Prof: Today,
I want to do the impossible and
talk about urbanization and
urban growth in fifty minutes.
It builds on what you're
reading and I'll give the
classic example,
which is the greatest project
of human intervention or
rebuilding,
that is the rebuilding of Paris
by that man that my late friend,
Richard Cobb,
once dissed as the
"Alsacian Attila."
 
In doing so,
I want to emphasize a couple
points.
 
One is that the nineteenth
century was a period of
phenomenal urban growth and
urbanization.
I will distinguish those in a
minute.
Secondly, one of the things
that emerges out of this urban
growth and urbanization,
but particularly the growth of
cities large and medium in the
nineteenth century,
is an increasing geography of
class segregation.
The theme of course in Paris,
as in other cities--London is a
good example--is a more
prosperous west and an
increasingly less prosperous
east.
Also, one of the things that I
really enjoy talking about in
trying to help people understand
is why it is that European
suburbs are not at all like
American suburbs.
Why is it that some people
feared by elites were perched on
the edge of European cities,
whether it's Vienna, Paris,
or lots of other places,
and not in the center; whereas,
in the United States,
if you think of the riots in
1967,
before most of your times,
in Detroit, or Newark,
or Watts, or East L.A.,
it was people in the center
with the wealthy people in the
periphery fearing the poor
people living in the center.
Why is it just completely
different?
I remember in the early 1990s
we were doing a book,
just a bunch of essays in
France, called Banlieues
Rouges, which means the red
suburbs.
I was supposed to write
something tying the book
together.
 
It was at the time of the
Rodney King trial.
Most of you are--not of the
trial of Rodney King,
but when Rodney King,
who was an Afro-American who
was beaten up by cops in L.A.
 
It was filmed by somebody who
just happened to have a camera
and was filming this.
 
There was a big trial.
 
The police who beat the hell
out of him were acquitted.
They were acquitted by a white
jury in the suburbs.
People in France couldn't get
over that, the idea of wealthy
people living in the suburbs as
opposed to poor people living in
the suburbs in Europe.
 
We had to hold the book for a
couple weeks until I could
figure out how to explain this.
 
That's one theme also under the
rubric of center and periphery.
Why are European cities
different?
Human intervention has
something to do with that in the
case of Paris.
 
That's fun to talk about,
so I'm going to do that in the
last half of the talk.
 
Just a few points at the
beginning.
I sent around,
I hope it will reach you,
something I sent out on October
16 on this class server,
which has most of these terms
on the board.
The nineteenth century is a
period of both urban growth and
urbanization.
 
Why are those different?
 
Urban growth is,
say, a population of any
city--the population of Vienna
rises from, say,
500,000 to 1,000,000.
 
I don't remember the statistics.
 
That is urban growth.
 
Vienna is bigger at the end of
the nineteenth century than it
was at the beginning of the
nineteenth century,
or any place you want to pick.
 
But the most important point is
that there is urbanization in
the nineteenth century.
 
You could have urban growth
absolutely and de-urbanization
if,
at the end of any period that
you're looking at,
you had more people living in
cities,
but they represented a smaller
percentage of the population.
 
You could actually have
de-urbanization if you had more
people living in the countryside
at the end of the period,
relative to those living in the
cities.
So, it depends on how you
define what an urban area is.
In the case of France,
where they have all these great
censuses all the time,
in the Restoration,
that is 1815-1830,
a city had 1,500 people in it.
There's that many people lined
up at the Milford Mall when it
opens in this country.
 
In 1841 they start using 2,000
people agglomerated,
that is, living in an
urban--;the church,
the steeple.
 
Open up the church and look at
all the people or whatever.
You know what I mean.
 
That's an urban area.
 
In the United States,
I have no idea.
A city used to be 5,000.
 
I think it may be 25,000 or
something like that.
It doesn't matter.
 
Depending on what you define as
urban, there's a remarkable
increase in the urban population
in the nineteenth century.
It's not just big,
huge cities like Naples,
or Constantinople,
or London, which is so enormous
compared to Paris,
compared to any city spatially.
But it's also small towns that
increase in size because of
industrial, commercial,
administrative functions.
All this is perfectly obvious.
 
The nineteenth century is the
growth of big,
big cities and the first
conurbations,
that is,
cities that just run into each
other,
such as now for example Boston
to Washington is practically a
conurbation.
In France it would be Lille,
Tourcoing, Roubaix.
In the north of England it
would be Manchester and its
expanding suburbs.
 
That's all perfectly obvious.
 
The next step is to say,
"Where does the population
of cities come from,
and who are all these people
that are increasing the
population of cities and are
part of this process,
in a statistical sense,
of urban growth?"
 
The second point that I'll make
is what people thought about
this.
 
What did they think about these
teeming cities?
"Teeming"
was a word that they started to
use to describe these cities
that seemed to be kind of
runaway cities.
 
First of all,
I'm not going to write this on
the board, despite the fact it's
the only mathematical formula
that I even know.
 
If you were trying to explain
the growth of any city from
Point 1 in time to Point 2 in
time,
what you do is simply look at
the population at Point 1 in
time,
say 1811 or something like that.
Then you try to find out where
the population came from that
increased it to Point 2 in time,
if the city reclassified what
was considered urban,
if they annexed its suburbs.
That's what Lyons does in 1852,
or Paris does in 1860 on
January 1, or almost anywhere
they do this.
That would be one factor.
 
