind this journalistic critique of the Travaux de Paris lay real technical
difficulties. As a new network woven through the already dense fabric of Paris's
underground infrastructures, the Mtro upset sewer, gas, water, and electrical lines. There
were also complaints about construction disturbing gardens and green spaces in the
city. 126 In 1908-9, President of the Municipal Council Adolphe Cherioux argued that with
so many works in progress and with works becoming increasingly complex and intensive,
projects needed to be better planned, so that road works wouldn't conflict with sewer
works, which wouldn't conflict with Mtro works, and so on. He called his plan the
unity of worksites. 127 Cherioux uncovered one of the key lessons of the era: if public
works are not carefully orchestrated, they become a hindrance rather than an
improvement. 128
The Parisian public clearly understood this, especially in the years between 1908
and 1914, where the historical record is unequivocal, filled with popular and populist
critiques of any powerful institution or person responsible for or important in public
worksthe local governments, national government, the Prefect of the Seine or the
Director of Paris Works, transit companies, labor unions, groups of investors, contractors,
etc. In all of these critiques there is a palpable sense that things were not going right in
125 Les Travaux de Paris: on n'en finira jamais! La Libre Parole, Aug. 22, 1909 it is interesting to note
that this could be translated into English as we'll never finish them, or we'll never be finished with
them;Paris en Demolition Le Temps Aug. 19, 1909 (VONC 129).
126 Les arbres de l'avenue de Clichy La Patrie, Aug. 16, 1908. The article complains that construction of
the underground Nord-Sud line threatened the plantations along the avenue.
127 Prfecture de la Seine, Direction Administrative des Travaux de Paris, Service Technique de la Voie
Publique et de l'clairage, Rapport de l'Inspecteur General Nov. 26, 1908. This and other documents
concerning Cherioux's plan can be found in AP VONC 129.
128 A brilliant literary rendition of this concept can be found in Alfred Dblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: The
Story of Franz Biberkopf (1961). Translated by Eugene Jolas (Continuum, 2002). Much of the story
revolves around the torn-up Alexanderplatz, a broken center-point in protagonist Franz Biberkopf's
wanderings through Berlin.

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the city. From the tone of the newspaper sources discussed above, we can infer the
journalists' zeal to stage a confrontation between citizens and government, to steer
opinion and mobilize the public. From the fact that the authorities collected these press
clippings in the first place, we can infer that the authorities themselves thought powerful
currents of opinion were coursing through the city and needed to be watched. The
secretaries at the Travaux de Paris collected press reviews to keep an eye on public
opinion, so the authorities were aware that the public was not happy with the state of
transportation in the city.
All of these various critiques aimed at public works administrationhygienic,
spatial, cultural, etc.were couched in a suggestive language of pain, distress, trauma
and shame. In 1909 Le Matin wrote, The capital is flayed, turned upside-down, gutted,
broken, a phrase which employs the familiar anatomical idiom in city planning to grisly
effect. A language of crisis emerged around familiar tropes: public works as surgery, and
the pain, trauma and disfigurement that result. 129 Two stock phrases recurred as article
titles: Paris-Chantiers, suggesting a city defined by construction sites, and Les Embarras
de Paris, suggesting that Parisians had reasons, plural, to be embarrassed by their tornapart capital. One article called Les Embarras de Paris argued that the problem went
deeper than the celebrated beauty of the cityit was also a question of the city's proper
function, the smooth flow of traffic and the cleanliness of the city. The article often
slipped into a medieval imagery, which suggested that the city was regressing instead of
progressing, moving back into a more barbaric age. The scaffolds and lifts of the
construction sites became castles, towers, forts. No longer urban, the work-sites

129 Petits Paradoxes de Paris Le Matin Aug. 18, 1909 (VONC 129).

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resembled villages, even ruins. 130 L'Intransigant used a vocabulary of craters and
mountains to convey an estranged city, no longer architectural but geological. 131 One
paper called the capital Paris gachis (spoiled or wasted Paris). 132 Like the critique of
the tramways, this critique of worksites often challenged the ideology of progress and
civilization with a language of barbarism.
These examples show how the city of worksites became Paris's Other between
1905 and 1910, plunging locals into a state of upheaval in which everyday life, that
which coalesces around repetitive scripts and routines, was prevented from forming
stable patterns. 133 Even before 1910, Parisians were tired of the upheaval, and then, in
bitter irony, came the flood of 1910, knocking out Paris's young electric system, and all
of the new urban railways that depended on it, for the better part of January and February.
The flood did billions of francs in infrastructural damage to the city's roads, sewers,
railways, pneumatic system, and electrical system. For the Travaux de Paris, the flood
heaped more clean-up work on the already difficult pile which had backed up since 1900.

Conclusion: 1910-1914
The complaints kept coming. In 1910-11, several newspapers began to reverse the
language of sabotage, which typically targeted syndicalists as vandals, and charged the
authorities with sabotaging the capital. 134 This linguistic link between the social-political

130 Les Embarras de Paris L'Aurore, Aug. 23, 1909.

131La place de l'Opra n'est plus qu'un trou immense! L'Intransigant, Aug. 25, 1910.
132Sabotage stupide L'Eclair, Aug. 1, 1911.
133This concept of everyday life as rhythmic can be found in Henri Lefevbre's Rhythmanalysis: Space,
Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (Continuum, 2004).
134La capitale sabote: ce que l'administration fait du splendide boulevard des Capucines,
L'Intransigant, Aug. 5, 1911; Partout des Trous L'Intransigant, Sept. 2, 1910: o s'arrtera
l'audace des vandales?

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crisis around syndicalism and the political crisis around public works is suggestive. In the
early 20th century, while syndicalist complaints about Mtro construction typically
targeted private contractors, journalist complaints about Mtro construction more often
targeted public authorities. But both were inspired by the maddening, crippling effects of
a city turned upside-down by electricity, mass transit, accidents, labor unrest, and
constant construction.
A language of infrastructural crisis emerged in Paris already before the
catastrophic Flood of 1910, as a result of the ongoing upheavals of 1895-1914. The city
battered by floodwaters in 1910 was already stricken. The decade of Mtro renovation
and tramway reorganization between 1902 and 1914 was sparked by the accidents of
1901 and 1903, before it was spurred by the Flood of 1910. In a similar vein, the leftwing discourse on a crisis in the cost of living, la vie chre, did not emerge as a result
of World War One, as one historian has argued, but had already emerged in the era
between 1900 and 1914. 135 We need a structural shift in the timelines we use to make
sense of Paris's history in this era, a shift which pulls the crises that emerged before the
War out from under the shadow of the crises brought on by the War. The urban problems
caused by the automobile are a fine example of this. While the 1920s has long been
recognized as the watershed moment for automobiles in European cities, both in terms of
private cars and in terms of autobuses, there was already significant experience with
automobiles in the city in the era between 1895 and 1914; hence autobuses were first
135 This chronological disagreement is my only complaint about Tyler Stovall's otherwise brilliant recent
article about life on the home front in World War One, The Consumers' War: Paris, 1914-1918,
French Historical Studies 31/2 Special Issue: War, Society, and Culture, ed. David A. Bell and Martha
Hanna (2008). Stovall claims that talk of la vie chre emerged as a result of wartime hardships how
then, does he account for pre-war artifacts like the article Le Prix de La Vie L'Humanit, Sept. 3,
1910, or the series in the National Archives labeled Crises de la vie chre: enqutes, voeux,
statistiques, brochures et journaux, 1900-1913 (F12 7023-7027)?

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applied in Paris in 1910. Development of the French automobile industry was significant
in the era between 1895 and 1907-8, after which time the French market was overtaken
by German and American competitors. 136 Henry Ford's Model T (1908) and assembly
line (1913) were also pre-war developments. This pattern could be spun out further.
Nationalization of industry and utilities, which is commonly associated with the inter-war
era and/or the Popular Front in France (i.e. the STCRP), was also first debated in the
Belle poque. 137
Historians continue to evoke the First World War as a historical rupture which,
among other things, finally burst the bubble of 19th century technological optimism. Not
so in Paris. The technophilic ideas on display in 1900 had already been called into
question by the accidents of 1901 and 1903, the upheavals of labor and construction from
1905-1910, and the great flood. In watching how workers, riders, Parisians and foreign
visitors experienced Paris's transportation networks and reacted to electricity in this
dynamic period, we have seen the process of closing the knowledge gap at work. We
have tried to see the history of technology from the user's point of view, and to watch as
new technologies were learned, evaluated, negotiated, debated, given meaning, etc.
Working these new technologies into Paris's everyday life was a bumpy process, full of
ambiguities and contradictions. Although the rapid growth of Mtro ridership between
136 Mathieu Flonneau, City infrastructures and city dwellers: Accommodating the Automobile in
Twentieth-Century Paris The Journal of Transport History 27/1 (March, 2006), pp. 93-114.
137 Three other examples can add substance to the shift of timelines I am arguing for. First, the lots
Insalubres, unclean blocks in Paris marked for demolition, were first identified in the belle epoch, but
didn't receive any attention until the interwar era. We'll hear more about this in Chapter 4. Second, the
same goes for plans to demolish Paris's fortifications: planning began before 1900, and demolition
didn't begin until after 1918. See Janet Horne, A Social Laboratory, p. 260. Finally, architectural styles
follow this rhythm as well. As Norma Evenson has shown, the clean lines, blocky forms and lack of
ornament that we associate with post-war modernism (especially Deco and the International Style),
already emerged in the era before 1914. Architectural modernism did not start with Le Corbusier, but
with Paul-mile Fries, Hector Guimard, Franz Jourdain, Auguste Perret and Henri Sauvage. See Paris
a Century of Change, pp. 159-163.

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1900 and 1910 confirms the London Times's perception that the Mtro was well-liked and
quickly integrated into Paris's daily life, the traces of popular opinion left in the archives
suggest a more cautious, more critical attitude on the part of the average user. Mobility
increased for the average Parisian, but so did risk. A crisis of modernity was already
afoot in Paris before the ravages of the First World War. 138
Faced with new social arrangements, business-government partnerships and new
technologies after 1900, engineers and politicians proved as uncertain as the public.
Whether savant or humble rider, electrical technology was new to everyone in Paris.
Hence we should go a step further than Bernhard Rieger's idea of the knowledge gap. If
there was a significant gap between lay and expert knowledge of technology during the
second industrial revolution, there were also important ways in which laymen and experts
were in the same position. Everyone needed time to experience these innovations for
himself or herself and decide how to use them and what meaning to give them.
Experiences, not surprisingly for this age of transition, were rather divergent. The masses,
for example, experienced both the rush of mobility and the spectacle of grisly accidents.
Le Temps spoke of a gap between theory and practice on the tramways, but it might
equally be called a gap between ideology and social reality. The cognitive dissonance
caused by this second gap was one of the central cultural problems of the era, not only in
Paris, but across the Western World. 139 How could the second industrial revolution's
messy reality of rapid innovation, combined with social and spatial upheaval, ever square

138 A good brief discussion of Peter Wagner's theories about crises of modernity appears in Michael Hrd
and Andrew Jamison, eds. The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity,
1900-1939 (MIT, 1998), pp. 1-15.
139 (1) Alain Beltran and Patrice A. Carr, La fe et la servante, pp. 133-172; (2) Linda Simon, Dark Light:
Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (Harcourt Trade, 2005); (3) Lisa Cartwright,
Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (University of Minnesota, 1995).

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with the late nineteenth century culture of technological optimism?
In conclusion, we should place Paris in a comparative, trans-national context.
Comparative and trans-national studies can bring out the global reach of these sort of
struggles to define technology and modernity. For example, there is a growing body of
historical research on strikes and riots which erupted across Europe, North America,
South America and Asia in response to the development of streetcars between the 1890s
and the 1910s, by scholars like Eric Schatzberg, Scott Molloy, James Fujii, and Min Suh
Son. 140 These studies can help us put Paris's experiences between 1895 and 1914 into a
coherent, global historical context, in which the users of new technological systems were
often uneasy about the rapid technological development going on around them,
development which they understood to be closely linked with modernity. Forms of user
opposition and resistance to technological development, like the user reactions I have
pursued here, provide a definite contrast to the technophilic perspectives we are
accustomed to hearing from administrators, capitalists and engineers in this period. This
difference in perspective, more than anything else, demonstrates the need for the kind of
study I have tried to offer here, which combines social and cultural history with the
history of technology to compare the different perspectives of designers and users.

140 James A. Fujii, Networks of ModernityRail Transport and Modern Japanese Literature Japan
Railway and Transport Review (Sept. 1997), pp. 12-16; Eric Schatzberg, "Culture and Technology in
the City: Opposition to Mechanized Street Transportation in Late-Nineteenth Century America," in
Technology and History: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed.
Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Allen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 57-94; Scott Molloy, Trolley Wars:
Streetcar Workers on the Line (University Press of New England/Univeristy of New Hampshire, 2007);
Min Suh Son, The "Devil Car" Riots: Science vs. Superstition in Late Nineteenth Century Seoul (talk
given at the University of Michigan, Dec. 5, 2006) and The Technology of Protest: Streetcar Riots,
Race and Public Activism (paper given at the October, 2007 session of the Society for Social Studies
of Science, Montreal).

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Part Two:
Hygiene, The Flow of Light, Air, Water and Waste

Common definitions of hygiene connect practices of cleanliness with prevention

of disease. In both English and French, the word links cleanliness and health in a
normative way. This has three major consequences. First, hygiene does not only concern
how individuals can be clean and healthy. It is also profoundly social or collective,
concerned to preserve the living conditions of the population at large and steer social
relations. Second, hygiene is heavily value-laden. Far from objective measures of what
practices help prevent disease, hygienic rules and norms are bound up with aesthetics and
morals. What is unclean is often considered profane, undesirable, ugly, dangerous,
barbaric, backward, subhuman, etc. 1 Third, since the Enlightenment, hygiene has been
bound up with progress, modernization and reform. Like a society's level of technological
development, its degree of conformity to modern principles of hygiene has become a
common measure of civilization. 2 Hygiene played a crucial role in the civilizing mission
of imperialists, and remains central in the post-colonial field of 'development.' As a result
of these moral, aesthetic, and political entanglements, hygienic principles can be (and
often are) used to justify actions that go far beyond keeping clean and preventing disease.
1 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo 2nd Ed. (Routledge,
1991-2000).
2 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Blackwell, 2000); Michael Adas,
Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideas of Western Dominance (Cornell,
1990); Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa
(Stanford, 1997).

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Many scholars have connected the French hygiene movement with the origins of
the Third Republic. 3 Somehow in the shadow of defeat by Prussia and the glow of
Pasteur's breakthroughs, biology became national destiny in France after 1871. The
hygiene movement emerged to heal the national body, trailing behind it all of the
historical debris which linked the social and the biomedical in mid-nineteenth-century
Paris. The Pasteurian revolution is such an important part of the scenery of fin-de-sicle
and belle poque France that several important histories of social reform in this era
include an obligatory chapter on hygiene. 4 But Bruno Latour famously flipped this
narrative on its head, arguing it was not Pasteur that created the hygiene movement, but
the hygiene movement that created Pasteur.
In The Pasteurization of France, Latour spoke of a hygiene movement, a
program of reforms for the reconstitution, the reorganization of human life, which
targeted the urban masses in particular. 5 Hygiene was never the monopoly of doctors,
social reformers, research scientists or even of a bourgeoisie afraid of the working
classes. This was a wide-spread movement, wide enough to encompass different points of
view, contradiction and debate, wide enough to attract attention from right and left alike.
Latour called it an enormous social movement [which] ran through the social body and
a social movement of gigantic proportions that declared itself ready to take charge of

Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford,
1976); Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France
(Yale, 1981); Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of
National Decline (Princeton, 1984); Eugen Weber, France Fin de Sicle (Harvard, 1896); Bruno
Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harvard, 1988); Daniel Pick, Faces of
Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (Cambridge, 1989); Paul Rabinow, French Modern:
Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (MIT, 1989); Jack D. Ellis, The Physician-legislators of
France: Medicine and Politics in the Early Third Republic, 1870-1914 (Cambridge, 1990).
4 Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, and Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France.
5 Latour, The Pasteurization of France, p. 16-17.

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everything. 6 This movement sought to remake society, or life, itself. Hence no domain
per se was safe from hygienic scrutiny; no means were out of reach. The movement
practiced a peculiar mixture of urbanism, consumer protection, ecology, defense of
the environment, and moralization.
In his words, the boundaries of hygiene are vague. Its flexibility was a large part
of its power:
It has no central argument. It is made up of an accumulation of advice,
precautions, recipes, opinions, statistics, remedies, regulations, anecdotes, case
studies.Illness, as defined by the hygienists, can be caused by almost
anything.Nothing must be ignored, nothing dismissed.
Latour summed up, it was necessary to act upon everything at once. 7 And so in Paris
after Pasteur, many different things became objects of hygienic workhotel rooms,
Mtro stations, night stands, public showers, water heaters, septic tanks, windows,
kitchens, roads, hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, whole cities, suburban housing
developmentsthe list could go on almost indefinitely.
For example, the topics treated in an 1882 history of hygiene included: childhood
hygiene, dietary hygiene, industrial and professional hygiene, unclean dwellings, urban
vs. rural sanitation, hospitals, the basics of contagious disease theory, the organization of
public medicine (administration), institutions where hygiene was taught, and records of
different hygiene societies. Within each of these broad topics was a sub-set of finergrained concerns: how to heat apartments, how to keep livestock, how to clean one's
military uniform, disinfection, physical exercise and swimming pools, and special
instructions for perishable foods like milk, meat and wine. There were special sections on
trichinosis, beer taps, meat markets, and margarine, but also sections on factory
6 Ibid., pp. 23 and 33, respectively.
7 Ibid., pp. 19-20.

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accidents, building materials, fertilizer, street lighting, prisons, slaughterhouses,
cremation of human corpses, yellow fever, vaccination and faculties of medicine.
Nothing, by definition, was out of hygiene's reach. 8
In fact, the hygiene movement desired nothing less than to remake everyday life,
to change peoples daily habits: the way they worked, ate, slept, washed, dressed,
reproduced, etc. Hygienists also scrutinized how rooms and buildings were designed,
built, arranged and furnished; the way food was produced, prepared, and consumed; the
way waste was stored, disposed of, processed; the crucial issue of water; and the
changing of schedules, rhythms and routines (how often people bathe, e.g.). They were
deeply committed to the Republic's mission of moral and material improvement.
This point about remaking everyday life opens up an important set of
methodological questions. We are used to thinking that the word design, a term
common in architectural history, technological history, and art history, can only be
applied to writing the histories of artifacts, objects, material things. How, then, can we
understand the hygiene movement, which so evidently sought to design not only healthy

8 Societ de Mdecine Publique et d'Hygine Professionnelle, L'tude et les progrs de l'hygine en

France de 1878 1882 (Paris: G. Masson, 1882). The popular press is another important source for
revealing the widespread and wide-ranging concerns of the hygiene movement. It also allows us to
begin the difficult process of measuring how successful the hygienists' opinion campaign was. Popular
newspaper Le Petit Parisien ran articles about: the hygienic power of light (Pontarm, "De la lumire,"
Sept. 5, 1896), garbage disposal (Pontarm, "Hygine et conomie," Aug. 27, 1897), the water supply
(Jean Frollo, "Ce qu'on boit," July 8, 1898), sewers ("Les gouts de Paris," July 3 and July 7, 1899),
public health and disease control ("La dfense sanitaire," July 11, 1899), overcrowded tenements ("Les
logements surpeupls," Aug. 1, 1899) and pollution of the Seine ("L'Empoisonnement de la Seine," July
26 and July 27, 1900). Editorialists also adressed the special hygienic issues of summertime (Jean
Frollo, "L'hygine de l't," July 19, 1902), of street cleaning ("L'Arrosage des rues de Paris," July 21,
1902), of hats and haircuts (R. Deuzres, " travers la science," July 25, 1904), of large families ("Les
Maisons hyginiques pour familles nombreuses" July 27, 1907), and of automobiles (" travers la
science", July 29, 1907). In its "advice for travelers" section, popular travel magazine A travers le
monde (across the world), published articles on "the rules of colonial hygiene" (1895, no. 1, pp. 126-7)
and "hygiene of the eye during travel" (1899, no. 5, p. 240). These publications were not exceptional.
One could find just as many relevant titles by browsing other periodicals, the published record is so rich
with hygienic texts.

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ecosystems, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, buildings, apartments, or furnishings, but also
human actions, habits, practice? In Paris after Pasteur, hygienists not only designed
material objectsthey also wrote social-cultural scripts for how to use these objects. This
dual project of designing infrastructures and practices demands an interdisciplinary
analysis. In the history of the hygiene movement we can see, all mixed up, the concerns
of art history (aesthetics of design), architectural history (aesthetic concerns and
structural engineering), history of medicine (bacteriology, hygiene in the narrow sense,
the emergence of public health), human geography and analyses of space (city planning),
and technological history (use of industrial devices, new human-made materials, etc.).
Hygiene was one of the premier urban problems in this age of urbanization. This
was true across Europe, but somewhat exaggerated in Paris. Why did hygiene become so
important in Paris? First, because the episodes of 1830-32 and 1848-50 forged deep links
in the French mind between hygiene and social/political unrest, cholera and revolution.
Second, as we'll see in Chapter 4, because the city of Paris was exceptionally dense.
Third, because of the intellectual climate I discussed in Chapter 1, which connected the
urban body and the social body. Hygienic reform of both infrastructures and practices,
moral and material improvement, seemed a duty of civilization abroad and a possible
answer to the social question at home.
The following two chapters deal with hygiene, zooming in on the city's two main
hygienic problems: housing and the flow of water. In Chapter 4, I deal with the themes of
housing, hygiene and urban density, showing the variety of ways that Parisians dreamed
of and tried opening their city, to relieve density, to clean it up, and to let light and air
flow freely. In Chapter 5, I deal with Paris's water networks: the water supply network,

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the sewer system, and the Seine. In this chapter, I focus on the relationships between the
social, the technological and the natural by analyzing water shortages, the debate on
pollution of the Seine, and the floods of 1876, 1882-3 and 1910. In both of these chapters,
although hygienists are not the protagonists, I often evoke the hygiene movement and
hygienists, and so it is important to have a sense of who they were. 9
Who were the hygienists? Social and political histories of France have long
known then as social reformers, men like Jules Simon (1814-96), Georges Picot (18381909), mile Cheysson (1836-1910), Arthur Raffalovich (1853-1921), Jules Rochard
(1819-1896), and Jules Siegfried (1837-1922). 10 They were the liberal professionals who
typified the Third Republic's ruling class: doctors, architects, engineers, local elected
officials, social reformers, businessmen, research scientists, professors, and
philanthropists. 11 Their spirit was crusading. They sought to convince others of their
ideas, so ultimately everyone could be a hygienist, and the scientific knowledge of
hygiene could be put into practice. For example, in its 1882 retrospective The Study and
the Progress of Hygiene in France from 1878 to 1882, the Society for Public Medicine
and Professional Hygiene explained that the book was intended to introduce to the public
the large number of works recently published on hygiene, their conclusions and their
applications in daily life. These insights, they hoped, would encourage workers and
allow them to give themselves an idea of the ensemble of current tendencies in hygiene.
It was a sort of popular reference book, a way to disseminate and popularize hygienic
9 In addition, we do not need another history of the Hygiene Movement. There are already a number of
good studies dealing with this topic: Latours Pasteurization, Rabinows French Modern, Aisenbergs
Contagion, La Berges Mission and Method, Barness The Making of a Social Disease and Gouberts
The Conquest of Water.
10 Dr. Octave Du Mesnil, l'Hygiene a Pairs L'habitation du Pauvre (Paris - Bailliere et fils, 1890), pp. 1418. In the 1880s, when Du Mesnil looked back on two decades of work on hygienic reform of working
class dwellings, these men were the ones he found most important.
11 See Nord, The Republican Moment; Latour, Pasteurization; Ellis, Physician-Legislators

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thinking. 12
The Society's president was Paul Brouardel (1837-1906), professor at the Paris
faculty of medicine, expert in pathology, forensic medicine and colonial medicine,
member of the academy of medicine, member of the French Consultative Committee on
Public Hygiene and the Seine Council of Hygiene and Salubrity. Havellock Ellis called
him a medico-legist. 13 Brouardel was also a hygienic crusader, active in campaigns
concerning food safety, tuberculosis, venereal disease, child abuse, alcoholism and public
decency. Andrew Aisenberg called him the most renowned hygienist of his
generation. 14
Important members of the Society included Octave du Mesnil (1832-1898), doctor
of medicine, who worked closely with the prefecture of the Seine, serving on the
Commission of Unclean Dwellings. He was the author of several studies intended to
illustrate that the living and working conditions of the working class were damaging their
health and moral fiber. 15 He led the Commission on Unclean Dwellings' study of
furnished rooms for rent from 1877 to 1883. 16 Du Mesnil was also a member of the
Society for Low-Cost Housing, and a guest at its first meeting in the home of Jules
Siegfried on March 1, 1890. This society was created following the 1889 International
Congress on Low-Cost Housing with Siegfried as its president. The immediate object of
the Society was legislation and fund-raising, designed to facilitate the construction of
12 Societ de Mdecine Publique et d'Hygine Professionnelle, L'tude et les progrs de l'hygine en
France de 1878 1882 (Paris: G. Masson, 1882). The best study to date of the hygiene movement's
campaign for public education comes from Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of
Health in the Industrial Age, trans. Andrew Wilson (Polity, 1989).
13 Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society (F.A. Davis Co., 1910), p. 601.
14 Aisenberg, p. 89. For more on Brouardel, see pp. 89-94.
15 Etude sur l'hygiene des ouvriers employees a la fabrication du verre mousseline (1867), Les Garnis
insalubres de la ville de Paris, rapport fait a la commission des logements insalubres (Paris: Bailliere,
1878), l'Hygine Paris: l'habitation du pauvre (1890), his most famous work.
16 Shapiro, p. 137.

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worker housing by granting fiscal advantages from the state. In 1892, Siegfried would
become Minister of Commerce. 17
These men were highly educated, spirited republicans, and extremely wellconnected with other important people, a very powerful group. Janet Horne said of them:
Although the members of this network projected the image of a very informal group,
they in fact had inroads into powerful circles that linked industry, parliament,
philanthropy, medicine, and public administration. Ann-Louise Shapiro wrote, The
prominent hygienists in Paris were in general from the same social stratum and had the
same official and quasi-official connections as did their bourgeois-reformer
counterparts. 18 In fact, many (e.g. Du Mesnil and Brouardel) were both reformers and
hygienists. Their success, and the power of the hygiene movement, lay in crossing or
stretching the boundaries between the state and civil society, in such a way as to make
experts much more socially and politically important. 19 Janet Horne spoke of the
...powerful parapolitical configuration of reform activities... 20
By comparing private, civil organizations like the Social for Public Hygiene and
the Society for Low-Cost Housing with a governmental organization like the
Commission on Unclean Dwellings, we can see what Shapiro called quasi-official and
Horne called parapolitical. The lack of substantive differences in mission and
membership between the public and private organizations is striking. The Commission on
Unclean Dwellings was one of the oldest government bodies in France whose task was
specifically hygienic in nature. Formed in 1850 as a bureau in the Prefecture of the Seine,
17 Horne, p. 233-4.
18 Janet Horne, p. 233; Ann-Louise Shapiro, p. 136.
19 See Jack Ellis, The Physician-Legislators of France: Medicine and Politics in the early Third Republic,
1870-1914 (Cambridge, 1990).
20 Horne, p. 225.

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its task was essentially twofold: first, to determine hygienic definitions and standards, and
second, to inspect houses in Paris and the suburbs that didn't meet these standards, and
suggest remedies. Firmly yoking science and government, the commission was a panel of
experts empowered both to pass scientific judgment and to advise lawmakers.
From 1870 to 1876, for example, the commission was composed of engineers,
local elected officials, state-licensed inspectors of architecture, engineering, and public
works, medical doctors, science professors, architects, landlords, and a few
representatives of the skilled building trades, mostly masons. Of 32 members, 7 were
doctors, 6 were state-licensed inspectors (and 4 of these were inspecteur gnral), 4 were
architects, 4 were engineers (3 of them graduates of the prestigious national school of
civil engineering, the cole des Ponts et Chausses), 2 were members of the Academy of
Medicine, and 1 was a member of the Council of Public Hygiene and Salubrity, another
hygienic decision-making board in the Prefecture of the Seine. There were two policy
makers on board and two landlords, plus three employees of the court, two of them
judges. The Prefect of the Seine presided, with some key allies in tow, for example
Eugne Belgrand, graduated inspecteur gnral des Ponts et Chauses, now director of
water and sewers, Haussmann's go-to man for water engineering, credited with authoring
Paris's unique dual-conduit water distribution system as well as the plan for its sewers.
Belgrand was not the only member of the commission who had already held important
posts in the Second Empire; there was also Alphand. This was an impressive bunch of
professional credentials, heavily weighted toward lawmakers, doctors, architects and
engineers; administrative continuity with the Second Empire was significant.
Like the broader hygiene movement, the Commission on Unclean Dwellings was

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deeply interdisciplinary, calling on members from various professions. 21 Alexis Beau, a
representative of the Bureau de bienfaisance brought a welfare provider to the table. Dr.
Deville, Chief Inspector for the Death Verification Service, was there to keep an eye on
that pet concern the mortality rate, as well as to share his first-hand experience of home
inspections. 22 De Montmahou, Chief Inspector of Primary Education was there to handle
questions of youth hygiene. For special questions about animal hygiene, there was
Reynal, a veterinarian. Links between various organs of government were established,
too. Hubert, Chief of the Hygiene Division at the Direction of Paris Works, kept his
office in touch with the commission, and Beaude did the same for the Council of Public
Hygiene and Salubrity.
The Commission depended on links with other governing bodies, established
professional and academic experts, and property owners. It's basic function, inspecting
unclean dwellings alerted to it, made the commission dependent on a broad network of
other offices concerned with hygiene for information: the Inspection de l'assainissement,
the architectes voyers, the Prefecture of Police, the hygiene and salubrity commissions of
each arrondissement, and above all, the Commission report stressed, from the Service
de la vrification des dcs (Death Verification Service), tasked with completing each
death certificate with details about the housing situation in which the corpse was found
and inspected. Information was collected in inspections and house visits, and then passed
through this baroque chain of institutions, shared and organized. 23 There was never a

21 Janet Horne, A Social Laboratory, pp. 224-5.

22 For more on the politics of birth and death rates in France, see Joshua Cole, The Power of Large
Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell, 2000). Robert Nye
called Frances declining birthrate a master pathology in the discourse on national decline, See
Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton,
1984), p. 140.
23 Paris's three levels of government made the bureaucracy involved more complicated. This sort of

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strict division of labor, because the functions of the various organizations overlapped.
This governmental organization rested on a heterogeneous network combining resources
from the public and private spheres, state and civil society, political power and social
capital, experts, the academy, the police, etc. 24
The hygienists' methods, the solutions to the social problems they saw, were
diverse, too. There was education, spreading the word of hygiene. There was renovation
of the built environment, the infrastructural fix, often called assainissement
(sanitization). 25 There was lawmaking, what is commonly called social reform, which
amounts to state-formation, the beginnings of the welfare state. There was the technical
component of hygiene, i.e. hardcore medico-scientific research concerning standards and
definitions. This involved questions like how much of certain pollutants can water
contain and still be safe to drink? what disinfectants are particularly good at killing what
germs? How much square footage is required for a humane dwelling? how wide should
streets, alleys, courtyards and windows be to provide buildings with adequate light and
air?and so on.
As Janet Horne put it: As contemporary observers struggled to define the social
question, their mission to improve the lot of workers and their families quickly grew to
encompass the material surroundings in which they lived. 26 The hygienists' objectifying

administrative complexity also explains why the materials at the Archives de Paris can be so
repetitivefor each communication, multiple governments must be informed, in writing, of the form
and content of the communication. Hence there are several ways to get at exactly the same historical
material.
24 Hygienic matters in Paris were legally defined as police jurisdiction. See: Aisenberg, Contagion, pp. 4165.
25 Yankel Fijalkow defined assainissement as rduction de l'insalubrit par travaux pouvant aller jusqu'
la demolition (reduction of uncleanliness by works, possibly going all the way to demolition. See La
construction..., p. 193. David Barnes said buildings were assainies when they were made healthy or
sanitized by structural modification. See The Making of a Social Disease, p. 120.
26 Horne, p. 226.

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gaze stressed the interaction of beings with their environment, as anthropology and
colonial medicine would with colonial subjects, as animals and plants are treated in
biology. Humans are susceptible to their environment, they argued, so if we change the
environment, we can change the people. Hence Latour's four aspects of hygiene:
consumer protection (biological and economic relations of consumer with contagious
others, like fruit and vegetable sellers), ecology (commerce of people with their natural
environment), urbanism (commerce of people and the built environment), and
moralization (rules for interactions of people with one another).
This environmentalism had a long history in France, from Lamarck's nurtureover-nature conception of evolution, to neo-Hippocratic tendencies in French medicine
and hygiene. 27 As David Barnes put it, hygienists ...inherited from an earlier era...the
desire to explain disease in terms of geography, and to control disease by controlling
space. Alain Cottereau called it glissement cologique (ecological slide), the
understanding of social realities in environmental terms. 28 Sharon Marcus argued that
hygienists showed an insistence on the equivalence between the physical state of
residential interiors and their occupants' moral behavior. 29 The connection of
uncleanness and immorality is crucial. The reason that the hygienists needed moral
improvement to be accompanied by material improvement was simple: they had a
specific view of dwellings and their inhabitants, studying them as objects. Du Mesnil, for
example, often referred to the conjunction of promiscuity and uncleanliness. 30

27 Aisenberg, Contagion, p. 21; Fijalkow, La construction des lots insalubres, p. 17.

28 David Barnes, Social Disease, p. 113
29 For Marcus's take on hygiene and public health, see Apartment Stories, pp. 152-157. Quote p. 154.
30 Marcus, Apartment Stories, p. 272. Marcus credits Du Mesnil with the conjunction of promiscuit and
malpropret, cited from his Les Garnis insalubres... (1878), p. 2.

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Chapter 4: Opening the City: Housing, Hygiene and Urban Density

Whether we define cities as agglomerated buildings (the 'container'), or

agglomerated people (the 'contained'), density is a key feature. 1 But from 1870 to 1914,
Paris was especially dense among European capitalstoo dense according to most
Parisians. Paris reached its current size, about 30 square miles, in 1860 when Haussmann
annexed the city's suburbs (faubourgs). By the eve of World War I it housed 3 million
people, an average 95,000 per square mile. By contrast, architect and father of French
urbanism Eugne Hnard noted that London in this era had a surface area just under 120
square milesnearly four times Paris's surfaceand about 4.5 million inhabitants, for a
density of about 37,500 per square mile. Paris's population density was two to three times
London's. Construction was denser, too; Hnard also showed that London had three times
more park space than Paris. 2

1 In this chapter, I use the term density to refer to both population density and density of construction.
Cities are also places where activity, information, infrastructure, wealth and many other things are
dense. (1) Amin and Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Polity, 2002), p. 2; (2) For more on
defining the city as built space or population, see Anthony McElligott, ed. The German Urban
Experience 1900-1945: Modernity and Crisis (Routledge, 2001), pp. 8-16.
2 See: (1) Commission dextension de Paris, vol. 2: aperu technique (1913), plate 1; (2) Eugne Hnard,
Etudes sur les Transformations de Paris: fascicule 3, Les grands spaces libres: les parcs et jardins de
Paris et de Londres (Oct. 1903), pp. 55-88; (3) Paris was also denser than Berlin. Just before the First
World War, Berlin was approximately 25 square miles in area and had just over 2 million inhabitants.
Berlin's density was closer to 80,000 per square mile. See Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin:
Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (University of Chicago, 1997), p. 96; (4) For
comparisons with today's densest cities, see Jon Mooallem, "Guerrilla Gardening," The New York
Times, June 8, 2008 (the architecture issue), pp. 76-82. On p. 80, Mooallem details the top five densest
cities on earth for 2008: Mumbai (76,790 people/sq. mile), Calcutta (61,945), Karachi (49,000), Lagos
(47,027), Shenzhen (44,463). None of these come close to Paris's 95,000 per square mile in 1913.

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Pariss density meant more than simply how much space was available. The city
was also enclosed by spatial logics and practices, spatial scripts like the technological
scripts we saw in the last chapter. Like technologies, spaces are scripted by designers and
users in order to steer their use. As scholars in disparate fields have argued, the built
environment is a primordial infrastructure, a material frame for human practice which is
much more than a container. 3 The spatial forms we inhabit shape us as we shape them. In
this chapter, well watch as Parisians negotiate urban spaces which are increasingly
fragile, inadequate, and out of step with spatial scripts. From 1870 to 1914, the lived city
did not match the ideal city, and this gap generated multiform theories and practices of
urban transformation.
As one Parisian wrote in 1913, from its origins as a Gallic settlement on islands in
the Seine, Paris was a fortress, an enclosure defended from the world outside by moats,
walls, boulevards (and today a belt highway). 4 A well-known spatial script is the
importance of the quartier (neighborhood), always pulling its residents backhence the
popular image of the vrai Parisien de Paris (true Parisian), a rooted local who never
leaves home, a sort of peasant in this city of villages. 5 The density of Paris apartment

3 Thomas Gieryn, What Buildings Do, Theory and Society 31 (2002), pp. 35-74; Annemarie Adams,
Kevin Schwartzman and David Theodore, Collapse and Expand: Architecture and Tuberculosis
Therapy in Montreal, 1909, 1933, 1954 Technology and Culture 49/4 (Oct. 2008), pp. 908-942.
Adams et al. conclude that architecture is both a technological support and is itself a significant
technology (942). In critical theory, scholars have punned on the word architecture, revealing the
meaning arch technology in its Greek roots. Denis Hollier wrote: it is not just a simple container,
but a place that shapes matter, that has a performative action on whatever inhabits it, that works on its
occupant. See: Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (MIT,
1993), p. x.
4 Commission d'Extension de Paris, vol. 1: historique (1913), p. 1.
5 (1) In Ch. 1 of La Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours (1872), Jules Verne introduces Passpartout as
un vrai Parisien de Paris, in order to convey his simplicity and backwardness, as opposed to Fogg's
hi-tech London futurism; (2) Jules Claretie, La vie Paris (1895), p. 176; (3) See also Sancha's cartoon
La plus parisiennecelle qui ne quitte jamais Paris from L'Assiette au Beurre, issue called Un
dimanche d't Paris, no. 73, Aug. 23, 1902, p. 1208.

