ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergence of a novel relationship between authority, humour and biological life that started to be practiced in late nineteenth-century Montmartre. It also explores how one early Montmartre journal, LAnti-Concierge, used humour to voice discontent about the ongoing housing crisis, which had been one important source of the popular discontent that released itself explosively in the 1871 civil war. One Montmartre periodical called LAnti-Concierge explicitly tackled an issue that had been central to the 1871 Paris Commune uprising: the housing crisis. The comparison between Mount Olympus and the small hill of Montmartre reactivated but playfully mocked the French revolutionary traditions habit of drawing on the authority of ancient Rome. The writing of the LAnti-Concierge made much more explicit the forms of anger, resentment and latent violence that underpinned much Montmartre humour. Montmartre, that is, was the privileged site in the experimental elaboration a new diagram of urban government.