Then you would have births
minus deaths.
Do you have a natural increase
in population?
The other thing is in versus
out migration.
Do you have more people
arriving in the city than
leaving it?
 
There are people leaving and
people arriving all the time.
But if you look at particularly
the first half of the nineteenth
century,
to make a generalization,
more people die in cities than
are born there,
because cities are very
unhealthy places,
which helps create this kind of
image of biological sickness
that I'll discuss in a minute,
that I'll evoke with some
conservative commentators from
those times.
What do I mean by that?
 
The average life expectancy in
Manchester, counting infant
mortality, so it's a little bit
exaggerated, was about nineteen
years old.
 
You guys would have about had
it.
Lille, in the north of France,
is the same thing.
That's pretty young.
 
But that counts life expectancy.
 
If you made it to the ripe old
age of eighteen,
then your chances of living
longer were pretty gray.
You still had places where you
have phenomenal,
still cases particularly in
areas where you have all these
spinsters in Brittany and in
Ireland,
of old women who live a very
long time.
Women lived and still live
longer than men.
Another reason why you have
more people dying in cities,
among other reasons,
is infanticide.
Foundling homes in these big
cities.
You name the big city--;Rome,
Berlin, anywhere you want,
St.
 
Petersburg, Moscow--;they have
huge foundling homes with
thousands and thousands of
babies abandoned every year.
One-third of those babies die
before the end of the next year.
Infanticide.
 
The church, which obviously
opposes infanticide and
obviously opposes abortion in
the nineteenth century,
what they do is they finally
agree to put in these little
things called tours,
T-O-U-R-S.
It's an awful example to give
and it comes out of an
institution that no longer
exists, Machine City,
but anyplace that you have
those kind of machines and you
put money in and you hope that
the window is going to turn
around and actually give you
your M&Ms.
To make a crass example,
that's what these tours were.
They encouraged young women,
usually unmarried or uncoupled
women, to abandon their babies
instead of exposing them and
having them die.
 
You put your baby in the
foundling homes.
You ring the bell,
you put the baby in this little
thing that turns around and then
the good sister comes and takes
the baby to the foundling home.
 
If all goes well,
the baby will be there in a
year, but one-third of them are
not there in a year.
You've got a lot of babies who
die.
This increases the mortality
rate.
Then you've also got a lot of
old people who come into the
cities--and young people--to
beg,
seeking those last vestiges of
charity,
who are clutching at passersby
as they go to church,
and who some people give them
money and most of the people
don't give them money.
 
Often they form part of the
community, which is obviously
the case here at Yale.
 
A lot of the older people die.
 
Policemen going on their rounds
in any city, Milan,
or Turin, or anywhere,
are going to find dead people
the next morning.
 
You've got more people that die
in cities than are born there,
really, in most places way into
the nineteenth century.
The point is obviously that
it's immigration that causes
urbanization and urban growth.
 
Massive immigration,
usually from the hinterland,
that is the region around
cities.
In the case of Berlin,
northern Germans from
Brandenburg or Pomerania and
many Poles were moving into
Berlin.
 
There were very poor people
moving into Berlin.
In the case of Paris,
people who come into Paris are
from Normandy,
or from Champagne,
or from central France where a
lot of them are seasonal
migrants and they ended up
living there permanently.
In the 1880s you've got a huge
wave of Bretons from Brittany
who don't speak French.
 
If you go to the station of
Montparnasse,
you'll see a lot of the cafes
around Montparnasse are named
after Breton
towns--;"à
la ville de Saint-Brieuc,"
la ville de Dinon.
Still today at that station,
Montparnasse,
the first thing you see when
you get off a train there is a
sign for public assistance for
Bretons.
It's in the station at
Montparnasse.
The population in Marseilles
includes lots of people from the
south of France,
from Provence,
but also Italians.
 
This is very obvious.
 
People who move into Barcelona
are far more likely to be
Catalan than they are to be
Galician, or Castilian or
something.
 
This is all obvious.
 
There's no surprises there.
 
The image that people had of
this rapid migration into cities
of poor people.
 
The majority of people who
moved to these cities are poorer
than the people who are already
there.
In the case of the 1950s and
1960s, in most of the cities
it's not the case.
 
The 1950s and 1960s they were
young professional couples who
get enough money to come to rent
an apartment in London,
good luck,
or to buy an apartment in
London, or in Berlin,
or someplace else, or Munich.
In the nineteenth century you
have waves of poor people.
The kinds of people you've seen
before who are coming to work as
domestic servants,
coming to work as day laborers.
In the case of London,
coming to work on the
teeming--;there's that word
again--;docks of the Thames
River,
as London is that imperial city
looking out on its vast empire.
 
The interesting thing about
London, I wish we had days to
talk about this stuff,
but it's really only in London
that you had people of color.
 
You could find them already by
the end of the
nineteenth-century,
people coming from India,
from what would become
Pakistan,
people coming from the
Caribbean.
In other cities,
you simply didn't have that.
The number of North Africans
coming to Paris is merely a
trickle really until after World
War I.
Anyway, contemporaries had the
idea that what this whole
process was,
and I should have written this
on the board,
but you can write it down if
you would please,
called the uprooting hypothesis.
They didn't call it that.
 
That's social science from the
1960s.
These people were uprooted from
their steady,
rural roots of organized
religion and from family support
and they are thrown into the
maelstrom,
into the chaos--sometimes a
creative chaos,
but nonetheless,
the perception was a dangerous
chaos that was urban life.
 