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houses inspired scripts like the close co-habitation of families in apartment houses, the
intimate sociability that resulted (sometimes contentious, sometimes cordial), and the so
called vis--visneighbors' view into each other's windows across the courtyard. Sharon
Marcus's cultural analysis of the Parisian apartment house shows its spaces and practices
chafing against the boundaries of public and private, individual, family and society,
throughout the 19th century, putting delicate social products like privacy and morality at
risk. 6 In Paris, spatial problems were always closely tied to social problems.
In this chapter, I explore various strategies for and fantasies of what I call
opening the city, or dealing with Paris's social-spatial problems, between 1870 and
1914. We can begin by comparing two seemingly disparate voices from the era: novelist
mile Zola and hygienist Octave du Mesnil. In 1883, Zola's novel of department stores,
Au Bonheur des Dames (often The Ladies' Paradise in English), told the story of
Denise, a recent migrant from the provinces, now a single working girl in the city. Her
first impressions of Paris disappoint her provincial expectations, especially where light,
air, and open space are concerned:
...the dark room made her feel uneasy; she felt a lump in her throat as she looked
around, for she was used to the large, well-lit rooms of her native province. A
single window opened on to a little inner courtyard which communicated with the
street by means of a dark alley by the side of the house. This yard, sodden and
filthy, was like the bottom of a well; a circle of sinister light fell into it. 7
The passage conveys not only Denise's perception that the provinces are cleaner and
healthier than the capital, but also Zola's. 8 Later in the novel, although Denise is more

6 For more on the social and symbolic dynamics of the Parisian apartment house, and extended reflection
on the role of enclosure as a principle spatial logic in 19th century Paris, see Sharon Marcus, Apartment
Stories (California, 1999).
7 Emile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise, Translated by Brian Nelson (Oxford, 1998), pp. 12-3.
8 This same argument about provincials accustomed to cleaner and more open dwellings was repeated in
Lucien Graux, La tuberculose et l'habitation urbaine (Paris: Jules Rousset, 1905), pp. 11-12.

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accustomed to Paris, the same eerie, sickly scenery appears. She is disoriented even
though Paris is now her home:
The banisters were against the wall, and there was a hole at the corner; sometimes
the tenants left their dustbins on the stairs. Denise, in total darkness, could only
feel the chilliness of the old, damp plaster. One the first floor, however, a small
window opening on to the courtyard enabled her to see vaguely, as if from the
bottom of a stagnant pond, the warped staircase, the walls black with filth, the
cracked and peeling doors. 9
Zola's deft description of Paris's dreariest domiciles shows many similarities to
contemporary writings by hygienist Octave Du Mesnil. Describing one tenement in the
13th district, Du Mesnil wrote, ...the walls are viscous, the ceilings are black, the
windows stripped of their wooden slats. Another house, ...whose floors are of pounded
earth, is covered with tar-paper. It is not sealed; the window panes that close it are
deprived of their glass, replaced with scraps of cloth. Its inhabitant sleeps on a bed of
straw. He pays 12 francs a month in advance for this space, and in addition he is charged
with caring for the dogs and chickens of the tenant [from whom he sublets]. Du Mesnil's
vivid descriptions of run-down working class housing are difficult to read. His 1890 book
was a call to arms, calculated to produce outrage and disgust in readers, who would join
the movement to open up and clean out the city. 10
Zola hoped that his vivid descriptions of contemporary poverty would move
readers in similar ways. He and Du Mesnil, in spite of professional and political
differences, shared a sense of moral and social outrage. Sharon Marcus argued that Zola's
Pot-Bouille (1883) represents the Paris apartment house as restless, bound by a

9 Ibid., pp. 182-3. The novel contains one other reference to a squalid courtyard, ...a narrow hole, the
smells from which poisoned the hotel (p. 282).
10 Octave DuMesnil, l'Hygine Pairs L'habitation du Pauvre (Paris - Bailliere et fils, 1890), pp. 34 and
29-30, respectively.

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strained, simmering containment, literally, as the title suggests, a pot ready to boil over.
She speaks of explosion, discharge, excess, escape, and overflow. Similar words had
been part of Zola's vocabulary for years. In L'Assommoir (1877), he wrote From top to
bottom, the lodgings, all too small for their occupants, seemed to be bursting, showing
scraps of their misery in every crack. 11
Zola and Du Mesnil weren't the only Parisians in these years with such words on
their minds. In 1891, Prefect of the Seine Poubelle asked an audience to consider how
many times Paris's growing population had made its city walls crack. In 1895, another
Parisian claimed the city wants more space, to breath more easily, it demands tearing
down these walls of Jericho, these inept fortifications which encircle it, which stifle it, it
wants to grow! 12 In 1900, journalist Michel Corday said Paris bursts through her walls,
overcomes her belt of columns, absorbs the suburbs, digs new moats in order to fill them
back up. 13 In 1913, a historical overview of Paris's urban growth argued that the capital
started to spill-over into the suburbs in the 19th century, as it considered the question of
whether to demolish the city's fortifications. 14 This vocabulary of bursting, cracking,
stifling, and spilling reveals widespread recognition of urban crisis, a historical trace of
11 Such descriptions of tenement houses in Paris appeared already in the first novel in Zola's celebrated
series, L'Assommoir (1877). There we find the following description: The grey walls, partly eaten
away by a kind of yellow leprosy, were streaked by the drippings from the roof, and were perfectly flat
from the pavement to the slates, without the slightest piece of moulding, the water-pipes alone curved a
little at each floor, where the open sinks were seen, covered with rust. The windows, without shutters,
displayed their bare panes, of the greenish hue of cloudy water...From top to bottom, the lodgings, all
too small for their occupants, seemed to be bursting, showing scraps of their misery in every crack. See
The Assomoir: a Realistic Novel, trans. Vizetelly (London: Vizetelly, 1884), pp. 46-7. Marcus,
Apartment Stories, pp. 166-198, quotes pp. 169 and 180, respectively.
12 For Poubelle's speech, see Dernire heure: l'inauguration de l'avenue de la Rpublique, Le Temps,
July 14, 1891, p. 1. Another account of the day's events can be found in the Bulletin Municipal Officiel,
July 15, 1891. For Petitjean, see Les Grands Travaux de Paris, 1895, pp. 9-10.
13 Michel Corday, Science et Moeurs: La Ville, La Revue de Paris, yr. 7, no. 4 (July-August, 1900), pp.
771.
14 Commission d'extension de Paris, vol. 1: historique, p. 166: ...XIXe sicle, poque o la capitale a
commenc dborder sur les communes de la priphrie.

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the everyday experience of Paris's density. In this chapter, well see Pariss built
environment as a broken, failing, overburdened infrastructure, continuing the theme of
urban crisis I developed at the end of the last chapter. Urban space was over-priced,
overcrowded and unclean.
Density was always closely connected with hygiene. In his 1867 book The Odors
of Paris, conservative journalist Louis Veuillot described Paris as musty and dense, a
city of dark corners without light and air, a humid archipelago of places perfect for
cultivating stink. Veuillot was a devout Catholic and thought Second Empire Paris,
profane in its modernity, was losing sight of its Roman heritage. For Veuillot, odors
stood for Paris's backwardness, suggesting that religion and hygiene were analogous
measures of civilization, and that Paris lacked both. In the 1870s, odors of Paris
became a catch phrase, passed along by authors from civil engineer J. Chrtien to wellknown journalist and critic Francisque Sarcey.15 The phrase remained current through the
early 1900s, often evoked in discussions of Paris's sewer system, water supply, and
ecological impact on the Seine. 16 Mold was a common topic, too, as writers from avantgarde humorist Alphonse Allais to politician and journalist Charles Floquet illustrate. 17

15 (1) Louis Veuillot, Les odeurs de Paris (Paris: Palm, 1867); (2) Jules Brunfaut, Les odeurs de Paris:
assainissement. (Paris: J. Baudry, 1880); (3) J. Chrtien, Les odeurs de Paris: tude analytique des
causes qui concourent l'insalubrit de la ville et des moyens de les combattre. (Paris: J. Baudry,
1881); (4) Francisque Sarcey, Les odeurs de Paris: assainissement de la Seine (Paris: Gauthier-Villars,
1882).
16 (1) Gil Baer, Revue comique du mois de juin La Lanterne, July 4, 1895; (2) Les odeurs de la Seine
Le Petit Journal, Sept. 8, 1895; (3) Les mauvaises odeurs, Le Radical, Sept. 9, 1895; (4) Le Petit
Parisien, July 30, 1896 and July 12, 1897; (5) Les mauvaises odeurs de Paris, Le Petit Parisien, July
10, 1908. For an important recent treatment of the issue, see David Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and
the Nineteenth-Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs (Johns Hopkins, 2006).
17 Echos de l'Escalier L'Anti-concierge: Organe officiel de la dfense des locataires. Yr 2, No. 5; April
to July, 1882, p. 2. For Floquet, see Le Temps, July 14, 1891 and Bulletin Municipal Officiel, July 15,
1891.

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References to humid structures, rotten or sagging walls, abound. 18 Hygienists often
connected connected density and disease. Villerm first made this claim for Paris in the
1840s, but French hygienists also drew on work from the international scientific
community, from men like Britain's Chadwick and Hungary's Korosi. What Chadwick
observed empirically, Korosi showed statistically: across 19th century Europe, death from
contagious diseases increased with population density in urban settings, especially in
poorer neighborhoods. 19
From 1870 to 1914, this enclosed quality of Parisian space inspired ongoing
negotiation of the city's problems with space, housing and hygiene. Parisians from all
walks of life felt that they needed more room to move and breathe. But how did different
groups in Paris respond differently? The chapters first section sets the scene, providing
background on the city's housing problem and its forceful insertion into politics early in
the Third Republic. The second section deals with the avant-garde and anarchist
responses to the housing problem from Montmartre, among them literary satire,
clandestine moveouts, rent strikes, and community organizing. The third section
continues this cultural history, looking at Parisian attitudes toward the stifling quality of
modern everyday life, and the use of cycling, tourism, popular novels and painting to
escape from the city. The fourth section deals with Auguste Fabre's dream of turning
skyscrapers into cooperatively-owned working class housing blocks. The fifth section
connects the anti-tuberculosis movement with efforts at slum clearance, and dreams of

18 (1) Moyens de secher et assainir les habitations humides" Le Magasin Pittoresque Yr. 44 (1876), p.
358; (2) R. Deuzres, A travers la science: les murs humides Le Petit Parisien, July 11, 1904; (3)
Andrew Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the Social Question in NineteenthCentury France (Stanford, 1999), pp. 21 and 54.
19 Octave DuMesnil, l'Hygine Pairs L'habitation du Pauvre (Paris - Bailliere et fils, 1890), 162-164.

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disencumbering and cleaning up public streets and sidewalks, hotels and even pieces of
furniture. In the final section of this chapter, I turn to large-scale urban plans and the birth
of city planning in Paris, a fitting end to four decades of grappling with what many have
called an urban crisis.

The Housing Problem

As we saw in Chapter 1, nineteenth century Paris's growing population strained
the housing supply. Rents increased steadily as buildings expanded and sub-divided,
creating more tiny places for people to inhabit. Thanks to scholars in urban and
architectural history, we already know that securing shelter in nineteenth century Paris
was difficult, especially for the lower classes. 20 Like Paris's density problem, the housing
problem was a question of both supply (quantity) and quality; the city was known for
cramped, overpopulated, unclean and expensive dwellings. 21 The housing problem is
also a recurrent theme in historical literatures on French social reform and public health
under the Third Republic. 22 Together, these bodies of literature show us that housing was
a charged issue in Third Republic Paris, a site of moral, social, political and epidemic
20 Norma Evenson, Paris: a Century of Change, 1878-1978 (Yale, 1979); Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing
the Poor of Paris 1850-1902 (University of Wisconsin, 1985); Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The
Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France, 1840-1914 (Cambridge, 1985); Francois
Loyer, Paris XIXe Sicle: l'immeuble et la rue (Paris: Hazan, 1987); Paul Rabinow, French Modern:
Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (University of Chicago, 1995); Sharon Marcus, Apartment
Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California, 1999);
David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2005).
21 Patrick Kamoun, V'l Cochon qui dmenage: Prlude au droit au logement (Ivan Davy, 2000), p. 14:
...logements exigus, surpeupls, insalubres et chers.
22 Judith Stone, The Search for Social Peace: Reform Legislation in France, 1890-1914 (State University
of New York, 1985); Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France, 18801914 (Louisiana State University, 1986); David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease:
Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-century France (University of California, 1995); Andrew Aisenberg,
Contagion: Disease, Government, and the "Social Question" in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford,
1999); Janet Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Muse Social and the Rise of the
Welfare State (Duke, 2002).

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danger, and the inspiration behind a booming movement for, and discourse on, housing
reform. The principle of the free market and the power of landlords kept Paris from
turning to a public solution sooner, hence the protagonists in this literature are the dogooding republican professionals in the movement for housing reform, most of them
hygienic crusaders, too.
Like its problems with traffic and density, Paris's housing problem was first
identified in the urban crisis of the 1830s-40s. In spite of the Cit Napoleon, Napoleon
III's ultimately failed attempt at worker housing, the Second Empire's legacy was more
determined by Haussmann's travaux, which sharpened the housing inequalities of the
early 19th century. The central problem in the Paris housing market between 1850 and
1914 was a shortage of low-cost housing. Haussmann's works encouraged a basic
imbalance (Bullock and Read called it a distortion): a surplus of upscale bourgeois
apartments in central and western Paris which often lay vacant because most Parisians
couldn't afford them, combined with a shortage of affordable housing for the lower
classes in the periphery and the east. 23 Thus one of the most well-known reform
campaigns of the 1880s-90s was mounted by the Society for Low Cost Housing, leading
to the housing laws of 1894, 1906, 1908 and 1912. 24
Private development in the early Third Republic tended to reinscribe these lines of
inequality. Du Mesnil showed that despite increasing movement of the working classes

23 (1) Bullock and Read, p. 301; (3) Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, Ch. 6 Rent and the Propertied
Interest, pp. 125-140; (3) Evenson, Paris a Century of Change, pp. 200-204.
24 The law of Nov. 30, 1894 (Siegfried) created incentives for builders to erect low-cost apartment houses
in the city's periphery. The laws of Apr. 12, 1906 (Strauss) and Apr. 10, 1908 (Ribot) sought to make it
easier for less fortunate people to own property by providing more municipal assistance, allowing the
municipality to intervene in matters of low-cost housing, and creating new public offices for low-cost
housing. Paris held its first competition for designs for publicly funded housing after the law of Nov.
23, 1912 (Bonnevay). See Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, p. 212.

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from the center to the periphery (especially into districts 13, 19, and 20) between 1876
and 1886, where prices were lower and development less dense, average living conditions
did not improve. Du Mesnil found that new buildings constructed explicitly as workers'
housing in the periphery audaciously reproduce the interior defects (malfaons) and
pollution (nuisances), whose suppression we have realized at great pain in the older
houses of our aged Paris. For Du Mensil, Haussmann's idea, so popular in the Third
Republic, that pushing the working classes from the center city would ensure healthier
conditions for all, was a myth. The center city was opened up and cleaned out from the
1850s to 1890s, but builders, developers, investors and landlords kept to their old ways in
developing the periphery well in the 20th century. Rather than solving problems, new
housing development simply moved problems from center to periphery [fig. 17]. 25
The Third Republic's first decade was no easy time for housing in Paris. While
rents rose 40% from 1817 to 1872, they suddenly grew another 30-35% from 1872 to
1882. 26 In 1882, popular encyclopedia Le Magasin Pittoresque (1833-1938) studied the
city's rents. Three-quarters of them (469,000 of 685,000 lodgings) were in the lowest
price range, under 2,400 francs a year, and the poor spent more of their income on rent
than the rich. 27 As significant as the study's results is the fact that it was published in a
popular encyclopedia, written as an almanac entry, a bit of popular wisdom on a topic of
common interest. The report's bare numbers, free of commentary, assume an audience
already familiar with their interest and import. Publishers could assume this because

25 Octave DuMesnil, l'Hygine Pairs L'habitation du Pauvre (Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1890), p. 23.
26 Ccile Pchu "Entre rsistance et contestation: La gense du squat comme mode daction" Universit de
Lausanne Travaux de Science Politique/Political Science Working Paper Series N 24 (2006), p. 11.
Available online: http://www.unil.ch/webdav/site/iepi/users/epibiri1/public/24Pechu.pdf
27 Les Loyers Paris Le Magasin Pittoresque Yr. 50 (1882), p. 113-4.

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Paris's housing problem became a contentious topic of public debate in the years leading
up to 1883.

Figure 17: Average rents by district, 1891 (AP VO3 220)

In the last two chapters, we saw that Universal Expositions were major spurs to
transportation development, chances to solve Paris's problem with traffic. They also
inspired work on the housing problem. 28 In 1877, the Commission on Unclean Dwellings
under Du Mesnil launched a study of the garni, or furnished room for rent, concerned
for the dangers which could result from the encumbrance that would necessarily be
produced on the occasion of the 1878 Exposition (fig. 18). The words danger and
encumbrance stand out here. Encumbrance suggests Paris's clogging, a dense urban
28 They would also inspire work on Paris's water problems, as we'll see in Chapter 5.

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fabric inimical to circulation, while danger suggests critical risks to be managed in
view of the coming exposition. The Second Empire had already marked the garni as a site
of hygienic danger. But faced with another international exposition in 1877, it was also a
national blemish, highlighting the hotel accommodations foreign visitors would find

Figure 18: Number of Unclean Dwellings Service visits by district, 1877-1883. Shaded districts had more
than 600 visits each, a rough median value. This map makes clear the differences in quality of housing
stock in the center and the periphery. Source: AP VO3 63.

and what would they think of Paris? Another danger was that foreigners would get sick in
Paris, likely from their hotel rooms, and spread diseases internationally on their way
home. 29

29 (1) Commission des logements insalubres. Rapport gnral sur les travaux de a commission pendant les
annes 1877 1883 (Paris: Imprimeries Runies, Etablissement D, 1884), p. 37; (2) In an earlier

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Foreign guests were not the only ones coming to Paris around 1878 looking for
rooms to rent. Social historians have documented a wave of immigration to Paris from
the late 1870s to early 1880s, corresponding with the Third Republic's first construction
boom. 30 Herein lies a historical pattern: each building boom in nineteenth-century Paris
was accompanied by a boom in immigrationpeasants and workers looking for
construction work, terrassiers like the ones we met in the previous chapter. 31 Terrassiers
could rarely afford better than the garni. Hence the percentage of Parisians living in
garnis also increased in this period. 32 Demographically, this migration increased the
number of young men living alone, and thus increased a long-stigmatized social category:
the floating population of immigrants, vagrants, laborers, the homeless, even Paris's
celebrated bohemians. 33 These demographic peculiarities brought specific
infrastructural effects. For example, the lodging house population was so overwhelmingly
male that urinals became standard equipment long before flush toilets, and were quickly

30

31
32
33

session, the Commission Report said the following: In the unanimous opinion of foreigners, who visit
Paris in such large numbers each year, and who plan to visit in ever greater number during our next
great universal exposition, the regrettable state of what we've been signaling [toilets, sewers, etc.],
singularly contrasts with those which exist in most other countries. See Commission des logements
insalubres. Rapport gnral sur les travaux de a commission pendant les annes 1870 1876 (Paris:
Charles de Mourgues frres, 1878), pp. 44 (both references AP VO3 63).
Bullock and Read, p. 299. While average yearly population growth from 1850 to 1914 was about 5%,
population growth from 1876 to 1881 was 14%. See also Shapiro,Housing the Poor of Paris, p. 55.
280,000 migrants came to Paris in these years. It also corresponded with the first boom in tramway
development, as we saw in chapter 2.
See Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, p. 180. Many of these booms were also connected with
international expositions.
Bullock and Reid, pp. 302-304.
The floating population is a common theme in social histories of early 19th century Paris: (1) Louis
Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth
Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Howard Fertig, 1973), esp. The Lodging House Population, pp. 227231; (2) John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 18151851 (Oxford, 1991); (3) On the gender imbalance in the population, see Alain Corbin, Women for
Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. trans. Alan Sheridan (Harvard, 1990), p. 188:
certain of the back streets, with their lodging houses, remained almost entirely male.

278
flagged by the Prefecture of Police as a site of hygienic danger. 34 This kind of population
growth also battered the built environment: simple wear and tear multiplied by thousands
of individuals. 35
Parisians exiled because of the Commune (both self-exiled bourgeoises and
deported communards) were also returning to Paris in the 1870s. Communards returning
after 1879 found the city squeezed by the housing crisis, with rents newly inflated by the
1878 Exposition and its development boom. Responding in the 1860s to the rent spike
caused by Haussmannization, the Commune mounted an ambitious politics of space,
ordering a moratorium on unpaid rents and expropriation of vacant houses for Parisians
whose homes were destroyed. 36 Now these same radicals who had waged spatial warfare
witnessed familiar inequalities in the housing market perpetrated anew in the Third
Republic. Not only radical politics but also social class drove many communards into
conflict over rents. In 1881, Prefect of Police Louis Andrieux urged more public and
private funding for rent relief, explaining, After the Commune, the prefecture of police
finds itself in the presence of a necessity and a duty: we must assist the numerous
families of insurgents whose head of household has been deported or incarcerated. 37 The
old battle lines were still drawn, too; Le Temps reported in 1883 that a rent striker bid his

34 In 1878, long before the Poubelle administration at the Prefecture of the Seine tried to make flush toilets
and water subscriptions obligatory for apartment houses, the Prefecture of Police ruled that all urinals in
lodging houses should be equipped with a water flush (an effet d'eau). Commission des logements
insalubres. Rapport gnral sur les travaux de a commission pendant les annes 1877 1883 (Paris:
Imprimeries Runies, Etablissement D, 1884), p. 42 (AP VO3 63).
35 Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, p. 55: Such growth inevitably placed severe strains on the
physical cadre.
36 Pechu, Entre rsistance et contestation. For more on the Commune's spatial peculiarities, see Kristin
Ross's The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (University of Minnesota,
1988).
37 Louis Andrieux, Souvenirs d'un prfet de police (Paris: Jules Rouff et Cie, 1885), p. 333.

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disappointed landlord farewell with Vive la Commune! 38
Ann-Louise Shapiro showed that the period from 1879-1883 was one of
heightened political activity among urban workers around the issue of housing,
including petitioning the authorities and organizing meetings and rent strikes. There was
also the popular demnagement la cloche de bois (literally moving out by the wooden
bell), which meant sneaking a poor family out of their apartment, usually in the still of
the night, including their furniture if possible, in flight from rent owed and/or eviction. 39
Contention swelled between the summer and fall of 1882, a wave buoyed by the Law on
the Freedom of the Press, July 29, 1881. Responding to the Paris landlord's association
founded in 1882, Marxist leader Paul Lafargue urged the formation of a tenants' union to
plan rent strikes. Fellow leftists Jules Guesde and Clovis Hughes proposed reforms to
legally reduce rents. Socialist municipal councilor Jules Joffrin suggested publicly owned
housing like in Britaina proposal opposed by Marxists Guesde and Lafargue, who
thought public ownership would only strengthen the state and postpone the revolution. 40
These questionsof public vs. private sponsorship, housing and the social
question, reform and revolution, state and societyshould be familiar to readers. They
are the same social and political questions that contemporaries were asking about urban

38 Quoted in Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, p. 113. Left-wing geographers have been particularly
interested in the issue of rents in the Commune. See David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity and
Roger Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class Community and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune
(Chicago, 1995).
39 See Sapeck, Le nomm 'Cerbre', L'Anti-concierge, Yr. 1, No. 1 (Dec., 1881), p. 3. See also JeanMarie Flonneau Crise de vie chre et mouvement syndical 1910-1914 Le Mouvement social, No. 72
(Jul. - Sep., 1970), pp. 49-81, See p. 65.
40 A flurry of articles on the housing question appeared in the Marxist paper L'galit from the summer of
1882 to the fall of 1883. For farther left activity, including rent strikes and clandestine move-outs, see
Ccile Pechu's excellent run-down of Paris radical groups in the 1880s and 1890s, Entre rsistance et
contestation, pp. 12-15. Anarchist periodical Le Pre Peinard was the longest running advocate of
striking and skipping rent.

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railways, as we saw in the last two chapters. 41 Haussmannization began a long-term
discussion in Paris about using public works to solve urban problems. Parisians talked
about housing and traffic in similar terms because they were seen as subsets of a broader
question about the role that technology and public works played in urban modernity.
Questions about how to finance, regulate and operate public works brought the city's
spatial and infrastructural problems into the arenas of press, public and politics. But
whereas the state had taken responsibility for providing transportation (as we saw in
Chapters 2 and 3) and water (as we'll see in Chapter 5) in the Second Empire, it was not
until 1906-12 on paper and the 1920s in terms of actual construction, that the government
began to accept the responsibility of providing public housing. 42 Housing's status as
public works, therefore, was constantly contested in this period, beginning with the
forceful left-wing campaigns of the 1880s.
If the government didn't yet provide housing, it already sought to regulate and
control it. 43 The government responded to pressing long-term social needs, but also
pressing short-term political needsthe more radical and more desperate parts of the
population were mobilizing to demand changes in housing while savants and bourgeois
activists were calling for housing reforms. Following the Prefect of Police's ordnance of
41 The Mtro was often touted as a solution to Paris's density and housing problems as well as its traffic
problem. The housing and traffic problems were similar in many ways. Both emerged from the urban
crisis of the 1830s-40s and were tackled resolutely, if incompletely, by Haussmann and company, then
passed on to the rulers of the Third Republic unfinished. More importantly, both problems were
complicated, if not caused, by Paris's density, and were often understood by contemporaries in terms of
circulation. The traffic problem concerned how goods, people, information and vehicles could flow
through the city more freely, while the housing problem concerned apartments packed so densely into
the city that no light or air could circulate, as one contemporary put it, in these depths, under this
pressure, in this darkness. Quoted in Octave DuMesnil, l'Hygine Pairs L'habitation du Pauvre
(Paris: Bailliere et fils, 1890), p. 14. Du Mesnil quotes the Talisman du Travailleur as describing life in
poverty as ces profondeurs, sous cette pression, dans cette obscurit.
42 Evenson, Paris a Century of Change, p. 212.
43 The authorities accepted housing as an infrastructure that needed to be regulated, scripted and
controlled, but they did not accept it as public works.

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May 7, 1878 on furnished rooms, the years 1881-1884 saw a season of work on
reforming building codes. Architectural historians often dismiss these laws for making
little impact on the form and style of Paris's buildings. 44 Although they did little to
transform Paris's Haussmannized exterior, they began a long, slow process of
transforming the infrastructures (pipes, wires, etc.) hidden behind it. 45 Architecture, in
the narrow sense of building style, was not radically changed by the new regulations, but
around the 1878 Exposition, the local governments began pushing for landlords to make
gradual changes to existing building stock, in the name of hygiene.
If we shift our perspective from exteriors to interiors of buildings, from visible
structures to hidden infrastructures, and from style to hygiene, all the standard highlights
of Paris architectural history between 1870 and 1914 look different. We can watch as the
built environment is scripted by designers. The regulations of 1880-4, the 1894 law on
low-cost housing and the public health law of 1902-3, which revised the rules for
building height, long know by architectural historians as moments of gradual change in
architectural forms, were also important moments in the history of the hygiene
movement. The laws of 1882-4, for example, regulated building height based on the
width of streets, to ensure that light and air could reach street level. The issue here was
not style but density. The law also reached inside buildings, setting standards for
individual apartmentsa minimum of 14 cubic meters of space (air) per resident, and
44 Evenson, Paris a Century of Change, pp. 149-50, Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History
(Yale, 1993), pp. 114-5. A new style of building, so the familiar story goes, only emerged with Art
Nouveau in the 1890s. Another version of this argument is made in David P. Jordan, Haussmann and
Haussmannisation: The Legacy for Paris, French Historical Studies 27/1 (Winter 2004), pp. 87-113.
45 Evenson missed the importance of hygiene in these new laws, but her sources did not. Louis Bonnier,
chief architect of Paris, responded to the law of 1882 by urging greater artistic freedom, saying ...after
all aesthetics are for people, not a luxury, but a need and a right, as important as hygiene. In other
words, Bonnier thought the law short-changed aesthetics by favoring hygieneand he was a hygienic
activist!

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access to direct daylight (jour)and setting basic standards for fresh water, toilets, and
garbage disposal, demanding that landlords upgrade piping and trash collection
facilities. 46
Disease control became a powerful influence on otherwise architectural
decisions. In the Police ordnance of May 7, 1878 on furnished rooms, the minimum
access to daylight clause (Article 5) specified that all rooms housing more than two
people must be directly lit. Once two people inhabited the same space, in other words,
contagion became a greater risk, demanding the well-known antiseptic power of
sunlight. 47 The ordnance's basic hygienic criteria for each dwelling were the volume of
air it contained and its distance from a source of sunlight. Hence size and shape of rooms,
placement of windowsotherwise architectural decisionswere regulated on hygienic
grounds. 48
The Commission on Unclean Dwelling flagged the shared parts of apartment
houses as hygienically dangerous: courtyards, stairways, landings, hallways, restrooms,
utility sinks, etc. The great majority of hygienic problems were due to dpendances,
which is to say to the parts of the house for [the] common use of all tenants. Hygienic
danger laid waiting in spaces where multiple residents crossed paths, flash-points of
epidemic contagion. These common spaces were often neglected by tenants and
46 We'll see more about reform of infrastructures and housing in the next chapter when we examine Paris's
water systems.
47 Commission des logements insalubres. Rapport gnral sur les travaux de a commission pendant les
annes 1877 1883 (Paris: Imprimeries Runies, Etablissement D, 1884), p. 41 (AP VO3 63).
48 We are dealing here with what Paul Rabinow called norms and forms of the social environment, the
rules and standards behind the design choices made by architects and engineers. From the history of
technology, we can see this same phenomenon in Wiebe Bijker's concept of stablization, that stage in
the development of any given technology when its design stops being negotiated and contested, and
gives way to a tentative consensus, a standard design. See Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and
Forms of the Social Environment (University of Chicago, 1995); Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites
and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT, 1999), p. 84-88.

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concierges alike. A gap developed between the jurisdiction of public authority and the
private space of individual apartments. Landlords most often delegated the work of daily
clean-up to domestics or concierges, but exercised little oversight, using their properties
largely as investments, collecting rent and staying as hands-off as possible. But keeping a
building clean demands constant maintenance. To make any hygienic progress, the
Commission would not only have to reach inside buildings to reform infrastructure and
space, but also reform the daily habits and practices of Parisians. 49 The Commission
wrote scripts for the apartment house which made tenants, not landlords, responsible for
the work of daily maintenance.
The 1878 ordnance set new minimums for proximity of toilets to the apartments
they served, as well as loose standards for ease of access.50 The ordnance states that when
the shared toilets of lodging houses were too far from apartments, tenants stopped using
them, and reverted to the older Parisian practice of dumping waste into courtyards or
streets. The ordnance regulated the spatial, infrastructural and hygienic dispositions of the
apartment house, on three levels: (1) the entire house, (2) individual apartments, and (3)
the social relations and practices of tenants. Hence the ordnance dealt not only with size
and ventilation of apartments, sources of daylight, condition of plumbing, and other
architectural and infrastructural details motivated by hygiene, but also with the tenants'
source of fresh water, their method of waste disposal, their use of toilets, and how and
how often they cleaned the house.
49 Commission des logements insalubres. Rapport gnral sur les travaux de la commission pendant les
annes 1870 1876 (Paris: Charles de Mourgues frres, 1878), p. 18 (AP VO3 63). As Rabinow put it,
this sort of social planning combined the normalization of the population with a regularization of
spaces, French Modern, p. 82.
50 See Article 8. Commission des logements insalubres. Rapport gnral sur les travaux de a commission
pendant les annes 1877 1883 (Paris: Imprimeries Runies, Etablissement D, 1884), p. 41 (AP VO3
63).

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The Prefecture of Police and the Commission on Unclean Dwellings recognized
the dialectic relationship of infrastructure and practice, trying to regulate both design and
use of houses, in order to clean up Paris's housing stock. The combination of social
reform, architecture and hygiene reflects the interdisciplinary, heterogeneous nature of
the hygiene movement. Like Michel Callon's engineer-sociologists, Du Mesnil and
other hygienist-politicians not only designed built spaces, but also ideal users and scripts
for use. Legal and architectural responses to the housing problem in the early decades of
the Third Republic necessarily engaged in social design. 51

Avant-Gardists, Anarchists and Housing in Montmartre

Montmartre, one of the most famous neighborhoods in Paris, is often identified as
Paris's Bohemian other. Richard Sonn called it a refuge, a liminal realm, a
borderland and a counterweight, a far-off place not far from central Paris, home to
avant-garde artists and anarchist outsiders cultivating alternative lifestyles. 52 For an 1898
visitor to Paris, it was hardly urban at all: The Butte, the real Montmartre, seems at first
view to be one-half country village and one-half provincial town...one would believe

51 Michel Callon, Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Social Analysis, in
Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems, (MIT, 1987), pp. 83103.
52 Sonn called it a congenial refuge from the commercial bustle of Paris and a liminal realm, a
borderland in which bohemians and radicals could fashion alternative lifestyles and politics and a
counterweight to the newly stabilized Third Republic. See Richard Sonn, "Marginality and
Transgression: Anarchy's Subversive Allure" Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel
Weisberg (Rutgers, 2001), pp. 120-141, quotes pp. 121 and 123. According to Sonn, Montmartre
...allowed just that sense of separation from the metropolis sprawling below its heights that the
anarchists needed to preserve the feelings of autonomy and integrity that allowed them both to envision
alternatives to the present social order and to actively experiment with such alternative arrangements in
their daily lives. See Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siecle France (University of Nebraska,
1989), p. 52.

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himself more than two hundred miles from the metropolis. 53 Neglected by
Haussmannization, later a rebel outpost and scene of bitter fighting during the Commune,
the neighborhood was slowly integrated into the rest of the city, often home to
movements to secede from Paris. 54
Famous for radical politics and modernist cultural production, Montmartre was
also an important contributor to the ongoing debate on housing. 55 The difficulty of
finding shelter is a familiar narrative in Bohemian Paris. Starving artist, homeless artist
or couch-surfing artist, most Paris Bohemians probably lived in one of the city's
cheep furnished rooms. Hence housingthe pressures of life in the lodging house,
making rent on a small income, the cruelty of landlords, property managers, doormen and
conciergesbecame staple themes of avant-garde cultural production. Jules Lvy
founded incoherent art at the first Salon des Incohrents (1882) in his one-room
apartment: my bedroom, a room that also serves as my living room, dining room,
kitchen, and bathroom. Philip Dennis Cate argued that Lvy inspired a diffuse avantgarde scene in Paris, a Spirit of Montmartre, influential on otherwise well-known Paris
avant-gardists of the era like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Alfred Jarry, Erik Satie and

53 Quoted in John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the Urban Frontier (Oxford,
1991), p. 12.
54 On the slow process of integration, see Mathieu Flonneau, Du profil de la rue la forme de la ville:
L'Intgration Parisienne du 18e arrondissement (1860-1940), Recherches contemporaines No. 4
(1997), pp. 49-73. On Montmartre's attempts to secede, see Jeffrey H. Jackson, Artistic Community
and Urban Development in 1920s Montmartre, French Politics, Culture & Society 24/2 (Summer
2006).
55 Montmartre was solidly working-class, home to many cheep rental properties. In 1891, almost 90% of
rental properties in Montmartre (66,532 of 74,038) were in the lowest bracket, with rents below 500
francs a year (see: Conseil Municipal de Paris, No. 16 (Apr. 20, 1891), Contre-projet de dlibration,
annexes. AP VO3 220). In 1906, there were 809 lodging houses in the district, housing 17,884 people,
for an average of 22 people per house (see: Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris 1906, pub. 1908, p.
615). The district was also visited more than any other between 1877 and 1883 by the Commission on
Unclean Dwellings see map above.

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Guillaume Apollinaire. 56
Other notable Incohrents included the rowdy Bohemians around Montmartre's
Chat Noir cabaretSapeck (Eugne Bataille), Jules Jouy and Alphonse Allaisknown
as Hydropathes and fumistes. Young writer-illustrators known for irreverence, black
humor, and free-thinking radicalism, they were, following the late-1870s consolidation of
the Republic, the first to organize open meetings that were at once republican,
anticlerical, apolitical and literary in the late 1870s to early 1880s. 57 This movement was
a sort of cultural twin to the left-wing housing activism we have already seen between
1879 and 1883. Known for absurdity, crudeness, political incorrectness, and cynicism,
the Hydropathes practiced biting parody, satire, sarcasm and comedy. 58 They were also
known for cutting-edge artistic techniques: multi- or mixed- media artwork like posters,
cartoons, the rebus and the lettrist word-picture. They put on shocking live performances
in cabarets and in the streets, and oversaw a deep catalog of short-lived, 'zine-like literary
experiments, appearing periodically in limited runs, combining poetry, prose and
illustrations. 59

56 Cate, The Spirit of Montmartre, in The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde,
1875-1905, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (Rutgers, 1996). Jerrold Siegel, by contrast, chose
Emile Goudeau as a point of origin for the same cultural scene. See Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics,
and the Boundaries of Bougeois Life, 1830-1930 (Johns Hopkins, 1986), pp. 216-241.
57 They were called Hydropathes perhaps because they didn't mix their fashionable absinthe with water,
perhaps to distinguish themselves from, or liken themselves to, a famous Bohemian clique of 1840s
Paris, the water-drinkers. They were also called fumistes, literally smokers who lounge in cafs
puffing their pipes, a rough equivalent for the American word slackers. Fumiste was a label the
Hydropathes wore with pride. Daniel Grojnowski, Hydropathes and Company The Spirit of
Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary
Shaw (Rutgers, 1996), pp. 95-110, quote p. 96. For another important recent collection of essays on
Montmartre's cultural history, see Gabriel P. Weisberg, ed. Montmartre and the Making of Mass
Culture (Rutgers, 2001).
58 The root of their humor was the blaguethe prank or put-onborrowed from Latin Quarter student
culture, via the influential Jules Lvy and Emile Goudeau.
59 L'Hydropathe (1879-80), Tout-Paris (1880), L'Anti-concierge (1881-3), and the longest running Le
Chat Noir (1882-95) followed in quick succession. Many short-lived artist groups also popped up: the
Hirsutes, the Decadents, the Zutistes, the Young, the Jemenfoutistes, etc. See: (1) Cate, The Spirit of

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Published during the 1881-83 wave of debate on housing in Paris, one of these
periodicals stands out for its relevance, a peep of social and political seriousness amidst
all the pranks. L'Anti-concierge styled itself Organe officiel de la dfense des locataires
(the official organ for the defense of tenants). As singular an artifact as it is, the magazine
bears important ties to its historical context. This group of freelance Montmartre artists
saw a market in Paris for a magazine that used humor to vent the socioeconomic stress
felt by so many tenants. But along with humor came serious politics in this topical, timely
and relevant magazine, so far from the incoherent label worn by its producers.
Behind the mock seriousness of their official organ lay a litany of resentments,
the discontents of Bohemians renting furnished rooms. First and foremost was a
misogynist, dehumanizing rant at conciergesoften older, single women themselves
scraping to get bywho were lambasted, even animalized by the fumistes as little better
than guard dogs. 60 But the concierge was only the central figure in a more global distaste
for authority, and especially for the petty inequalities of the apartment house, the social
power of concierges, gardiens (doormen) and gerants (property managers). Last, but not
least, the magazine took up the critique of M. Vautour (Mr. Vulture), a generic Paris
landlord lampooned by left-wing writers and illustrators from Daumier (1852) to
Lafargue (1909). 61 Vautour was always an investor, a real-estate speculator, sometimes
steeped in antisemitic stereotypes, as Sapeck's heavy-handed reference to Shakespeare's

Montmartre, p. 23; (2) Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze, Fumisme: le rire jaune du Chat Noir, in
(Ab)normalities. Catherin Dousteyssier-Khoze and Paul Scott, eds. (Durham University, 2001), pp. 151161, quote p. 152.
60 The magazine's first issue contained a cartoon of animal trainer or tamer Bidel facing off against a
concirge. L'Anti-Concirge: Organe Officiel de la Dfense des Locataires. Yr. 1, No. 1, Dec. 1, 1881,
p. 2.
61 See two Daumier cartoons of landlords in Harvey, Capital of Modernity, p. 126. See also Paul Lafargue,
Monsieur Vautour et la rduction des loyers (Parti socialiste S.F.I.O, 1909).

