Monday, October 19th, 2015 Urban Property Rights and the Revitalization, Rehabilitation, and Reform of Paris, 1750-1800

Description

“Haussmanisation,” the monumental razing and reconstruction in the Second Empire (1852–1870) helped make Paris into “the capital of the nineteenth century,” in Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase. The vast historiographical domination of the Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s transformation of the capital city has all but obliterated the “pre-history” of Parisian urban development. It has also created a teleological gold standard of modern urban reform by which previous aspirations were bound to fail. Fully half of the capital’s buildings, by some estimates, were torn down. Entire neighborhoods were displaced toward the banlieue or toward the faubourgs, such as Belleville and Menilmontant, in the outlying areas of the capital, mostly toward the Northeast areas of Paris. “Haussmannisation” evokes the creation of a centralized administration to carry out visionary plans to raze and rebuild vast swaths of the modern city. By examining previous moments of debate and reform in the eighteenth century, we intend to call into question the exceptional nature of Haussmann’s urban reforms. Haussmanisation is inscribed in a longer history within France but also is a part of a tradition of adaptation undertaken in all great Western capitals to the realities of population explosions, new sciences of hygiene and sanitation, and, above all, the challenge of providing greater fluidity and “circulation” within the city.

Allan Potofsky is a historian specializing in the French Atlantic and Parisian urban history during the eighteenth century. He is a professor at the Université Paris-Diderot since 2009 after previously holding the position of Maître de conferences at the Université Paris-8 (Vincennes à Saint-Denis). He is the author of Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolutions (Basingstoke and NY : Palgrave, 2009: paperback version 2012) and has edited two collections of articles (for French History, 2011 and the History of European Ideas, 2009). Recent articles concern the environmental history of Paris and the investment of slave wealth in urban property during the French Revolution. He is currently writing a book, Paris-on-the-Atlantic (Editions Vendémiaire), focusing on the French capital as a social and economic hinterland of early globalization of the eighteenth century.