The result of all of this was
that revolution becomes seen as
an extension of purse snatching.
 
In fact, some of the bad social
science from the 1960s in trying
to explain the riots in Detroit
and places like that said,
"Well, you've got a lot of
poor people coming from Alabama
and Arkansas,"
which is certainly the case,
"or from South and North
Carolina move up to Detroit and
try to get a job in the
factories there.
They get to Detroit and they
just freak out,
because those rural roots have
been cut."
You still see this in various
electoral campaigns even today,
even as I speak,
this idea that cosmopolitanism,
which is also by the way in
almost every language sort of a
code word for anti-Semitism.
 
When people say,
"Cities are so
cosmopolitan,"
they meant they are full of
Jews.
 
This is particularly true in
this sort of anti-Semitism and
racism of eastern and central
Europe where you had such a
large Jewish population living
in cities like Prague,
Budapest, Vilnius,
Riga,
just about anywhere you could
name.
With the kind of increase in
ethnic populations with the
Estonization of Tallinn or the
Czechization of Prague,
you had fewer Germans and fewer
Jews living in those cities,
but you had this sort of
anti-Semitic discourse that
lingers.
 
Vienna is the classic case.
 
Vienna goes from being sort of
a liberal city in the 1850s and
1860s to sort of a hotbed of
anti-Semitism,
where the mayor of Vienna at
the end of the nineteenth
century,
a buffoon called Carl Lueger,
says,
"I say who's a Jew."
That's one of his more infamous
statements.
"I declare who's a Jew and
who isn't."
Of course, one wants to
understand how Adolf Hitler got
his anti-Semitism.
 
It really comes from World War
I,
but the basis was already laid
there by growing up in Austria
in the 1890s and the first
decade of the twentieth century.
If you think about that,
does this massive immigration
necessarily lead to urban chaos?
 
The answer is obviously not.
 
We have the effect that now we
know a lot about,
historians,
and social scientists,
and social geographers,
and sociologists,
which is called chain migration.
 
Take the case of China.
 
People who have studied Beijing
discovered a long time ago,
I remember this from days when
I was studying Chinese history
back at Michigan,
and all these people pouring
into Beijing in the nineteenth
century.
They formed native places
associations.
It's obvious.
 
You get together with people
that you know from your part of
China.
 
They are sort of the
intermediaries between you and
the city.
 
The Irish are a classic case.
 
We've already seen how the
British elite are scared the
hell out of the Irish,
of the Irish,
because they're Catholic and
all that.
They don't just pour into
Manchester, Liverpool,
and London and freak out.
 
It doesn't work like that at
all.
They live with their families.
 
Their families make a little
money and say,
"Why don't you come
along?"
It's the same thing.
 
Look at the case of America,
people coming to the United
States at the end of the
nineteenth century first of all
massively from northern Italy
and then in the twentieth
century from southern Italy.
 
They send money back all the
time.
It's very different than the
Germans who came to the United
States.
 
They were almost never in
contact with their families
again, relatively,
and the same with Swiss.
But the Italians always stayed
in contact.
In any case,
all these people,
it's very sensible.
 
If you come from California to
Yale, there are a couple high
schools in L.A.
 
that send all of these students
to Yale.
If you're kind of freaking out
when you get to Yale and saying,
"All these people are all
so smart,"
or whatever,
then the next thing you do is
you go to people that you
wouldn't even say hello to in
high school and say,
"Why don't we hang out
tonight,"
or something like that.
You find people who have
origins like you,
geographic or whatever,
and hang out with them.
It's a logical thing.
 
It happens every single time.
 
In the case of people moving to
Paris, Limousins,
people from the center part of
France, Limousins,
they live in certain
neighborhoods around the center
of Paris in the way that Bretons
lived around what became the
station of Montparnasse.
 
This is chain migration.
 
You see it in Philadelphia.
 
You see it in London.
 
You see it in Moscow.
 
You see it in St. Petersburg.
 
You see it everywhere.
 
But, having said that,
that's not the way
contemporaries viewed this.
 
Let me just give you a couple
examples of how often
well-meaning,
but not always,
contemporaries saw the
phenomenon of urbanization and
urban growth.
 
Let's listen to a preacher
called James Shergold Boone,
minister of St.
 
John's church in the Paddington
district of London.
This is his sermon.
 
When he's talking about cities,
he's evoking Sodom and
Gomorrah.
 
"The very extent of
edifices and the very collection
of vast masses of human beings
onto one spot,
humanity remaining what it is
(bad is what he means),
must be fraught with moral
infection."
They continually use words like
"infection,"
that there's a biological
inequality of people with each
other.
 
The poor are biologically less
likely to,
in a world where Darwin and
post-Darwin misuse of Darwin is
very important,
to survive the challenges of
illness of disease.
 
In illness, the cholera carries
away poor people more than rich
people.
 
Going back to the good
minister,
Cities are the centers and
theatres of human ambition,
human cupidity,
human pleasure.
On the one side,
the appetites,
the passions,
the carnal corruptions of man
are forced in a hotbed into a
rank and file luxuriance,
and countless evils which would
otherwise have a feeble and
difficult existence are struck
out into activity and warmth by
mere contact with each other.
 
On the other side,
many constraints and safeguards
are weakened or even withdrawn.
 