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usurer of Venice demonstrates. 62
The magazine's third issue (Jan. 1, 1882) opened with a Jules Jouy editorial
against the tradition of New Year's gifts (trennes) for concierges. 63 What, Jouy asked,
have concierges really done for us? They maintained strained, awkward, confrontation
relations with you, the tenant, read your postcards, neglected to give you your mail, left
you waiting outside in the rain, and generally climbed the wall of your private life.
Jouy saw the concierge as a cloying, spying, micro-manager. Her awkward middling
position of power between landlord and tenant, which made her a sort of first among
tenants, allowed her to cross boundaries of liberty and privacy, violating the
individuality of dwellings in the house. It also made her jealous to conserve what social
power she could in the face of poverty, sexism, social 'fear of falling,' and sometimes the
stigma attached to being an 'old maid.'
Jouy and company were willing to admit they were bad tenantshence the poetic
line that surging from all corners of the universe/ [come] the fumistes, at your house,
turning everything upside-down 64 but they were not sympathetic to the social
pressures on the concierge. Think of the homeless, they quipped, who have no shelter, no
heat, no privacyand no concierge! Sapeck's cartoon Phrenology of the Concierge,
depicted a crotchety old man in profile, his cranium marked off into different sections,
each one labeled with a vile tendency. 65 The cartoon both mocked phrenological science

62"Locataires et Proprios," L'Anti-concierge: Organe Officiel de la Dfense des Locataires Year 2, No. 6,
July to Oct., 1882, p. 1.
63"La Dernire Quinzaine" L'Anti-concierge: Organe Officiel de la Dfense des Locataires. Year 2, No. 3;
Jan. 1, 1882, p. 1.
64 Ibid., p. 2. The lines rhyme in French: "Que sergissant de tous les coins de l'univers,/ Des fumistes, chez
toi, mettant tout l'envers."
65These were: dishonesty (mendacit), banality (platitude), lying (mensonge), slander (calomnie), theft
(vol), envy (envie), insolence, nighttime deafness (surdit nocturne), and spying and hiding letters

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and appropriated the doctor's power of diagnosis; the concierge, according to Dr. Sapeck,
was very sick species. 66
The magazine's heart was the gossip column, Echoes in the Stairway, which ran
stories of obnoxious concierges who posted signs detailing their minimum expectations
for holiday gifts, or who had inflated, histrionic senses of their own importance (one had
her business cards printed with the slogan the concierge of Victor Hugo). Another story
mocked the uncouth, uncultivated concierge next door, who didn't realize her neighbor
was the painter Marius Michel. When his friend mistakenly knocked at her door asking
for a painter, she said: Nous n'avons pas d'ouvriers dans la maison.....!i.e. we don't
have any workers (painters) working in the house. 67 Dealing with clueless concierges
who nonetheless held the building's keys was not easy. So the Hydropathes delighted in
stories of tricking, cheating or outsmarting concierges, transgressive tales which
subverted the normal relations of power in the apartment house.
Alphonse Allais promoted a way to annoy your concierge while amusing
yourself. First bribe the concierge to open up after hours, then pretend to have left
something outside; when the concierge offers to go get it, lock him out. Then he'll have to
return your money to get back inside. Allais exclaimed: Oh, the magical power of
metal! The story ends with the telling line, It is useless to add that Alphonse Allais
doesn't have mold in his place on the rue de Lillewhich slyly discloses a lesson for the
reader: those who know how to skillfully manipulate the social relations which bind the

(espionnage et cachetage de lettres) L'Anti-concierge Year 2, no. 7; October 1882-Jan. 1883, p. 1.

66 In Jouy's article Fantasie Conciergicide, he wrote "...le concierge, monstre raffin, forme palpable de
Satan sur la terre. Quand je dis palpable, il ne s'ensuit pas que je vous conseille de palper - vous
pourriez attrapper une maladie de peau" and "Le monde ancien a eu sa pluie de sauterelles. Le monde
moderne a sa pluie de concierges." L'Anti-concierge, Yr. 1, No. 2 (Dec. 15, 1881), p. 1.
67 Echos de l'Escalier L'Anti-concierge Yr 2, No. 5; April to July, 1882, p. 2.

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apartment house win access to better accommodations. 68 For Allais, everyday life in the
lodging house was the scene of a constant, micro-level power struggle. Echoes in the
Stairway highlighted the question of who has access to housing infrastructure and how,
recommending ways that tenants could re-script the spaces of the apartment house in
more empowering ways.
Each issue ended with mock advertising pages that imagined consumer products
designed specifically to compromise, annoy, sedate, even murder concierges. These mock
ads did two things. First, they indulged in their own science-fiction-style fantasy about
the advance of technoscience and progress (for example the Edison concierge, a laborsaving automaton designed to make concierges obsolete). Second, they mocked the
contemporary proliferation of cheap consumer goods, marketed to increasingly
specialized, segmented consumer groups by making inflated claims. In their mock
advertisements, Sapeck, Jouy and Allais imagined an alternate Second Industrial
Revolution, in which medical, chemical and technological advances, available to the
consuming public, would make tenants more powerful for once, rather than landlords. 69
They imagined an urban modernity in which access to good housing was more equal, in
68 Alphonse Allais, Une manire d'embter son concierge en s'amusant soi-mme, ibid.
69 In one issue, a local sweet shop advertised conciergicide confections (confiserie concirgicide)
described as explosive, poisoned, unbreakable in painted wood. The shop also offered Melty
bonbons guaranteed to spread a foul odor in concierges' throats when swallowed, and delectable anise
in iron, guaranteed to break concierges' teeth. Finally, pills for sedating concierges were offered, to
allow tenants to sneak around the house unnoticed (See L'Anti-concierge Yr. 2, No. 3 (Jan. 1, 1882), p.
4). Another issue offered a cough syrup (wink, wink) from a famous pharmacist sold only to
concierges. H. Ducroquet, Paris veterinarian, was selling several dogs and offered a 99% discount to
any buyer having the intention of introducing dogs into houses where these animals are forbidden.
Donato, the famous hypnotist (magntiseur) offered his magical, magnetic services to put concierges to
sleep on the day rent was due. Then there was the Pilivore Cabrion, a hair tonic guaranteeing instant
hair loss and immediate inflammation of the scalp. Just one application suffices. Sold only to
concierges and young academics wishing to conform to the uniform. Other ads offered train tickets for
concierges on trains bound to wreck, and various pills and potions for concierges and their daughters, to
give them zits, filthy hands, diarrhea, etc. (see Echos de l'Escalier L'Anti-concierge Yr. 2, No. 5
(April to July, 1882), p. 4).

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which the built environment was not so fragile.
Once, the magazine reprinted an otherwise serious news story from Le Figaro
about a wicked Belleville concierge who beat an elderly tenant in a petty dispute over a
mattress and was ordered to pay 5,000 francs in damages. It was a brief moment of
apparent journalistic seriousness in this otherwise tongue-in-cheek publication. 70 There
were others. By their 6th issue (July to October, 1882), L'Anti-concierge was deeply
engaged in discussion of Paris's housing crisis. This was the same summer that Joffrin,
Hughes, Guesde and Lafargue offered their left-wing solutions to the housing crisis.
Several newspapers, Sapeck explained, had reported the formation of a Chambre
syndicale des Propritaires parisiennes, a Paris landowners' union or association. One of
the new group's principle demands was information for its members about bad tenants
(mauvaise locataires). Sapeck shuddered to think how information would be collected.
If landowners asked for information, concierges would have to collect it, inspiring even
more vigilant surveillance and violations of tenant privacy:
From here we'll see all the concierges transformed into spies, hunting for anything
that might concern their tenants and having as a professional duty transmitting [it]
to the central police station, which would be located in the office of the Paris
landlord's union, all the police information they could dig up or discover.
But this, o bourgeois liberalism, is universal espionage taken to the tenth power!
What's more, he argued, people judged to be in an incorrect family situation,
who disagreed with the landlord's opinions, or were simply weighed-down by poverty
might also be removed from their home, and find themselves on the street, unlikely that
any new landlord would find them more credit-worthy than the old landlord did, ending
in the impossibility of finding housing and forced to take refuge in some nasty hovel

70 Ibid., pp. 3-4.

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for which they pay double or triple. No hygienist would have disagreed with this
scenario. 71 The irony was palpable. Sapeck could barely believe that the lowly tenant,
already so alone in his struggle against the landlord, would now face an army of
landlords: each tenant will find himself faced with a band of man-eaters, hell-bent on
his complete ruin and organized for it. Landlords held all the cards: The law is made
for them, and that's not enough! Sapeck's impassioned editorial was accompanied by a
caricature of Clovis Hughes, well-known poet and left-wing Deputy from Marseilles,
who had just introduced his bill to reduce rents. Bravo, dear poet! he wrote. 72
This was serious political engagement. In this editorial, Sapeck confronted current
events, took interest in lawmaking, took sides in the class war, and critiqued surveillance
as inimical to political liberty. When mainstream politics touched the editors' lives more
directly (Clovis Hughes's 1882 rent reform campaign), they came out as plain partisans of
a political cause, siding with mainstream left-liberals and socialists, or with revolutionary
Marxists. 73 Rodolphe Salis, founder-owner of the Chat Noir, ran for municipal councilor
of Montmartre and lost in 1884, on the platform that the neighborhood should secede
from Parisserious politics, or a prank? Salis's campaign might also have been

71 In fact, Jules Simon echoed Sapeck's claims about the inequalities of tenants and landlords in his
preface to Du Mesnil's L'Hygine Paris (1890), p. 6.
72
Locataires et Proprios L'Anti-concierge Year 2, no. 6; Juillet Octobre, 1882., p. 1: Voit-on d'ici tous
les concierges transforms en mouchards, l'afft de tout ce qui peut concerner leurs locataires et ayant
pour devoir professionel de transmettre au poste central de police, qui tiendra lieu de bureau l'Union
syndicale des propritaires, tous les renseignements policiers qu'ils auront pu arracher ou dcouvrir! /
Mais c'est, liberalisme bourgeois! l'espionage universalis et port sa dixime puissance! Notons
bien encore qu'il s'agira d'un espionnage vexatoire au suprme degr. Quiconque sera, tort ou raison,
convaincu par les limiers du propritariat d'tre dans une situation de famille incorrecte, d'avoir des
opinions contraires aux bas instincts de M. Vautour, ou mme, purement simplement sera atteint et
convaincu de pauvret, grand crime pour M. Vautour, celui-l sera, ipso facto, dans l'impossibilit de
trouver un logement; il sera, tout au moins, forc de se rfugier dans quelque taudis infect qu'on lui fera
payer le double et le triple. / C'est--dire que chaque locataire se trouvera en face d'une bande
d'anthropophages, acharne sa ruine complte et organise pour cela.
73 "Locataires et Proprios," L'Anti-concierge No. 6, July to Oct., 1882, p. 1.

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alternative posturing, shoring up Montmartre's outsider status, or a radical bid for
municipal self-government like that of the Commune. It would not be the last time
Montmartre tried to secede. 74 The social and spatial grievances of the communards lived
on in LAnti-concierge.
But ultimately, L'Anti-concierge is hard to place politically. On the one hand, its
populism and constant boosting of social underdogs matches its playful and belligerent
socialist or anarchist tendency to wage class warfare. Its advocacy of radical tactics like
clandestine move-outs places it close to contemporary anarchist groups in Paris, the only
other advocates of the poor radical enough to consider such action. 75 On shallowest
reading, the magazine might appear to be a serious political magazine representing a
more-or-less organized campaign for tenant rights, but this set-up was a send-up. The
magazine mocked the pomp and arrogance of calling oneself the official organ for the
defense of anything, let alone tenants. The magazine parodied the all-too-earnest,
progressive style of reform-minded civil associations in the Third Republic's rich culture
of civic sociability. 76 In so doing, the men of L'Anti-concierge also separated themselves
from the dominant bourgeois movements for social reform, housing reform and hygiene
of men like Cheysson and Du Mesnil, with their bourgeois liberalism.
The class conflict depicted in L'Anti-concierge took place within the lodging
74 Philip Dennis Cate, The Spirit of Montmartre, The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the
Avant-Garde, 1875-1905, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (Rutgers, 1996), p. 28. The question
would be posed again in the 1920s. See Jeffrey H. Jackson, Artistic Community and Urban
Development in 1920s Montmartre, French Politics, Culture & Society 24/2 (Summer 2006).
75 See Pechu, pp. 12-15.
76 In her clever analysis of fumisme's humor as Bakhtinian carnival, Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze argued
that the fumistes were centrally concerned with mocking the prudhommie of republican do-gooders.
See Fumisme: Le rire jaune du Chat Noir in Dousteyssier-Khoze, Catherine & Scott, Paul eds.,
(Ab)normalities (Durham University Press, 2001), p. 153. For more on this rich civic culture, see Philip
Nord, The Republican Moment and Kenneth Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public
Sphere.

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house, between tenants, neighbors and concierges. The little Foucaultian pushes and pulls
of power in everyday lifedropping a flower pot on granny's head, locking her out of the
house, withholding rentoccupied the magazine much more than any serious attempt at
social, political or architectural change. 77 Instead, the magazine foregrounded a struggle
over access to and control of housing. Contesting the scripts for use of apartments written
by politicians and landlords, LAnti-concierge shows us Montmartres role as a
neighborhood of lodging houses, the scene of a constant everyday struggle to combat the
price and quality of low-income housing. The magazine was a radical user manual for
tenants, telling what Michel de Certeau called spatial stories, operations on places,
scripts written by users rather than by designers which could tip the balance of power and
empower users as re-designers. 78
Eventually the Hydropathe tradition was passed from the Chat Noir to L'Assiette
au Beurre (1901-1911), an illustrated magazine we saw in the last chapter. Illustrators
Theophile Steinlen, Caran d'Ache and Adolphe Willette were all members of the Chat
Noir group who later drew for L'Assiette au Beurre in the 20th century. All three men

77 A great resentment and distrust of mainstream republican politics emanates from the magazine. The
Montmartre bohemian's typically stark anti-bourgeois posturing only adds to this effect (...o bourgeois
liberalism!). There was surely rebel energy in the Hydropathes, but it is hard to say whether it was
revolutionary (left?) or anti-political (right?). Combining anarchist/socialist relish for class warfare with
populism, hints of misogyny and antisemitism, and an insouciant anti-politics, the Hydropathes
approached the category-defying margins of republican political culture in the 1880s: Boulangism and
anarchism. Newspaper LEcho de Paris, for example, referred to anarchists on the left and the right
and called the Marquis de Mors, an aristrocrat who funded anarchist terrorism, an aristo-anarchist.
LEcho de Paris, May 1, 1890. See also: Le Parti Ouvrier, Apr. 13, 1890, and Anarchists and
Boulangists, Le Parti Ouvrier, Apr. 17 and Apr. 30, 1890. Cultural historians have connected the
Hydropathes with all manner of antisemitic and anarchist radicals on both extremes of the political
spectrum, and connected them with Paris movements that combine radical politics with aesthetics as
recent as Dadaism and Surrealism, see: Siegel, Bohemian Paris, pp. 234-239; Philip Dennis Cate, The
Spirit of Montmartre, The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905,
ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (Rutgers, 1996), p. 38. In the same volume, see also Daniel
Grojnowski, Hydropathes and Company, p. 107.
78 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Part 3, Spatial Practices, pp. 91-130.

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were also associated with the Incoherents, who included Bohemian innovators Jules Lvy
and Emile Goudeau, fellow L'Assiette au Beurre illustrators Albert Robida and Flix
Valloton, along with Salis, Sapeck and Allais from the Chat Noir. 79 By the time British
writer Frank Emanuel wrote The Illustrators of Montmartre in 1904, the Montmartre
scene was well established, internationally recognized, and the illustrators of L'Assiette
au Beurre were holding down an avant-garde humorist tradition dating back to the late
1870s. Minor literatures to be sure, they clung to the literal and figurative periphery of
Paris. As Emanuel put it, these artists inhabited ...the so-called eccentric quarters of
Paristhat is to say on the soiled fringe of nondescript outlying districts of the Ville
Lumire, which is separated from the city proper by the shabby-gentile exterior
boulevards. 80
Though the Chat Noir faltered between 1895 and 1897 and ultimately closed, it
anchored an important period for bohemian Paris. Thanks to vehicles like L'Anticoncierge and L'Assiette au Beurre, Bohemia's dialog on housing was passed on. 81 When
Guillaume Apollinaire went to visit Alfred Jarry in 1897, the concierge directed him to
the third floor and a half. Apollinaire pretended to be astonished by the answer, but
only to set up an extended fumiste joke. The building's owner, concerned for his bottom
79 The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate
and Mary Shaw (Rutgers, 1996), pp. 245-248 (biography appendix). Membership lists from the Chat
Noir and the Incoherents from this book can be compared with L'Assiette au Beurre's contributor's list:
Stanley Applebaum, ed. French Satirical Drawings from L'Assiette eu Beurre (New York: Dover,
1978), pp. xiii-xiv.
80 (1) Frank L. Emanuel, The Illustrators of Montmartre (London: A. Siegle, 1904), pp. 4-5; (2) Gilles
Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Franz Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan (University
of Minnesota, 1986); (3) for further development of the Minor Literature concept, see Scott Spector,
Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle
(University of California, 2002).
81 L'Assiette au beurre was no stranger to housing issues. Issue 200 (Jan. 28, 1905) was devoted to
concierges, and issue 355 (Jan. 18, 1908) was titled Three Months' Rent: issue drawn by Bernard,
Ricardo Flores and Poulbot so they can pay theirs. See Appelbaum, ed. French Satirical Drawings,
pp. 69 and 116.

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line, had taken advantage of its high ceilings to cut each floor in half horizontally and
double the number of stories. Apollinaire wrote This building, which is still standing,
had therefore about fifteen floors, but since it rose no higher than the other buildings in
the quarter, it amounted to merely the reduction of a skyscraper.
So Jarry's apartment was also a reduction. Jarry, unusually short, could
comfortably stand up under the demi-ceiling, but Apollinaire had to stoop. The
furnishings were reductions, too: the bed was a mere pallet and also served as Jarry's
table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floori.e. in bed. Hence, in a turn of
fumiste wit, The furniture was the reduction of furniturethere was only the bed.
There was part of a painting on the wall, and his book collection was the mere reduction
of a library, said Apollinaire, and that is saying a lot for it. Strangest of all was a large
stone phallus decorating Jarry's mantelpiece:
Jarry kept this member, which was considerably larger than life size, always
covered with a violet skullcap of velvet, ever since the day the erotic monolith
had frightened a certain literary lady who was all out of breath from climbing
three and a half floors and at a loss how to act in this unfurnished cell. Is that a
cast? the lady asked. No, said Jarry, "its a reduction. 82
So Apollinaire had a good laugh waving cheeky penis jokes at bourgeois ladies, but like
L'Anti-concierge, this crude cultural combat was inspired by something more serious and
more subtle. Apollinaires story of Jarry's reductive apartment was not just designed to
provoke laughter or shock, nor even to show off Jarry's oddball apartment as bohemian
credentials. Given the difficulty of finding adequate housing on a Bohemian budget, it
was also the story of a money-grubbing landlord cheating his tenants by doubling the

82 From Guillaume Apollinaires Il y a (1925), quoted by Roger Shattuck in The Banquet Years: The
Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, Revised Edition (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968), first published in 1955, pp. 213-214.

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number of apartments and halving their space, as well as a story about a respectable
bourgeois lady disoriented by the squalor of bohemian living. Jarry could only afford half
an apartment, and could barely furnish the place.
The Chat Noir's connections with Montmartre's anarchist circles are also
significant. Emile Pouget, Paris anarchist famous for the book Sabotage, published his
infamous periodical Le Pre Peinard (Father Cobbler) from a Montmartre print shop
between 1889 and 1894, when his press was shut down by police in their anti-anarchist
campaign. Pouget fled to London, publishing there from 1894-5, before returning to Paris
in 1896 and publishing until 1902. His contributors included Incoherent illustrator
Adolphe Willette. The magazine contained regular columns called Mort aux proprios
(death to landlords) and La cloche de bois which were, as Le Figaro put it, ...reserved
for colorful accounts of clandestine move-outs. 83 1889 was the same year that Paris
anarchist Pennelier founded Paris's first Syndicat des Locataires (Tenants' Union).
Knowing the authorities would find it acceptable, Pennelier's cover was a humanitarian
and hygienic concern for unclean dwellings. But in practice, the group campaigned for
landlords to clean up unclean dwellings, regulation to protect the property of tenants (so
that landlords and concierges could not appropriate furniture for unpaid rent), taxation of
rents, and suppression of hidden move-in fees and holiday gifts for concierges. The
group's staple direct action was the clandestine move-out. It saw a bumpy career before
foundering in 1906, reorganized and changed meeting spots between 1906 and 1909, and
ended up in Clichy, not far from Montmartre. The programs of Pouget and Pennelier
centered around small-scale, individual or small-group direct action: rent strikes and
83 (1) Le Pre Peinard - Un journal "espatrouillant" (1889-1900) (Paris: Les Nuits Rouges, 2006); (2) Le
Figaro, Supplement Literaire de Dimanche, Jan. 13, 1894, p. 6.

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clandestine move-outs. If anyone in Paris was really organizing tenants from the 1880s to
1900s, it was the far left, in Montmartre, following a program rather close to that
recommended by L'Anti-concierge.
In the person of George Cochon, the anarchist critique of housing met the
syndicalist's interest in collective action. 84 Weaver by trade and author of 39 manires de
faire rler son concierge (39 Ways to Make Your Concierge Groan), Cochon became
secretary of the Union sydnicale des locataires ouvriers and employs (Syndical Union of
Worker and Employee Tenants), the descendant of Pennelier's union, in 1911. Angered
by Cochon's campaigning for rent strikes and clandestine move-outs, his landlord slated
him for eviction in January of 1912. He turned his eviction into a media circus,
barricading himself in his apartment for five days with large stones, hanging out a red
flag on his balcony, and a banner which read Under the Third Republic the law is
broken by the police. Cochon's creativity and ambition made him well known, well
liked, and well feared. Whereas previous anarchist responses to the housing problem had
been relatively small-scale, Cochon planned larger, collective actions. He organized large
groups of people to squat in or occupy abandoned buildings in the Paris area, and mass
move-outs in which many families fled eviction together. Cochon's innovation as an
activist was direct actions that included large numbers of people, mostly remained
peaceful, and raised public visibility of the housing issue. Swiss political scientist Ccile
Pechu credited him with inventing the squat as a form of social action. The squat was
both an expedient, free place to house the homeless, and an occupation, a claim to space,

84 There is only one book-length study of Cochon to date, Patrick Kamoun's V'l Cochon qui dmnage:
prlude du droit au logment (Paris: Ivan Davy, 2000). For more on Cochon, see: Jean-Marie Flonneau,
Crise de vie chre et mouvement syndical 1910-1914 Le Mouvement social no. 72 (1970), pp. 49-81.

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an appropriation of empty buildings and/or public spaces, which highlighted the
capitalistic wastefulness embodied in vacant apartments, or flaunted the citizen's right to
use public spaces. 85
Soon after his eviction, late January 1912, Cochon and a group of carpenters
sneaked the prefabricated pieces of a small house into the Tuileries garden, and set it up
for a large homeless family named Husson. They hung out a mock real-estate sign
reading, House with garden offered by the Syndical Tenants' Union and the Building
Union for a family of ten persons without lodging, abandoned by l'Assistance publique
(public welfare office). This sort of high-visibility prank, which simultaneously gave a
homeless family shelter and flagged the issue of public assistance for large families, was
characteristic of Cochon's activism. Pechu analyzed his methods of spectacularization,
his devotion to publicity as a tactic and his uncanny ability to bait the media. Unlike the
clandestine move-outs of the 1880s-1900s, Cochon's actions were public, calculated to
provoke visibility, scandal and reaction. He formed a noisy band, the Racket (Raffut),
with an open lineup and ever-changing instrumentation. Using any implements at hand,
the Racket created a terrible anti-music to sound the alarm for tenants to flee their
dwellings, and to disorient landlords and concierges in the process. In June of 1913, the
Racket, along with a recently evicted family, burst in and interrupted the performance at
the Moulin Rouge.
The theatrical style of these actions was right out of the playbook of the
Montmartre cabarets: mockery of the powerful, the managed production of the

85 Ccile Pchu "Entre rsistance et contestation: La gense du squat comme mode daction" Universit de
Lausanne Travaux de Science Politique/Political Science Working Paper Series N 24 (2006), online:
http://www.unil.ch/webdav/site/iepi/users/epibiri1/public/24Pechu.pdf

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outrageous, the combination of humor, lying, and subverting normal power relations,
shocking public performance and spectacle, etc. It must have been both embarrassing and
infuriating for the authorities to deal with Cochon and his followers. 86 This was practical,
tactical fumisme, in which the same old gags sent very serious messages. But Cochon's
connections with the Chat Noir group went deeper than simply sharing the style of
Montmartre's bohemian-cum-anarchist scene. Like Salis, Cohon ran for office, for maire
of the 20th district in 1912. The campaign destroyed his credibility in some anarchist
circles, and he lost the election. The Tenants' Union lost members by the thousands, and
Cochon formed the new Fdration nationale et internationale des locataires, publicized
by posters designed by Chat Noir Illustrator Theophile Steinlen. In spite of these ups and
downs, Cochon remained a popular hero. Several popular songs were written about
Cochon, one called la cloche du bois," by Jules Jouy of the Chat Noir.
Montmartre, for all of its hysterical publicity, was a relatively small place, where
anarchists and avant-gardists mingled, keeping up a lively dialog about Paris's housing
crisis from the 1870s to the 1910s. In this working class neighborhood filled with cheep
rental properties, the social pressures of the lodging house nurtured some of Paris's most
raucous and radical responses to the housing problem. From LAnti-concierge to Cochon,
Montmartre struggled to overturn the citys housing crisis with a carnivalesque explosion
of resentment, satire, cruel jokes, community organizing and direct action. These cultural
86 In addition to occupying the Tuileries, they also occupied the courtyard at the Chamber of Deputies, the
Madeleine, and the Prefecture of Police. In April of 1912, Cochon helped move 50 families into the
Chateau d'Eau barracks near Place de la Rpublique. In April of 1913, Cochon and an estimated 15,000
homeless people invaded the Htel de Ville. Cochon was particularly fond of taking over spaces owned
by the State, hence the Htel de Biron and the army's Btiment du Bastion, or places that represented
some other form of social power: the CGO depot, an old Jesuit college, the Bourse du Travail. In
November of 1912, Cochon and company occupied the Thiers library and the National Printers. In
1913, Cochon negotiated a sublet of the Comte de Rouchefoucauld's private mansion for homeless
families. On a few occasions, they simply occupied the street (see Pechu, pp. 19-25).

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practices re-scripted the apartment house, the neighborhood, and all low-income areas of
the city as spaces ripe for appropriation by disgruntled tenants, as they struggled to cope
with the high cost, low quality, and strained social relations of Pariss housing
infrastructure.

Escaping the City: Fleeing into the Open Air

Journalist and critic Jules Claretie wrote a daily column for Le Temps from 1880
to 1910 called simply Life in Paris (La vie Paris). 87 Claretie said his focus was
moeurs (morals or customs), and so the column was quite simply the notes of a moralist
from day to day. 88 He was interested in everyday life, those patterns of practice that
coalesce around social rhythms and routines, as well as the kind of character that these
routines produced in Parisians. He tracked modernity and the zeitgeist, any sign of the
times. In his times, he saw a fever for light and air. Claretie contrasted yesterday's
Parisian, who never left Paris, with today's new, modern Parisian. Paris's long-standing
love of liberty had become love of the open air. Today's Parisian, he wrote, can no
longer live in the narrow streets...of the past." He was thirsty for ...this light fluid
which is called air and which is life. 89
Using the same verb (assault) used to describe the rush of riders to the Mtro on
opening day, Claretie wrote that the Parisian assaults the trains de plaisir, the cars of
suburban trains, steamboats, tramwaysanything that frees him, liberates himand he
heads for the country or for the shore. Expanded means of transport increased mobility
87 Claretie, Jules. La vie Paris: 1880-1910 (Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1881-1911).
88 Jules Claretie, La vie Paris: 1895 (Paris: Charpentier, 1896), pp. VI-VII: tout simplement les notes
d'un moraliste au jour le jour.
89 Ibid., p. 45.

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for Parisians, feeding their already bubbling desires to escape the city and vent the
pressures of urban living. Certain holidays (Pentecost, said Claretie) and the summer
season of vacations brought an exodus from Parisbut not just any exodus; Parisians
were fleeing a sick city. Like Haussmann and Poubelle, Zola and DuMesnil, Claretie
medicalized the urban condition, explaining that Parisians fled their city for their health:
One would say that they feel that their lungs and their pores need to breath easily, and
they prescribe themselves this air cure. Claretie also called air a vital fluid. 90
Claretie connected the Parisian's love of freedom with the city's geography. He
noticed a change in the scale of daily life: Larger streets are killing the smaller, just as
the department stores do the boutiques. He saw that Parisian love of light and air was
changing city planning, and so Paris's terrain was changing, too. Roads were getting
wider because air passes through these large avenues, these modern boulevards, because
the Parisian here breathes with ease. Similarly, the celebrated passages (shopping
arcades) were dying out, because they have a great drawback for Parisians...they lack
air. The love of air was changing the topography of pedestrian Paris, said Claretie, as
crowds passing by cried De l'air! du grand air! (Into the air! into the open air!). 91
Closely connected with this love of fresh air and open space was the rise of
another important source of expanding mobility and access to green space: the bicycle.
As Claretie put it, the avid cyclist had a sort of special rage which I'll call the appetite
for space. Cyclists wanted to go farther, to see more. Like the mania for open air,
bicycles were a very particular element in the complete transformation of mores which

90 Ibid., p. 46.
91 Ibid, pp. 47-48.

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we are witnessing. Make no mistake: the bicycle is preparing us a new France. 92 For
Claretie, new technologiesbicycles, steamboats, tramways, etc.increased Parisians'
access to mobility thus setting off changes in practice. He worried that the new culture of
physical exercise, travel and adventure developing around the bicycle was too bodycentered, and would damage the culture of French literacy. Books and bicycles, for
Claretie, stood for mind and body, and the bicycle's new culture of biceps would
distract French people from the life of the mind. He worried that there was a neurotic,
restless psychology at work here, a mania for movement (folie de movement). 93
Voyages, for Claretie, were always journeys of escape and forgetting, and so he warned
readers that traveling is one form of intoxication. 94
Summers and weekends gave Parisians time to escape the city. 95 In August of
1895, Claretie wrote At the present time, three quarters of Parisians are traveling the
major roads and tiring themselves out, under the pretext of amusing themselves. The
traditional Parisian who never left home had been replaced by a sort of wandering
Parisian who, when the summer has come, can no longer remain at home, and doesn't
even have enough paths to the country to satisfy his dream. These restless urbanites

92 Ibid., 49: un lment tout particulier dans la complte transformation des moeurs laquelle nous
assistons. Ne vous y trompez pas: la bicyclette nous prpare une France nouvelle.
93 Ibid., 49-50. For more on movement, vacations, vehicles, etc. see La Vie Paris: 1896 volume, p. 238
(August 20, 1896).
94 Ibid., p. 178: le voyage est une des formes de l'ivresse. Claretie explained: This need to travel, born
of the desire to escape everyday cares and current responsibilities, is also one of the symptoms of the
nervousness which is dislocating us. The man taken by the unknown, who hurls himself to adventure in
virgin lands, is a sort of conqueror resolved to enlarge the world; but the Parisian who packs his trunks
to accomplish, -- the guide in hand, the train schedule in his night sack, -- whatever kind of circular
voyage, is quite simply, most of the time, someone bored who wants to escape himself. To escape from
the self, to vanquish the demon inside that every modern being possesses, ennui, malcontentment with
everyday tasks, this is the ambition of the Parisian who snaps shut his suitcase.... and ennui n'est que
la mlancholie des imbciles, pp. 176-7.
95 Ibid., p. 175: #XVI, Aug. 15, 1895: Claretie offered a Petite philosophie du Bonheur et du Rve
propos des excursions d't, et pourquoi les Parisiens voyagent bicyclette ou en wagon.

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were never satisfied: he wants to discover forgotten places and travel far, as far as
possible, as a cyclist puts his pride in availing himself of the maximum number of
kilometers his machine can handle in a day. Claretie saw the cyclist as a sort of
archetype, the most identifiable carrier of Paris's modern folie de mouvement. Hence
monstrous, hyperbolic phrases like The bicyclist is the only modern voyager to whom
adventures happen (adventure, that chimera of the world today). 96 For Claretie, the
cyclist, self-propelled and self-directed, was different from the tourist with his luggage,
carted around on boats and trains. The cyclist was the last romantic voyager, who has
...recovered the unexpected, the ideal, the fantastic. 97
For Claretie, the cyclist was only the most clear-cut example of a much more
widespread trend. Come summer, he argued, everyone in Paris wanted to get away, even
those who could not afford it, hence the popularity of getting away in one's mind,
demonstrated by popular books like Voyage autour de ma chambre (Trip Around My
Room) and Voyages dans mon fauteil (Trips in my Armchair). Claretie's discussion of
open air, holidays, bicycles and the culture of health and fitness shows that for many
Parisians, daily life in the city did not live up to their expectations. Their lived city did
not match their ideal city. Specifically, the lived city was short on green space, open
space and fresh air. Hence, while the authorities worked to open the city, through road
planning, slum clearance, and rewriting building codes, the Paris populace often tried to
escape the city, through travel or through imagination. A growing body of consumer
goodsbicycles, popular books, train ticketswere marketed specifically for the

96 Ibid., p. 174: Le bicycliste est le seul voyageur moderne qui arrivent des aventures (l'aventure, cette
chimre du monde actuel).
97 Ibid., p. 183.

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purpose of helping urbanites escape the city. Just as the avant-gardists of Montmartre
critiqued the apartment house, so weekending and vacationing Parisians critiqued the city
at large.
Painting was another way to escape. Two of Seurat's most famous paintings from
the 1880s, The Bathers at Asnires (Une Baignade Asnieres) and Sunday Afternoon
on the Island at la Grande Jatte depict Parisians escaping the city in their leisure time.
Seurat's interest in leisure culture drove him to follow the hoards of Parisians leaving the
city for the green spaces of the suburbs and the banks of the Seine. Here, he took urban
social realism (bourgeois leisure) and set it in a post-impressionist landscape. From the
differences of costume in the two paintings, viewers can see that the bathers at Asnires
were a more working-class or lower-middle-class bunch, with none of the buttoned-up
Sunday finery of la Grande Jatte. Seurat's bathers at Asnires are also set against
smokestacks and smog in the distance, an explicit depiction of the ills of urban life. The
contrast of figures in the front swimming and smokestacks in the background also invites
speculation about Seurat's ecological consciousnessdid he intentionally depict factories
on the west side of Paris, upstream of Asnires? Did he mean to comment on the quality
of water his bathers swam in, or to suggest the source of their pollution? 98

98 In light of the issue's public prominence, it is very unlikely that Seurat did not know about it. Asnires
was directly across the river from Paris's main drain at Clichy, where half of Paris's sewage entered the
river. Alfred Durand-Claye, an important water engineer in Paris, knew that water at Clichy and St.
Denis, site of the city's other main drain, had been significantly altered already as of 1871. On Dec. 12,
1874, the Ministry of Public Works convened a Commission whose mission was to propose measures
to take to remedy the infection of the Seine in the area around Paris. See Comptes rendus hebdomaires
des sances de l'Acadmie des sciences (1871: vol. 72), pp. 89-92 (Note on a plan by Durand-Claye for
new collecteurs in Paris). See also: Ministre des Travaux Publics. Rapport de la commission charge
de proposer les mesures prendre pour remdier l'infection de la Seine aux abords de Paris (Dec. 12,
1874). AP D1S8 6, assainissement de la Seine. It would be difficult to say exactly how widespread
awareness of Paris's ecological impact on the Seine was, though many newspapers of the era echoed La
Petite Rpublique's angry 1895 editorial, which charged the Travaux de Paris with operating sewers
that plague the city and the suburbs. See: Ernest Judet, l'Eau et la politique, Le Petit Journal, Sept.

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Seurat's follower, painter Paul Signac (1863-1935) took Seurat's pointillist style
and interest in escaping the city, and pushed them further. Whereas Seurat only depicted
Parisians escaping the city, Signac made anti-urbanism a lifestyle and a message. Born
and raised in Paris, he became an avid traveler, fond of escape. In the 1890s he bought
property in Saint-Tropez and built a studio there, eventually leaving Paris permanently
except for periodic visits. In the south of France, he developed what art historian Anne
Dymond called a politicized pastoral, a way of idealizing the landscape and people of
southern France as a counterexample to the problems of Paris's urban modernity. His
pastoral scenes politicized urban life, and provided an alternative, anti-urban anarchist
critique of the city. 99
The post-impressionist pantheon includes many artists who fled Paris for the
provinces (and Czanne was a southerner to begin with). Van Gogh and Gaugin ran from
Paris to Arles in 1888, and then Gaugin fled again after Van Gogh's infamous ear
incident, this time to Tahiti. Like Signac, Gaugin (1848-1903) was a native Parisian. But
for Gaugin, the provinces were not far enough from the metropoleonly the colonies
would do. In Tahiti, Gaugin represented indigenous life as noble savagery, an idealized
non-urban and non-modern other to Paris's daily life. For these pioneering modernists,
Montmartre could never be far enough away from Paris. Gaugin and Signac challenged
the idea that Paris was the pinnacle of civilization, preferring to escape this city in crisis
rather than work to repair it. Rather than hold the lived city to an urban ideal, they wrote

14, 1895, p. 1; M. Charnay, Retour de l'eau de source La Petite Rpublique, Sept. 18, 1895, p. 1;
Assainissons la Seine L'clair, Sept. 9, 1909; L.M. Bonneff, "Dans les Egouts de Banlieue"
L'Humanit, Nov. 24, 1909, p. 2.
99 Anne Dymond, "A Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France"
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 353-370.

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scripts for a non-urban modernity.

