ABSTRACT
Memory preys on places: there are virtually no un-situated recollections. Yet the mind exacts a price for preserving the past. Recollections are the fruit of conflict and compromise, indelible but unstable. Taking nineteenth-century Paris as my example, a city undergoing violent urban and political change as a result of both industrialization and the revolutions of 1830, 1832, 1848, the coup of 1851, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Commune, I wish to explore the intersection of memory and the built environment that followed these dramatic changes of regime and the attendant iconoclastic consequences. Though Paris witnessed the destruction of huge swaths of urban fabric throughout the century, during the Second Empire (1850–1870) piecemeal interventions gave way to a concerted effort to overhaul the French capital, led by Napoleon III and his prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. By then, the old historic center, the Île de la Cité, and adjacent parts of the Right Bank, had become a vast slum, with tottering tenement buildings and dark, narrow streets [9–1].The area had been devastated by the cholera pandemic of 1832 which coincided with yet another popular revolution, and the government and the leisured classes came to associate the impoverished quarters with both disease and insurgency. Prompted by political as well as hygienic concerns, the government razed the winding alleyways and rotting houses which barely allowed sunlight to trickle down to street level. Though Haussmann also tore down mansions and palaces belonging to the aristocracy, the bulk of the destruction was aimed at the derelict housing stock that served as home to the poor and to segments of the middle class, either in the center or in strategic districts required for the broad new boulevards that would henceforth criss-cross the city. Charles Marville, Rue du Haut-Moulin (Seen from the Rue Glatigny), Paris, 1865–1866.
[Bibliothèque Administrative de la Ville de Paris / Roger-Viollet]
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