This is what I mean by leaving
those imaginary rural roots in
which solidarity was considered
to be automatic and family
support so very,
very important.
"In cities there is a
complication of evils.
External forces cooperate with
inward desires."
You can conquer those inward
bad desires in the countryside,
but all is lost in the demon
rum of moral corruption.
The reality is from urban life,
etc., etc.
Sir Charles Shaw,
who was police chief of
Manchester, described the
residents of industrial cities.
He called the residents of
industrial cities such as his
own as "the debris which
the vast whirlpool of human
affairs deposited here in one of
its eddies,
associated but not united,
contiguous but not
connected."
 
That's a perfect description of
the uprooting hypothesis.
There's nothing you can do to
save people from themselves.
To take an example from Paris,
because I'm going to talk about
Paris in a while,
in the 1830s a certain
Vicomte--quite
forgettable--exclaimed,
How ugly Paris seems after one
year away.
How one stifles in these dark,
damp, narrow corridors which
you are pleased to call the
streets of Paris.
One would think that it was an
underground city,
so sluggish in the air,
so profound the obscurity.
In it thousands of people live,
bustle, throng in the liquid
darkness, like reptiles in a
marsh.
Or Victor Hugo.
 
"Cities,
like forests,
have their dens in which hide
all the vilest and most terrible
monsters.
 
All is ferocious."
 
It couldn't be any more
condemning than--particularly in
Germany,
where the whole sense of having
a hometown,
of being attached to a
particular space and all of the
corruption that comes from big
cities.
 
You see this over and over
again.
Take New York.
 
Here's another reverend,
the Rev.
Amory D. Mayo,
who attacked the city.
All the dangers of the town may
be summed up here,
that here withdrawn from the
blessed influence of nature and
set face to face against
humanity,
mankind loses his own nature
and becomes a new and artificial
creature,
an unhuman cog in a social
machinery that works like fate.
 
Again, in Émile Zola,
the theme of fate is terribly
important,
of destiny along with,
as you'll see,
people that have those,
if you've read other Zola,
that have the bad genes.
They've got the drinking genes
or whatever.
You find all this appalling
stuff.
Here's another one in a lecture
in 1844, The Young
Americans.
 
The cities drain the country of
the best part of its population,
the flower of its youth of both
sexes.
They go into the town and the
country is cultivated by a so
much inferior class.
 
Et cetera, et cetera.
 
That was the image.
 
And, of course,
all of the revolutions have a
lot to do with that.
 
Simon, I can't find my wand.
 
Is it up there?
 
It's not?
 
Voilà.
 
Can you do it?
 
Thanks.
 
Let's look at an example of
this.
I'm sorry, I can't click.
 
I'm just going to have to wave
my hands frenetically,
or something,
or jump up and down.
I want you to look at Paris and
think about what I've said.
This is Paris in 1839.
 
Compared to London--I don't
have to talk about this.
In London you can walk miles
and you're still staggering
around looking for the next Tube
stop,
because it's about three times
as big,
at least three times as big
physically.
Paris, in 1837 you could walk
from the Arc de Triomphe,
which is up on the left,
to the ending about an hour and
a half.
 
This is before the inner
suburbs are annexed for tax
reasons, but also for reasons of
imposing order on the
troublesome periphery.
 
This is part of the lecture.
 
What you've got is,
if you know Paris at all,
it doesn't matter if you don't
know Paris, here's the Garden of
Luxemburg.
 
You've got the Tuileries up
along the Seine there.
You've got your basic Seine
river.
You did have three islands,
now there are but two.
They cemented that one over.
 
Ile Saint-Louis there,
which is now one of the great
tourist traps in western
civilization,
but it's still beautiful.
 
There's Cité
with old Notre Dame right in
the middle.
 
You've got an enormous
population.
You've got in the central
districts three times the
density of population that you
have now.
We have an apartment in the
Marais a couple of blocks up
from Notre Dame.
 
The density there in the 1840s
in this neighborhood which is
called the _______,
was three times what it is now.
You've got this enormous
implosion of people into the
center from the provinces.
 
Next one, please.
 
Voilà.
 
The reason I put this up here,
this is the first photo of
Paris.
 
This is what you call the
daguerreotype,
daguerreotype.
 
I can identify this as--I'm
sure not the only one,
but this is the
faubourg.
It's an English word as well as
French.
It means it's sort of an
extension of the town.
It's a difficult etymology.
 
It doesn't really come from
false bourg,
but from other things.
 
It's beyond the walls.
 
But this is the first one.
 
This is also from about 1837.
 
Now, Haussmann,
the Alsacian Attila,
he built these boulevards that
became the staging ground for
the so-called Belle
Époque.
But there were also boulevards
anywhere around,
because the boulevards were
where the walls had once been.
Vienna is a great example.
 
The rings around Vienna were
the rings where the walls had
been that were knocked down as
the city grew.
In Berlin you find the same
thing.
Next, please.
 
This is cheating a little bit.
 
This is just unhealthy.
 
This is an eighteenth-century
hat.
Look at the guy.
 
He's a nineteenth-century guy
looking progressively forward to
the nineteenth century with his
bourgeois outfit.
This could be the Restoration,
actually.
He's going to get hit.
 
"It's raining,"
he says, but it's not.
It's a chamber pot being dumped
on his head.
In the 1860s only about ten
percent of buildings had water
above the second floor.
 
Next, please.
 
This is by a guy called Charles
Meryon.
It doesn't matter.
 