Auguste Fabres 1896 Plan for Skyscrapers as Working-Class Cooperative Housing

While some dreamed of escaping the city, another Frenchman was dreaming of
American skyscrapers. In 1896, Auguste Fabre (1833-1922), entrepreneur, activist, freethinker, journalist, and co-oper, wrote an article titled Les Sky Scratchers: ou Les Hautes
Maisons Amricaines (Sky Scratchers, or High American Houses). 100 The article
interpreted the early 1890s skyscrapers around Chicagos Loop (e.g. the 1892 Masonic
Temple) as the embodied blueprints of a utopian social order. 101 Arnold Lewis has shown
that many late-nineteenth century Europeans looked to Chicago for an early encounter
with tomorrow. The tall buildings around the Loop seemed a time warp, a virtual
museum of Europes technological, industrial, architectural and commercial future. 102
Most Europeans assumed that European skyscrapers would serve the same purpose they
did in Chicagothe offices of white collar workersbut Fabre saw the potential for
worker-owned cooperative housing blocks, and a solution to Paris's housing crisis. While
Jules Siegfried and the more famous social reformers around the Muse Social debated
the merits of public and private support for worker housing, Fabre recommended a third
way: co-operation, collective ownership. 103

100 I found this source online, at the website for the International Institute for Social History in
Amsterdam, http://www.iisg.nl/. Fabre, Auguste. Les Sky Scratchers, ou Les Hautes Maisons
Amricaines (Nmes, Bureau de Lmancipation, 1896).
101The article was based in what Mike Davis called the core modernist fantasy of the future metropolis,'
see: Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Vintage, 1999), p. 361.
102Lewis, Arnold. An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicagos Loop, and the Worlds
Columbia Exposition (University of Illinois Press, 1997), 1-10. It is also worth noting the importance of
the 1893 World's Columbia Exhibition in bolstering this international image of Chicago as a future city,
given what we have already said about World's Fairs.
103 On the Muse Social's reformers, and their debate over public and private, see Janet Horne, A Social

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By upbringing Fabre would have been a capitalist. Born in Uzs in 1833 and
orphaned, he was adopted by a Protestant preacher and Fourierist. He grew up reading
Fourier in his fathers library, and trained to be an industrialist. He inherited his fathers
silk factory, but was always a reluctant entrepreneur, a moralist and a free-thinker
fascinated with Fouriers vision of perfected industrial organization, material abundance,
class harmony, and sensual enjoyment. 104 Working in Lyon, Fabre was forced to play the
boss in a labor dispute, an experience which made a class-traitor of him. He followed his
conscience, closed his business and moved to Nmes to become a craftsman and shopkeeper, producing and selling farm equipment. In Nmes Fabre also worked as an activist,
organizing a workingmans club for evening instruction and discussion called La
Solidarit (1876), a workers consumer cooperative with the same name (1878), and a
cooperative bakery called La Renaissance. 105 Fabres commitment to utopian social
organization solidified between 1879 and 1883, when he replaced his friend Godin as
administrator of a cooperative experiment near Guise they called the Familistre.
According to hygienist and housing reformer mile Cacheux, it was the premier example
of employer paternalism in France at the time. The community combined a carefully
(humanely) engineered factory and nearby apartment complex where workers lived.
The entire property was cooperatively owned. Fabres role at the Familistre was various:
he drafted the articles of association, served as director of economic affairs, and

Laboratory for Modern France, pp. 83-96.

104 On Fourier, see Manuel, Frank. The Prophets of Paris (Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 195-248. The
utopian socialists remained an important inspirtation for urban transformation across the 19th century;
Haussmann had Saint Simon, Fabre had Fourier. Paul Rabinow has also stressed architect-planner Tony
Garniers debt to both Saint Simon and Fourier. See French Modern, pp. 212, 224, 231.
105 See Background on Fabre from the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam:
http://www.iisg nl/.

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performed daily, cooperative manual labor. 106
In the mid 1880s, Fabre returned to Nmes and met Charles Gide, an unorthodox
economist, also a Protestant from Uzs with interests in Fourier and the growing French
consumer cooperative movement. 107 Gides free-thinking lectures, which considered
economics from the consumer's point of view, first scandalized the laissez-faire
environment of mainstream Paris academic and intellectual life in 1884. With duard de
Boyve, who founded the general cooperative l'Abeille Nmoise (the Bee of Nimes) the
same year, Fabre and Gide are often credited with starting the consumer cooperative
movement in France, earning the label the School of Nmes. The following year, 1885,
they were instrumental in organizing the first national convention of consumer
cooperatives in Paris. The conference spawned a new journal, Lmancipation, to publish
the school's opinions. Though all three wrote for the journal, by 1889 Gide would
become the premier spokesman for consumer co-ops in France. 108 Fabre's article on
skyscrapers appeared in an 1896 issue of Lmancipation.
Repeating the hygienist slogans of his social reformer colleagues, Fabre portrayed
the crisis of working class housing as an urgent social problem. Working-class housing
was notoriously cramped, dirty, poorly ventilated and poorly lit, a threat to safety, health,
and morality. 109 But recent advances in building technology and architectural form
structural steel, elevators, the skyscraper, new heating, plumbing and sanitation
systemsoffered a glimpse of what working-class housing could look like in a utopian

106 See mile Cacheux, Les habitations ouvrires (Laval, E. Jamin, 1882), pp. I-III. The Familistre was a
unique, utopian arrangement to be sure. One is reminded of both Brook Farm and high Fordism.
107Emile Cheysson is another important social reformer of the era from Nimes.
108 Williams, Rosalind. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France
(University of California, 1982), pp. 269-321. See also Background, http://www.iisg nl/ (cited above).
109 Fabre calls working-class homes vile hovels (bouges infects), Les Sky Scratchers, p. 9.

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future. Like the law-makers of the 1880s, Fabre dreamed of expanding working class
access to quality housing, equipped with the latest infrastructures. He thought
modernized infrastructure could clean up working class everyday life.
With excitement for humanitys future, Fabre reported that the United States had
developed skyscrapers, and that a recent report by Mr. Wuarin 110 established, beyond
any doubt, their feasibility, efficiency, and convenience. Fabre knew that hygienists and
reformers had long upheld the single-family home as the ideal for working class housing,
and that he would have to preempt criticism and disbelief in arguing that no working
class dwelling is more healthy, convenient, or economical than the skyscraper. 111 Fabre
argued that skyscrapers could expand access to hygienic living conditions. Because heat,
incoming and outgoing water, and other services could be purchased cheaply in bulk for
the entire building, many tenants would have access to better services than they could
afford alone. The skyscraper's height would ensure apartments open access to sunlight
and fresh air. No window would open onto a dark, cramped, dirty alley or courtyard,
looking out instead onto open sky. Fabre appealed to hygienic authority to argue the
importance of light and air for human well-being, both mental and physical. 112 In their
materials, organization, and design, he argued, skyscrapers embodied superior living
conditions.
To those who scrutinized the hygiene of the working-class lifestyle, Fabre gave a
similar reply: each apartment would be equipped with a trash chute, thus rationalizing
sanitation. Tenants would no longer have to worry about waste disposal. Waste could be

110 I cannot help thinking that Fabre was awkwardly translating the English name Warren.
111 Fabre, Les Sky Scratchers, p. 5.
112 Fabre, Les Sky Scratchers, pp. 22-23.

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conveniently discarded from ones own apartment, falling immediately to the ground- or
basement-level, kept at a safe distance from everyday living space, and efficiently
disposed in bulk. 113 Similarly, Fabre touted the new duct and temperature-regulating
technologies employed in the heating system. 114 With a central furnace, it would no
longer be necessary for each apartment to have its own stove. This would reduce soot in
apartments, improving quality of air and reducing the risk of fire. Fire was a hot topic for
Fabre, who imagined relatively fire-proof skyscrapers based around an iron skeleton
(ossature en fer), and made of incombustible materials (matriaux incombustibles) like
iron, steel, bricks, stone, and cement. Skyscrapers would also be equipped with carefully
designed staircases and walkways (balcons-trottoirs) for easy evacuation in case of
emergency. 115 Fabres ultimate point concerning technology, design, bulk utilities, and
modern conveniences was all the economy of construction and the perfections of
function inherent in the great, unified dwelling. 116 The best new technologies and best
living conditions would literally be built into skyscrapers.
Fabre argued that the buildings' spatial layout would promote privacy and
independence, a common word in his essay. This would not, however, mean the
isolation of tenants from one another and the decline of public or civic life. By
concentrating a large population in a small area, possibilities for sociability would
increase. In Fabre's words, With the grand, unified house the tenant and the dwelling act
and react, the one on the other: the former, [by] reclaiming for the building more and
more perfect general forms and dispositions, the latter, [by] requiring of its inhabitants a
113 Ibid., 26-27.
114 Ibid., 16.
115 Ibid., 17-19.
116 Ibid., 28.

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more and more sociable mood and habits. 117 Moral hygiene would also be increased,
because young people unsupervised by their own parents and given to act out would be
supervised by neighbors: all circulation throughout the housing complex would occur
under the eyes of parents and the whole population. 118 The reorganized, high-density
living space could thus teach tenants new habits, new forms of social interaction and
cooperation. Fabre saw everyday life in the housing block as a moral and educational
experience which would reshape tenants as subjects, and help them practice utopian
forms of social interaction. Like the housing regulations of 1878-84, Fabre designed both
infrastructure and practice, architecture and society; his designs were ambitiously
scripted, to both preempt criticism from social reformers and control and civilize tenant
practice.
Last but not least, Fabre argued that these housing-blocks should be cooperatively
owned in order to fulfill their maximum economic potential. Fabre recognized that
building such structures would require an enormous amount of capital; only corporate
bodies, groups of shareholders, could amass enough funds. The housing blocks would be
organized as public corporations, something like condominiums, in which the tenants
were share-holders, and the whole was cooperatively owned. In a moment of republican
fanfare, Fabre claimed that responsibility of funding should lie with the public, the great
public. 119 Once built, the concentration of so many tenants in one place would enable
bulk savings on services like heat and water. Any outstanding costs could easily be
recuperated through the price of the apartments, because the finished product would

117 Ibid., p. 29.

118 Ibid., 5.
119 Ibid., 10.

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have enormous sale-value. 120
Fabre's argument in favor of cooperative ownership was not merely economic; he
also appealed to a historical argument. Recently, he claimed, France had seen a
corporatization of business in several sectors of the economy. Large, public-shareholder
corporations had been formed in the transportation (esp. railroad) industry, as well as in
the iron and steel industries. Administration had been centralized while ownership was
decentralizedin Fabres view a gain in both bureaucratic efficiency (and control) and
consumer power. The same trend could also be seen in commerce; while consumers were
organizing in co-ops, merchandise was being centralized in the new department stores
(grands magasins). 121 Fabre saw the same change in scale as Claretie, writing:
Will housing undergo the transformation we have seen in transportation, in
industry, and in commerce? Will it centralize itself as a body, while it
decentralizes itself as property? In a word, are we headed toward the large,
unified apartment house, in spite of the streams of ink poured and the counterarguments hurled at it by certain economists?
The recent construction of sky scratchers, and the advantages they offermake
the affirmative possible, at least for large cities. 122
This historical argument reaches its most hyperbolic at the end of the essay, where
Fabre draws a not-so-subtle parallel between the historical form of progress and the
architectural form of sky scrapers: always larger, always higher. The full passage is
worth quoting:
Watching these tall American constructions raising their arms of steel toward the
sky, one is struck with admiration for the immense resources of modern
industry.Forward! Onward! Onward! Progress lies in the search for the best
conditions of development in human life and in the incessant pursuit of an ideal,
120 Ibid., 12.
121 Ibid., 10-11. On the growth of mass consumption and department stores, see Benjamin Arcades
Project, and Williams, Dreamworlds. Michael Miller, The Bon March, Zola Lady's Paradise.
122 Ibid., 12.

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always larger, always higher.
While modern industry had made these buildings possible, recent trends in corporate
ownership could secure the fruits of industry for all. For Fabre, it was the advance in
productivity and the resulting enormous social capital which separates civilization and
barbarism. Cooperative ownership would provide the financial conditions for social
perfection, wherein everyone could enjoy the infrastructural fruits of modern civilization
(a grand narrative, indeed). 123
As a futuristic work of prophecy and forecast, Fabres essay is similar to the
science fiction of contemporaries Jules Verne and Albert Robida. While claiming a moreor-less sober appreciation of recent technological developments as possible keys to the
housing problem, Fabre tended to fetishize technology itself, to beam at its size and
speed, to offer it as an answer to social questions, and to make it a motor of history. Fabre
gave technology a certain historical agency. With the elevator everything changes,
(avec lascenseur tout change), thanks to it (grce a li) it was possible to live in
such tall buildings. Or: With the Sky scratcher everything changes, (Avec le Sky
scratcher tout change). 124 Fabre's contribution to Paris's ongoing debate on the housing
problem was to offer a technical fix, a solution based not in reform legislation or moral
education, but in new, modern architectural forms, social forms, construction methods
and networked infrastructures for heat, light and sanitation.
123 Cooperative societies for low-cost housing saw major growth between 1896 and 1906. Total capital
held grew from 215,000fr. to 7,188,336fr. In these same years, private shareholder companies for lowcost housing grew from 1,435,000fr. to 7,142,150fr. See: (1) Recueil des documents sur la prevoyance
sociale (Paris: Berger-Levrault and Cie, 1905), p. 12. (2) Recueil des documents sur la prevoyance
sociale (Paris: Berger-Levrault and Cie, 1908), p. 12. For more on the cooperative question in housing
reform, see Bullock and Read, pp. 452-464.
124 Ibid., pp. 4 and 17. P. Villian and E. Mauger used the same formula in their pamphlet about the Mtro:
avec la locomotive, tout change. See Un Mtropolitain qui ne cote rien et ne trouble rien (Paris:
Grande Imprimerie, 1892), p. 27.

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Hence Fabre fits Michel Callon's theory of the engineer-sociologist rather
neatly. As Callon argued, the design decisions made by engineers are never merely
technical. Technological designs and plans are not only used to solve techno-scientific
problems, but also used by engineers to pursue social effects and social change. 125 Fabre's
dreams of skyscrapers envisioned architecture and engineering no more than social
relations, morality, health and safety. Throughout the essay, architecture and technology
are constantly and consciously evoked in the service of some larger social goalsolving
the housing crisis, moralizing tenants, reducing social inequality, or building community.
Fabre scripted skyscrapers in order to write the fragility of the built environment and
Pariss urban crisis out of French urban modernity.

Tuberculosis, Unclean Blocks and Slum Clearance, 1894-1914

As Fabre gave agency to skyscrapers and elevators, so the hygienists gave
contagious agency to built spaces. Individuals were no longer the only agents of
contagionnow apartments, buildings, city blocks could be contagious, sick spaces in
which diseases incubated and were passed on. In 1890, DuMesnil called them logements
meurtrirs (murderous lodgings); in 1904 journalist R. Deuzres called them maisons
maudites (cursed or haunted houses); in 1906, A. Fillassier called them maisons funbres
(funeral homes). 126 Like the murderous tramways we met in the last chapter, these
killer houses symbolized the dangers of modernity. Their killer agency came from being

125Callon, Michel. Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analysis.
The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, eds. (MIT, 1987), p. 84.
126 (1) Octave DuMesnil, l'Hygine Pairs L'habitation du Pauvre (Paris: Baillire et fils, 1890), p. 14;
(2) R. Deuzres, A travers la science Le Petit Parisien, July 4, 1904; (3) A. Fillassier. Les casiers
sanitaires des villes et les oeuvres d'assistance (Paris: Jules Rousset, 1906), p. 1.

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unclean, unsafe and unhealthy. Journalists, doctors and social reformers tirelessly
detailed the squalid conditions they found in working class dwellingshumid walls,
shattered tile floors, mold, structures rotting or sagging. One author described parquet
wood floors so used-up, spongy and cracked that they could not be properly
disinfected: ...old, worn wooden floors harbor murderous microbes in their cracks. 127
Descriptions of working class life revolved around charged stock words: the nouns taudis
and bouge (slum, hovel), the adjective infect (literally infected or metaphorically foul),
and the verb entasser (to be stuffed or crammed).
In the 1890s, with decades of hygienic work on cities and the modern etiology of
disease behind them, Paris hygienists began to speak of overcrowding and overpopulation
(entassement, encombrement, surpeuplement, cantonnement) on multiple levels:
individual apartments, buildings, city blocks, neighborhoods. In 1891, Jacques Bertillon
showed that 14% of Parisians suffered from excessive overcrowding, meaning two or
more people per room. Bertillon also found that the problem was confined mostly to the
19th and 20th districts. 128 Census data shows the trend continued through 1896 and
1901. 129 In the mid 1890s, while acknowledging a decline in the mortality rate across
Europe, including a decline in several contagious diseases (typhoid, smallpox, measles,
scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria), Bertillon showed that working class Parisians,
especially in the peripheral districts, did not benefit equally from this decline of disease
and death; their mortality rate was higher and contagious disease remained a common
cause of death. The 1882 typhoid outbreak and the 1884 and 1892 cholera outbreaks were

127R. Deuzres, A travers la science Le Petit Parisien, July 4, 1904.

128Shapiro, pp. 75-78; Janet Horne, pp. 226-228.
129 Bullock and Reid, p. 307.

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also heavily localized in working class areas. 130 Even using the modern tools of postPasteurian germ theory and demographic statistics, Bertillon came to rather traditional
conclusions: the parts of Paris where the poorest people lived were also the densest, the
most disease ridden, and the least equipped with modern infrastructures to handle fresh
water and wastewater.
There was one particular diseasetuberculosiswhich did not follow the general
decline in disease and death rates in Paris. In 1894, Paul Juillerat, already know for his
research in animal biology, became the first director of the Prefecture of the Seine's new
Casier sanitaire des maisons. 131 The new office was tasked with compiling statistics
about disease in Paris, and in the tradition of John Snow, with plotting individual
instances of disease on the map of Paris to create an epidemic geography, producing
knowledge of Paris's deadliest places. Juillerat and his staff spent the next decade
collecting data about individual houses in Paris through inspections, and then analyzing
them statistically, etiologically, and geographically. The staff also performed
disinfections during house visits, disinfecting between 7,000 and 11,000 houses per year
between 1894 and 1905. Juillerat became one of France's premier spokesman for the idea
that tuberculosis was caused by excessive urban density, and its resulting lack of light
and air, two fundamentals of hygiene.
Soon hygienists across France were talking about the struggle against

130Evenson, Paris a Century of Change, p. 208.

131The word casier is difficult to translateit can mean rack, filing cabinet, compartment or pigeonhole.
David Barnes argued that the name of the Casier sanitaire, which methodically collected information
about houses in Paris, conveys a sense of grid or network, a tissue of compartments extended over the
city. See: (1) David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century
France (University of California, 1995), pp. 117-128; (2) Yankel Fijalkow argues that Juillerat and the
Casier sanitaire led the putting in place of a system of information for the city (la mise en oeuvre
d'un systme d'information sur la ville), see La construction des lots insalubres, p. 127.

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tuberculosis. It became a slogan, passed from L.R. Regnier in 1898, then to Acheray and
Paul Brouardel in 1901. 132 Brouardel's book The Struggle Against Tuberculosis centered
around a simple, three-part formula for understanding the struggle: tuberculosis was
contagious, preventable, curable. Along with Casimir Perier, Lon Bourgeois, and
doctors Landouzy and Grancher, Brouardel founded the Fdration antituberculeuse
(Anti-tuberculosis Federation) in February, 1902, which would later become the
Association antituberculeuse franaise (French Anti-tuberculosis Association). Brouardel
was also instrumental in founding the Alliance d'hygine sociale (Alliance for Sociale
Hygiene) with Casimir Perier in 1905.
The struggle against tuberculosis passed to municipal councilor Ambroise
Rendu in 1902. On December 22nd, Rendu addressed a meeting of important social
reformers associated with the Muse Social about the struggle. 133 The phrase was spread
globally as well, applied to public health movements across Europe, Asia and the
Americas. London held an International Congress on Tuberculosis in 1901, and
Washington in 1908. 134 Paris played host to this international anti-tuberlcular movement

132(1) L.R. Regnier, "La lutte contre la tuberculose" Journal d'Hygine (Feb. 3, 1898), p. 52; (2) Paul
Edouard Acheray, La lutte contre la tuberculose dans les milieux populaires. Dispensaires
antituberculeux (These fac. med. No. 39. Lille, 1901); (3) Paul Brouardel, La lutte contre la tuberculose
(Paris: Bailliere, 1901); (4) L. Thoinot, "La vie et l'oeuvre de Paul Brouardel (1837-1906)," Annales
d'hygine publique et de mdecine lgale (series 4, volume 6, No. 3, 1906), p. 229. David Barnes
memorably translated the phrase as the War on Tuberculosis. See The Making of a Social Disease,
pp. 13-18.
133 La Rforme Sociale: Bulletin de la Socit d'conomie Sociale et des Unions de la paix sociale fondes
par P.-F. Le Play (series 5, volume 5, year 23, Jan.-June, 1902), p. 389.
134 (1) London's 1901 Congress included a presentation on the comparative study of tuberculosis
prevention in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Denmark,
England, France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Monaco, Norway, Portugal, Romania,
Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States. See: Transactions of the British
Congress on Tuberculosis for the Prevention of Consumption, vol. 1 (London: William Clowes and
Sons, Ltd., 1902), pp. 200-221; (2) Albert Robin, La lutte contre la tuberculose La Revue de Paris
1903; (2) Robert Savary and Dr. Collet, La Lutte contre la tuberculose en France, Annales des
sciences politiques (1904): 49049; (3) Dr. Patrikios, La lutte contre la tuberculose en Grce,
Transactions of the International Congress on Tuberculosis, Washington, Sept. 21 to Oct. 12, 1908 vol.

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in 1905. The Paris International Congress on Tuberculosis was put on by a commission
including hygienists Brouardel and Landouzy and senator Paul Strauss. Following a week
of conferences featuring hygienist-reformers Cheysson, Roux, Juillerat and Bonnier
(October 2-7), the exhibition was open to the public for three weeks (October 8-29). The
organizing committee counted 184,762 visitors, but estimated 200,000. 135
The exhibition was inaugurated with a visit from French President mile Loubet.
A guide led Loubet through the exhibition, taking him past two exhibits with a similar
structure: a pair of model rooms juxtaposed in order to teach hygienic lessons. The first
exhibit appeared in the social section of the exposition, and was set up by L'Assistance
publique, the city office for public welfare and poor relief:
Then they took him [Loubet] into a room where one could see a cell from the
Prison at Fresnes-les-Rungis and the room of a domestic [servant] in a nice house
on the avenue des Champs-Elyses side by side. The contrast between this cell,
which is perfectly hygienic, and the room, which is obviously unclean, is
striking! 136
In addition to its hygienic message, the contrast between these two rooms suggested a
moral problemhow could one allow prisoners to live in better conditions than honest
domestic servants did? Like the garni, both prison cells and domestics' quarters were
common sites of hygienic concern.
Later Loubet was taken to a second pair of rooms:
...two bedrooms were set up looking at one another, so that the visitor would
easily establish their comparison right away. The first was hygienic, furnished
with the care of the Touring-Club of France; the other unhygienic, which with its
curtains, its fabric wall coverings, its furniture, its rugs, its traps for dust and for
4, pt. 1 (Philadelphia: William Fell, 1908), p. 28.
135Congrs International de la Tuberculose, tenu Paris, du 2 au 7 Octobre 1905. Vol. 3: Confrences;
Ftes, Visites et Excursions; Exposition (Paris: Masson and Company, editors, Library of the Acadmie
de Mdicine, 1906), pp. 13-14.
136Congrs International de la Tuberculose vol. 3 (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1906), p. 8.

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microbes, its lack of air and of light, reminded one of the better part of current
bedrooms and certain hotel rooms, where the tourist who leaves Paris to go breath
the pure air of the mountains, of the countryside, or the sea, often risks finding
germs instead. 137
These second two rooms were separate exhibits, but the exhibition commission
deliberately juxtaposed them. The one was a typical, low-rent furnished room, set up by
the Society for Preservation Against Tuberculosis by Popular Education, with the
exaggerated claustrophobia of the Victorian interior, heavy drapery, spongy upholstery
and fringe on everything. The exhibit ended with a call to go sleep across the way
(aller coucher en face), in the modern, hygienic hotel room set up by the Touring Club of
France. This second room was furnished with light-weight curtains, and open, airy
furnishings built around sleek wrought-iron skeletons. Floors and walls were made of
smooth, washable materials. 138
The Touring Club communicated with visitors visually and linguistically through
a barrage of speech, posters and pamphlets. It recommended replacing dark colors with
light colors, replacing wallpaper with washable painted surfaces, showing that rooms
could be furnished in a way at once modern, hygienic, and pleasant. The Touring Club
called for the renovation of as many hotels in Paris as possible. Their first demand, to
clean up old hotels and to this effect, introduce some brightness and cleanliness...
Sunlight, their brochure explained, combats humidity and makes more gay. After light
came air. Their second demand was to give rooms the biggest dimensions possible. To
be clean, it should be large. The Touring Club's top two demands called for more
daylight, better ventilation, and more space. For them, furnished rooms needed to be

137 CIT, vol. 3, p. 8-9.

138 CIT, vol. 3, pp. 334-336, pp. 462-469.

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opened up and cleaned out.
These exhibits based on contrasting rooms drew on a long tradition of popular
pedagogy in hygiene. At the 1889 Universal Exposition, visitors were asked to compare
the clean house with the unclean house in an exhibit set up by the municipal office
for assainissement. The exhibit defined household hygiene so narrowlybased solely on
the absence or presence of modern infrastructures for public services like light, heat,
water and sewagethat one reviewer found the exhibit unconvincing, classist and
steeped in naive technological determinism. It is not necessary to be a sanitary engineer
(which today is a consecrated expression that is often abused) to perceive that all of this
is nothing but an affair of the purse and of tastea question of social class and private
preferences. What the exhibitors called hygiene, the reviewer saw as simply the latest
in fashionable bourgeois gadgetry for the home, not necessity but luxury. 139
At the 1900 Universal Exposition, visitors to the exhibition of L'Assistance
publique saw two contrasting hospital rooms, one representing the Parisian hospital's
dark 19th-century past, the other its bright 20th-century future. One reviewer called the
historic room the sinister 'retrospective section', evoking graphic images of medieval
medicine, the absence of modern pharmacy, and four patients to a bed. The modern room,
by contrast, had a soft and comfortable bed, and was irreproachably clean. It existed
in an incessantly renewed atmosphere where rooms were frequently cleaned, sheets
were frequently changed, and the latest materialized benefits of science were available

139 (1) Louis Havard. La maison salubre et la maison insalubre a l'exposition universelle de 1889: tude
sur l'exposition du service de l'assainissement (Paris: Imprimerie Charles Noblet et fils, 1890), pp. 24-5;
(2) In 1885, a judge ruled that piped water, in multifamily housing, was not a public health concern, but
merely concerned the comfort and convenience of tenants, see Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, p.
152; (3) In 1906, another official stated that bathtubs and showers were luxury devices for most
Parisians, not indispensable, see Evenson, Paris: a Century of Change, p. 209.

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to patients. 140
These room exhibits were models of spatial organization, dioramas of everyday
life designed to popularize the expert opinions of hygienists. They were displayed in
major and minor expositions, to visually communicate the hygienists' consensus about
sites of hygienic danger (working-class housing, domestics' quarters, prisons, hospitals),
and to illustrate the hygienic details of room design. There was a post-Pasteurian shift of
scale at work here, a microscopic zooming-in on the smallest spaces where germs can
hide, opening every crevasse to let light (meaning both cleanliness and truth) into the
darkness. 141 Hence the architectural detailsplacement of windows and vents, height of
ceilings, etc.were reinforced by smaller details: materials, furniture design and
decoration.
These displays also advertised for consumer products marketed as hygienic. The
1905 International Tuberculosis Exhibition was every bit as commercially-driven as the
Universal Expositions. In the exhibition catalog, the Touring Club advertised a hygienic
night table, [fig. 19] recommended by all doctors for hospitals, sanitariums and
hotels 142 any place at high risk for contagion because occupancy changed frequently.
The advertisement foregrounded a particular design feature: the sides of the table were
hinged, reversible and removable, removing and replacing at will...therefore washing
could not be more easy and ABSOLUTE. The table was designed to be modular and
washable, its sides become shutters, opening the table to light and air, leaving no corner

140 L'Exposition Le Petit Parisian, July 2, 1900.

141 For more on the cultural and epistemological history of light, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body:
Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (University of Minnesota, 1995).
142The word htel in French refers to both rooming houses where tourists stay and rooming houses where
Parisians live.

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untouched. 143

Figure 19: Ad for the Touring Clubs hygienic night stand, Hygea.

Though few scholars besides Leora Auslander have taken much notice, furniture
was a common object of hygienic scrutiny. Auslander saw a new politics of the
everyday in the work of hygienists like Du Mesnil, who believed that the working class
should have furniture appropriate to its station, such as would encourage good and moral
behavior. She also described taste professionals who acted as moral and aesthetic
experts, selling their ability to read the class position, daily habits, and thus the moral
standing of an individual or family by interpreting its furniture. These changes in
furniture consumption and the social arbitration of taste made a fitting cultural
counterpart to the more scientific pretensions of hygienists like Du Mesnil, who also
read morals and daily practice from the material surroundings of his subjects.

143 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (University of California, 1996), p.
219.

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By 1906 the struggle against tuberculosis was already on the decline. 144 But under
Juillerat's direction, the project of plotting tuberculosis on the map of Paris had born fruit.
More than a decade of study had revealed six neighborhoods in Paris where mortality
from tuberculosis was especially high. The public health law of 1902-3 specified that if
the mortality rate in a given municipality (commune) exceeded the national average,
departmental authorities were required to intervene. Paris did not meet these conditions,
but Juillerat campaigned for intervention, anyway. For him Paris was an exception
while its average mortality rate was steadily declining and lower than the national
average, certain neighborhoods, blocks and buildings did not fit the pattern. He argued
that the municipality was an inappropriate unit of analysis, too broad to accommodate
Paris's diversity and complexity. The Casier sanitaire's mortality statistics showed that the
city's densest neighborhoods suffered disproportionately from death by tuberculosis. In
these neighborhoods, the rate of tuberculosis was greater on the lower floors of buildings
than on the upper floors. For Juillerat this proved that tuberculosis increased with lack of
access to light and air. 145
Between 1906 and 1909, based on the information collected by the Casier
sanitaire, the Paris municipal council identified the six highly tubercular areas as lots
insalubres, unclean blocks [fig. 20]. Here, anti-tuberculosis efforts shifted from public
education to assainissement, physical clean-up and renovation of built spaces. Between
1906 and 1914, the departmental office for architecture, sidewalks and gardens
(Direction administrative des services d'architecture et des promenades et plantations)

144Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease, p. 18.

145 Paul Juillerat, Rapport Monsier le Directeur des affaires dpartementales, Dec. 20, 1904 (AP VONC
1342).

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Figure 20: Deaths from tuberculosis by quartier, 1913. The six small, dark patches are the lots insalubres.
Source Commission d'extension de Paris, vol. 2, plate 16.

drew up plans for demolishing buildings and widening streets in the six unclean blocks.
Two of these plans can be seen below (figures 21 and 22). 146
These plans were staunchly Haussmanian, combining road-widening with slum
clearance, targeting long-stigmatized spots of urban blight. The plans show a fainter map
of existing constructions overlaid with darker lines representing planned modifications to
roads and buildings. Figure 21 shows an entire block of houses (shaded in the plan) slated
for removal and roads to be widened on all four of its sides. This plan was centered on
demolition. Figure 22 shows a close-up view of a similar project, with a group of houses

146(1) Ambroise Rendu, Rapport au nom de la 6e Commission, sur l'assainissement des lots insalubres
Paris (Conseil Municipal de Paris, No. 69, July 1, 1909); (2) Two additional cartons at the Archives de
Paris contain these clean-up plans: see VONC 1342 and PEROTIN 10653 150.

326
around an intersection rudely bisected by planned street boundaries. This plan, by
contrast, was not centered on demolition, but on modification of existing buildings,
shearing off the front walls of structures to widen the street. These plans envisioned
opening the city's densest places, to let more light and air flow.

Figure 21: Block of houses on the rue des Etuves slated for demolition in 1909.

These slum clearance plans went beyond simply designing spaces and practices to
civilize working class life. They also sought to steer forces of nature, controlling the flow
of light, air and disease. Like the tramways we saw in the last chapter, as vulnerable to
humidity as they were to the actions of designers and users, Pariss built environment was
heterogeneous. Throughout this chapter I have interpreted the built environment as
infrastructure, the consequence being that streets and buildings are heterogeneous

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networks just as tramways are. Slum clearance emerged not only to sculpt social and
spatial relations, but also to master nature by controlling light and air, microbes and
contagion.

Figure 22: Houses on rue Aubry le Boucher slated for demolition; lot insalubre #1, 4th district. Source:
Archives de Paris VONC 1342.

Progress on realizing these projects stalled until the 1920s and '30s, tripped up by
the same old Haussmannian problemsexpropriation remained controversial and it was
difficult to finance such large projects, as we saw in Chapter 2 with Mtro plans. Even
though they only existed on paper, in the 1890s and 1900s, these documents display
dreams of Paris's urban transformation just like Mtro plans did. They display a certain
way of thinking about the urban environment or built space, one which combines
environmental determinism, a demographer's eye for birth and death rates, a commitment

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to public health, obsession with the housing question, a Haussmanesque widening and
straightening of streets, and a way of plotting social danger on the map of Paris, marking
certain working class areas as slums, kinks in the urban fabric. This outlook, which I have
referred to throughout this chapter as one of opening the city, treated the built
environment as a technology to be manipulated, a social technology which could be
tinkered with to control the social (poverty), the spatial (overcrowding) and the natural
(tuberculosis). The various projects for opening the city we have seen in this chapter
operated on the built environment at every conceivable scale, from individual pieces of
furniture to individual rooms, entire buildings, city blocks, neighborhoods, etc.
There was little limit on the spaces, artifacts and practices that could be opened.
Following the Mtro accident of August 10, 1903, the authorities spent nearly a decade
overhauling station architecture, working to open stations to the flow of foot traffic, light
and fresh air. Documents from the Travaux de Paris show that Mtro stations on lines
2,3,4,7 and 8 were aggressively opened between 1904 and 1914 [fig. 23]. 147 Figure 23
shows the 1913 plan for a large ventilation shaft to be cut into the top of a Mtro tunnel,
leading air up through a grate to be hidden behind a hedge in the Parc de Monceau.
Stations were also fit with elevators and additional entrance/exit tunnels. At the same
time, hygiene and ventilation of Mtro stations were popular topics in hygienic
literature. 148
Opening one space, such as a Mtro station, sometimes threatened to enclose
147 See the PEROTIN 10653 series at the Archives de Paris, cartons 347, 348, 353, 355-60, 362, 363.
148 (1) Dr. Charles Vibert. La catastrophe du Mtropolitain, extrait des Annales d'hygine publique et de
mdicine lgale (Paris: Librarie J.-B. Baillire et Fils, 1905); (2) J.B. Thierry, tude sur le
Mtropolitain de Paris: Ses installations intrieures, ce qu'elles sont ce qu'elles devraient tre (Paris:
Librarie Technique Charles Branger, 1907); (3) Conseil d'hygine publique et de salubrit du
dpartement de la Seine. Au sujet de l'efficacit des mesures prises pour assurer le nettoyage et la
dinfection des ouvrages souterrains du Mtropolitain (Paris: Chaix, 1914).

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another space, for example a stretch of sidewalk. On two occassions, in 1900 and 1907,

Figure 23: Cross-section view of a Mtro tunnel ventilation shaft, 1913.

the departmental office for architecture, sidewalks and gardens denied a contracted
companys request to add new clutter (namely ventilation shafts and sheds for public
toilets) to the already crowded sidewalks. As Architect of Promenades Formig put it in
his 1900 report, little structure of all kinds are becoming so numerous in public spaces
that it seems a general measure should be taken to block their infinite multiplication,

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which accentuates each day. 149
Formig was not alone. As early as 1877, a municipal engineer recommended the
administration deny demands to build new public toilets, arguing that the sidewalks
are...already so encumbered that it would seem to us difficult to install any new new
constructions without injuring the circulation of pedestrians. Another engineer agreed:
the surface of public spaces in Paris being already seriously encumbered by installations
of all sorts. 150 Newspaper La Paix joined the choir of people calling for opening up the
sidewalks in 1891, and newspaper Le Figaro in 1904. 151 Engineer and Municipal
Councilor Jules Armegnaud, a hygienic activist, forcefully connected what he called the
profusion of little structures encumbering our sidewalks with hygiene in his 1907 book
Let's Clean Up Paris. Mayor of the 2nd district and president of the Paris Association for
Art in the Street Ernst Levallois joined the fray with his 1910 book Clean Paris! 152
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, engineers, journalists, hygienists and
patriotic local activists called for public spaces (voies publiques) to be opened up and
cleaned out, a local manifestation of the hygiene movement that was closely connected
with the critiques of the city of worksites we saw in the previous chapter.
Hence neighborhoods, houses, apartments, night stands, Metro stations, and
sidewalks could all be opened in the struggle against Paris's excessive density, always
149(1) Rapport de l'Architecte des Promenades - Demande de Bureau de Tramway par la Cie Gle de
traction - Place de la Bastille angle et Boulevard Bourdon. (Formig, 20 Oct 1900): Les dicules de
tous genres deviennent si nombreux sur les voies publiques qu'il semble qu'une mesure gnrale serait
prendre pour empcher leur multiplication infinie qui s'accentue chaque jour. (2) Rapport de
l'Architecte des Promenades - Galeries souterraines de ncessit 28-30 Bd. Bonne Nouvelle - Demande
de la Socit des Lavatoirs souterrains (Formig 19 Fev. 1907). AP PEROTIN 10653 213
150 Rapport de l'Ingnieur ordinaire (Aug. 25, 1877) and Note (July 12, 1877), both from AP VONC 16.
151 Norma Evenson, Paris a Century of Change, pp. 20-21.
152 (1) Jules Armegnaud. Nettoyons Paris (Paris: Librarie moderne Maurice Bauche, 1907), p. xiii: ...la
profusion des dicules encombrent les trottoirs... (2) Ernst Levallois, Paris Propre! (Paris: Edouard
Cornly, 1910).

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done with an eye to preventing disease and facilitating the flow of light, air, water and
traffic. In the first two decades of the 20th century, hygienist scrutiny of individual
apartments, buildings and neighborhoods was joined by larger-scale projects, the
beginnings of urban planning. 153

Conclusion: The Emergence of City Planning, c. 1902-1914

Claretie and Fabre were not the only Parisians in this era who noticed a change in
the scale of urban life and urban consciousness. While hygienists in this era moved from
scrutinizing individual apartments and buildings to scrutinizing entire neighborhoods,
from epidemic sociology to epidemic geography, so to speak, a new way of
understanding the city as a whole (eventually a new discipline) was born: urbanisme (city
planning).
As Paul Rabinow has shown, the road to modern French urbanism was long and
winding, drawing on a diverse, international body of sources. 154 Somewhere around the
turn of the century, a group of French architects including Tony Garnier and Henri Prost,
associated with the Institut de France's Villa Medici in Rome, began to produce plans for
entire cities. What made these plans new and modern was their comprehensive and
interdisciplinary scope, combining social, spatial and scientific elements, and
synthesizing concerns for aesthetics, traffic, communication, hygiene, housing, green
space and zoning. Recognizing the built environment as heterogeneous, city planning
tried to synthesize work on the social, spatial, technological and ecological conditions of
153 Wolf on Henard, Rabinow, Charvet book on Fortifications.
154 Rabinow includes the growing German discussion of Stadtbau set off by Camillo Sitte in 1889,
Belgian Charles Buls' 1893 pamphlet L'Esthetique des Villes, and Ebenezer Howard's 1902 treatise The
Garden Cities of To-morrow. See French Modern, Ch. 7, pp. 211-251.