The point of this is this is
Cité.
There's Notre Dame there,
before Viollet-le-Duc's big
spire on it.
 
The point is that before the
rebuilding of Paris this was
among the most densely populated
parts of Paris.
At the end of the period,
that is 1870,
it's the least densely
populated part of Paris.
Because--remember capitalism
and the state?
They build government buildings.
 
The hospital is one of them.
 
The Prefecture of Police,
which had all the fighting
around it in 1944,
in August, was built as well.
These places disappear.
 
The morgue, one of the more
important morgues was here also.
That again, gave the idea of
the disease of the center city.
Next, please.
 
Name those people.
 
There we go.
 
Paris on the left.
 
It's 1850.
 
Paris on the right.
 
They're all running together.
 
You see there's a lot more
people.
You have the filling-in of the
center.
You've got the periphery with
the emergence of these suburbs.
It's the suburbs that have
increasingly poor people living
in them who can't afford to live
in the center of Paris.
That's the big difference.
 
That's a big, big difference.
 
You have a customs barrier
around Paris.
Every time you bring things
into the city,
or any other French city,
you have to pay taxes on it.
A six-pack of beer,
you pay a tax.
You have more space outside the
city walls, so that's where you
build factories.
 
You're nearer to the canals and
to railroads,
so that's where you build
factories.
The center city froze the
unwanted industries,
the dirty industries--;soap,
chemical, etc.--;outside.
Paris doesn't de-industrialize.
 
You still have the garment
industry.
But the dirty industries,
the big industries stay on the
outside.
 
That's where your labor force
lives.
How different that is than
Philadelphia or Detroit,
where you already had all this
space and you've got the
population moving into big
central areas and essentially
staying there.
 
To be sure, in the United
States, we have places like a
very small part of New Orleans.
 
You've got San Francisco.
 
You've got Beacon Hill.
 
You've got Manhattan.
 
You've got places where you've
got a lot of wealthy people
living in the center city.
 
But places like Detroit are
more really common of the
American experience.
 
Next, please.
 
I can remember when I was a
kid, when I was younger than
you, I think,
going to a Yankee-Tiger
doubleheader in 1967.
 
Roy Whit played third base.
 
We walked out and the city of
Detroit was on fire because of
the riots.
 
It's still all burned out there.
 
One of the interesting things
was Grosse Pointe,
Michigan, which is a very fancy
place.
We have a lot of students here
from Grosse Pointe.
I'm not dissing Grosse Pointe,
Michigan,
but the municipal council tried
to figure out a way that you
couldn't get to Grosse Pointe
from the center of Detroit
unless you had a map,
unless you really knew how to
get there to try to keep
"them,"
that is,
the poor people of the center,
from going to the suburbs.
 
The upper classes of Grosse
Pointe armed themselves with
their hunting rifles,
just as the constables had in
central London in 1848.
 
The spatial juxtaposition is
incredible.
Next.
 
Oh, here we go.
 
Those were lots of people in
the center.
The theme here is overcrowding.
 
Here is the Market of the
Innocents, which it's called.
Now it's down by the forum Les
Halles.
Lots of people.
 
Then the big market Haussman
built would later be torn down.
Lots of people in the middle.
 
That's a theme.
 
Next, please.
 
The Rue Pirouette in 1860.
 
These are really old medieval
buildings.
A lot of them get destroyed by
the rebuilding.
Next, please.
 
Violà,
this is a good one.
This is one of the streets that
would disappear.
You could say,
"What the hell is he
talking about?
 
Where are all those
people?"
If you have really good eyes,
you can see that there are a
few people here,
because of these long
exposures,
there's actually some people
standing there.
 
This had already been condemned
to be destroyed,
rather like the Rue Transonain.
 
It had part of the collective
memory of the massacre there.
What is this in the center?
 
It's a ditch down where sewage
went.
There were some sewers in
Paris, but it was very
unhealthy.
 
In these areas,
this is right near the
Panthéon,
that is sort of in the center
left, eastern part of Paris.
 
People just get destroyed by
the cholera in 1832,
and again in 1849,
and again in the 1880s,
in 1884.
 
Fundamental inequality before
death of the poor.
This street--this is actually a
great photo.
This is by a guy called Charles
Marville, who went around and
took pictures of these
neighborhoods that were going to
disappear.
 
Don't worry about the names.
 
Don't worry about the streets.
 
I'm trying just to make a point.
 
Not everybody lived on those
streets.
In the second empire,
that is 1852-1870,
Napoleon III,
people lived it up.
A lot of Zola's novels are
really amazing about that.
He didn't like Louis Napoleon
terribly much.
This is living it up in a big
banquet in a big hotel.
Already you can see the wine
glasses.
They're starting to put the
wine glasses in connection with
the food.
 
That's something that comes in
the nineteenth century,
the idea of having red wine
with cheese.
You do have white wine with
goat's cheese.
Or having white wine with--most
with fish and fowl and that kind
of thing, and these long,
elaborate banquets of one
course following another.
 
I can hardly condemn that,
having sat through a few
thousand of them myself.
 
Anyway, there we go.
 
Fancy people.
 
Next, please.
 
This is revolution in 1830.
 
The bourgeois guy doesn't
belong there.
He never went out there anyway.
 
Marianne--this is a highly
romantic view of death.
Here's your street urchin
there, who's fighting the good
fight in 1830.
 
This is Delacroix's famous
Liberty Leading the
People.
 
This is an enormous painting.
 
These people look like they're
kind of playacting.
They're kind of saying,
"Oh, I'm dead now."
A few minutes later they're
going to get up again.
This is very romanticized.
 
Next, please.
 
Compare this to Meissonier.
 
This is a very underappreciated
painting.
Again, the name doesn't matter.
 
It meant something to him and
it does to art people,
but this is called The
Barricade.
This is only eighteen years
later.
This is 1848.
 
This is real death.
 
These are ordinary people.
 
Again, look at the gray-green,
the sick corridors.
This is an affectionate look at
people who are dying for a good
cause in the center of Paris.
 
Louis Napoleon,
Napoleon III,
didn't want revolution again.
 
Since there were barricades in
so many of these revolutions,
barricades begin on the day of
the barricades in Paris in 1572,
or something like that,
before this course stokes up.
He said, "Let's build the
boulevards so wide that you
can't build barricades across
them."
In 1944 and in 1968 barricades
were in the same places,
often, where the revolutionary
barricades had been in 1789 or
in 1848 or 1871.
 
These guys, that's Napoleon,
the guy with the pen.
That's Haussmann,
who was born in Paris but had
Alsacian parents.
 
He's in the middle.
 
Louis Napoleon flops a map down
and says,
"Build big boulevards
through this teeming city,"
"teeming"
used for the third time.
He does that for three reasons.
 
One, two, three.
 
One, to bring more air into
Paris, more boulevards with
sewers underneath them.
 
Boulevards mean better
transportation,
more light.
 
Secondly, he does this to
increase the flow of capital.
It's not a coincidence that
department stores are built on
these boulevards.
 
Some of the ones are still
there.
The shopkeepers not near
department store got wiped out.
They were really mad.
 
Very extreme rightwing voting
at the end of the nineteenth
century.
 
The ones near the department
stores do very well.
Third, and he says it in
Haussmann's memoirs,
Louis Napoleon wants these
built so you can't have
barricades.
 
He builds these boulevards
around and through the
traditional revolutionary areas.
 
The result is lots of people
pack up and they leave.
Next.
 
We're going to go through the
next ones fairly quickly.
Here's Paris 1855.
 
Belleville up there,
or La Villette,
or Montmartre there,
which has a god-awful church,
Sacré-Coeur,
built on it after 1871.
Those were annexed as suburbs
in 1860.
It's inner suburbs annexed into
Paris.
This wall here is the limit of
Paris today.
You still have people farming
in Vaugirard and these places,
Grenelle.
 
All that will stop.
 
By 1870 this is all sort of
packed with people.
The people living in
Belleville, which is on a hill,
were people many of whom were
forced out of the central
quarters by high rents.
 
They are the ones perched
dangerously, from the point of
view of the center,
on the periphery.
Ironically, as the middle
classes move further and further
west, they lost their contact
with ordinary people.
A lot of the stuff they're
reading is based upon--they
don't really see those people up
there.
Maybe they walk down the hill,
they can't afford to take the
horse-drawn carriages,
the omnibuses,
to be servants in their houses.
 
These spatial things are very
interesting.
You find them in other cities,
too.
Here, they take the map and
they say, "Let's build
boulevards."
 
You don't have to know anything
about Paris to know that there
wasn't any north-south--;north
is up there;
south is down toward
me--;thoroughfare,
and they built Boulevard Saint
Michel,
Boulevard Strasbourg,
Boulevard Saint Denis that goes
up to the station of the east
with the station of the north,
right to the left.
 
Étoile,
up here, the boulevards help
create the kind of star notion.
 
Étoile means star.
 
It looks like a star around the
Arc de Triomphe and the big
grand crossing that I'll show
you in a minute that gives you
the west-east access,
as well as some other ones, too.
They do a lot of building.
 
They knock down a whole hill.
 
This is now where the Palace of
Trocadéro is,
lots of work employing lots of
people, so the housing workers
like them.
 
In 1855, let's look at--you're
walking through the Gallery of
Machines at one of these world
fairs.
Because Victoria had one in
1851, Louis Napoleon's got to
have one, too.
 
He has two.
 
He has one in 1855 and another
one in 1866 or 1867.
You're walking along here.
 
You can look at paintings.
 
Above all, you can look at
machines.
You can look at things you can
buy.
That's the principle of these
expositions.
Paris is on stage.
 
That's the principle of a
department store.
You can walk through a
department store and you can buy
forty-nine different kinds of
shawls, ranging from very cheap
ones to very expensive ones.
 
It's the same principle.
 
The boulevards are really an
extension of,
as my friend Phillip Nord once
argued and so have a lot of
other people,
these department stores
themselves.
 
They become sort of a staging
area for what became known as
the Belle Epoque.
 
It wasn't so belle for
people who didn't have any
money, because those were hard
economic times.
These department stores still
exist.
The BHV, the Bazaar de l'Hotel
de Ville still exists in Paris.
Bon Marché.
 
There's a terrific book on Bon
Marché
by Michael Miller.
 
It's still there.
 
Zola called them "the
cathedrals of modernity."
Already in the 1850s they had
singing groups singing Christmas
carols at Christmas.
 
People would come.
 
They couldn't afford to buy
anything and just be part of the
spectacle.
 
Paris became a spectacle in
itself.
The boulevards were part of
this.
These aren't very good prints,
but he was so important he
became-to haussmann
something was to bulldoze
it.
 