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the city.
These developments were a long time coming. British and American writers had
been talking about the laying out of cities since the early-mid 1870s 155 , and
transatlantic dialog was ongoing. In 1882, Popular Science translated an article from the
Revue Scientifique by M. Badoureau for American audiences, who cited Haussmann as
an international model, a point of origin for this type of comprehensive urban
planning. 156 In 1910, F. Bottge reviewed recent German ideas in city planning for
American audiences, claiming the discipline was only a decade old, and that the Germans
had invented it. 157 Scholars have disputed these chronologies as much as contemporaries
did. 158
In Paris, however, urbanism emerged not only from decades of international
intellectual dialog, but also from the very practical and local experience of the city's
social, spatial and epidemic problems, which we've seen throughout this chapter.
155 (1) Leonard Kip, "The Building of Our Cities." Hours at Home: a Popular Monthly of Instruction and
Recreation 11 (July 1870): 206-212; (2) P. Gerard, How to Build a City (Philadelphia: Review Printing
House, 1872); (3) J. B. Waring, "On The Laying Out Of Cities." Papers Read at the Royal Institute of
British Architects. Session 1872-73. (London: The Institute, 1873), pp. 141-155; (4) Britton Armstrong
Hill, Liberty and Law Under Federative Government (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1874), see
esp. Ch. 2, "The Laying out of Cities," pp. 67-73.
156 M. Badoureau, The Development of Cities, The Popular Science Monthly vol. 21 (May-Oct., 1882),
pp. 391-395.
157 F. Bottge, The Art Of Laying Out Cities, Cassier's Magazine: An Engineering Monthly 38 (October
1910):483-489. Professor Emeritus at Cornell John Reps has compiled an outstanding set of sources
online, called Urban Planning, 1794-1918: An International Anthology of Articles, Conference Papers,
and Reports, invaluable for reconstructing the international dialog at the origins of urban planning:
http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/homepage.htm.
158 Nicholas Papayanis highlighted the period from 1750-1850 as formative for the discipline, see his
Csar Daly and the Emergence of Modern Urban Planning Planning Perspectives 24/1 (Oct. 1, 2006),
pp. 325-346, and Planning Paris Before Haussmann (Johns Hopkins, 2004); Rabinow argued for a
gradual development somewhere in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, see French Modern, pp. 12, 82,
211-251; Haussmann remains a common landmark. See: Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin,
Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructure, technological mobilities and the urban condition
(Routledge, 2001), pp. 53-6, and Papayanis's discussion of Francoise Choay's work, Planning Paris
Before Haussmann, pp. 1-5. Lastly, the rebuilding of Lisbon's Baixa neighborhood after the devastating
earthquake of 1755 is often cited as an important landmark in city planning, see Nicholas Schrady, The
Last Day: Wrath, Ruin and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (Viking, 2008).

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Urbanism, just the basic idea that urban development should be planned rather than
allowed to run free, was a sensible reaction to four decades of watching the city suffer
from lack of light, air and space. Thus the most famous point of origin for French
urbanism outside Haussmann and Le Corbusier is Eugne Hnard (1849-1923), who
worked at the Travaux de Paris since 1882 and was centrally involved with design and
construction for the 1889 and 1900 Universal Expositions. 159 He was a member of the
Muse Social's network of reformers, helped spread the Garden Cities idea in France, and
is often credited with inventing the traffic circle (he called it carrefour giration).
Between 1902 and 1909 he published eight essays on urban planning known as
the Studies on the Transformations of Paris. 160 Spanning road and bridge planning,
Haussmanesque alignment, extension and widening of major streets, park planning,
traffic planning for pedestrians and automobiles, and renovation of the city's
fortifications, these eight studies envisioned a Paris of streamlined traffic flows and
generous open space and green spacea more beautiful, more efficient and more
hygienic city. Hnard's pioneering urban plans were the spatial counterpart to the Muse
Social's attempts to build governmental and philanthropic infrastructures in these years
for solving Paris's problems with housing, hygiene and density. They are the spatialvisual manifestation of the group's ideas about social organization, not unlike Fabre's
skyscraper plans. 161

159 Peter M. Wolf. Eugne Hnard and the beginning of urbanism in Paris 1900-1914. IHP-CRU (joint
publication of International Federation for Housing and Planning and Centre de Recherche
d'Urbanisme), 1968. Wolf uses the words "urbanisme" and "city planning" interchangeably, arguing that
the word "urbanisme" did not appear in France until about 1910-1912.
160 Eugne Hnard. Etudes sur les transformations de Paris et autre crits sur l'urbanisme (Paris:
L'Equerre, 1982).
161Rabinow, French Modern, pp. 254-7; Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France, pp. 253-6. Fabre
was also connected to the Muse Social network, through Charles Gide.

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In 1903, George Benoit-Lvy founded the French Association for Garden Cities,
the same year that Dr. Albert Calmette, a distinguished pathologist from the Pasteur
Institute, demanded that all French cities currently surrounded by military fortification
walls dismantle them and reserve the space for parks, public health facilities, worker's
gardens, and the general enjoyment of impoverished families. Hnard drew up similar
plans for expanded park space the same year. By 1907-8, this idea of demolishing the
fortifications and shantytowns of the Zone and replacing them with a ring of public parks
and playing fields, had become the official campaign of the Muse Social's new Section
on Urban and Rural Hygiene, which officially adopted Hnard's 1903 plan.
The campaign was timed to coincide with the municipal elections of May, 1908;
they spread 12,000 posters around Paris reading Air, parks and sports! Hygienists
Louis Bonnier and Paul Juillerat, who we met earlier in this chapter, were members of the
Hygiene Section. Familiar faces from the anti-tuberculosis movement signed on, too,
from the Touring-Club to Municipal Councilor Ambroise Rendu, who submitted the
plans to the Municipal Council in 1908, and would submit the plans to redevelop the lots
insalubres in 1909. Deputy Alexandre Ribot, also campaigning for the 1908 law on lowcost housing, joined the campaign with a public address, claiming the state had a new
sense of its social duty. The redevelopment plan was finally decided in 1912 and
demolition started 1919. 162 Sociologist Marie Charvet's recent study of the debate about
redeveloping the fortifications argues that urbanism grew out of the concerns of the
hygiene movement somewhere betweeen 1880 an 1919, closely following Rabinow's

162 Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France, pp. 245-268.

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chronology. 163 This recent literature from Rabinow, Horne and Charvet, then, shows the
deep connections in these years between the campaigns for low-cost housing, public
housing, tuberculosis prevention, redevelopment of the fortifications, and redevelopment
of the lots insalubres. These studies show that French urbanism emerged from what I
have called opening the city throughout this chapter.
By the eve of World War I, Paris's spatial conditions were strained. Between 1910
and 1914, the far left mounted a campaign to address what they called a crise de la vie
chre (crisis of the cost of living), which attracted support from the illustrators of
L'Assiette au Beurre, as well as from L'Humanit and the broader syndicalist
movement. 164 In these same years, George Cochon was building his popular and
increasingly spectacular movement for tenants' rights. By 1912-13, Paris was awash in
discussion of a crisis of rents, a phrase which had been used before, for example,
tellingly, in 1857 and 1882-3. 165 Between 1900 and 1910, rents up to 500 fr./year grew
between 10% and 14%, while rents from 500-1,000fr. grew only 8%. 166 Demographer
and statistician Jacques Bertillon, who had diagnosed Paris's overcrowding in 1891,
oversaw popular encyclopedia Je sais tout's investigation of the rent crisis in 1912, which

163 Marie Charvet, Les Fortifications de Paris: de l'hyginisme l'urbanisme, 1880-1919 (Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2005).
164 (1) Le Prix de La Vie L'Humanit, Sept. 3, 1910; (2) Jean-Marie Flonneau, "Crise de vie chre et
mouvement syndical 1910-1914" Le Mouvement social, No. 72 (Jul. - Sep., 1970), pp. 49-81; (3) Tyler
Stovall, The Consumers' War: Paris, 1914-1918, French Historical Studies 31/2 Special Issue: War,
Society, and Culture, ed. David A. Bell and Martha Hanna (2008); (4) L'Assiette au Beurre ran a special
issue on la vie chre, no. 496 (Oct. 1, 1910), see Stanley Appelbaum, ed. French Satirical Drawings
from L'Assiette au Beurre (Dover, 1978), p. 69; (5) Finally, see the series in the National Archives
labeled Crises de la vie chre: enqutes, voeux, statistiques, brochures et journaux, 1900-1913 (F12
7023-7027).
165 (1) Comte A. de Tourdonnet, De la crise des loyers, Revue contemporaine 30 (Feb.-Mar., 1857), pp.
696-730; (2) Andr Cochut, De l'enchrissement des marchandises et des services: causes et effets,
Revue des deux mondes vol. 60 (Nov.-Dec., 1883), pp. 512-552.
166 Henri Biget, Le logement de l'ouvrier: tude de lgislation des habitations bon march en France et
l'tranger (Paris: Jouve et Cie, 1913), p. 23.

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showed an additional growth of rents by another 15-16% in 1911 alone. 167 The need for
low-cost housing was greater than ever. Bonnevay's law of Nov. 23, 1912 created the first
public offices for low-cost housing, and the city of Paris held a competition for building
designs.
Responding to long-standing concerns that the city was bursting, the
departmental government called a Commission d'extension de Paris (Commission for the
Extension of Paris), which made a comprehensive 1913 study of built space, open space
and green space. The commission debated demolishing the fortifications, expanding the
city limits, increasing park space and cleaning up the city, writing Since the epoch of the
Renaissance...we desire in the city more light, more air, space. 168 Pressed by influential
reformers like Eugne Hnard and others at the Muse Social, Paris's municipal and
departmental governments began to push for more and more fundamental re-orderings of
urban space. But urbanism, like public housing and the redevelopment of both the
fortifications and the lots insalubres, was a late-comer to Paris's turn of the century
debate on housing, hygiene and urban density. All of these new, large-scale projects for
repairing Paris's nagging social and spatial problems were hatched between the 1890s and
the 1910s, interrupted by the First World War, and not realized until the 1920s.
Meanwhile, long-standing dreams of opening the city were disappointed.
In the last two chapters we saw that Parisian discussions of transportation between
the 1870s and 1910s often revolved around the assumption of Paris's basic inadequacy in
this area. But in spite of this perception (or because of it), transportation development in

167 Jacques Bertillon, La crise des loyers Je Sais Tout (Apr-May, 1912), pp. 697-704.
168 Prefecture de la Seine. Commission d'extension de Paris vol. 1 aperu historique and vol. 2
considrations techniques prliminaires (Paris: Chaix, 1913). Quote, vol. 2, p. 45.

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this era was booming. By 1914, Paris enjoyed an impressive array of transportation
networks: autobuses, tramways and the Mtro. As we have seen in this chapter, the same
era turned out quite differently for Paris's built environment. In spite of decades of
argument about housing, hygiene and density, these problems remained acute. New
legislations in the 1880s regulated building height and set basic standards for access to
toilets, water, light and air. Jules Siegfried's law of 1894 created financial incentives for
worker housing or low-cost housing development projects in the periphery and
suburbs. The public health law of 1902-3 gave the authorities the right to intervene more
in buildings, pushing the boundaries of the public further into private space. The laws of
1906, 1908 and 1912, created government assistance for developing low-cost housing. As
lingering problems remained unsolved, a language of crisis emerged. Much more than in
the case of transportation infrastructures, the authorities in Paris were weighed down by
Haussmann's legacy in dealing with the built environment. The power of landlords, a lopsided housing market, liberal ideologies about property, the controversy around
expropriations and a simple lack of money kept Paris's various dreams of opening the city
from being realized until the 1920s.
The ongoing rush of immigration to Paris decisively overtaxed infrastructures
throughout the long 19th century. As Michael Wagenaar argued, between 1850 and 1914
the built environment and infrastructure were increasingly unable to meet modern
demands, amounting to an urban crisis. The problems were seemingly endless:
poverty, crime, health, hygiene, and disease, sanitation, water supply, and traffic. As
Wagenaar put it, French cities were confronted with the alarming state of public health,

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physical decay, congestion, and increased pollution.169 Describing Paris's early 19th
century urban crisis, David Jordan used very similar terms:
All the basic urban services collapsed under this burden. Water, sewers, hospitals,
police, transportation, education, commercenothing functioned adequately.
Pedestrians and carts could no longer use the same space. Complaints as well as
demands and schemes for improvement issued from every quarter. Then came the
ghastly cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849... 170
The similarity between these two depictions of different eras is significant. It shows that
Paris was consistently unable to solve its urban crisis from the 1830s through 1914. The
authorities, under pressure from an increasingly sophisticated and insistent public dialog
about public works and critical infrastructures like housing, water, and transportation,
were constantly trying to catch up with population growth, combat wear and tear, and
meet changing expectations about the moral and material standards of civilization. But
expectations about the built environment, the standards for housing, hygiene and density
we have seen throughout this chapter, were consistently disappointed. Parisians tried
opening the city in a number of different ways, but only piecemeal progress was made.
Hnard claimed that as a devoted, patriotic Parisian, born and raised in the capital,
he was as proud of his city as anyone else. But those who shout Paris, City of Light or
Paris, Queen City do little to maintain the city's level of development as a model of
civilization. The city's reputation could not last without the daily work of ongoing
maintenance and improvement. Those who fall asleep on the job, content to boast
about their city without maintaining it, ...will wake up one day very confused and very
disillusioned, in perceiving that they have been left behind in many ways by other great
169 Wagenaar, Conquest of the Center or Flight to the Suburbs? Divergent Metropolitan Strategies in
Europe, 1850-1914. Journal of Urban History 19/1, Nov. 1992, pp. 61-2. See also Nye, Crime,
Madness and Politics, pp. 54-6.
170 Jordan, Life and Labors, p. 96.

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capitals. 171 Throughout the period from 1870 to 1914, the built environment was one
nagging place where Parisians worried their city lagged behind. As Hnard put it, it was
never enough to reinscribe the city's reputationone always had to dream of the future,
as well. In this chapter we have seen various Parisian dreams about opening the city,
dreams which were difficult to realize between 1870 and 1914, and remained
fundamentally unfinished.
As Pariss urban problems scaled up, urbanism emerged to manage the growing
complexity, heterogeneity and fragility of the built environment. Born in dreams of
opening the city, this new discipline sought to integrate diverse concerns like social
reform, spatial organization, disease control and architectural aesthetics. Urbanists wrote
scripts not only for the forms of buildings and streets, but also for flows of people, light,
air and microbes. This attempt at a comprehensive, interdisciplinary view of the city was
designed to take on the problems of Pariss urban modernity in all their complexityfor
example the social inequalities of the housing market, the physical damage caused by
delinquent contractors or the flood of 1910, the political headache of Montmartres direct
actions, or the epidemic dangers of overcrowded tenements and unequal access to
sanitation infrastructure. To solve Pariss long-standing urban crisis, urbanism would
have to manipulate the built environment as the most basic of urban infrastructures. As
built space became more complex, more heterogeneous and more fragile, this task
became more daunting in scope and scale.

171 Hnard, Etudes sur les transformations de Paris, pp. 57-8.

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Chapter 5: Flows of Water and Waste

Water is both a basic human need and one of humanity's oldest technologies. It
has driven waterwheels, clocks, steam engines, factories, mills and power plants. It drives
agriculture, industry, transportation, sanitation and recreation. In the home it is used for
cooking, cleaning, bathing and gardening. It helps fight fires and is a cooling agent for
living bodies and machines. It is the primordial element of hygiene, a symbol of purity
across cultures. 1
For cities, bodies of water are navigable, drinkable, a source of power and
irrigation, a way to remove waste and therefore a key to hygiene. Richard White
famously called the Columbia River an organic machine, an energy system which,
although modified by human interventions, maintains its natural, its 'unmade' qualities.
More recently historians of technology have coined the term envirotechnical for things
like bodies of water, complex systems which confound our distinctions between nature
and technology. 2 It is rivers' ability to produce energy and do work, just as technologies
do, which has attracted human settlement for thousands of years. As Cornelius Disco

1 For more on the many meanings and uses of water, see In this issue, Martin's Reuss's Introduction,
and Steven Jackson's Writing the Global Water Crisis from Technology and Culture's recent special
issue on water, vol. 49, no. 3 (July, 2008), pp. 531-547 and 773-779.
2 Richard White, The Organic Machine (Hill and Wang, 1995), p. ix. The term envirotech emerges
from the work of historians of technology working closely with the special interest group of The
Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) with the same name: Sara Pritchard, Jim Williams,
Daivd Nye and Thomas Zeller.

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argued, cities have an affinity for rivers and their multifarious potential. 3 So Paris lives
on and by the Seine. 4
In nineteenth century Europe, as elite projects like Haussmannization wired major
cities for globalization, city dwellers became dependent on a tangle of roads and rails,
pipes and wires for basic needs like food, water and mobility. Maxime du Camp
recognized that in addition to these technical networks (he named the postal network,
telegraph, railways and omnibuses, for example), Paris was also dependent on an
envirotechnical network: the Seine. In 1875, du Camp wrote that the Seine ...is one of
the major avenues by which the capital supplies itself, it completes the ensemble of our
organs of communication, and in addition it has a special existence, represented by the
industries which live on it and by it. Du Camp noted that Paris depended on the Seine
for many things, including raw materials wood and coal and basic foodstuffs wine and
grain. Shipping also carried vinegar, oils, trois-six (a French spirit), sugar, coffee, soap,

3 Cornelius Disco, Taming the Rhine: Economic Connection and Urban Competition from Urban
Machinery, ed. Mikael Hrd and Thomas J. Misa (MIT, 2008), pp. 23-48.
4 For these reasons, water is also becoming an important topic in urban studies, though the historians of
technology clearly have a lead in what remains a young field for everyone. John Reader's recent Cities
(Open City Books, 2006) is a notable exception, but then Reader self-consciously takes an ecological
point of view on cities. The real leader here is Resources Of The City: Contributions To An
Environmental History Of Modern Europe, ed. Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin, Genevive MassardGuilbaud (Ashgate, 2005). Another important example is Petri S. Juuti & Tapio S. Katko (eds), Water,
Time and European Cities:History matters for the Futures, a multinational study funded by the
European Commission, available online at www.watertime.net. The European Cities and Technology
Reader, ed. David C. Goodman (Routledge/Open University, 1999) has some treatment of sewers and
water supply, but little on the role that bodies of water play in cities. Paul Stanton Kibel's Rivertown:
Rethinking Urban Rivers (MIT, 2007), a collection of essays about American riverfront development,
largely stays within the methodological bounds of urban planning. The number of more or less
comprehensive urban studies which include no significant treatment of water is striking: The American
Cities and Technology Reader, ed. Gerrylynn K. Roberts, Philip Steadman (Routledge/Open University,
1999); Ronan Paddison, Handbook of Urban Studies (Sage, 2001); Michael Pacione, The City in Global
Context (Routledge, 2002); The Blackwell City Reader Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson, eds. (Blackwell,
2002); The City Reader, ed. Richard T. LeGates, Frederic Stout (Routledge, 2003); The City Cultures
Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, Iain Borden (Routledge, 2004); Key Concepts in Urban Studies,
ed. Mark Gottdiener, Leslie Budd (Sage, 2005); The Global Cities Reader, by Neil Brenner, Roger Keil
(Routledge, 2005). The field remains quite young.

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animal fodder, fish, metal, cotton, pottery, paper and furniture to Paris. 5 The Seine was
also a source of life-giving water and a way to remove waste. Du Camp wrote that it was
at once the watering trough and the general sewer. 6 Cities, like any organism or
ecosystem, need to balance inputs of fresh nutrients with outputs of waste. For all of
these reasons, the Seine is a crucial component of Paris's urban machinery. 7
As a technology and a natural resource, then, water is precious for cities. Thus it is
not surprising to see it at the center of social, cultural and political conflicts and
negotiations. But if there is always a human-human struggle at work to control water as a
resource, this entails a struggle between humans and nature, a human bid to control what
will always remain a natural resource. In this chapter, we'll see the Seine in flood
asserting its power, and the weather punishing the city with thirst and stink during heat
waves and water shortages.
In late 19th and early 20th century Paris, water was at the center of the hygiene
movement. The very basis of life, water is both the most everyday of things and the most
primordial element of hygiene. Reforming Pariss practice of water use touched on
hygiene at many levels, from practices of personal cleanliness in eating, drinking, and
bathing, to waste water removal, pollution of the Seine, and water-born illnesses like
typhoid and cholera, which continued to plague the city in the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed,
when water engineers called for the assainissement of the Siene, between the 1870s and
1900s, they envisioned something not unlike the assainissement of houses we saw in
Chapter 4. Opening the city and reforming the city's use of water were often connected as
5 Maxime du Camp, Paris ses organes ses fonctions sa vie, vol. 1, pp. 283, 313-318.
6 Maxime du Camp, Paris ses organes ses fonctions sa vie, vol. 5 (Paris: Hachette, 1874), pp. 283.
7 Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, ed. Mikael Hrd and Thomas J. Misa (MIT Press,
2008).

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two basic hygienic missions. As reformer-hygienist Jules Simon put it, We'll start by
giving the Parisian population air and water, and we'll have to see for the rest. 8
Reforming the way Parisians used water was thus an important point of departure for
remaking the whole of their everyday practice. If there was any place to start in purifying
the social body, it was with water.
In this chapter, I consider water from three angles. In the first and longest section,
on Paris's strained water supply, I consider water as a natural resource and a human need,
telling the story of the Water Service's struggle to meet the needs of a growing population
with a growing appetite for water. In this section, we'll see the city challenged by water
shortages in the summers of 1895-1906, as the Water Service worked to modernize the
city's water system. In the second section on waste disposal, sewers and cleaning up the
Seine, I consider water as a hygienic technology, manipulated in various ways by
humans: filtered, measured, chemically analyzed, and polluted. This section shows Paris's
growing ecological footprint. In the final section on the flooding of 1876, 1882-3 and
1910, I consider the Seine as a force of nature, always just outside of human control.

Le manque d'eau Paris's Water Supply Shortages

Until 1854, Paris had no water distribution system, but a patchwork of sources
serving local needs. Most potable water came from area rivers (the Seine, Marne, Ourcq
and Bivre) which were also the major channels of navigation and the main drains for

8 In the preface to DuMensil's L'Hygine Paris (1890), p. 10. As Jean-Pierre Goubert put it, In France
as in Britain, the rapid strides made by the notion of public health during the 1830s had the virtue of
integrating the question of water supply into a larger context which included the problem of housing,
the cleanliness of towns, bodily hygiene, domestic habits, poverty and disease, The Conquest of Water,
p. 47.

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human and industrial waste. In addition the city was dotted with wells, giving Parisians
access to groundwater. For centuries monasteries and convents in the city kept reservoirs
and beginning in the early modern period water could be bought from water carriers
(porteurs d'eau), who collected water from various sources and sold it by the pail around
the city.
As long as Pariss population and productive capacity remained relatively small,
the age-old practice of drawing clean water upstream and dumping dirty downstream
could continue. But given the dramatic urban growth and industrialization of the
nineteenth century, the Seine soon exceeded its capacity to support the city's population.
Well-known hygienist and hydrologist George Bechmann realized this, writing:
When men were spread out in small groups over vast spaces, nature almost always
furnished for them all the elements necessary for their health in profusion: the air
they breathed was pure, the water they drank contained no harmful substances,
the ground they walked on took care of rapidly transforming any perishable
organic matter that running water had not carried away.
But, to the extent that groups became larger and more compact, that the surface
occupied by each of them increased, and that greater numbers of human beings
found themselves together on the same expanse of terrain, more and more serious
causes of insalubrity appeared, in the face of which nature was not long in
showing itself powerless. So it was necessary to come to its aid with more
perfected and more complex means, as agglomerations were denser and more
extensive.
From this fact emerged artificial life, which is the condition of existence of the
inhabitants of cities in general, and without which it would not have been
possible to develop the enormous capitals whose rapid growth raises more
difficult problems each day and calls without cease for new studies and constant
efforts. 9
In the cities of 19th century Europe, an important part of this artificial life was a
set of technologically mediated ways of distributing water: canals, pumps, pipes,
fountains. As Jean-Pierre Goubert has shown, over the course of the century these
9 George Bechmann, Salubrit urbaine, distributions d'eau et assainissement. 2 vols. 2nd edition
(Encyclopedie des travaux publics, 1899), p. 7.

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fixtures became more and more common in both public and private spaces, as well as
more and more evoked as measures of civilization. Public fountains became fashionable
in the first half of the century, enlightened gifts from governments to the people, but they
rarely met the public's real needs. 10 From 1854 to 1914, the Travaux de Paris struggled to
keep up with the growing needs of the population, by both piping the city and tapping
new sources. But Parisian engineers also struggled to keep up with changing standards
for water use. Ironically, public standards were rising in part because these same
engineers were aggressively promoting higher standards in the educational campaigns of
the hygiene movement. 11 The republican project of moral and material improvement
often faltered because moral improvement outstripped material improvement. Just as
public demand for transportation and housing was often disappointed in this era, so was
demand for water. Across Paris's nineteenth century, the public learned that it was
entitled to public services before those who promised it (the government and its experts)
could deliver on their promises. This is particularly clear in the case of Paris's water
supply.
Haussmann and Belgrand began the city's comprehensive water distribution
network in 1854. Belgrands idea (called double canalisation, double piping) was to
outfit the city with two separate networks of pipe, one supplying river water for public
uses (street cleaning, watering public gardens and parks), and the other providing eau de
source, natural spring or river water, for private, domestic uses (cooking, cleaning,
drinking, bathing). Belgrand worked the existing, partial network of pipes for distributing

10 For more on water and civilization in the 19th century, see Goubert, The Conquest of Water.
11 Goubert's study of hygienic education in the French press, schools, and hospitals blazed the trail for this
topic.

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canal and river water, inherited from the public works of previous regimes, into the
public service, and designed a whole new network for the private service. 12 Both sets of
pipes would be routed through the city's new sewer mains, as we will see later in this
chapter. The eau de source would come from the Cochepies and Nemours springs, about
110 kilometers south-east of Paris in Bourgogne, and would be carried to Paris on the
grand Aqueduc de la Vanne.
Such a large-scale plan took time and money. In the meantime, the city was
supplied with a provisional quantity of fresh water from the Dhuis (or Dhuys) springs.
The Aqueduc de la Dhuis opened in 1865, carrying an average 20,000 cubic meters of
water a day. But even after Haussmann and Belgrand's decisive intervention, the city still
did not enjoy water distribution facilities adequate to its needs. In 1872, British aristocrat,
art collector and philanthropist Richard Wallace found Paris (his home for many years),
so under-served in terms of water that he famously donated around 100 public fountains.
A number of Wallace Fountains can still be seen in Paris today. 13 Work on the
Aqueduc de la Vanne ran 1863 to 1870, and it was not publicly opened until 1874. By the
time it started delivering eau de source, 20 years after it was deemed necessary, it was
already insufficient to meet the populations needs. Haussmann and Belgrand had
indicated the path ahead, but the Third Republic inherited a lot of unfinished work.
In 1871, the city's network of pipes reached 1,431,000 metersan impressive
figure, but we should remember that it was landlords' responsibility to connect their

12 For more on Haussmann and Belgrand's sewer planning, see: (1) Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and
Sewermen, pp. 25-36; (2) Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water, pp. 61-7 and 196-9; (3) David
Jordan, Transforming Paris, pp. 267-97.
13 Richard Kaufmann, Paris of To-day, translated from the Danish by Olga Flinch (New York: Cassell
Publishing Company, 1891, Ch. 16 The Water Supply, pp. 166-172.

347
houses to the city network with pipe and subscribe to the Water Service. In 1873, of
70,000 houses in the city, 15,706 subscribed only to river water from the canal d'Ourcq
(60 francs a cubic meter), and 22,183 subscribed to the more expensive mix of eau de
source and water from the Seine (120 francs a cubic meter). Only half of the houses in
Paris had any kind of subscription to the water service, and only one third subscribed to
the more expensive private service. 14 But water use was steadily growing; by 1881
there were 49,500 subscriptions, or two thirds of houses in Paris. 15
During the unusually hot summers of 1880 and 1881, the water supply was
strained. In 1880, household wastewater and storm water were no longer enough to flush
the sewers, so their fermenting contents began to smell, contributing to the episode that
David Barnes has called the Great Stink of Paris. 16 During the heatwave of July, 1881,
reservoir levels dropped, leading to a water shortage. Like the Great Stink, this shortage
provoked much public outcry. As Chief Water Engineer Couche put it in 1882, Few
subjects have occupied Paris more, for several weeks, than what we have come to call
'the lack of water' of this past July. 17 According to Couche, everyone in Paris agreed on
the inadequacy of the city's water supply, so much that a new expression, manque d'eau
(literally 'lack of water'), had arisen to describe the situation. Parisians discovered the
water shortage in 1881. That same year, the municipal council commission on water and
sewers set a long-term goal of supplying Paris with 1,000,000 cubic meters of water a

14 Prefecture de la Seine. Direction des eaux et des gouts. Reneignements gnraux sur les eaux et les
gouts de la ville de Paris (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1875).
15 M. Couche, Ingenieur en Chef des eaux de Paris. Le service des eaux en juillet 1881 (Paris, Jan. 1882)
AP VO3 220.
16 See David Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Stuggle Against Filth and
Germs (Johns Hopkins, 2006), p. 1: In 1880, a pervasive and disgusting stench afflicted the city for
most of the summer, provoking a popular outcry and a minor political crisis.
17 Couche. Le service des eaux en juillet 1881 (Paris, Jan. 1882) AP VO3 220, p. 1.

348
day, as opposed to the then current supply of 390,000 cubic meters a day. 18
Hence the early 1880s was a busy time for Paris's water engineers, who embarked
on two projects. The first was a hydrological study of northern France, to identify new
sources of fresh water for the city. The second was outfitting the city with an increasingly
sophisticated and diversified collection of water-processing technologies, from steampumps to draw water from the river, to chemical and bacteriological methods of water
purification and new reservoirs. Both the public and private (potable) distribution
networks grew. As engineers worked to complete the first project, they used the second to
make up for the lack of water. Thus, sometime around 1880 they began to back-up the
city's supply of eau de source with river water in case of shortage during the hot season.
But this expedient measure was not always welcomed. 19 Defenders of Belgrand's
principle of dual piping like Eugne Poubelle were uneasy with distributing river water
for domestic uses. Many followed hygienist Dr. Thoinot in linking the distribution of
river water with Paris's 1882 typhoid outbreak. 20
Poubelle became Prefect of the Seine in 1883, and immediately began a series of
hygienic reforms: the first concerned sewers (Nov. 4, 1883), the second concerned trash
collection (March 7, 1884), and the third concerned the water supply (Dec. 8, 1884). No
Prefect of the Seine is more famous for hygienic work, and Jean-Pierre Goubert has
credited him with achieving the utopia of Haussmann by completing Paris's water
18 Conseil Municipal de Paris. Note du directeur des travaux de Paris sur les travaux urgents
entreprendre dans la ville de Paris, et sur les resources affecter leur execution, 1881 (AP VO3
220), p. 1.
19 As Robert Lon put it, Since 1880, in the summer, a part of the water piping had to be supplied with
river water...a disastrous expedient which could only be provisional. See Paris et son alimentation en
eau, La Revue de Paris, Dec. 15, 1913, pp. 849-69.
20 See L. Thoinot, La fivre typhode Paris de 1870 a 1899. Role actuel des eaux de source." Bulletins
Et Mmoires de la Socit Mdicale Des Hpitaux de Paris 3d ser.:v.16 (Paris: Masson, 1899), pp. 645669.

349
system. 21 In December of 1884, as he delivered a report to the Municipal Council on
increasing Paris's water supply, he said: Today, because of the increasing alteration
[read: pollution] of the Seine, both before and after Paris, eau de source is best from the
point of view of salubrity. Many hygienists maintained that eau de source was the only
safe choice for human consumption. The problem was ensuring that it was the only kind
of water distributed to private dwellings. If two kinds of water were provided to each
house, Poubelle asked, how could we ensure that tenants used them for their proper
purposes? It was unacceptable to think that the city might supply river water for domestic
uses and be responsible for further hygienic problems (or typhoid outbreaks). The only
solution, he argued, was to provide only eau de source for all domestic uses. 22
He thought Paris needed to more than double its water supply, adding an
additional 240,000 cubic meters a day to the 140,000 cubic meters a day then provided by
the Dhuis and Vanne aqueducts. The water would come from two sets of sources, even
farther from Paris: the Vigne and Avre springs, 134 kilometers away, and the Voulzie and
Durteint springs, 135 kilometers away. Paris's growing demand for water was widening
the circle of its ecological impact. Time and money were also needed: the two aqueducts
were estimated at 62 million francs, declared a work of public utility in 1890 and not
opened until 1893. 23
Poubelles 1884 call to distribute only eau de source for domestic uses, then, was

21 The Conquest of Water, p. 67.

22 See Poubelles Memoire au Conseil Municipal (Dec. 8, 1884), in Nouvelle Derivation deau de
Source (Paris: Imprimerie Municipal, 1884), p. 3: unit d'eau et de canalisation l'intrieur des maisons
et, par suite, distribution exclusive de l'eau de source pour la boisson, les soins de propret individuels
et pour tous les usages de l'habitation.
23 Ibid, pp. 6-7. See also the comprehensive overview of Paris's water system created for the 1900
Exposition: Notice sur le service des eaux et de l'assainissement de Paris (Paris: C. Branger, 1900),
pp. 60-2.

350
a statement of goals, not a report on current conditions. Municipal reports of 1892
suggested that at least half of the buildings in Paris were still without a subscription to
eau de source, even though the city's dual pipe network was finally complete. 24 The
water service continued to distribute river water in the pipes of the private service,
especially during summer heat or drought, at least through 1911. As Poubelle himself
admitted, river and canal water from the public service would always be available from
common spigots on the ground floors of buildings, for washing courtyards and stables,
for watering gardens, and for various industrial uses. But what, then, was to stop tenants
of buildings without a subscription to eau de source from going downstairs, several times
a day, to gather water from the common tap to bathe, cook or clean? This
disproportionately affected lower-rent buildings, more likely without a subscription to the
private service. The Prefecture of the Seine could not control water use unless it could
control the way landlords equipped their buildings and the way that tenants used water
another ambitious program for controlling design and use, like the housing reforms we
saw in the last chapter.
Poubelle's entire term in office, 1883-1896, was characterized by frontal conflicts
with the municipal authorities on the one hand, and with Paris landlords on the other. His
administration fought for major interventions into Paris buildings, to address both the
city's housing and water problems. His most famous regulation, of 1884, ordered
landlords to provide their buildings with common garbage cans for the use of all tenants,
so that garbage could be stored away from living spaces. The regulation so upset

24 Ibid, p. 49-60. On p. 51, Le Mansois Duprey wrote: La double canalisation est complte et les
conduites sont partout porte des immeubles. This, at least, is what the administration wanted to
project. We'll see later in this chapter that the network did not, in fact, reach all parts of Paris.

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landlords and the newspapers that supported them (Le Figaro) that they named the cans
Poubelle after the Prefect, a word that still means trashcan in French today. In 1892,
subscription to the private water service was made obligatory, and in 1894, it became
obligatory to equip each dwelling with direct to sewer drainage (tout l'gout) for
wastewater. 25 These hygienic regulations throughout Poubelle's career were coordinated
with the housing reforms of 1884 and 1894 that we saw in the last chapter. Housing stock
and the city's water system were slowly upgraded from the 1880s to 1910s because
Poubelle and his successor Justin de Selves put pressure on Paris landlords in ways that
Haussmann would not.
Such measures of control were important, but it was difficult to conceal the
contradictions at hand. While the authorities wanted to encourage more water use, they
never could provide enough water, and no matter how much they educated the public
about the proper use of water, they did not trust the population to use water properly.
While the practical exigencies of governance suggested water control, the theoretical
exigencies of hygiene suggested more and more water use. The line between water use
and abuse was all too fine, the gap between ideals and practices too wide. The Water
Services actions could only be contradictory. In 1880, it equipped subscribing houses
with water-use counters for the first time, to prevent waste, but in 1892, even though it
did not have enough spring water to go around, subscribing to the Water Service was
made obligatory. 26
Landlords were not the only obstacle. The real issue was one of what Bruno
25 Matthew Gandy, The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space, p. 31.
26 Le Mansois Duprey. L'Oeuvre sociale de la municipalit Parisienne 1871-1891 (Paris: Imprimerie
Municipal, 1892). See also: Notice sur le service des eaux et de l'assainissement de Paris (Paris: C.
Branger, 1900), 58-9.

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Latour calls delegation, the process of assigning work to humans and technologies. 27
Poubelle's move to reform water-use practices by limiting access to waterby physically
shaping channels of water flowsuggests that the water service found pipes were more
compliant, easier to control, than people. Education campaigns put pressure on
users/tenants while regulation put pressure on landlords to modify buildings. In the
meantime, the local government could not deny its constituents access to water, and so
hygienically suspect sources of water continued flowing. The water service could control
which buildings had access to pipes, but they could not yet control what Parisians used to
make their soup. And so the complexity and heterogeneity of the citys water system
linking pipes, people and natural resourcesprevented the water service from realizing
their totalizing fantasy of remaking everyday water use.
Water engineers needed to control not only humans and technologies, but also
natural resources. Hence the ongoing search for more sources of fresh water drove
engineers farther and farther from Paris, a process which would increasingly put the
capital in conflict with the provinces. Ecological questions gave way quickly to politics.
In his 1889 article The Derivation of Sources for the Supply of Cities scholar of law
and politics Lon Aucoc wrote The combination which best serves the interests of city
dwellers and brings them precious advantages, the derivation of eau de source, entails
serious drawbacks for country dwellers who until then had enjoyed the derived waters.
In order to prevent political conflict between urban and rural spaces, he argued, projects
for supplying cities had to be carefully studied and planned. As Paris's population grew,
so did its appetite. Paris's water crisis threatened to deplete rural resources, spreading the
27 Bruno Latour, Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts, from The
Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (MIT, 1983).

353
difficulty of Paris's nineteenth century urban problems into a broad hinterland and setting
off regional conflict over natural resources. 28
The water supply was hooked to natural forces in other ways, as well. The
summer of 1895 brought another heat wave, the second Great Stink of Paris, and a
serious water shortage, which became a source of public outcry in the press and the
streets. 29 Following nearly a month of torrid heat without rain, reports began to appear in
newspapers between the 7th and 9th of September that the Seine's water level was 70
centimeters below normal and the stink was becoming unbearable. Paris's sewers drained
into the Seine at Clichy and St. Denis, but with the river so low, there was not enough
water to cover or wash away all of the waste, both animal and industrial, present in the
river. Le Petit Journal reported multiple islands of muck, or rather fecal matter, starting
to form on top of the water, and sludge (vase) deposited on the banks as the water
receded. After Clichy, the Seine was nothing more than an immense cesspool; and we
say pool because the current doesnt exist anymore to speak of. The water was
thickened and blackened and yet, the editors noted with shock and disgust, people
continued to swim in it, in a desperate attempt to relieve the infernal heat. 30
The 10th was the hottest September day on record, at 37C (98.6F). 31 On the 11th,
the Prefecture of the Seine posted notices throughout the city informing residents that,
28 Lon Aucoc, La drivation des sources pour l'alimentation des villes (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1889), p.
1. The article originally appeared in the Comptes rendus de l'Acadmie des sciences morales et
politiques and was then excerpted and reprinted by Picard.
29 The month of September, 1895 saw a flurry of editorials in several newspapers: (1) Le Petit Journal:
Les odeurs de la Seine (Sept. 8), Le regime de l'eau de source (Sept. 10), En voulez-vous des
microbes? (Sept. 11), L'eau de Seine (Sept. 13), Ernst Judet, L'eau et la politique (Sept. 14); (2) La
Petite Rpuiblique: La baisse de la Seine (Sept. 9), La chaleur (Sept. 10), De l'eau! (Sept. 13),
L'Eau de Seine (Sept. 16), Retour de l'eau de source (Sept. 18); (3) L'Intransigant: Paris sans
eau (Sept. 11), Paris sans eau (Sept. 13), L'eau de source: Plus d'eau de Seine (Sept. 18); (4) Le
Matin: L'eau de source (Sept. 12), mile Gautier, Paris qui boit (Sept. 16).
30 Les Odeurs de la Seine, Le Petit Journal, Sept. 8, 1895.
31 La Chaleur, La Petite Rpublique, Sept. 10, 1895.