Maybe to "Merriman"
something would be to drink a
good bottle of Côtes du
Rhône.
Maybe one day that will be mine.
 
Maybe I'll get a French verb.
 
I'm just kidding.
 
But anyway, haussmannisation
is to bulldoze something.
This is called the
haussmannisation of a
neighborhood.
 
Here, these people are getting
the equivalent of about ten
dollars, forced out of their
houses.
They've got their dog.
 
They've got everything they own
there.
Look at the mattress.
 
A mattress is the last thing
you ever pawned.
There's the mattress.
 
They're leaving.
 
The next one, please.
 
This is called Haussmann
Part II.
Here you've got your
Haussmannian vista.
You've got the big boulevards
with all these not then so fancy
balcony railings.
 
The real fancy ones come later
in the Third Republic.
This is really St. Augustine.
 
It's a hideous church.
 
Some people really like it.
 
My dear friend Bob Herbert
thinks it's not bad,
the art historian.
 
This is haussmannisation
of a corridor,
part two, of a neighborhood.
 
Next, please.
 
You've got people building.
 
That's the Tour Saint-Jacques,
which is still there.
A lot of these are little teeny
people who are from the center
part of France or the builders.
 
Everybody's aware of this
building.
Here you can say,
"How are we going to get
from Point 1,
which is down by the Seine,
the Rue de Rivoli,
which has been expanded?
How do you get to this new
opera they're building?"
First you tip off your friends
so they make a lot of money on
the deal, knowing what to sell
and what to buy.
Then you take a ruler.
 
You didn't have to be an
architectural genius.
You draw a straight line.
 
That's what I mean by
"imperialism of the
straight line."
 
Next, please.
 
You're getting to the opera.
 
There you can see it rising up,
Garnier's opera.
It rises up out of the smoke,
out of the cloud of
destruction.
 
I'm getting carried away.
 
Next, please.
 
There it's being built.
 
There it is.
 
You are here looking at what
now is the largest concentration
of pickpockets in the western
world,
because there's an American
Express right near there.
You see all these Americans.
 
They've got their big wallets.
 
They say, "Where's the
American Express,
dear?"
 
It's right over here.
 
Voop!
 
Their wallets are out of there
before they hit the top step of
the Métro.
 
That baby's gone.
 
Anyway, that's the Place
Vendôme down there.
Next, please.
 
There it is in 1900.
 
Here again, imperialism in a
straight line.
There you've got--maybe I'll do
a thing on blowing up this
building here.
 
Sometime we'll come back to
this maybe.
Anyway, there you go.
 
Here's the great crossing in
the center of Paris.
This is--you're crossing from
Ile of Cité
here and you're going up.
 
Here's the Gare de l"Est,
the station of the east there.
This way you're looking down
east.
There's the Tour Saint Jacques.
 
The only point is that they
expand this down toward Saint
Antoine and the Faubourg Saint
Antoine where the
revolutionaries were in 1848,
and where they were in 1789,
and where they were in 1792,
as well,
and at other times in the
French Revolution,
1830 for example.
 
They're down there.
 
That's the big crossing point,
la grande
croisée.
 
There's the Gare de l'Est.
 
When I see that station it's so
sad.
That's where all the people
drinking champagne went in 1914
shouting, "À
Berlin."
Just as in Hauptbahnhof,
in Berlin they were shouting
"Nacht Paris."
 
Of course, they don't come back.
 
So many Jews were deported from
here,
if they were sent from the
Galle du Nord to Drancy,
if they were on the direct line
to Auschwitz or the other death
camps,
they went through this station.
Next.
 
Arrested by French police,
1942-1943.
He builds Les Halles,
the big market.
My friend Vincent Scully,
who teaches in here afterward,
he would do a better job on
this, but I do remember the
first time I was ever in Paris.
 
I don't know how old I was.
 
Younger than I once was and
than I am now,
or younger than I'll be,
or whatever the line is.
I met somebody on a bus in
Germany.
She was a sculpturess and she
kindly invited me to stay in her
apartment.
 
It was all on the up and up.
 
It was no problem.
 
She took me down in the middle
of the night to see this place,
and to see the restaurants
where you'd see the wealthy
people eating,
and the butchers with their
smocks covered with Beaujolais
and also with animal blood.
It was really cool.
 
Then they tore this down.
 
They tore it down to build a
whole bunch of unsuccessful
places and the filthy
destruction of a monument.
We need Vince Scully here to do
this.
People chain themselves to
these things.
They say, "Can't you leave
just one so you people would
know what these are like?
 
Can't you leave just one?"
 
They said, "No,
we can make some money here.
We can get in--soon we'll have
McDonald's all over the place.
We'll make some money."
 
They got rid of them and
there's none of them left.
It's a tragedy.
 
Haussmann built those.
 
I'm not a big Haussmann guy.
 
Here's a building with more
Third Republic.
These are the buildings that he
built along the boulevards.
Next, please.
 
I've got to rocket on.
 
If you follow art history you
know there's a very famous
painting by Caillebotte that
shows the anonymity.
It's called Paris with the
Effect of Rain.
It's right here on this place,
which is where two boulevards
come together.
 
That's part of the thing, too.
 
You've got your basic middle
class people.
They were carrying umbrellas.
 
They are disconnected.
 
They would never say hello to
each other,
and they're crossing this
intersection that becomes part
of the heartbeat of urban life,
or something dramatic like that.
Next, please.
 
You've got these boulevards.
 
This already existed,
because it was where the walls
had once been.
 
This is the Boulevard
Montmartre.
Next, please.
 
Oh, man.
 
There was supposed to be
another one there.
Anyway, no problem.
 
My bad.
 
If you were flying around
overhead, you would look down
here.
 
Here is Notre Dame.
 
There's Les Halles up in that
direction.
That's the church of Saint
Sulpice.
You see the big crossing
points, the big boulevards that
have been built.
 
Here's the big old crossing
point there, the Tour Saint
Jacques.
 
A bird's eye view of all of
this.
What I left out was Camille
Pissarro's image from that same
point where he painted.
 
An impressionist painted
because of their interest in
light and first view and all of
that.
There's a lot of important
paintings of this.
Renoir didn't like these
boulevards.
He said they're lined up like
troops at a review.
That's the most appropriate
image of the centralization of
state power.
 
Speaking of state power,
what happens in the Paris
Commune in 1871 is that ordinary
people in Paris take arms,
as you know.
 
They build barricades across
these places.
Next, please.
 
Then the troops of the
provisional government from
Versailles,
appropriately enough,
come in and they use these same
boulevards,
the extension of the Rue de
Rivoli,
the Rue St.
 
Antoine, to go and gun down
ordinary people,
25,000 of them.
 
Welcome to the twentieth
century in 1871,
when you were guilty for whom
you were.
"À
Paris tout le monde
était coupable."
 
"In Paris everybody was
guilty,"
said a prosecuting attorney.
 
Next, please.
 
But the spatial aspects of this
are important.
This is right.
 
That's the Madeleine.
 
There's just a lot of
destruction.
Here's Manet's depiction of
women being shot.
There were these images of
rumors that women incendiaries
were burning down the wealthy
buildings of the property.
Les pétroleuses,
the female incendiaries.
Manet did one and so did
Courbet.
Next, please.
 
Finally, that's real death.
 
Those are rather small people
in tiny caskets who have just
been mowed down because they
were who they were,
that is poor and in people's
Paris.
They systematically targeted
areas like Belleville,
because they were identified
with the left.
If we could speed through these
next few, then we'll be out of
here.
 
Next, please.
 
Here again, those are the
boulevards with the old gates.
Here's what I mean by east-west.
 
In the northwestern part of
Paris people were moving into
slightly better buildings.
 
In the northeast,
more rural looking ones just on
the outside, the laundry of
combat.
We know this is after 1900,
because there's a reference to
the metro.
 
The metro didn't open until
1900.
So, this is probably about
1912, actually there.
People on the periphery coming
in to pawn their mattresses.
Here's the gates when you were
outside.
Again, why are all the
factories on the outside,
all the ordinary people?
 
Because life was cheaper out
there.
That's why beyond Montparnasse
are all these café
areas that are still in Paris,
now,
but were once out there,
because it was cheaper to be
out there.
 
At the end of her sad,
short, drunken life,
Gervaise in L'Assommoir
goes out to hook on the
periphery, on the boulevard.
 
She gets poorer and poorer.
 
Zola was so well aware of the
spatial concomitants of all of
this.
 
This is what it was like
passing through the barrier.
It's outside that the red belt
exists.
It's outside of all.
 
Vienna is a classic example.
 
In the 1930s you've got the
army blasting,
firing cannons against the
working-class housing perched on
the outside of town.
 
"Sires,"
said one of the ministers to
Louis Philippe,
"those usines,
those factories that you are
allowing to be built around
Paris,
on the outskirts will be the
cord that strangles us one
day."
It's on the outskirts in these
industrial suburbs that had once
been producing cherries for the
urban market and fruit,
but now were their factories.
 
It's there that the Communist
party did so well in the 1920s
and 1930s, and even beyond.
 
They provided social services.
 
They defended people.
 
They were called the mal
lotis, people that had
inappropriate places to live.
 
So that, again,
was what I meant by center
versus periphery and the sense
of not belonging to the center,
of not belonging to the center.
 
You see the same thing with
people living inside of American
cities, of not belonging to
prosperity.
It can contribute to a
formation of a counter-society,
of kind of a sense of not
belonging that creates a sense
of belonging.
 
As we are rejected,
we too can become powerful.
The spatial aspects of this are
terribly important.
Look at the riots in the
suburbs in 2005.
We don't have time to talk
about that, but that's a
fascinating thing.
 
Different people who are
marginalized by the center,
large populations of North
Africans, and of West Africans,
and people from the Caribbean.
 
It's the same phenomenon,
the center and periphery is
there.
 
Last, and I think I've pulled
it off, if you went westward,
this is a Monet.
 
This is one of the many
regattas at Angers.
You went westward for pleasure,
not eastward.
You went further and further so
the middle classes,
particularly in the western
part of Paris,
plant their flag defiantly in
Normandy, in Deauville,
and in Angoville and all of
these places there.
It's there that the
impressionists paint the
Parisian upper classes,
who when you go to Deauville
you still see all the 75 license
plates and the 78s from the
Paris region.
 
It's still the place.
 
There's a social geography of
leisure, too,
that develops in Paris,
as in these other cities.
It happens so remarkably in
what was not only the bourgeois
century,
not only the rebellious
century,
but above all,
the urban century where the way
in which people lived in very
important ways was transformed.
 
Thank you very much.
 
Good luck on the midterm.
 
See you next week.
 
See you on Wednesday.
 