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owing to a shortage of eau de source, the residents of the 1st4th districts, as well as the
better part of the 9th and 10th, would be supplied instead with water from the Seine for the
next 20 days. The press and the streets were filled with protest. Even though the water
was most likely coming from upstream of the main sewers, from the pump station at Ivry,
it was still the same river, after all, and journalists did not miss the opportunity to claim
that residents of the center city were drinking this blackened, unclean liquid that they
draw from the Seine, from the mouth of the sewers. 32 Among other vivid terms,
journalists called the water yellow, unclean, thick, nauseating, slimy, fetid, and warm. Le
Petit Journal said that it was of doubtful clarity, and hot as a double-boilerin fact, it
was more a pure of microbes than water, properly speaking. 33 Another paper
described ...the population, already panicked by the idea of microbes, of fevers, of
epidemics of all kinds. 34 At the very moment when the Seine was low and especially
dirty the water service had to start distributing it as potable water.
Talk of cholera and typhoid was soon to follow, in what became a full-on
indictment of the city authorities and their inability to properly govern the city, provide
for the basic needs of its residents, and take care of that master problem of urban life:
hygiene. Geographer mile Gautier saw the situation as ironic. How was it possible that
France's advanced civilization (his word) could produce high-speed trains and electric
light, but not meet the most basic of human needsfresh water? Appealing repeatedly to
hygienic scholarship and standards, Gautier, writing in a major newspaper, sought to
convince the public that the authorities were not keeping up with modern hygienic
32 M. Charnay, De leau! La Petite Rpublique, Sept. 13, 1895.
33 Le Rgime de lEau de Seine Le Petit Journal, Sept. 10, 1895.
34 L'Eau de source Le Matin, Sept. 12, 1895: la population dj affole par l'ide des microbes, des
fivres, des pidmies de toute nature.

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knowledge and practices, and therefore not keeping up with the progress of civilization. 35
Worse yet was continuing mistrust of the public from politicians and engineers,
quick to defend themselves against such criticisms by blaming the public for wasting
water. Humblot, Chief Engineer of the Water Service, said Parisians had been enjoying
a veritable aquatic orgy. Apart from drinking extra water and taking cold showers or
baths to relieve the heat, it was common practice to leave ones water running in the sink
to let it cool, and then leave ones carafe under the running water to chill it, so that it
would keep drinking water cool longer. Bienvenu, an engineer just beginning his wellknown work on the Mtro, suggested that some Parisians, including some in his building,
were leaving the water running all night, just to cool their apartmentsprecisely at the
moment when water was shortest and most needed. 36
These remarks were poorly chosen, only inflaming an already heated public
discussion. The contradictions were maddening: if the city engineers recognized that
humans needed extra water in uncommon heat like this, how could they expect Parisians
to conserve it? As one journalist put it, if Parisians have to endure a water shortage
during every heat wave, when thirst is greatest, that not only concerns hygienists, but
also logicians. 37 Although some newspapers confirmed Bienvenus suspicion that
Parisians left their taps running, others questioned its likelihood: Well! one journalist
wrote, we dont know what kind of building M. Bienvenu lives in, but it must have a
very special disposition. Most of the time, he explained, faucets are installed in kitchens

35 mile Gautier, Paris qui boit, Le Matin, Sept. 16, 1895. Gautier asked how Paris would keep up with
...les exigences lgitimes de la consommation [qui] vont en croissant indfiniment avec les progrs de
l'hygine consciente et l'extension ininterrompue de l'industrialisme?
36 Le Matin, Sept. 12, 1895.
37 Leau de Source: Paris qui boit et Paris qui gaspille, Le Matin, Sept. 12, 1895.

356
or bathrooms. Houses with taps in the bedrooms, or Parisians who left the tap in the
kitchen running to cool off the bedroom, must have been quite exceptional. 38 This was
a subtle way of suggesting Bienvenu's wealth and privilege, his being out of touch with
the public. Such caustic sarcasm was not uncommon among journalists that summer, and
who could blame them?they had first been deprived of water during a heat wave, and
then blamed for the shortage.
In an article called Water and politics, journalist Ernst Judet argued that the
water shortage demonstrated the powerlessness of the Water Service's engineers to
control the forces of nature: The powerlessness of our perfected civilization shines
before the phenomenon which overwhelms us, the habitual changing of the seasons.
Judet inverted narratives of progress, contrasting science and civilization with Paris's
current conditions, using words like monstrous and barbaric. As he explained, it is
precisely during the summer that people need the most water. To distribute water freely
in the winter and then ration it in the summer was a barbaric and absurd system. Far
from scolding the population for using water in the summer, he argued, we should
encourage it, because it is a condition of well-being and health which can only be denied
in case of siege and any contrary proposition is simply monstrous. In fact, Judet
argued, the water shortage showed why the French should stay close to their
revolutionary tradition, putting pressure on the authorities to deliver what was a public
right: water, only to be denied in case of siege. Parisians not only had a right to water,
but also to clean water. As another journalist would put it in 1898, following the
arguments of Gautier and Judet, The hygiene of water thus enters into the domain of the

38 Leau de Seine, Le Petit Journal, Sept. 13, 1895.

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state's obligations. 39
Judet's polemic explicitly reminded Parisians of the politics of water. Other
journalists made the point, too. Charnay wrote, The suppression of water during heat
waves has become commonplace, a subject for summer stories, quite useful for
journalists short on political news. 40 Charnay found the shortage a convenient prop for
denouncing the city's entire public works establishment:
Meanwhile, voil all that the municipal council of Paris has been able to do, now
that it holds sovereignty over budgetary revenues. Hundreds of millions are
wasted to open new streets, generally useless, except for landlords who receive
the indemnities from expropriation, to pave the least frequented but well inhabited
streets in wood, to construct sewers that plague the city and the suburbs. And
Paris has neither means of transport, nor even water to drink!
He even accused the water service of using eau de source to water gardens in the
quartiers de luxe, the posh neighborhoods on the west side. Like Judet, Charnay reversed
the narratives told by politicians and engineers to shore up their social power. It was not
the public that wasted water, but the authorities who wasted all sorts of resourceswater,
money and time. 41
In spite of all this controversy, the 1895 water shortage did not last 20 days, as
predicted. On September 16th, just 5 days after the distribution of river water was
announced, the temperature was dropping, the level of reservoirs was rising, and the city
informed residents that spring water would be gradually restored. To be safe, they
suggested that residents continue to boil their tap water for another two to three days. By
39 Jean Frollo, Ce qu'on boit Le Petit Parisien, July 8, 1898.
40 Ernst Judet, L'eau et la politique, Le Petit Journal, Sept. 14, 1895: L'impuissance de notre
civilisation perfectionne clate devant le phnomne dont nous accable le changement d'habitude des
saisons. Like Judet, journalist Charnay wondered why Parisians weren't making more of a fuss: M.
Charnay, De l'eau! La Petite Rpublique (Sept. 13, 1895): La suppression de l'eau pendant les
chaleurs caniculaires est devenue une habitude, une matire chroniques estivales fort utiles aux
journaux court de nouvelles politiques.
41 M. Charnay, Le retour de l'eau de source, La Petite Rpuiblique (Sept. 18, 1895), p. 1.

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the 18th, the water shortage was fading in the press; the controversy lasted only a week.
But Paris's water problem was far from solved. Parisians were made to endure water
control measures of various kinds (rationing, shut-offs, distribution of river water) again
in the summers of 1896, 1898, 1900, 1904, 1905, 1907 and 1911, as well as during the
flooding of 1910. 42 Many of these shortages lasted longer than a week, some nearly a
month. The more the water service struggled to supply Paris with enough eau de source,
the more its options dried up. By the eve of the First World War, 1895's critique of the
Water Service would become well-developed, common fare. 43
In effect, we need to invert the history of the hygiene movement we are used to
hearing. Rather than interpreting the hygiene movement only as a response to the
nineteenth century's urban crisis, the case of Paris's water shortages suggests the hygiene
movement may also have helped cause some aspects of the crisis. I am not arguing for
the ideological nature of crisisfar from it. Although it is easy to see that crises are often
in the eye of the beholder, the results of neurotic perception, Pariss water crisis was real,
urgent and material. Given the city's population, the natural system at its heart (the Seine)
had long since exceeded its capacity for supplying fresh water and removing waste. The
population was out of scale with the river's natural capacities. Hence the Water Service's
aggressive attempts to mediate the relationship between nature and humans with new
technology, to turn this natural resource into an industrial product as Jean-Pierre
Goubert famously argued. By further enclosing water as a commodity and monopolizing
distribution, the Water Service made Parisians dependent on their pipe network for this

42 Elisabeth Hausser. Paris Au Jour le Jour: Les vnements vu par le presse 1900-1919. Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 1968, pp. 37-40, 165, 200, 418.
43 Robert Lon, Paris et son alimentation en eau La Revue de Paris (Dec. 15, 1913), pp.

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basic human need. 44
It was not just that engineers were losing the battle to keep up with the growing
population, as Humblot pleaded in 1896. They were bound to lose the battle, because
standards for water use were also rising. The hygiene movement constantly redefined the
need for water, for both ideological and practical reasons. In 1861 Paris had a population
of approximately 1,700,000 and used an average of 115,000 cubic meters of water a day
(68 liters/person/day). In 1895, with a population of 2,500,000, water use had increased
to 550,000 cubic meters a day (220 liters/person/day). In these 34 years, the population
grew by 1.5 times, while water use grew by more than 3 times. Theoretical standards for
the amount of water needed per person per day were on the rise, too; in 1884, Poubelle
estimated 150 liters; in 1896, Humblot estimated 220. 45
In addition to increasing standards for individual and domestic use, and increasing
demand from the public, the spread of hygienic thinking produced ever more uses for
water. One of the most important was street cleaning. Between 1894 and 1897, the
public, the municipal council and the Travaux de Paris kept up a lively debate about how
omnibus stops should be washed. Paved with wooden blocks, they were often covered in
horse urine and feces, and the filth seeped into the porous pavement. Horses surely found
the stops convenient places to relieve themselves while not moving and not working, but
this brought humans into constant contact with horse waste. Hence a number of
complaints made to the authorities in these years demanded reform of the regime of bus

44 Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age, trans. Andrew
Wilson (Polity, 1989).
45 (1) Poubelle, 1884; (2) Humblot, tude & programme pour le complment de l'alimentation de Paris en
eaux de source et de rivire. Rapport de l'Inspecteur gnral (Nov. 4, 1896), pp. 12-14.

360
stop washing, or to have stops paved in cement. 46 Local hygiene campaigns, like the
projects for disencumbering and cleaning-up the sidewalks we saw in the last two
chapters, or subtle changes in daily practice, could thus put new demands on the water
supply. We also know that water was needed for the hydraulic elevators of the 1890s, for
example in the Eiffel Tower and the Htel de Ville 47 , and used to pull the Montmartre
funicular, opened 1900. 48
In the summer of 1896 the Water Service was still responding to the crisis of 1895
when another shortage struck. Humblot produced a a study tying Paris's growing water
use to population growth, and envisioned a long-term plan to match the water supply with
the population's needs by 1930. Following Belgrand's lead, Humblot suggested that
filtered river water be used to bolster the supply of eau de source in case of shortages,
stressing that contemporary filtration systems could keep the public safe. Increasing the
water supply, he argued, Is even a pressing necessity in regard to the approach of the
Universal Exposition of 1900: we would certainly not like to show muddy streets,
covered in dust and sullied by the detritus of traffic, any more than dried-up fountains, to
the numerous foreigners that it will attract to Paris. 49 A plan to tap the Loing and Lunain
sources had already emerged in November of 1895. In fact, Humblot's 1896 report was
46 See the documents collected in AP VONC 1350, Voies Publiques - affaires diverses.
47 See: (1) M. H. de Graffigny, Industrie: Les ascenceurs, La Revue scientifique series 4, vol. 14
(Paris: Bureau des Reves, 1900), pp. 400-06; (2) J. Reyval, Installations lectriques de la Tour Eiffel,
Revue D'lectricit vol. 26, no. 3 (Jan. 19, 1901), pp. 79-88.
48 The Montmartre Funicular was approved by the municipal council in 1891, but opened for service until
1900. In this funicular traction was produced by the counter-weight itself, which took the form of a
large container of water. The mass of water could be adjusted to the same weight as the car, and when
both were hooked to the same cable, the downward motion of the counter-weight would pull the car
upward. See: Louis Figuier, l'Anne scientifique et industrielle yr. 37 (1893) (Paris: Hachette, 1894), p.
109-10.
49 Humblot, 1896: C'est mme une ncessit pressante, en gard l'approche de l'Exposition Universelle
de 1900: on ne voudrait certes pas montrer aux nombreux trangers qu'elle attirera Paris des rues
boueuses, couvertes de poussire et sallies par les dtritus de la circulation, non plus que des fontaines
taries, pp. 4-5.

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the culmination of running discussions between engineers Huet, Humblot and Bienvenu
since 1892. As Bienvenu wrote in 1895, the problem was to move beyond the
precarious equilibrium that the arrival of the waters of the Avre has permitted us to
obtain. He realized that all plans to tap new sources between the 1860s and 1890s had
barely provided enough water by the time they were completed, including the 1893 Avre
aqueduct. His sense of urgency was clear: If we want this result to be attenuated in the
summer of 1898, we must act without delay.50 Like projects for developing the
tramways and the Metro we saw in Chapter 3, the project for increasing Paris's water
supply was given a boost in the mid-1890s by the impending exposition.
As if to prove Bienvenu's point, another shortage arrived in the summer of 1898,
and again the newspapers were alive with debate. Jean Frollo, writer for Le Petit
Parisien, sounded a note of despair: The question of potable water comes back
periodically to the order of the day for the public authorities, without ever being
resolved. 51 Le Temps, meanwhile, reported that the Water Service was considering three
new plans to capture sources: the first, to connect sources in the area around Paris with
existing aqueducts, the second, to draw water from Lake Lman, on the border with
Switzerland, and third, to draw water from the Loire and Loiret rivers, the same source
used by the city of Orlans. 52 The second plan pushed Paris's appetite for water farther
than it had ever gone, into the Swiss Alps, while the third plan got Paris tangled in a
centuries-old politics of Bourbonism vs. Orlanism.
50 Prefecture de la Seine. Ville de Paris. Direction Administrative des Travaux. Direction des Eaux.
Aqueduc de Drivation des Sources du Loing et du Lunain. Projet d'Excution. Bordereau des Pices.
Nov. 22, 1895, p. 3.
51 Jean Frollo, Ce qu'on boit Le Petit Parisien, July 8, 1898.
52 L'eau Paris, Le Temps, Aug. 24, 1898. A quick look at the office files of the Commission technique
d'eau potable (AP VO3 1221) shows that these three plans were actively discussed between 1897 and
1900.

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Between 1898 and 1903, the city of Orlans, home to a dynasty with a long
history of conflict with Paris and Versailles, continued this old family feud by other
means, as home to an angry movement to save local waters from Paris's thirsty grasp.
Drained of the precious waters of the Loiret, one local put it, Orlans would be less clean,
less healthy. The river's aquatic plants would die, decomposing and creating a bog,
possibly a source of dangerous miasmas. Local waterways could no longer guarantee
the freshness of the soil or even the means of irrigation for local farmers, and they
would be less navigable. Plus, a recent typhoid outbreak had everyone on edge. 53 The
Orlanists' fear of Paris's ecological impact on their region echoed similar complaints
from the Paris suburbs. They were not the only ones organizing against Paris because of
water, as we shall soon see.
The shortage of 1898 also brought a technical change. After the Avre aqueduct
was opened in 1893, the Water Service hoped that backing-up the potable water supply
with filtered river water would no longer be necessary. But the shortage of 1898 dashed
these hopes. 54 That summer, the Water Service began to mix in river water again, a
choice which would have disastrous consequences in the typhoid outbreaks of the
summers of 1899 and 1900. After the shortages of 1895 and 1898 the Water Service
wasted no time making sure the Loing and Lunain aqueduct was ready for the 1900
exposition. But on Friday, July 20th, 1900 the temperature reached 37.9 C (100F), the
53 Note sur le Captage des Eaux de Val d'Orlans, par M. Flix Marboutin, Ing. des Arts et Manufactures,
Sous-chef du Service Chimique l'Observatoire Municipal de Montsouris. (May 24, 1903) AP VONC
1217. See also: Commission technique charge d'tudier les diverse questions se rattachant
l'Alimentation de Paris et de la Banlieue en Eaux potables. Compte-Rendu de la sance du 30 Novembre
1900, AP VO3 1221. One commissioner mentioned his certainty that Orlans would oppose the
capture of water from the Loire and Loiret. He was right.
54 Dr. Thoinot, La fivre typhode Paris de 1870 a 1899. Role actuel des eaux de source." Bulletins Et
Mmoires de la Socit Mdicale Des Hpitaux de Paris 3d ser.:v.16 (Paris: Masson, 1899), pp. 645669.

363
highest since 1874. In spite of the new aqueduct, water ran short and the exposition was
deserted. Even though Friday was at the time the chic day to attend the exposition, only
about 150,000 visitors came (compared with figures like 700,000 from the previous
Sunday). Ticket prices dropped from 45 to 20 cents. In addition to propping up the supply
with limited quantities of filtered river water, then, the Water Service also tried
something new: shut-offs. On Saturday the 21st, newspapers began to warn that water
would be shut off from 11pm until 6am the next morning. 55
Each night between July 21st and August 5th, engineers shut off the 'private
service' half of the dual piping system in order to prevent any use of eau de source at all.
Overnight, while no one could deplete them, reservoirs would refill. 56 This technical
decision reflected the authorities' ongoing distrust of public water use. The word waste
returned to the public spotlight and all the familiar scripts from 1895 were replayed. The
engineers at the water service accused the public of wasting water and journalists threw it
back in their faces. Vivid descriptions of the dried-up, gooey Seine deployed a language
of disgust and outrage. The newspapers began to speak of the poisoning of the Seine,
reporting dead fish, cats and dogs floating on the river, whose waters had become a slowmoving, blackened sludge (boue noirtre). 57
Some new problems arose, too. Jean Frollo of Le Petit Parisien was particularly
concerned about the ecological state of the river in the suburbs, much worse by his
55 Hausser, Au Jour le Jour, p. 37.
56 L'eau Paris, Le Petit Parisien, July 22, 1900.
57 See the following articles from Le Petit Parisien: L'eau Paris (July 22, 1900), L'Empoisonnement
de la Seine (July 26, 1900), L'Empoisonnement de la Seine (July 27, 1900), L'eau de source (July
27, 1900), L'eau Paris (July 28, 1900). Also see the following from Le Temps: L'Eau Paris (July
22, 1900), L'Eau Paris (July 24, 1900), La secheresse et la Seine (July 24, 1900), Les incendies
et le manque d'eau (July 25, 1900), L'Infection de la Seine (July 26, 1900), L'Infection de la Seine
(July 27, 1900), L'Eau Paris (July 28, 1900), L'Eau Paris (July 30, 1900), Faits divers (Aug. 1,
1900).

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estimation. At Saint-Denis, at the mouth of one of Paris's main sewers, the situation was
critical: the sewer has formed, by its dejections, a body of viscous and stinking matter
which, at a length of thirty meters, advances in the river whose current is so feeble that it
cannot break it up. Reports were equally graphic from Clichy, Suresnes, Epinay, SaintOuen, Argenteuil, Bezons, Marly and Pecq. Suburban politicians quickly called for a
meeting to address the situation, deciding to form a Union of shoreline municipalities
(syndicat des communes riveraines), which demanded an audience with the Minister of
Public Works. Like the Orlanists we just met, these suburban leaders felt the need to
organize against Paris to protect their natural resources.58
Worries about environmental pollution and public health echoed across the city
and the suburbs. Thanks to the Poubelle administration, all subscribing houses enjoyed
eau de source for drinking, cooking, bathing, and flushing toilets. The 1900 shut-offs,
therefore, threatened not only the potable water supply, but also the city's drainage and
sewer networks, which were flushed in part with household wastewater. On July 24th, the
Academy of Medicine protested, noting that compromising the sewers in this way could
entail serious public health risks. 59 It was not the sewers, but rather the fresh water supply
that delivered the greatest public health risk of the summer: a typhoid epidemic.
Hygienist Dr. Thoinot had already sounded the alarm in the medical community in 1899,
but the public scandal, which Jean-Pierre Goubert called one of the most famous of its
era, didn't break until 1900. Thoinot noted that between 1894 and 1898, the typhoid rate
declined sharply, a trend which confirmed the Water Service's high hopes for the Avre
aqueduct. But the typhoid rate spiked suddenly after 1898, from 556 cases and 105 deaths
58 L'Empoisonnement de la Seine, Le Petit Parisien, July 27, 1900.
59 Hausser, Au Jour le Jour, p. 38.

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in 1898 to 2,371 cases and 404 deaths in 1899. The wave crested in 1900 with 3,148
cases and 568 deaths. Dr. Thoinot sounded the alarm just as he had in 1882, arguing that
the epidemic resulted from the city's decision to back-up the supply of eau de source with
river water starting in 1898. 60
Journalists picked up the idea and ran with it. In August 1900, reporters from Le
Matin interviewed two men from the municipal laboratory at Montsouris, responsible for
water analysis, who had noticed an abnormal quantity of typhoid bacteria in their
samples. While the engineers at the Water Service continued to argue both that using
filtered river water was safe, and that it was not completely safe, but absolutely
necessary, these municipal scientists sharply disagreed: What do they think now about
their abundant distribution 'of purified Marne and Seine water'? How many more victims
do they need to convince them that their frightful mixes are nothing but a violent
poison? 61
Already in 1898, the shift from distributing river water to overnight shut-offs was
connected with the changing reputation of river water in both expert and public
perception. Even the proponents of using filtered river water were uneasy about the
process, and the 1899-1900 epidemics only made it worse. In 1900 meetings at the
Prefecture of the Seine, several engineers, perhaps sympathetic with the Orlanist faction,
recommended that the Water Service stay away from the Loire and Loiret rivers, because
(a) the city of Orlans would certainly resist, (b) the sources were definitely contaminable

60 (1) La fivre typhode Le Matin, Aug. 29, 1900; (2) Dr. Thoinot, La fivre typhode Paris de 1870
1899. Role actuel des eaux de source. Bulletins et mmoires de la socit mdicale des hpitaux de
Paris 3d ser.:v.16 (Paris: Masson, 1899), pp. 645-669; (3) Goubert, The Conquest of Water, pp. 24 and
49.
61 La fivre typhode Paris Le Matin, Aug. 27, 1900.

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and probably contaminated, in view of (c) its recent typhoid outbreak. This led to an
uncertain and inconclusive discussion about filtered river water. Ultimately the issue
remained undecided, pending study results from the lab at Montsouris. Many, even many
water engineers were unsure about the filtration process, but with no official line on
filtration scripted, they fell back on the status quo: distributing filtered river water was a
necessary evil. 62 But many in Paris, lay and expert alike, knew that river water was
increasingly unsafe to drink. In 1900, talk of cleaning up the Seine (asainissement de la
Seine) and poisoning of the Seine (empoisonnement de la Seine) was closely related to
the typhoid scare and the Academy of medicine's warnings about the sewers. Behind all
of this was a growing awareness of the city's ecological impact, and an awareness that
water was now an industrial product which could be manipulated by humans, for better or
for worsemanipulation could purify water, or it could contaminate it.
Like the tramway and Metro accidents of 1900, the water shortage and typhoid
outbreak disturbed the Exposition and its technophilic messages, another embarrassing
international showcase of infrastructural inadequacy, engineering mistakes and hygienic
backwardness. In 1902, George Bechmann, a key academic voice in the hygiene
movement and Humblot's successor as Chief Engineer of the Water Service, wrote We
have not forgotten the crisis that the service of potable water distribution in Paris, the
private service, passed through in 1900. 63

62 Commission technique charge d'tudier les diverse questions se rattachant l'Alimentation de Paris et
de la Banlieue en Eaux potables. Compte-Rendu de la sance du 30 Novembre 1900, AP VO3 1221.
63 Rapport de l'Ingenieur en chef du Service Technique des Eaux et de l'Assainissement (G. Bechmann,
Oct. 8, 1902). Bechamnn admitted the insufficiency of the water system, rather than evoking natural
causes for the water crisis, and showed embarrassment about 1900. The report appears in Alimentation
de Paris en eau potable: mesures prliminaires en vue des nouvelles adductions d'eau (Paris: Chaix,
1902), pp. 13-40.

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The summers of 1901-3 brought a cool spell, with highs rarely getting above 30
C; the need for water was less and reservoirs did not dry up. There were no shortages in
these years, and herein lies an important pattern: Paris only experienced shortages during
periods of intense heat and lack of rain. Even as a fully packaged, industrialized product
distributed in pipes, water remained a natural resource, sensitive to ecological changes.
The water supply was intimately connected with the weather, which put water engineers
in a difficult place. On the one hand, they knew that the water supply depended on the
cooperation of natural forces, and could use this fact to deflect criticism and blame for
Paris's supply problems. On the other hand, publicly claiming that these were natural and
not technological problems called into question the engineers' ability to control and
master nature.
The lasting problem of water pressure shows how complex the relationship with
nature could be. Water pressure is dependent on several physical facts: the amount of
water in question, its elevation, and most basically, gravity. Unless there is a sufficient
amount of water pushing along a sufficient slope, gravity cannot move the water. This
meant that from the 1860s to the 1890s, while the water distribution system remained
unfinished, piping water to the higher ground in Paris (e.g. hilltops like Montmartre and
Belleville), as well as to the upper floors of buildings, was always difficult. Because these
hilltops were working class areas, this meant water troubles for those already less
economically fortunate. Due to the social geography of the Paris apartment house, the
same pattern repeated on a smaller scale in each house: the poorest people lived on the
highest floors, and also had the most precarious access to water distribution. During
summer water shortages, as the Water Service often feared that reservoir levels would get

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so low that it could no longer sustain water pressure. 64
Shortages returned in the summer of 1904, but not before journalists sounded the
alarm. On July 17th Le Petit Parisien asked, in light of rising summer heat, whether there
would be a water shortage. The fact that the paper raised the question before the shortage
shows how well Parisians understood the pattern; each heat wave brought with it a
shortage of eau de source, overnight shut-offs and distribution of filtered river water. 65
On the 20th, the paper wrote: So many works of adduction and capturing [of sources]
have not yet allowed [us] to predict heat waves and each summer a new disturbance
comes to hurl itself at the Water Service! 66 In 1904, all of the signs were present:
distribution of river water, overnight shut-offs and a note from Dr. Thierry, director of the
Prefecture of the Seine's hygiene service, that Parisians should boil their water in view of
a recent typhoid outbreak. 67
In the summer of 1905, water was shut off every night from July 31st to August
10th, but there was no heatwave, no shortage, and no uproar in the press. Reservoir levels
never ran low; engineers just padded the city's supply for good measure. 68 Even more
than 1904, the summer of 1905 demonstrates the dull compulsion of a city used to water
shortages. The Water Service was storing water in case of a heat wave, now a normal
safety measure to be taken every summer. Far from Jean Frollo's editorial fire of 18951904, Le Petit Parisien greeted the 1905 shut-offs with nothing but an advertisement for
Cap powder, a mass-market water sterilizer, as if to say you can't fix the Water

64
65
66
67
68

Couche, Les Eaux de Paris en 1884 (Paris: Chaix, 1884), pp. 51-55 (AP VO3 220).
La chaleur Le Petit Parisien, July 17, 1904.
La chaleur Le Petit Parisien, July 20, 1904.
L'Eau Paris, Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 17, 1904.
L'Eau Paris, Le Temps, Aug. 11, 1905.

369
Service, so save yourself. 69 The routine was repeated in 1906: as one popular science
author put it, Each year, at the same time, the question of potable water poses itself. This
year, the situation is already aggravated due to an exceptionally torrid summer. 70
Water shortages like those of 1895-1906, however, only affected those with a
subscription to the water service. For the many Parisians we met with delinquent
landlords, or who lived in sub-standard housing, finding water was always difficult, not
only during summer heat. In spite of the authorities' claim that as of 1892 the entire city
was piped for water distribution, there were notable exceptions, places on the map of
Paris where the tendrils of modern infrastructure did not yet reach. In 1906, Le Petit
Parisien reported on a group of houses in the Zone at Pantin with no running water
(figures 24 and 25). 71 The Zone was a 250-meter-wide ring of land between the city
limits and the 1844 fortifications. Technically under the jurisdiction of the military, and
called zone non aedificandi (non construction zone), the space was largely abandoned by
the military after 1870, and became a liminal realm of barren spaces, squatters and
shantytowns (bidonvilles). 72
Reporters from Le Petit Parisien interviewed Mme. Pornine, who ran a bar in the
area at 10 rue de Flandre. She explained that the 15 households occupying this space in
Pantin had approached the authorities again and again, petitioning them for water, but
each one has been useless. Condemned to scavenge for water and share with one
another, she explained, the only way to find water was by ruse, fraud or bribeand
69
70
71
72

L'Eau, Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 5, 1905.

traverse la science Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 27, 1906.
Un Sahara Pantin Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 13, 1906.
See: (1) Norma Evenson, Paris: a Century of Change, pp. 204-7; (2) Rosemary Wakeman, Nostalgic
Modernism and the Invention of Paris in the Twentieth Century French Historical Studies 27/1
(Winter 2004), pp. 115-144. John Merriman, The Margins of City Life (Oxford, 1991), pp. 6, 34, 59, 65,
81, 121; (4) Janet Horne, A Social Laboratory for Modern France, pp. 250-2.

370

Figure 24: View from the fortifications to the Zone near Saint-Ouen. From bottom to top, one sees the
trench of the fortifications, the bald land of the zone, and the shantytowns pushed up against the city limits
of Saint-Ouen (image Wikipedia commons).

what water we find now! Every two to three days, a man came to clean the gutters,
opening a stand-pipe on the rue du Chemin de fer to help him sweep. The spigot was only
open for an hour, and water pressure was not strong, so as she told them, you've got to
hurry to get what you need. Housewives go running with their urns, and they line up like
at the theater. Thanks to Belgrand's dual system, the water that came out was not
potable, but it was easy to steal.
If this option didn't work, there was also a spigot on the other side of the street, at
the corner of rue du Vivier and rue de Solferino, but this water was technically under
jurisdiction of the suburban commune Aubervilliers, and thus patrolled by agents
threatening onerous fines. To find water in this neighborhood, Mme. Pornine
explained, you must take care to go at night, like criminals, keeping yourself well

371
hidden. Sometimes residents of Aubervilliers would offer water, but the residents of the
zone couldn't count on their consistent generosity, and they couldn't show their generosity
too overtly, or agents would fine them for misusing water as well.

Figure 25: Le Petit Parisiens photograph of the shanties in Pantin without water.

The problem was that the Zone fell between jurisdictions, between the city and the
suburbs, and was only overseen by the Army, which was completely disinterested.
Hence, in the Zone's desperate conditions, tenants, property managers and landlords had
banded together to ask the authorities for help. 73 Le Petit Parisien also interviewed M.
Clermont, a property manager (grant and locataire principale), who detailed the city's

73 This contrasts significantly with the landlord-tenant conflicts we saw in the last chapter.

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plan to distribute water: spigots would be installed at the homes of the two locataires
principales, and all the tenants who sublet from them would have to collect water there.
The water service submitted plans to the Army for review, and the zoniers were still
waiting for a response when Le Petit Parisien's article was published. But infrastructure
was still lacking. As local inspector (agent-voyer) M. Courtois put it coldly, The zoniers
would have water when they want it! For that, all they need to do is to obtain the piping.
It's one or the other: either they establish it at their own cost, or they guarantee the water
company a sufficient minimum of subscriptions.
Everything about this 1906 episode in the Zonedaily life as a struggle to find
water, the indifference of some authorities (both military and civilian), the cruelty of
others (the Aubervilliers police, the water company), and the battle over boundaries (city
vs. suburbs, subscriber vs. non-subscriber)suggests that, for all the shortages within the
network of Paris subscribers in these years, times were much harder for those without a
subscription. These zoniers, who remained off the grid of Paris infrastructures, had a
difficult time finding water now that it was enclosed, privatized and commodified. The
lack of open water outside the network was a much longer-running and more devastating
shortage than any of the summer shortages experienced by subscribers in Paris. This story
shows that engineering narratives of infrastructural progress were often exaggerated,
conveniently neglecting those parts of the city and the population not yet served by
modern infrastructure. This explains journalists' zeal in exposing counter examples like
this shantytown in the Zone. Not all Parisians had equal access to fresh water. On the
lowest rungs of the social ladder and at the margins of the city everyday life could be
more like life in early modern Paris, where there was no municipal water distribution

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system, and daily household practice necessarily included the search for water.
Paris's water supply problems would come up again and again in the years
between 1906 and 1914. In 1907, L'Intransigant ran a story about the controversy over
filtered water; in 1909, L'Autorit called another typhoid outbreak an administrative
scandal. 74 The flood of 1910, which we'll see later in this chapter, brought another water
crisis because floodwaters filled the sewers to capacity, mixing fresh water, waste water
and storm water, all of which ran through the sewers. But the biggest water shortage
came with the heat wave and Great Stink of 1911, as we'll see at the end of this chapter.

Waste, Sewers and Pollution of the Seine

One of the most radical things Haussmann's administration did, definitely without
a full sense of its consequences, was to help break the organic cycle for Paris. 75 In the
cyclical rhythms of ecology, each species' waste is useful for some other species. In
human history, we can see this in the centuries-old process of waste recycling,
transforming waste into useful, productive things like fertilizer, fuel and raw materials. 76
In this process, everything cycled back into the earth; there was little mediation in the
relationship of humans to nature. But along with Bechmann's artificial life, nineteenth
century urbanization brought a new problem to Europe: large populations began to
outstrip the natural waste-processing capacity of water and soil. The Seine had long been
a natural main drain for Paris, but in the 19th century's rapid urbanization the city outgrew

74 Paul Bersonnet, Parisien, bois ton eau sans crainte! L'Intransigant, Aug. 12, 1907; Aux Service des
Eaux. Un scandale administratif. Une epidmie de typhoide, L'Autorit, Aug. 23, 1909.
75 Matthew Gandy, The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space, Transactions of the
Institute of British Georgraphers NS 24 (1999), pp. 23-44, see p. 35.
76 See Gandy, The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space, see also Steven Johnson, The
Ghost Map

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the river. As Sabine Barles put it, Cities thus became parasite ecosystems..., living at the
expense...of river systems. 77
Waste also changed in meaning and value. As agronomy professor Muntz
explained in 1891, in rural, agricultural, subsistence societies, feces has great value as
fertilizer. All food for humans and animals comes from the earth, and all feces goes back
into the earth, constantly recycling nitrogen and other nutrients. In urban societies, this
cycle is broken. All waste comes from consumption of imported products, and far from
being a source of wealth, as in the fields, becomes a cause of difficulty. 78 Waste cannot
be used on site, and must be exported. Hence nineteenth century cities searched for new,
technologically-mediated ways to dispose of and process waste. For Parisians like Muntz,
urban modernity entailed inhabiting an ecosystem in which the natural cycle had been
broken.
Paris's earliest waste disposal practice, dating to the middle ages, was to throw all
waste, relatively unsorted, into the street, hence the French term tout la rue (everything
into the street). The contents of chamber pots, kitchen scraps, paper and clothall waste
produced by animals, people, households and workshops was sent to the street, a theater
of recycling. Here an urban underclass of rag-pickers (chiffoniers) of various kinds
some looking for cloth, some for manure, wood, paper, metal, glass, bone, etc.sorted
through the waste and cleaned it up for redistribution. 79 Whatever remained was, at least

77 Sabine Barles, Urban metabolism and river systems: an historical perspective Paris and the Seine,
1790-1970, Hydrology and Earth Sciences Discussions 4 (2007), pp. 1845-78, quote p. 1846.
78 A. Muntz and Ch. Girard. Les Engrais, vol. 1, 2nd edition (Paris: Librarie de Firmin-Didot et Cie,
Imprimeurs de l'Institut, 1891), p. 351. As waste's economic value changed, so did its cultural meaning.
It went from fertility to filth. See Matthew Gandy, The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban
Space, p. 32, where he discusses Alain Corbin's olfactory revolution .
79 William Blanchard Jerrold. Imperial Paris; including new scenes for old visitors (London: Bradbury
and Evans, 1855), Ch. 8: "Chiffons and Chiffoniers," pp. 176-192. See also the excellent analysis of

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in theory, swept by rainwater through the gutters into the Seine.
From the late middle ages into the early modern period, Parisians developed a
separate system for human feces based around fosses fixes, fixed cesspits dug under
houses that received the dejections of chamber pots and toilets. 80 By the 19th century, this
was the main form of human waste disposal in Paris. Grard Jacquemet reports that
70,000 of Paris's 80,000 houses were equipped with them in 1880. 81 A class of
vidangeurs grew up in the city, men who emptied cesspits and carried Paris's waste to
processing plants outside the city where it was made into fertilizer. 82 The city could not
use all of its own waste, but farmers in the department could, and they could thus provide
the city with all of the imported produce it needed. From the mid-1700s to mid-1800s,
then, Paris's waste was exported to and recycled by a rural hinterland, which fed on the
capital's waste and turned it into the capital's imported foodstuffs.
Haussmann and Belgrand made Paris's first attempts at a comprehensive, unified
sewer network, growing the network from 143 km of pipe to 773 km. 83 They planned a
combined system, meaning a system which would handle human waste, the residues of
street cleaning, and storm water, hence the phrase tout l'gout (everything into the
sewer). This system thus threatened to undo the lives and livelihoods of chiffoniers and
vidangeurs, automating and technologizing waste disposal, obviating forms of human

80
81
82
83

urban recycling in mid-19th century London in Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's
Most Terrifying Epidemicand How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Riverhead
Books, 2006), Ch. 1 The Night Soil Men, pp. 1-24.
The first royal decree on cesspits dates to the 1530s, in reaction to a plague epidemic. See Donald Reid,
Paris Sewers and Sewermen, p. 10.
Grard Jacquemet, "Urbanisme parisien : la bataille du tout--lgout la fin du XIXe sicle," Revue
dhistoire moderne et contemporaine (1979), pp. 505-548.
It was either dried and made into human guano (poudrette), or dried and saltpeter (sodium nitrate) was
extracted from it for fertilizer.
Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations, p. 30.

376
labor that had been essential to urban waste-processing for centuries. 84 It also threatened
to cut the economic circuit between the capital and its hinterland, possibly dumping
Parisian feces in mass quantities into the Seine for the first time.
Even Haussmann himself was uneasy about using the new sewers to handle
human waste, concerned for the commercial interests of the vidangeurs and the Seine as a
source of fresh water. 85 Hence the 1860s was a dynamic and difficult decade for Paris's
sewers, which saw the experimental beginnings of a sewage farming program under
engineer Alfred Durand-Claye that would continue for several decades. Durand-Claye
envisioned a city in which every apartment could enjoy modern toilets, piped directly to
the sewers, in which sewer mains would not empty into the Seine. 86 There was always a
tension between the repressive impulse to hide or evacuate waste, and the sublimative
impulse to transform waste into something useful like fertilizer. 87 Already by 1866, not
long after human waste first began entering the Seine via the sewers, engineers and
politicians were already concerned about pollution, though they used words like
alteration and corruption. The discussion of direct to sewer drainage was always
linked, between the 1850s and 1910s, to the question of cleaning up the Seine, a question
of the proper relationship between the city and the river, between humans and nature.
The sewer program that the Third Republic inherited from Haussmann was not
only physically unfinished (only the mains were complete), but was also conceptually

84 Dolly Jrgensen, Cooperative Sanitation: Managing Streets and Gutters in Late Medieval England and
Scandinavia, Technology and Culture 49/3 (July, 2008), pp. 547-567.
85 Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations, p. 80; Matthew Gandy,
Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space, pp. 32-3.
86 See Hygine publique, on Durand-Claye's sewer plans, from Comptes rendus hebdomaires des
sances de l'Acadmie des sciences vol. 72, 1871, pp. 89-92.
87 I have borrowed this psychoanalytic language from Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen,
Introduction. He borrowed it from Freud, via Mary Douglas.

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unfinished, still experimental. Engineers and hygienists were still unsure about (a)
whether waste was better used wet, as in sewage farming, or dried, like powdered
fertilizer, (b) whether it should ultimately go into the soil, the Seine or the sea, and (c)
how a comprehensive reform of waste disposal could ever succeed in Paris, given the
opposition of powerful commercial interests: landlords and vidangeurs. It was this
manifold uncertainty which shaped what urban historian Grard Jacquemet famously
called the battle of the tout-a-l'egout in the early Third Republic, the struggle of the
Water Service engineers against vidangeurs, landlords, the municipal council and the
scientific community to generalize direct to sewer drainage throughout the city. The Paris
sewers, just like the Mtro, passed through a protracted dream phase between the Second
Empire and the First World War, during which development was slow, designs were not
yet stabilized and infrastructure remained a common topic of public debate. Much like
the trolley system of tramway traction, the apparently modern, international tout-a-l'gout
was not so quickly adopted in Paris. 88
The question was precisely how to evacuate Paris's enormous surplus of waste,
without polluting the Seine, considering that the Seine had always been the city's main
drain. Could the problem of waste be solved, or merely moved away from the city? If
waste was merely moved away, then who would have to deal with it? As Paris's
population and appetite increased, so did the amount of waste it produced. The sewage
farming system, for example, grew steadily between the 1860s and the 1890s, from 5

88 I do not dwell on the development of the sewers in this chapter, because there is already quite a good
literature on sewer development in Paris. Donald Reid's Paris Sewers and Sewermen is a landmark,
here, but there has been important supplementary material in: (1) Grard Jacquemet, "Urbanisme
parisien : la bataille du tout--lgout la fin du XIXe sicle," Revue dhistoire moderne et
contemporaine (1979), pp. 505-548; (2) Roger-Henri Guerrand, La bataille du tout l'gout,
L'Histoire 53 (Feb. 1983), pp. 66-74.

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hectares of irrigated land in 1866, to 115 hectares in 1876, 300 hectares in 1880 and
1,800 hectares in 1897and the system still needed room to grow. 89 The plan submitted
for an enqute by Durand-Claye, Mille and Belgrand in June of 1875 estimated that in
order to process all of Paris's wastewater through sewage farming, the city would need
6,659 hectares of land, adjacent to the suburban communities Gennevilliers, Nanterre,
Rueil, Argenteuil, Sartrouville, Le Pecq, and Achres. 90 When residents of the suburbs
read these plans, they reacted with what Jacquemet called a general uproar. Of 32
municipalities represented in the General Council of the Seine-et-Oise department, 27
rejected the plan, and 8,500 signatures were collected to support this opposition. One
journalist asked whether the capital had the right to sacrifice Gennevilliers. 91 By the
1890s, it was estimated that the city would need 7,820 hectares of land for sewage
farming, a space larger than the land area of Paris. Adolphe Carnot, a member of the
Commission suprieure de l'assainissement de Paris (High Commission for the Clean-up
of Paris), had studied 40,000 hectares of land suitable for the purpose, some more than
60km from Paris.92
The city's increasing production of waste, like its search for sources of fresh
water, threatened to spread its urban problems into a broad hinterland. In the debates of
the 1860s and '70s concerning the tout l'gout, Paris engineers stressed the necessity
89 (1) Jacquemet, "La bataille du tout-a-l'egout," p. 509; (2) F. Launay, Les champs d'pandage de la ville
de Paris et le parc agricole d'Achres (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1897), p. 5; (3) Conseil General de la
Seine, no. 29. Rapport au nom de la Commission dpartementale des eaux sur l'assainissement du
dpartement de la Seine, presented by MM. Paris and Carmignac, 1909, p. 3.
90 See Durand Claye et al. Avant-project d'un canal d'irrigation l'aide des eaux d'gout entre Clichy et la
fort de Saint-Germain in Commission d'enqute sur l'avant-projet d'un canal d'irrigation l'aide des
eaux d'gout entre Clichy et la fort de Saint-Germain, Assainissement de la Seine: puration et
utilisation des eaux d'gout (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1876), pp. 8-11.
91 Jacquemet, "La bataille du tout-a-l'egout," pp. 509-510. For more on suburban opposition to the plan,
see Dr. Salet, Mmoire sur l'avant-projet de drivation des eaux d'egout de la ville de Paris (St.
Germain en Laye: T. Lancelin, 1876).
92 See the special issue of La Construction Moderne on the tout l'gout, March 3, 1894.

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and modernity of this system, contrasted with the barbarity and stink of cesspits, without
solving the question of where waste flushed into the sewers would go. In 1884, hygienist
Mari-Davy coined the phrase tout l'gout, rien la Seine (everything into the sewer,
nothing into the Seine), the same year that the Director of the Montsouris Observatory
called for tout l'gout, tout la mer (everything into the sewers, everything into the
sea), by way of the long-envisaged canal from Paris to the sea. Everyone could agreed
that human waste needed to be evacuated from Paris, and that covering it and carrying it
in water was the most civilized way to do this, but few could agree on where the waste
should ultimately go: into the Seine? Into the soil of the suburbs? Into the sea? 93
In addition to the problem of where waste should go, there was a technical
problem. As the battle over the tout l'gout continued into the 1880s and 1890s, many
wondered whether Paris's strained water supply could provide enough water to
appropriately flush the sewers. Poubelle's decree of November 14, 1883 recommended
that each apartment of two rooms or more have its own toilet (rather than common toilets
for shared use), and that each toilet should drain directly to the sewers, be equipped with
a hydraulic apparatus to ensure a flush of 10 liters per person per day, and a siphon at the
exit pipe, to prevent waste and odor from backing up into the toilet. Coupled with the
decree of December 8, 1884, which recommended distributing only eau de source for all
domestic uses, this meant that these new toilets would be flushed with eau de source. Up
to an estimated 10% of the city's much needed fresh water would be flushed into the

93 See: (1) Journal d'hygine 9e v. (1884), p. 576; (2) Ponts et Chausses - Direction des Travaux de Paris
- Service de l'Assainissement de la Seine. Rapport de l'Ingnieur ordinaire, Assainissement de la Seine
en aval de Paris (Aug. 31, 1892), AP D1 S8 6; (3) Allan Mitchell, Rves parisiens: L'chec de projets
de transport public en France au XIXe sicle (Presses des Ponts, 2005), pp. 48-64.

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sewers. 94 As Senator Paul Strauss put it in 1895, Are we going to lose, indefinitely and
constantly, through the tout l'gout...all the eau de source that we supply at great cost
and so inadequately...? 95 The tout l'gout system, like new practices of personal
cleanliness and street cleaning, was yet another new drain on the city's strained water
supply. The water shortages and stinking sewers of 1880, 1895 and 1900, which we saw
earlier in this chapter, show the depth and longevity of this problem.
We can show that more and more waste was going into the sewers instead of
cesspits. In 1881, Durand-Claye estimated the amount of waste emptied from cesspits at
about 1,000,000 cubic meters a year. 96 Hereafter, the number of houses using cesspits
declined steadily, from around 80,000 in 1880 to 25,821 in 1913. Hence the amount of
waste processed by Paris's several suburban waste-processing plants also decreased in
these years. As cesspits were phased out, direct to sewer drainage was gradually phased
in, growing from only 213 hookups in 1885 to 52,053 in 1913. This greatly increased the
amount of wastewater sent to be processed in sewage farming, which for example grew
from 7,212,928 cubic meters in 1873 to 226,544,409 cubic meters in 1902. 97 Across the
period from 1870 to 1914, solid waste removed from cesspits was gradually replaced
with wastewater flushed into the sewers.
As Paris's method of waste disposal changed, so did the physical composition of
94 Prfecture de la Seine. Assainissement de Paris. Rforme du mode actuel de la vidange. Projet de
rglement relatif aux cabinets d'aisance, aux tuyaux d'vacuation, etc. Projet de loi autorisant une taxe
par tuyau de chute, 1883.
95 Quoted in Jacquemet, La bataille du tout lgout, p. 518.
96 In 1881 Durand-Claye estimated that Parisians produced an average of 2,520 cubic meters of waste a
day, or 919,800 cubic meters a year. See Observations des ingnieurs du service municipal au sujet des
projets de rapport prsents par MM. A. Girard et Brouardel, M. Alfred Durand-Claye, rapporteur
(Paris: Chaix, 1881), pp. 5-6. The Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris for 1881 estimated even
more waste, at 1,126,706 cubic meters; see pp. 134-5.
97 (1) Jacquemet, "La bataille du tout-a-l'egout," p. 543; (2) Annuaire statistique de la ville de Paris 1902
(pub. 1904), p. 94.

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its waste, requiring a constant search for new methods of waste management. Hence
vidangeurs treated cesspit waste with chemicals (such as aluminum sulfate and iron
sulfate), dried waste to make fertilizer, and eventually incinerated waste.98 Wastewater
treatment underwent a similar development in these years, from Durand-Claye's late1860s plan to filter wastewater using the soil to the chemical and bacteriological
purification of the early 1900s, and eventually purification with ozone, invented by the
French chemist Marius-Paul Otto in 1906.
Belgrand dreamed in 1855 that all Paris's wastewater could go into the Seine, but
none of it within the city of Paris, hence the main drains were placed fairly far down, at
Clichy and St. Denis. But this merely moved the problem of waste downstream, both
compromising the suburbs' water supply with Paris's waste and doing nothing to prevent
further dumping by the suburbs. The Minister of Public Works called the first
Commission to work on the assainissement de la Seine (clean-up of the Seine) in 1874,
estimating that Paris contributed about 200-300,000 cubic meters of partially dissolved
solid waste to the Seine every day. In 1882, the departmental government formed the
Commission de l'Assainissement de Paris to do two things: to improve the hygiene of
houses in Paris and ensure the evacuation of all impure products they produced
another indication of how closely the reform of housing and the reform of water use were
connected. 99 The Commission's technical section worked on the question of cleaning up
the Seine, estimating that the city now produced 400,000 cubic meters of waste a day. It
also showed that both the Seine and the Marne, important sources of water, were
98 For more on the various methods of treating urban waste, see M.W. Ramsay, L'puration des eaux
d'gout, a presentation given at the Sixth International Congress on Applied Chemistry, Rome, April
24 to May 3, 1906 (Paris: Bureau de la Revue et du Rpertoire, 1906).
99 Commission de l'Assainissement de Paris, Sance du 15 janvier 1885 (AP VI5 1), p. 5.

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compromised by suburban sewers and industry upstream of Paris. The impact of the
upstream suburbs on Paris mattered as much as Paris's impact on the downstream
suburbs. 100 The waterways of the entire department needed work. By 1899, Paris's
produced nearly 500,000 cubic meters of waste a day. 101
Just as the amount of wastewater produced by the city and the land area used to
process it were growing, so was the geographic extent of the clean-up problem. In 1892,
Belgrand's idea to stop all dumping of untreated sewage into the river inside the city
limits was set to go into effect in 1893. 102 It took until 1894 to put it into law, and the
city's main sewer at Clichy, still within the city limits, was not finally closed until July 8,
1899. Even while the tout l'gout remained incomplete, because of both infrastructure
and subscriptions, it was an important hygienic struggle to complete the rien la Seine.
Closing the main sewer at Clichy became an opportunity for republican fanfare and
celebration of public works like the opening of the Avenue de la Republique we saw in
Chapter 1, with neighborhood houses spontaneously decorated by citizens, and plenty of
police protection to control the crowds. A litany of important politicians, doctors,
engineers and hygienists attended. President of the Municipal Council Lucipia called it a
veritable triumph of hygiene over routine, and Prefect of the Seine De Selves suggested
it should be given special mention at the coming 1900 exposition. 103
With no sewage going into the Seine, Paris would need more space for sewage

100 Prefecture de la Seine, imprint No. 5. Direction des Travaux de Paris. Commission Technique de
l'Assainissement de Paris, 4eme Sous-Commission. Sance du 9 Dcembre, 1882. Rapport prsent par
M. Mille, pp. 5-8 (AP D1S8 6).
101 Au Jour Le Jour: L'Assainissement de la Seine Le Temps, July 9, 1899, p. 3.
102 Poubelle, Memoire au Conseil Municipal, Dec. 19, 1892 (AP D1S8 6).
103(1) Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen, p. 82 (2) Au Jour Le Jour: L'Assainissement de la
Seine Le Temps, July 9, 1899, p. 3; (3) L'puration de la Seine, Le Petit Parisien, July 9, 1899, p. 1.

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farming, so the authorities expanded the system to 6,300 hectares of terrain. 104 Once
Paris's main drain was closed, it begged the question of how the Seine was being altered
by sewers across the department. Only two weeks after the ceremony at Clichy, the
Clichy Municipal Council noted that suburban communes throughout the department
were still dumping their waste into the Seine, and demanded that the departmental
government do something about it. 105 In 1900 the Prefect of the Seine and the Minister of
Public Works teamed up to create a project for the suburbs, which were then still
dumping an estimated 357,000 cubic meters a day of their own into the Seine. 106 In order
to accommodate the growing quantity of waste to be processed by the soil and by
farming, the departmental authorities worked to implement purification methods, mostly
modeled on British septic tank systems (especially the bacteriological system of Dr.
Calmette), between 1904 and 1907. 107 By 1907, what had started in the 1870s as
cleaning up the Seine had become a project for cleaning up the Seine, the Marne and
the Bivre. 108 The debate Belgrand started in 1855 concerned Paris's effect on the Seine;
40 years later, the same discussion concerned the effect of the entire department on all of
its waterways. Just as Paris's search for fresh water widened the circle of its ecological
impact in these years, so did the long-standing question of how to flush everything into
the sewer, but nothing into the Seine. The plans hatched in 1907 would see plenty of

104 L'puration de la Seine, Le Petit Parisien, July 9, 1899, p. 1.

105 Rapport de l'Ingnieur ordinaire and Rapport de l'Ingnieur en Chef, Sept. 15, 1899 (AP D1S8 6).
106 Etat d'infection de la Seine en aval de Paris: Rponse au Service Municipal d'Assainissement: Avis de
l'Ingnieur en Chef (Rsal), Oct. 3, 1900 (AP D1S8 6).
107 Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Compte rendu de la sance du samedi 24 Dcembre, 1904, on AP VONC
1217; Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport #4 (June 29, 1905) and Conseil Gnral de la Seine,
Rapport # 13 (July 5, 1907), both in AP D1S8 6.
108 Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport au nom de la Commission des eaux et de l'assainissement, sur
l'tablissement d'un programme avec puration biologique des eaux d'gout pour l'assainissement de la
Seine, de la Marne et de la Bivre, No. 13 (1907), presented by Louis Parisot (AP D1S8 6).

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administrative work, but no realization, before 1914. 109
Much like the dream life of the Mtro and the battle of the tout l'gout,
projects for cleaning up the Seine were slow-moving between the early 1870s and 1900.
In these years, all three Paris governmentslocal, departmental and nationalworked on
the problem of the city's increasing pollution of the Seine. What began motivated by
growing awareness of the modern city's ability to pollute water had become by 1900
motivated by the inverse: recruiting chemical and bacteriological means to show modern
science's ability to purify water. Where Paris's wastewater is concerned, the period from
1870 to 1914 saw engineers, politicians and journalists struggling to grapple with the
finite filtering capacity of water and soil, and humanity's power to manipulate water.
Paris's organic cycle had been broken, hence the increasing attention put on purifying
both potable water and wastewater, in this period, using technoscience to manipulate
nature.

The Seine, Floods and the Role of Nature

Paris lies in the Seine basin, a large, teardrop-shaped area in north-eastern France
whose rivers drain into the Seine, which rises in central France near Dijon, and drains
into the English Channel at Le Havre. Where Paris stands, the river has cut a wide valley
into the earth, leaving behind a ring of hills. Paris's basic topology is that of a bowl, and
the flat plain at the bowl's center is the Seine's floodplain. Like many rain-fed rivers, the

109 Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport #29 (Dec. 3, 1909); Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport # 7
(March 17, 1911); Conseil Gnral de la Seine, Rapport #3 (June 8, 1914) these last two are in AP
D1S8 7.

385
Seine floods regularly. 110 From 1700 to 2000 it flooded 75 times, on average 25 per
century, or once every four years. Two thirds of these floods (48) never got higher than 6
meters, which the Prefecture of Police today considers the threshold of significant
physical damage to the city. On its course through the city, the Seine is a relatively
humanized or technologized waterway, its channel heavily built-up with stone, its quays
far above the normal water level. Hence a majority of floods are not catastrophic for the
city, as the exceptional floods of 1658, 1740 and 1910 were, during which waters reached
over 8 meters. Floods typically come during the winter, almost always between
November and April. Between 1891 and 2001, 73% of floods that reached 6 meters or
more came in January, and the other 27% in December or February.111 That Seine floods
are loosely rhythmic in this way does not make them any easier to predict. The only
chance of predicting when Paris will flood lies in flood reports from the Seine's many
tributaries, following large amounts of rain throughout the Seine basin. 112 Floods are a
normal part of life in Paris, and under most circumstances, the Seine's fortified river bed
and the natural filtering capacity of the earth are enough to keep water out of Paris. But
when floods were extraordinary, they left deep traces in the archive. Between 1870 and
1910, Paris saw flooding greater than 6 meters in 1876 and 1883. 113

110 For a concise distinction between rain-fed and alpine rivers, see Cornelius Disco, Taming the Rhine,
cited above.
111 Paris Prefecture of Police, Plan de Secours Spcialis Inondations Zonal (Jan. 1, 2006), vol. 1, Ch. 1.3,
pp. 25-28. Online at http://www.prefecture-policeparis.interieur.gouv fr/prevention/innondation janvier2006/sommaire htm. It is important to note that
flood rhythms change over time, too. Before 1891, Paris saw major floods over 6 meters in March of
1751, 1784, 1804, 1807, 1817, 1844 and 1876.
112 As hydrologist Mdric Clment Lechalas pointed out, Belgrand had already made this argument in
1876, that major Seine floods ...sont toujours le rsultat d'une srie de crues successives des affluents
torrentiels, which saturate the soils of the entire Seine bassin, removing the natural draining properties
of the soil. See Hydraulique fluviale (Paris: Baudry et cie, 1884), p. 287. This argument remains current
even today.
113 The flood of 1872 was around 6 meters, but measurements differ. Paris also saw waters above 5 meters

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In 1876, floodwaters crested at 6.69 meters on March 18th. Reporters from Le
Temps visited the worst areas of flooding in the suburbs upstream of Paris. Here, the
spectacle is much more terrible. In places the river swelled to 5 or 6 km wide. But the
number of flooded houses is incalculable. The flood threatened to put people out of
work, out of food, out of home. The worst damage was at Alfortville, a largely working
class area. The reporters used works like incalculable, effroyable (frightful), terrible,
spectacle, monotonie, immense and lugubre to describe what they saw. In Paris, flooding
on the quai de Passy compromised omnibus service, and flooding in the basement of the
Palais Bourbon shut down the print shop. The Esplanade des Invalides also flooded.
Some of the worst damage occurred in Bercy, an industrial area on the river bank, home
to warehouses where many of Paris's foodstuffs and raw materials were stored, especially
wine. Le Temps pleaded, We hope that it will be the origin of a radical reform in the
regime of the Seine with the aid of constructions worthy of a people truly master of its
destiny. Even though the necessary works would be gigantic, some preventative work
on engineering the waterway would ultimately cost less than cleaning up after a similar
catastrophic flood. 114
Belgrand's study of the 1876 flood became one of the most referenced
hydrological works of the era. 115 For those whose houses flooded, popular encyclopedia

in 1877, '79, '80, '86, '89, '96 and '97. Paris Prefecture of Police, Plan de Secours Spcialis Inondations
Zonal, pp. 25-28.
114 Faits divers, Le Temps, Mar. 18, 1876 no. 5449, p. 2. The point would be made later, but not heeded
soon enough. In 1900, one engineer suggested that Paris could be defended against floods by reworking
the barrages at Bezons and Bougival, which helped control the river around Paris. The barrage at
Bezons, for example, was not physically renovated until 1933. See: Etat d'infection de la Seine en aval
de Paris: Rponse au Service Municipal d'Assainissement: Avis de l'Ingnieur en Chef (Rsal), Oct. 3,
1900 (AP D1S8 6).
115 Mdric Clment Lechalas, Hydraulique fluviale (Paris: Baudry et cie, 1884), p. 287; A. de Preaudeau
, Manuel hydrologique du bassin de la Seine (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1884), p. 56; Leveson

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Le Magasin Pittoresque offered advice on how to dry out and repair humid walls. 116
Zola's fast-paced and tragic short story L'Inondation (The Flood) conveys a sense of the
violence and drama of flooding in the Garonne basin in 1876, which killed more than
500. The story's narrator and protagonist, an aged farmer living on the Garonne river near
Toulouse, father of three and great-grandfather of two, is the last one left when the
flooding river swallows up his farm, house and family. 117 Flooding in the Paris area was
also an important subject for impressionist cityscapes; Alfred Sisley depicted flooded
Marly and Bercy in 1876, and Camille Pissaro flooded Pontoise in 1882.
In 1883, floodwaters crested at 6.24 meters on January 5th. In fact, the Seine
suffered two distinct floods that winter, first in December of 1882 and second in January
of 1883. As engineers from the cole des Ponts et Chausses explained, two separate and
roughly equal floods were propagated by two separate periods of unusual precipitation in
the Seine basin. The flooding caused little damage to property or human life, and so
struck the men of the Ponts et Chausses as a learning opportunity, the first chance to test
Belgrand's 1854 flood warning system. Ideally, they claimed, they could provide four to
five days warning with the right meteorological data. Their conclusion was that the
science of predicting floods was a difficult one, but already making great strides; they
were optimistic that rigorous empiricism and a mountain of data could one day crack the
Francis Vernon-Harcourt, Rivers and Canals: The Flow, Control, and Improvement of Rivers and the
Design, Construction, and Development of Canals Both for Navigation and Irrigation, with Statistics of
the Traffic on Inland Waterways (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896), p. 151. Ellwood H. McClelland, Floods
and Flood Protection: References to Books and Magazine Articles (Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh,
1908), p. 39.
116 Moyens de scher et assainir les habitations humides Le Magasin pittoresque 1876 (yr. 44), p. 358.
117 (1) Emile Zola, The Flood (New York, The Warren Press, 1911); (2) For more on the damages caused
by 1876 flooding in the Garonne basin, see Socit de statistique de Paris, Centre national de la
recherche scientifique, Journal de la Socit de statistique de Paris (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1875), p.
265. Although the publication date is printed as 1875, the collection amazingly contains many materials
on 1876, including these records of flood damage.

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river's code. 118
While the historical record for 1876 shows us one side of the story, that of human
suffering, the weakness of humanity before the forces of nature, the historical record for
1883 is cold and technical, reflecting another narrative, that of dispassionate analysis and
humanity's rational mastery over nature. Floods defy narratives of human mastery over
nature, showing that even the most technologized, humanized, envirotechnical waterways
have explosive physical powers with undeniable and sometimes catastrophic
consequences. They also tend to inspire reflections on the relationships between humans
and nature, and attempts to repair humanism, to shore up narratives of technological
mastery over nature and re-humanize the environment. Floods prove us wrong, while
they drive us to prove them wrong.
No flood of the era was more catastrophic or more spectacular than 1910. That
January, Paris saw the worst flooding since 1658. Swelled by the autumn's unseasonal
rains across the Seine basin, the river rose from its usual 2 meters to over 8 meters deep.
In spite of contemporary newspaper reports of human and animal corpses floating on the
water, people trapped in their homes, food shortages and familiar fears of a typhoid
outbreak, human casualties were relatively light. The flood's real impact was hundreds of
millions of francs in infrastructural damage, which brought the bustling capital to a near
standstill for more than a week and compromised it for months.
The government commission called to report on the flood, composed of
influential Parisian scientists, engineers and elected officials, identified 5 main types of

118 Annales des ponts et chaussees no.53 pt.1 v.2 1883, Memoires et documents No. 50, "Etude sur les
crues de l'hiver 1882-1883 dans le bassin de la Seine." Written by G. Lemoine and A. de Preaudeau
(Paris: A. Dumas, 1883), p. 314-346.

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infrastructure effected: (1) transportation networks (roads, railways, tramways, the
Mtro), (2) sanitation networks (sewers, trash collection, street cleaning), (3)
communication networks (telegraph and telephone), (4) power networks (distribution of
electricity, gas and compressed air in underground conduits), and (5) the built
environment more generally (roads, bridges, quays, houses). 119 A chain of related
concerns follow in the commission's report: flood prevention measures, public health and
hygiene, Paris's ecological effect on its downstream suburbs, shortages of resources,
unemployment, homelessness, and more broadly the politics of infrastructure. In the face
of all this damage and all these concerns, however, the commissioners stressed their
optimism and how well the city held up, defending what Graham and Marvin in
Splintering Urbanism called the notion of the ordered, unitary city, mediated by
standard ubiquitous infrastructure networks. This modern infrastructural ideal or
modern unitary city ideal, as they call it, was an influential idea in Paris from
Haussmann to the First World War, as we have already seen. 120
Floodwaters reached Paris on January 22nd. Engineers for the East Paris
Tramway network were so sure that their power plant at Ivry would flood that they shut
down the entire network preemptively. 121 Paris's tramways depended on the functioning
of the street network and the electrical grid, but both of these networks were quickly
compromised by floodwaters. Over the course of the next week, Paris's several tramway
companies struggled to keep service running by reverting to older modes of traction,

119 La Commission des Inondations. IV Rapport gnral de M. Alfred Picard (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale,
1910).
120 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological
Mobilities and the Urban Condition (Routledge, 2001), pp. 49, 52 and 62.
121 Les inondations: le dsastre s'tend la rgion parisienne, Le Petit Parisien, Jan. 22, 1910, p. 1.

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notably horse power and steam. Older trams and omnibuses, on a steep decline in Paris
since the introduction of electric trams in preparation for the 1900 Exposition, were
suddenly in high demand, and were rolled out of storage and back onto the rails.
The failing tramways were a sign of problems deeper underground. Beginning
with Haussmannization, the Paris sewers were used for bundling infrastructure. 122 In
Haussmann's famous quote about organs of the large city, when he called the sewers
underground galleries, saying and that pure fresh water, light and heat would circulate
like the various fluids whose movement and maintenance are essential to life, he was not
only being metaphorical. 123 Underground galleries were the sewer mains. Because he
and Belgrand chose a combined sewer system the mains required were enormous.
These enormous mains thus provided a space in which to bundle infrastructures, where
the technical components of Haussmann's modernized city could be hidden, kept out of
his beloved streetscape. Hence, pure fresh water, light and heat were literal references
to water and gas pipes running through the sewer mains. 124
This left multiple networks vulnerable to flooding in 1910: fresh water, waste
water, gas, electricity, telegraph, telephone and compressed air. Compressed air, for
example, was used to send messages in Jean-Baptiste Berlier's network of pneumatic
tubes, as well as to power clocks and elevators throughout the city. On the evening of
January 22nd, across the city, the hands of Paris's synchronized clocks stopped between
10:48 and 10:53 when the Popp company's compressed air plant at Quai de la Gare
flooded. Standard, human time stopped. The humanized environment partially dissolved

122 Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, pp. 53-55.

123The entire quote is reproduced in Chapter 1.
124 Goubert, The Conquest of Water, pp. 61-7.

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in the floodwaters, showing us what historians of technology call sociotechnical
social systems, structures and routines densely intertwined with technological systems. 125
Floodwaters not only infiltrated the city laterally, via the river bed, but also
bubbled up from the groundwater, traveling through the deep, layered structures of the
citybasements and cesspits, catacombs and stone quarries, sewers and railway tunnels.
Contemporary astronomer and popular science author Camille Flammarion called Paris a
vast molehill, run through with underground channels, forming a sort of ant-hill
network. Consequently, he argued, All of Paris rests today on a worm-eaten base 126
The sewers, carrying Paris's sources of light, heat, water, power and sanitation, wound
through this vast space beneath Paris, putting the city's most basic services at risk. One
angry handbill circulated in Paris after the flood stated The city of Paris brought the
flood to you with its sewers. 127
Underground Paris was also the scene of heavy construction during the rapid
transportation development of 1899-1914. Tunnels for two separate railways, the NordSud underground railway and the Mtro's Line 4, were in progress when the flood hit.
Workers were just beginning to build the access stairway for the Nord-Sud station at the
Place du Palais Bourbon on January 22nd when floodwaters burst in. The space intended
for the stairway was crossed by a major sewer-line that ran under the rue de l'Universit
and fed into the main sewer of the Bivre. River water had risen high enough to reverse
the flow of the pipe, pushing water away from the river, underneath the Left Bank. The

125 Wiebe Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT,
1995).
126 Camille Flammarion, Le fleau qui rampe Je sais tout vol. 62, year 6 (March 15, 1910), pp. 172-182,
quotes pp. 177 and 180 (une sorte de rseau de fourmilire and Tout Paris soutient aujourdhui sur
une base vermoulue).
127 See Jeffrey Jackson, unpublished manuscript on the 1910 Flood, p. 96. Cited with author's permission.

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sewer pipe began to crack under pressure and floodwaters, now mixed with sewage,
poured into the worksite, wrecking scaffolds, carrying away construction materials, and
collapsing the roadway of the rue de l'Universit above. Soon the workers stood agape as
an underground river rollicked between the quays of the unfinished station, carrying
away wood, brick, stone and their tools. 128 The next day, Le Petit Parisien reported that
the roadway of the boulevard St. Germain had collapsed as a result of this underground
flooding, as well. 129
The flooded Nord-Sud tunnel led floodwater underneath the Right Bank as well.
Underneath the Gare St. Lazare, the Nord-Sud tunnel passed beneath the Mtro's Line 3.
On January 24th, the Nord-Sud tunnel was full and water began bubbling up into the
Mtro. Mtro engineers Bienvenu and Htier reported that employees rushed to erect
barriers to keep water out of the Opra. The place de l'Opra, not far from the train
station, was the symbolic center of Haussmann's city. Recall from Chapter 3 that the
Opra worksite was opened and re-opened in 1903, 1905 and 1910. By 1910, Mtro lines
3, 7 and 8 crossed underneath the plaza in an enormous, triple-decker cement hub. 130
These massive underground works were perched atop the underground lake famously
depicted in Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, and therefore at immediate flood risk. Mtro
tunnels flooded in several other places, too, including the Rennes station on Line 4, not
far from the breach at rue de l'Universit. In all, Htier and Bienvenu estimated that 19.4
kilometers of the network's total 63, or about one third, were flooded. 131

128 Les inondations: le dsastre s'tend la rgion parisienne, Le Petit Parisien, Jan. 22, 1910, p. 1.
129 Les inondations: la Seine continue monter, le dsastre s'accentue partout, Le Petit Parisien, Jan. 23,
1910, p. 1.
130 Flood Commission, Rapport Htier et Bienvenu, p. 241. See also Max de Nansouty, Causerie
Scientifique: Sciences Appliques: Le grand trou de la place de l'Opra, Le Temps, July 31, 1903.
131 Flood Commission, Rapport Htier et Bienvenu, p. 245.

393
Problems for the Mtro emerged as soon as floodwaters hit the city. On the
morning of January 22, lines 1 and 6 had to be shut down when their power plant on Quai
de la Rape flooded. Like Paris's underground infrastructures, its power plants were
vulnerable. We have already seen that electric tramways and pneumatic clocks were
quickly knocked out as their power plants flooded. Paris power plants were typically built
on the banks of the river, on relatively low ground, to facilitate drawing water and
dumping waste, so they were quick to flood. The same fate awaited all of Paris's major
train stations on the national train network or grande lignes. The Gares d'Austerlitz, de
Lyon, des Invalides and d'Orsay all sat on or near the banks of the Seine, and those that
did notthe Gares de l'Est, du Nord and St. Lazare (de l'Ouest)had multiple
connections with Paris's flooding underground (hence the Gare St. Lazare was filled by
water from the Nord-Sud railway).
Of the city's four main garbage processing plants, only the one at Romainville was
on ground high enough to escape flooding. The build-up of unprocessed waste (garbage
dumped from people's houses and swept from the streets) became so large that already by
January 23rd, the Prefect of the Seine and Prefect of Police agreed that all waste which
could not be processed should be thrown into the Seine. 132 A contemporary picture book
shows men lined up along the viaduct at Auteuil, shoveling waste from carts into the
river. 133 This only aggravated the long-standing conflict between Paris and its suburbs
over the capital's pollution of the Seine. 134 In Paris, by contrast, fresh water pipes ran in

132 Flood Commission, Rapport Boreux et Tur, L'vacuation et la destruction des gadoues Paris, p. 163.
Contemporary postcards show the dumping in progress.
133 Crue de la Seine: Paris inond (Paris: ditions ELD, 1910).
134 (1) Flood Commission, Rapport M.P. Alexandre, Les Communes Suburbaines, pp. 422-500; (2) Jeffrey
Jackson, Unpublished manuscript on the 1910 Flood, p. 132, cited with author's permission; (3)
Commission d'Extension de Paris, vol 2: considrations techniques prliminaires (Paris: Chaix, 1913),

394
the sewers, bundled with gas, electric and compressed air lines. As soon as the sewers
flooded, Paris's fresh water supply was slowly mixed with sewage, river water and storm
water. On January 23rd, the Water Service had newspapers publish a warning for
Parisians to boil their water before consuming it. 135 The city's vital circulus, balancing
inputs of fresh resources and outputs of waste, was slowed.
Such infrastructural breakdown had a devastating impact on the city's everyday
life. The flood put many people out of work and out of their homes, and disrupted the
social-cultural scripts (maps, itineraries, etc.) that Parisians used to navigate their city. Le
Petit Parisien told the story of a bourgeois commuter, forced to transfer from the Gare
d'Orsay, which was closed, to the Gare d'Austerlitz, all the way across the left bank. The
tramway was the best way to make the transfer, but it was also closed due to flooding,
and he was forced to take a coach: Coach! To the Gare dAusterlitz, and at a gallop!
What a story! Im gonna miss my train, I am! Damn flood! Damn weather! Hurry up!
Coach! 136 As Htier and Bienvenu found in investigating the Mtro, interruption of
service on the network during the flood has been without a doubt one of the most
obvious facts for the immense majority of the Parisian public, in regard to the trouble, as
profound as it was unexpected, that it brought to the relations of everyday life. 137 The
degree to which modern everyday life in Paris had become dependent on networked
infrastructures like the tramways and Mtro was as profound as it was unexpected.
As these networked infrastructures failed, the normal routines and rhythms of

plate 25 contrasts density of sewer lines in north-west Paris with sewer lines in the nearby north-west
suburbs.
135 Le Petit Parisien, Jan. 23, 1910, p. 2.
136 Le Dsastre s'tend de la region Parisienne. Le Petit Parisien, Jan. 22, 1910.
137 Rapport Htier and Bienvenu, p. 235.

395
everyday life dissolved, the cityscape transformed surreally, and Parisians were forced to
develop 'hacks' and 'workarounds,' new ways to navigate familiar urban spaces, now
estranged. Streets became canals, second-story windows became doors, and out-of-work
men and women became spontaneous volunteers, roaming the city looking for others who
needed help. Sandbags, rowboats and lumber were suddenly in high demand. As many
contemporary authors put it, Paris had become Venice.138 Signs of upheaval were all
around. Driven from their underground homes, thousands of rats now scurried in the
streets. Crowds of Parisians, awed by the spectacle of the furious river, gathered on
bridges to watch. The Eiffel Tower reported unusual ticket sales on Jaunary 22nd, selling
over 1,000 tickets to Parisians excited to view the flooded city from above. 139
Extraordinary circumstances made engineers of Parisians, as it challenged the
city's engineers. Parisians were forced to exercise their ingenuity in such difficult
circumstances. There is no more obvious symbol of this ingenuity than the passerelles,
wooden walkways thrown up ad hoc on scaffolds throughout the city's flooded quarters
(figures 26 and 27). As Parisians struggled to keep afloat, the city's engineers scrambled
to erect barriers, pump water from buildings, and make quick decisions. Newspaper Le
Petit Parisien wrote of the powerlessness of the engineers (l'impuissance des
ingnieurs) to stop the forces of nature. 140
Le Petit Parisien was not the only newspaper questioning the authorities' ability to
handle the situation. Writing for Le Soleil, journalist Henry De Largle argued, It is not
contestable that the functionaries of the State and of the city of Paris are in part
138 Je sais tout vol. 62, year 6 (March 15, 1910), p. 160.
139 Le Petit Parisien, Jan. 22 and 23, 1910.
140 Les inondations: le dsastre s'tend la rgion parisienne, Le Petit Parisien no. 12,138 (Jan. 22,
1910), p. 1.

396
responsible, not for the flooding itself, but for its disastrous consequences. He had
several critiques for the authorities: that the Left Bank train stations should never have
been built so close to the river, for example, or that the company which operated the
Nord-Sud should be held responsible for all the damages caused by its tunnels. Rumors
that the city's sewers had burst abounded. And though engineer Colmet-Dage, attached
to the flood commission, could demonstrate that the sewers had not burst, but merely
reached maximum capacity 141 , journalists like De Largle thought the authorities shirked
responsibility by claiming that it was not the city's pipes which had failed, but the
privately-owned pipes which connected houses to the sewers. 142

Figure 26: Improvised passerelle, Porte d'Ivry.

141 Flood Commission. Rapport Colmet-Dage. Les gouts publics et les branchements particuliers
Paris.
142 Henry De Largle, Les rsponsabilits, Le Soleil, Feb. 11, 1910, p. 1.

397

Figure 27: passerelles on the rue de l'Htel Colbert

Journalist Ernest Judet, writing for L'clair, wrote:

Everyone is beginning to understand that the current catastrophes are not
accidents without cause, but are the screaming proof that the innumerable travaux
in which Paris is covered have been engaged at random, thanks to the engineers
and entrepreneurs, whose ideas and plans have never been subjected to the
appropriate critique of the collective interests of the city. Both groups shot blind,
running after solutions and progress whose charm their imaginations have
increased ten-fold, and which the public ignores, but enchanted by certain
seductive innovations, it has unfortunately become love. 143

143 Ernest Judet, Les cinq pouvoirs, L'clair (Jan. 19, 1910).

398
Judet's virulent critique of engineers, contractors (entrepreneurs) and elected officials cut
through the ideology of technological determinism and the technological sublime,
accusing these men of being seduced and enchanted by technological innovation. The
science they peddled looked like religion to him. Judet built on a discussion which had
been brewing in the Paris press since at least 1906, concerning delinquent contractors and
the disfigurement of the cityscape by the construction sites of unfinished works. Judet
shows us that the city hit by floodwaters in 1910 was the unfinished city of construction
sites we saw in Chatper 3. 144
Newspaper Le Matin generalized the critique: One says to have faith in science:
one learns that it contains goodness, morality, and peace. We believed what was said. But
today everyone is asking the same question: How has this science, so sure of itself, been
defeated by the primitive waters? How was it not capable of protecting the most beautiful
city against the capricious river? For Le Matin, not the Paris authorities, but science
itself was put on trial by the flood. Graham and Marvin's modern infrastructural ideal
was not far off. Le Matin posed science and modernity against the primitive waters,
forces which threatened to undo the city's modernity. The article ended by calling the
flood the 1870 of the engineers, a humiliating defeat like the one France suffered at
Prussia's hands in 1870. 145 Using languages of critique which had been developing since

144 See, for example: Les malfaons, Le Matin, Jan. 16, 1906; Les malfaons du Mtropolitain Le
Matin, Jan. 26, 1906. Les malfaons du Mtropolitain Le Matin, Feb. 6, 1906; Au Mtropolitain,
l'Humanit Aug. 16, 1907; Questions Parisiennes: l'Hygine et le Mtropolitan La Patrie, Aug. 16,
1908; La dsorganisation des services publics L'Intransigant, Aug. 18, 1908; Les Embarras de
Paris l'Aurore, Aug. 23, 1909; Les Travaux de Paris: on n'en finira jamais! La Libre Parole, Aug.
22, 1909; Les Embarras de Paris le Radical, Aug. 29, 1909; Les Propos du Lanternier La Lanterne
Aug. 18, 1909; l'Hygine au Mtropolitain L'Humanit, Sept. 3, 1910; Un muse, une bibliothque
et un lyce menacs d'un chantier, Le Matin, Aug. 25, 1911.
145 Henry de Jouvenal, Maintenant, l'avenir Le Matin, Jan. 31, 1910. This critique continued well after
the floodwaters had receded. See: La place de l'Opra n'est plus qu'un trou immense! L'Intransigant,

399
at least 1895's water shortage and omnibus strike, the press called out the engineers from
the Travaux de Paris specifically, defending the citizenry against any Haussmannesque
abuses that his successors might carry out.
The flood cracked the surface of the technophilic ideologies promoted by Paris
engineers since the 1850s as the last word in city planning. It showed that Paris's modern
means of transportation, communication and waste disposal, as well as its industrialized
sources of power, were fragile. It showed Parisians how much everyday life in their city
had come to depend on these icons of modernity, how much the city's normal socialtechnical circulus depended on the cooperation or control of the Seine. The flood showed
Paris the awesome complexity and heterogeneity of their city. It brought the technical
parts of infrastructure, so commonly hidden in capital cities like Paris for aesthetic
reasons, into view. It showed that social relations depended on dense ties to technology
and the forces of nature, binding humans, their tools and their environment in peculiarly
modern, mediated ways.
With the comforts and confidence of urban modernity stripped away, Parisians
were forced to resort to older technologies: rowboats replaced urban railways for
mobility, candles replaced gas for heat and light, and animal power replaced
electricity. 146 As they improvised new ways to navigate the city, Parisians watched how
quickly and easily the edifice of modernitynormally so attractive and imposing, even
hegemonic, and offering benefits like convenience, efficiency and productivity

Aug. 25, 1910; Partout des Trous L'Intransigant, Sept. 2, 1910; Sabotage stupide L'clair, Aug. 1,
1911; La Capitale Sabote l'Intransigeant, Aug. 5, 1911; Paris-Chantiers, L'clair, Aug. 6, 1911;
Affaires Municipales Les Nouvelles, Aug. 9, 1911; Les bcheronnes de Paris L'Intransigant, Sept.
30, 1911.
146 Recall from Chapter 3 that candles and lanterns were also important during the Mtro accident of
August 10, 1903.

400
crumbled, leaving behind an uncanny other of everyday life, the intimate spaces of their
home town turned to an obstacle course. This upheaval of normality in the city was so
fascinating to Parisians that they actively sought new ways to experience and remember
the city, hence the ingenious photographers who walked the city taking pictures, and the
enormous market in Paris for mementos like the postcards and photo albums they
produced, now one of our best sources for reconstructing this historical moment. 147
We should heed sociologist Eric Klinenberg's argument that there are social
disasters as well as natural disasters. 148 I argue that Paris's infrastructural paralysis in
1910 resulted as much from the previous half-century of urban renewal and
infrastructural overhaul as from the forces of nature. In this chapter, I have foregrounded
the relationships between society, technology and nature. We have also seen that
Parisians were aware of these relations, and aware of the fragility of the urban condition,
using the authorities' difficulties in responding to the flood as a lever for critiquing
modernity, science, technology and government.
The 1910 flood taught that what engineers and the public had recognized as urban
modernity since Haussmann was fragile, complex and contingent. It taught that the
rhythms and routines of modern life were run through with technology, that they were
social-technical. But it also taught that society and technology were tied to the forces of
nature, and that stress in any one part of a heterogeneous chain of networks could

147 (1) Crue de la Seine: Paris inond (Paris: ditions ELD, 1910); (2) Linondation Paris et dans la
Banlieue Janvier 1910: 60 vues (Paris: Oeuvre des orphelins-apprentis d'Auteuil, 1910); (3) Michel,
Albin, ed. Paris dans leau: Les Inondations pendant les Journes des 26-27-28-29-30 & 31 Janvier
1910: Cinquante Vues photographiques indites daprs nature (Paris: ditions de Luxe, 1910); (4)
Paris inond, 29 Janvier 1910, 32 vues (Paris: Piere Petit, 1910); (5) Paris Inconnu: L'Inondation de
1910 (Paris: Socit Anonyme de Limprimerie de Vaugirard: St dditions artistiques de tourisme et
de sports, 1910). This last book was sold by the Red Cross to raise money for disaster relief.
148 Eric Klinenberg. Heat Wave: a Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago, 2002).

401
produce failure in other parts. It complicated the simplistic, optimistic and teleological
narratives of technological progress familiar from forums like the Universal Expositions.
Since the summer of 1900, these had been called into question again and again, by water
and housing shortages, typhoid outbreaks, tramway and Mtro accidents, and
development sullied by delinquent contractors. The flood of 1910 drove home an already
familiar message: the darker side of urban modernity, a world of ecological damage,
social conflict, urban collapse, technological weakness, bureaucratic ineffectiveness, and
social strain. The flood of 1910 showed Parisians what I've called the fragility of
modernity.
At the end of July, 1911, in the midst of another heatwave, the water was shut off
again; river water was distributed, and the press overflowed with accusations and caustic
sarcasm. One journalist reported that he was surprised, when he turned his faucet, that a
dead dog didnt come out, adding Cholera, here? Yeah right! It would die of thirst. 149
Lclair ran a cartoon depicting a haggard old man sitting down at a caf: Waiter, an
absinthepure!...so as not to waste water! (figure 28). 150 Journalists peppered the press
with snide jokes. One journalist found his neighbors in turmoil. During the shut-off, one
neighbor was reduced to reading a book called A Glass of Water; another had to open a
bottle of mineral water to take a bath. The fat lady across the way took a bath in a salad
bowl with eau de mlisse (a lemon balm tincture), while the concierge at number 30
reported, tears in her eyes, that her canaries died because she watered them with Eau de
Vichy, a famous mineral water reputed to have medical properties. 151 The irony was

149 Louis Latape, Canicula, La Libert, July 31, 1911.

150 Lclair, Aug. 1, 1911.
151 Louis Latape, Canicula, La Libert, July 31, 1911.

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palpable: all of these other things called eau were available, but no pure water.

Figure 28: Les Resigns (The Resigned), Lclair, August 1, 1911.

During the 1911 shortage, the critique of the administration which had been
brewing since 1906, concerning the city of worksites, fed into the critiques bubbling up
from 1910. 152 One journalist, bringing the Flood of 1910 to bear on the 1911 water

152 Louis Latapie, "Canicula," La Liberte, July 31, 1911; "36o a l'ombre" Le Petit Journal July 31, 1911;
"Paris manque d'eau" Le Petit Parisien, July 31, 1911; Ernst Judet, "A l'eau! A l'eau!" L'Eclair, July 31,
1911; "L"Eau a Paris" La Lanterne, Aug. 1, 1911; "De l'eau! De l'eau!" L'Autorite, Aug. 1, 1911; "Les
Parisiens continuent a manquer d'eau" Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 1, 1911; "Paris aura-t-il assez d'eau?" Le
Radical, Aug. 1, 1911; "Affolement au Service des Eaux," L'Eclair, Aug. 1, 1911; "On est affole au
Service des Eaux," L'Intransigeant, Aug. 1, 1911; "La Question de l'Eau," La Petite Republique, Aug.
2, 1911; "De l'eau!" L'Aurore, Aug. 2, 1911; "'Voici de l'eau' declare le Prefet," Le Journal, Aug. 2,

403
shortage, wrote:
Thus are Parisians destined to perish under the water or to die of thirst. The
administration is incapable of sparing us the floods and the shortage. And to
administer our interests in this way, it spends a half million a year! For, is there a
city in the world worse governed, with a population at once worse served and
more docile? Paris is dirty, Paris stinks, Paris is encumbered, Paris has too much
water, Paris has a shortage of water...and Parisians, smiling, are going to bring
millions to the taxman and throw ballots into the electoral urns as if to say:
Thank you! 153
Later he wrote, It seems that the Republic is incapable of grand conceptions and major
works. Since the Empire, in effect, it has done nothing great or useful in Paris. He thus
undercut a narrative of progress in public works which Parisians had been hearing since
the Poubelle administration (as we saw in Chapter 1 with the Avenue de la Rpublique).
Ernst Judet, so critical during the shortage of 1895, also connected the 1910
flooding with the 1911 shortage, spinning it into a general indictment of the Paris
authorities: a year ago we barely escaped a flood that the engineers aggravated, and
none of the measures adopted to prevent its return are in the process of being realized.
Was it any wonder, then, that the city could not handle the water crisis, instead presenting
the lamentable spectacle of crowds suffering in the heat, with no comfort, no refuge
anywhere, deprived of water to drink, water with which to wash and bathe...? This, he
concluded, is the shame of a capital like Paris. 154 Journalists also reminded Parisians of

1911; "Bonne nouvelle: on va nous donner de l'eau!" Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 2, 1911; "Les faits du jour:
Nous aurons de l'eau," Le Radical, Aug. 2, 1911; "De l'eau de Marne," L'Eclair, Aug. 2, 1911; "Le
regime de l'eau filtree," L'Intransigeant, Aug. 2, 1911; "L'Eau de Marne sterilisee," L'Aurore, Aug. 5,
1911; "L'Eau de Marne sterilisee," Le Petit Parisien, Aug. 5, 1911; "Les Grands Travaux: Paris Port de
Mer," Le Radical, Aug. 5, 1911; "Les bassins filtrants qui ne filtrent pas," L'Intransigeant, Aug. 11,
1911; Laurent Surville, "Pour l'Eau a Paris: Conlusion de Notre Campagne," L'Eclair, Aug. 12, 1911;
Laurent Surville, "Eau du Rhone ou du Lac de Geneve?" L'Eclair, Aug. 16, 1911; Joseph Denais, "Le
Lac de Geneve a Paris?" La Libre Parole, Aug. 26, 1911; "L'Eau du Rhone a Paris," Les Nouvelles,
Aug. 26, 1911. All of these articles are conserved in a press review in AP VONC 131.
153 Louis Latapie, Canicula, La Libert, July 31, 1911.
154 Ernst Judet, L'Eau! L'Eau! L'clair, July 31, 1911.

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the search for water at the bottom of the social ladder. In the midst of the heatwave,
...the Wallace Fountainswhat few are leftdon't have enough in their two goblets for
the eager clientle jostling around them. 155 Another newspaper reported people going
door to door in Montmartre with any containers at hand: pans, pitchers, pots, buckets and
bowls. Others just collected yellowed water from the gutters, planning to boil it. 156
Le Radical noticed that the shortage defied the recommendations of doctors and
hygienists:
You are thirsty; doctors tell you to drink often to supply your sweat glands and
avoid kidney obstructions; doctors can spew their advice, [but] the City can't spew
its water, and to the great detriment of hygiene and the desires of its inhabitants, it
is particularly greedy at the same instant when they have the greatest need. 157
After a few days, the real problem was revealed. Speaking with sources close to
the Water Service, La Petite Rpublique reported that the Vanne Aqueduct had ruptured
sometime in mid July. During the three days it was being repaired, Paris lost about as
much water (340,000 cubic meters) as it would normally consume in a day. Then, once
the repaired aqueduct was put back into service, the drought overtook it, and water
stopped flowing 130km from Paristhe problem of water pressure, again. 158 In midSeptember, 1911 the Seine's water level was so low that navigation had to be stopped for
a week. 159 What more evidence did the public need of the powerlessness of engineers?
Unlike previous summer water shortages, 1911's critique of the Water Service was more
pointed, because these were not deliberate shut-offs, but technical failures.
Another paper noted that the city's water filtration system was being renovated
155 36o l'ombre, Le Petit Journal, July 31, 1911.
156 Paris manque d'eau, Le Petit Parisien, July 31, 1911.
157 La vie municipale: Paris aura-t-il assez d'eau? Le Radical, Aug. 1, 1911.
158 La question de l'eau La Petite Rpublique, Aug. 2, 1911.
159 La Seine Empoisonne, Le Petit Parisien, Sept. 23, 1911.

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throughout the shortage. The administration a bit hastily decided the summer would be
humid, and there would be no shortage. Thus, with that rapidity of decision that
characterizes grand projects, the city decided to demolish the existing basins, which do
not respond to the exigencies of the Service and have need of being modernized. But
the regrettable thing, this paper wrote, is that when one undertakes to modernize them
all at once, this takes us back to a hygiene worthy of the middle ages. The paper went on
to explain that the meter-thick layer of sand which normally filtered the water had been
removed from the basin. A temporary basin was set up to replace it, but it did not inspire
confidence: we have today but a wee little basin, a child basin, constructed in twelve
hours... The author called it a toy basin, which could only handle 35,000 cubic meters
of water a day, and challenged the authorities directly: We're keeping track of the
rapidity with which this unclean liquid flows! The author also thought the city's chlorine
bleach (eau de Javel) water disinfection system was crude, and effected the taste of the
water, suggesting that it invest 5,000,000 francs in an ozone purification system. 160
These examples show journalists eager to connect the failings of 1911 with those
of 1910 and before, and eager to discuss technical details. Far from leaving the technical
details to engineers, as Municipal Councilor Deyhanin suggested in 1872, these
journalists wanted and needed to discuss the technical details of public works, just as
Municipal Councilor Duval-Arnould did in 1900 as he critiqued the Diatto system. These
journalists sought to publicly contest the technical details of the water system, to inflame
an already heated public dialog about public works. The press called out the Travaux de
Paris and accused them of under-developing the city. Journalists expected more from a

160 Les bassins filtrants qui ne filtrent pas, L'Intransigant, Aug. 11, 1911.

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modern, networked city, and knew that the city's engineers and the public did, too. Papers
began to demand the waters of Lake Geneva themselves. 161 The situation remained dire
in 1913. 162
What have we seen in this chapter? Much like the large-scale plans for urban
renewal we saw at the end of the last chapter, Paris's water problems were scaling up.
Paris's water supply and wastewater disposal needs were growing, spreading the city's
ecological impact on water farther and farther from the city limits, from the suburbs to
Orlans, from the Atlantic to Lake Geneva. 1911 also brought the finalization of plans for
flood control work and clean-up of the Seine, which included widening and deepending
one branch of the river in central Paris, and modifying the flow of the Marne. 163 But like
the urban plans we saw in the last chapter, these would lie dormant until after the First
World War. From the last chapter into this chapter, we have seen that Paris's foremost
hygienic problems (housing, density and water) between 1870 and 1914 were sites of
constant work, but never fully resolved. As late as 1928, 18% of houses in the city still
didn't enjoy the tout l'gout. 164 One engineer suggested for the sake of flood prevention
that the city rework the barrage at Bezons in 1900, another in 1910; it wasn't renovated
until 1933. 165 Like the housing and density problems, Paris's nagging water problems

161 There was also discussion of tapping the Rhne, an affluent of the lake. See: Laurent Surville, "Pour
l'eau Paris: Conlusion de Notre Campagne," L'clair, Aug. 12, 1911; Laurent Surville, "Eau du Rhone
ou du Lac de Geneve?" L'clair, Aug. 16, 1911; Joseph Denais, "Le Lac de Genve Paris?" La Libre
Parole, Aug. 26, 1911; "L'Eau du Rhne Paris," Les Nouvelles, Aug. 26, 1911.
162 Robert Lon, Paris et son alimentation en eau La Revue de Paris
163 "Les Grands Travaux: Paris Port de Mer," Le Radical, Aug. 5, 1911; Sabine Barles, Urban
metabolism and river systems: an historical perspective Paris and the Seine, 1790-1970 (cited
above), p. 1861.
164 Evenson, Paris a Century of Change, p. 212.
165 See: (1) Etat d'infection de la Seine en aval de Paris: Rponse au Service Municipal d'Assainissement:
Avis de l'Ingnieur en Chef (Rsal), Oct. 3, 1900 (AP D1S8 6). (2) A. Morillon and M. Piketty, La
verit sur les inondations Revue de la batellerie no. 3 (July, 1910), pp. 2-7. This and other sources
related to defending Paris against floods after 1910 can be found in AN F 14 16584.

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show an urban crisis emerging before World War One, which would not see any
significant corrective action until the interwar period. Water supply, flood control and
Seine clean-up plans illustrate this clearly. Whereas transportation development moved
swiftly after the 1890s, Paris's water system, like its housing supply, took more time to
develop.
In spite of the hygiene movement's aggressive public campaign to educate the
public about water use, and an ever-growing network of pipes, there remained spaces in
Pariss periphery and the Zone that were off the grid. Public demand for water, like
demand for transportation and housing, was disappointed throughout this era. The
Republic's moral improvement was moving faster than material improvement,
because the public learned that it was entitled to public services before those who
promised it (the government and its experts) could deliver on their promises. The Water
Service increasingly enclosed water in Paris, making Parisians more dependent on the
distribution network, on the state, and on the landlords for their water. But they did this
before they could guarantee water to everyone. Even as they worked to grow the water
supply, the complex of hygiene and civilization continued to produce ever more uses for
water. Demand grew not only because of population growth, but increased per capita, as
well.
The housing problem and the water problem were also similar in that their
solution was stalled by Paris landlords. Getting laws, inspectors and standards to work
inside the walls of privately owned buildings proved a difficult project for the Paris
authorities. The 1892 and 1894 laws making eau de source and direct to sewer drainage
obligatory for landlords were the first step, but frequently violated well into the 1920s.

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Perhaps the most important reason that water and sewage development moved
slowly in this era was the lesson taught by the 1910 flood, that the forces of nature would
always be beyond the control of the city's engineers. Through heat, drought, stink, and
flooding, we've seen the Seine and the weather schooling Paris. Throughout this chapter,
we have seen Paris's water system as a heterogeneous network combining humans, pipes
and other technologies, and the Seine. We've seen that water distribution and sewage
infrastructures depended on the cooperation of ecological factors like gravity, heat and
rainfall. Although water was more and more enclosed in this period, turned into an
industrial product distributed in human-made networks, it still remained fundamentally a
natural resource. It was envirotechnical, but never fully subject to human control. The
Seine's floods drove this point home.

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Conclusion: The Fragility of Modernity

On the morning of March 10, 2005 I left my tiny, furnished studio apartment in
Paris bound for the French National Library for research. The same day the International
Olympic Committee was visiting Paris to evaluate its bid to host the 2012 Summer
Games. I first realized something was wrong when I reached the Corvisart Mtro station.
The turnstiles were shut down and one could get in for free. Inside, the loudspeakers
blared that there was a 20 minute wait for trains in both directions. Suddenly I realized
what was going on: the CGT, the labor union that has represented Paris transit workers
for decades, had called a strike for this most sensitive day. Sabotaging the citys Olympic
bid would give their strike even more impact. Transit strikes are not uncommon in Paris,
and they have a crippling effect on the citys everyday routine. The entire city slows
down, and Parisians miss work or arrive late by the thousands. Today Parisians depend
on the Mtro (and RER commuter trains) even more than engineers Htier and Bienvenu
found they did during the 1910 flood.
That day in 2005, I became one of these thousands of commuters knocked from
our normal morning itineraries, forced to improvise a new route. I decided to walk to the
library, but arrived to find that disorder had spread there as well. Makeshift paper signs
were posted warning of delays due to les mouvements sociales (social movements) and
the library was short-staffed. I was hoping to spend the day reading LAnti-concierge, but

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the microfilms were in transit and therefore unavailable. Luckily I had documents on hold
from my last visit and could make a productive day of it. But I was never able to devote
myself 100% to my work that day. I kept thinking of the shrewdness of the striking
transit workers who planned to shut down the city on this especially significant day,
compromising schedules, commuters, turnstiles and trains. I realized that a disruption in
one sector (transport) could provoke disruptions in other sectors as well (information, the
library). The strike removed the human inputs that the transit networks need to function,
disrupting commuter itineraries and in turn disrupting the places commuters worked. The
strike not only made it harder for me to get to the library, but also harder for me to get my
work done once I was there.
That evening on my walk home I arrived at the Place dItalie to find myself in a
huge CGT demonstration, a noisy carnival of striking workers that had transformed my
neighborhoods largest traffic circle into a bustling pedestrian mall. So strikers were also
disrupting automobile traffic and embarrassing the city authorities hosting the
International Olympic Committee. Months later I was working at the Paris
Administrative Library in the Htel de Ville, by chance on the day the International
Olympic Committee announced its decision. A crowd has assembled on the plaza in front
of the Htel de Ville waiting for the announcement, and I could hear them cheering from
the reading room. Then the announcement came: by 54 votes to 50, the 2012 games
would be inLondon. The crowd groaned. That night the France 1 evening news
interviewed a bartender who said lamour des jeux est fini, cest tampinethe love of
the games is finished, its stamped out.
That year in Paris also saw a rash of deadly fires in run-down apartment buildings

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and hotels. The deadliest, on August 25th, gutted a building just blocks from the National
Library on Boulevard Vincent Auriol, home to several families of West-African
immigrants living in poverty. Almost 20 people diedthe most lethal fire in Paris since
1944. Le Mondes website recalled a phrase familiar from my research: crise de
logement (crisis of lodging). On September 5th, I wrote in my Paris journal: as of
yesterday, another HLM full of Ivoirians burned in the Paris region. That makes four fires
since April. Days later I left work at the National Library to find another raucous
demonstration on my way home. A large crowd had convened in front of the still
blackened building on Boulevard Vincent Auriol, preparing to march for immigrant
rights and access to better housing. I marched with them in solidarity for several blocks
before turning to go home. The evening news estimated that I was one of 5,000-15,000
demonstrators.
2005s transit strike and apartment fires showed me that the historical
vulnerability of Pariss housing and transportation infrastructures, which I was
uncovering in my research, still haunted the city. My experiences in Paris were constantly
framed by news of growing unrest and violence in the Paris suburbs, as well as news
from the United States covering the ongoing fallout from Hurricane Katrina. 1 In the
summer of 2006, on my second research trip to Paris, I had to miss several days of work
at the National Archives because the elevator that employees use to move documents to
and from the stacks kept breaking. Then I spilled water on my laptop. The laptop
survived, but it wont run Windows XP anymore; now it runs Linux. Also in 2006, the
Prefecture of Police published the final version of its long-awaited Emergency Flood
1

For more on the violence in the Paris suburbs in 2005, see Joshua Cole, Understanding the French
Riots of 2005: What historical context for the crise des banlieues?, Francophone Postcolonial
Studies 5:2 (Autumn/Winter 2007), pp. 69-100.

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Plan 2 , as if to answer director Bruno Victor-Pujebets gripping TV docu-drama of the
same year, Paris 2011: La Grande Inondation (The Great Flood). Paris 2011 revealed an
inconvenient truth for Paris in the style of The Day After Tomorrow, arguing that a flood
of 1910s magnitude would do much more damage today, due in no small part to the
citys increasing complexity and reliance on networked infrastructures. It is no accident,
in light of international coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the notion of the 100 year
flood that both Victor-Pujebet and the Paris Police recalled 1910 in 2006. To top it all
off, on the day of my return trip to the United States, I nearly missed my plane because of
another transit strike.
These experiences showed me that what Parisians learned from the flood of
1910the fragility of urban modernity, the interconnectedness of overlapping
heterogeneous infrastructural networkswas still relevant today. In 2005 and 2006, I
saw firsthand that trains, libraries, apartment houses, elevators and computers are fragile
infrastructures, vulnerable to disruptions of technical function, social routine and the
forces of nature. As we think about the infrastructural failures of our own era we should
remember Pariss experience from 1870 to 1914. The story of infrastructural
modernization that I have offered in this study holds portable lessons about how the
rhythms and routines of everyday urban life depend on carefully coordinated
heterogeneous networks which link humans, technologies and the natural environment in
complex ways. This is as true in 2009 as it was in 1914, as true in Paris as it is in New
Orleans.
My story started with Haussmann, whose ambitious urban renovations kicked off

Paris Prefecture of Police, Plan de Secours Spcialis Inondations Zonal (Jan. 1, 2006), vol. 1, online:
http://www.prefecture-policeparis.interieur.gouv fr/prevention/innondation janvier2006/sommaire.htm.

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a long-running debate in Paris about the role of networked infrastructures in urban
modernity. Haussmann was a global leader in promoting what Graham and Marvin called
the modern infrastructural ideal or modern unitary city ideal, the notion of the
ordered, unitary city, mediated by standard ubiquitous infrastructure networks. 3
Although he didnt complete the comprehensively networked city, he managed to fix the
ideal squarely in Paris's collective consciousness, an ideal which Parisians then had to
reinterpret for themselves as the next generation of politicians and engineers worked to
retool his projects and complete them, giving rise to the massive amount of work on
roads, rails, pipes and wires that weve seen in this study. Above all, Haussmanns legacy
to the Third Republic was Misas compelling tangle of technology and modernity. 4
Thus, Haussmann started a dialog in Paris that he couldn't finish. By hooking
networked infrastructures to urban governance, he politicized public works and
associated them with urban modernity. By using infrastructural development to solve
social problems, he coded infrastructural networks as modernizing, progressive, civilizing
forces. He fancied himself a surgeon, but recognized his role as a demolition artist. He
butchered the housing market, neglecting many parts of the city that needed the most
work, turned real estate into a speculative commodity, turned landlords into one of the
most powerful interest groups in Paris, and left the city deep in debt. Like David Harvey,
I see Haussmannization as deeply ambivalent, creative destruction, as civilizing as it was
barbarous. Nineteenth century Parisians knew this. Haussmannization gave rise to mixed
reactions from the very beginning, as we saw in Le Temps, 1872. But it got Parisians

3 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological
Mobilities and the Urban Condition (Routledge, 2001), pp. 49, 52 and 62.
4 Thomas Misa, The Compelling Tangle of Modernity and Technology, in Modernity and Technology,
ed. Misa, Brey and Feenberg (MIT, 2003), pp. 1-30.

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talking about urban modernity in terms of networked infrastructures and their human
consequences, as Jules Verne did in Around the World in 80 Days. They began to debate
how infrastructure and practice were related, to write scripts for how networked
infrastructures should, could or would be designed and used.
Our first example of this scripting process was what I called the dream life of the
Mtro, 1872 to 1895. In imagining the city equipped with a new metropolitan railway
network, politicians, journalists, architects, engineers and intellectuals of all kinds
debated whether or not a railway was good for everyday practice in Paris, and how it
would impact traffic flow, urban planning, cultural patrimony and health and safety. I
borrowed Wiebe Bijkers concept of interpretive flexibility to describe the wide range
of different dreams of the citys future inspired by the idea of the Mtro. Although most
Parisians treated the Mtro-to-be as a foregone conclusion, this was never an unbroken
story of technical progress. As designers tried to script the new railway as progressive
(offering solutions to social, economic and spatial problems) they were constantly
challenged by critics like architect Louis Heuz, who coined the term ncropolitain, and
Albert Robida, who depicted the Mtro as the dishonor and violation of the Queen
City. In debating the impact that a future railway would have on their city, Parisians
were exploring the relationship between infrastructure and practice, one of the basic
themes of this study.
From 1895 to 1914, as Parisians began to build, operate and experience these new
railways, a new problem arosehow could designers maintain scripts that coded these
infrastructures as progressive in the face of user experiences that suggested otherwise
technical accidents, labor unrest, delinquent contractors and a city torn apart by

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construction? In Chapter 3 I contrasted the efflorescence of design dreams from the
1870s to the 1890s with the dynamic, difficult and dangerous user experiences of the
1890s through the 1910s. This underscores the importance of considering both designer
and user perspectives in the process of writing technical scripts.
Following the work of Madeleine Akrich and Bernhard Rieger, I have tried to
develop a method for studying the process of script-writing empirically and historically
which combines the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of social and cultural history
and the social study of technology. While cultural historians like Rieger tend to produce
excellent analyses of the meanings of technology, shedding much needed light on how
users produce these meanings as much as designers do, they tend to blackbox the
technical details of design, and to ignore the designers point of view in ways that
implicitly validate it. Social students of technology like Akrich, on the other hand,
provide much needed analyses of technical design and the designers point of view, but
work so hard to deconstruct designs that they only investigate users empirically when
they can help deconstruct designers hegemonic scripts. Unlike Rieger, most of their
empirical focus is on designers, not users, but this also tends to implicitly validate the
designer point of view.
I argue that Actor Network Theory and studies of everyday life can help us
develop a method that takes both technology and practice as empirical objects of study,
and uses both designers and users as sources. We need to embrace the difficult empirical
task of finding users in the archive, as well as the interpretive task of placing designers
and users in historical dialog. Everyday life theorist Michel de Certeau argues that both
designers and users write scripts, constantly analyzing the gap between these two social-

416
technical positions. Actor Network Theory allows us to add the important point that no
sociotechnical system can operate without harnessing natural resources in some way,
such that humans, technologies and nature should be placed on equal explanatory footing.
All this is necessary, I hope to have shown, because we can never begin to unravel Misas
compelling tangle of modernity and technology without turning directly to the question
posed by Jules Verne in 1872: (how) has technology shaped human practice by allowing
humans to master nature in new ways? How could we ever test a hypothesis like
Vernes without historicizing the relations between humans, technology and nature? In
this study, I have attempted an interdisciplinary analysis which combines the fruits of
social, cultural, spatial and everyday analyses of human practice, interdisciplinary studies
of science and technology, and environmental history to do just that.
The experience of living in Paris in 2005-2006 showed me that this
interdisciplinary analysis is as useful for understanding the present as for understanding
the past. 2005s transit strike showed the gap between designer and operator scripts for
Paris transit networks, as workers showed who really controls the network, and its muchneeded role in maintaining the citys daily social and economic life (the flow of workers
and work). 2006s flurry of discussion about what a flood the magnitude of 1910 would
do today brought nature back into the equation. Although striking transit workers have
enough power to shut down the citys vital circulation at will on any given day, the
flooding Seine could do even worse, damaging the citys infrastructures so badly that
they could not be restarted at will.
These pinpoint moments of crisis (1870, 1895, 1900, 1903, 1910, 2005, 2011)
which set off chain reactions in heterogeneous networks (or networks of networks, to be

417
precise) show that some infrastructures and practices depend on others. For Paris, there is
no potable water without the cooperation of the Seine, the rain, and gravity, and there is
no electricity or passenger transport when water is out of place. There is no daily
commute without cooperative workers who provide the daily maintenance of technical
systems, because these systems cannot operate without human inputs. In moments of
crisis when one part of the city collapses and others begin to fall with it, we can see the
complexity and fragility of modern cities in clear relief.
But these pinpoint moments of crisis are no more devastating than the slowly
seeping long-term fragility of urban infrastructures that we have seen in Pariss housing
supply. Not only does the urban environment shape us; we also have a significant impact
on the built environment through constant wear and tear, and a significant impact on the
natural environment through our increasing appetite for resources and production of
waste. From the shabbiness of 1880s Montmartre to the zonards of 1906 without water
and the house fires of 2005, we can see Pariss urban modernity defined by uneven
development. Even on a day-to-day basis, when the citys many overlapping networks are
functioning correctly and in harmony with one another, some people have more
access to the benefits of infrastructure than others, some have more access to updated
infrastructure, and to the health, safety, convenience, power and comfort that come with
it. Like Fogg and Passepartout, contemporary Parisians may live in the lap of luxury or in
the squalor of sub-standard slums. Chapter 4 on the built environment and chapter 5 on
water and waste were designed to bring out these contrasts. They show us that Pariss
fragility is ongoing rather than emerging only during discrete moments of crisis and
collapse.

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We may still indulge in technological determinism and the technological sublime,
telling ourselves reassuring progressive tales about technology and modernity, when we
gloat over the increased capabilities of our newest handheld devices or the increasing fuel
efficiency of our cars, but these notions seem quaint when we think of Hurricane Katrina,
peak oil, and growing public awareness of global climate change. Of course new
technologies allow us to tap into natural forces and resources in new ways; of course they
increase human capabilities in new ways; of course they help us control resources,
diseases, and each other. But they also remain fundamentally heterogeneoussocialtechnical-naturalso that mechanization can never fully take command.
Rather than thinking of modern urban life as commanded by technology (which in
turn might be said to command nature), we should put ourselves in the shoes of the
mechanic or the striking transit worker who provides (or withholds) the daily effort
necessary to maintain a humanized environment and cooperative machines in the face of
the forces of nature, social stress, and infrastructural wear and tear. We, like Haussmann
and his engineers, embark each day on the difficult path of acting out and rewriting
social, spatial and technological scripts which tie our practice to increasingly complex
networks that combine natural forces, technological components and human effort. We
get our water from the tap; we get to work on the train; we depend on electricity for any
number of things (heat, light, mobility, communication, etc.). In order to make these
elaborate social-technical-natural systems run, we have to do the constant work of
coordinating nature, humans and our tools. Mechanization never fully took command, but
it has always taken work.
This work, I argue, is both a continuing current of contemporary life and a long-

419
standing historical trend that historians need to investigate as we historicize this thing
called modernity. In this study, weve watched how Parisians designed, used, scripted
and re-scripted complex systems like tramways, subways, sewers, apartment houses,
skyscrapers and water distribution systems during the early Third Republic and the
Second Industrial Revolution. In treating both built space and technical networks as
infrastructure, weve been able to empirically watch as designers and users work to
coordinate nature, technology and people into a functional whole, a working city, and by
the same token come to terms with social unrest, technical failure, and the power of
nature.
In order to do this daily work of infrastructural design, maintenance, operation
and use, all city dwellersengineers, politicians, workers, citizens, consumersneed
knowledge about how heterogeneous networked infrastructures operate, and what kinds
of inputs they need from humans and nature. This knowledge is provided by scripts,
which are often hotly contested. During the Paris water shortages of the 1880s-1910s,
designers suggested that the water system malfunctioned because of natural factors
beyond their control (drought) and user waste of water. Users, meanwhile, wrote scripts
which suggested that government and engineers were mismanaging technical systems and
failing to control nature in proper ways. Both perspectives make sense because Pariss
water distribution network was and is heterogeneous, requiring a balance of human
inputs, technical function and natural humidity.
Other examples have shown us user and designer scripts that do not directly
conflict, but rather rework the same ideas. In response to the tramway accidents of 19001901, users scripted the tramways as a murderous technology, while designers argued

420
that mechanical traction would kill horse traction. In the first case, murder was used to
connote malfunction, while in the second it was used to connote technological progress.
In response to the prevalence of disease in Pariss low-income housing, hygienists of the
era wrote design scripts which blamed apartments for being murderous. Here again,
murder stood for malfunction, but this script was written by designers rather than users.
In all of these cases, we can see Parisians coming to terms with the fact that their
networked urban modernity brought not only increased mobility and reduced disease, but
also social inequality and physical risks which could sometimes be deadly.
These themes of conflict and contest over scripts bring us to a final important
point: the politics of infrastructure. Ever since Haussmann made providing infrastructure
a duty of the state, the question of infrastructures relation to practice has been a political
one. The dream life of the Mtro showed us different levels of government fighting over
jurisdiction of the network and public debate about the proper relation between the public
and private sectors and the meaning of public works. The years 1895 to 1914 showed
us citizens (striking workers, angry journalists, disgruntled users, campaigning
politicians) talking back to the authorities, and the Mtro becoming an important
institution for building a local welfare state. In Chapter 4 we saw housing becoming a
contentious political issue, the subject of liberal reforms, socialist campaigns and
anarchist activism. In Chapter 5 we saw water and waste becoming political problems for
Paris in its relations with the suburbs, other cities, the rest of France and even
Switzerland. From the local to the national level, Pariss story of infrastructural
modernization is shot through with politicsstruggles over meaning, struggles over
resources, struggles over financing public works, struggles over jurisdiction, struggles for

421
legal reform, struggles over the public in republic or in public works.
This politics of infrastructure has had a lasting effect on how we understand urban
governance. There can be no governing a city without careful management of
infrastructures and resources, without attention to safety, health, mobility, housing, and
water for citizens. Urban governance entails the maintenance of heterogeneous networks,
while urban citizenship entails using them. Questions of technical scripting, therefore,
give rise quickly to questions about rights and responsibilities. From the 1870s to the
present, Pariss housing problem has been continually referred back to the question of
whether tenants, landlords or the state is responsiblei.e. responsible for causing the
problem and/or responsible for solving the problem. Failures in water distribution,
meanwhile, got Parisians talking about human rightsthe right to fresh water, the right
to health and safetyand the states obligation to make sure citizens enjoy them. Finally,
the issues of expropriations and oversight of government contractors bring up the longstanding French problem with a revolving door between the private and public sectors.
Thus, whether we are talking about housing, sewers, transportation or water distribution,
struggles over how these urban infrastructures are used, operated and funded, struggles
over who scripts them, who controls them and who benefits from themthese are always
already political struggles. The increasingly plural, increasingly radical and increasingly
polarized politics of early Third Republic Paris has helped me put this in clear relief.
Networked urban infrastructures, I mean to argue, are political in many senses.
They are not only shaped by political goals but also used as political tools. 5 They are
institutions that must be funded and regulated. They organize basic strands of the social
5

Gabrielle Hecht said this of computers and missile-guidance systems, but she was making an argument
about nuclear power plants, a claim designed to apply to any technical artifact. See The Radiance of
France, p. 337.

422
fabric like time, space and work. They not only constrain or enable access to resources,
but also are resources worthy of being controlled in their own right. Hence they become
objects of political struggle, contentious public issues or election issues. To bring the
analysis back to present, all we need to do is consider Pariss 2005 transit strike and its
effect on Pariss geopolitical position via the International Olympic Committee, or the
political damage done to the Bush administrations reputation by New Orleans failing
levees (and the devastating social inequalities behind them). The fragility of the
networked city has had, and will continue to have, political consequencesconsequences
for how we understand urban life, how we understand technologys role in human affairs,
and how we understand humanitys relationship with nature, and how we define
modernity. As the politics of infrastructure confront us in the form of Hurricane
Katrina or Pariss transit strikes and house fires, we would do well to take a moment to
remember the story of modernitys fragility that I have told here.

423

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V.ONC 110: strikes, 1905-1908

424
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425
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