A groundbreaking work of scholarship that sheds critical new light on the urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III
In the mid-nineteenth century, Napoleon III and his prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, adapted Paris to the requirements of industrial capitalism, endowing the old city with elegant boulevards, an enhanced water supply, modern sewers, and public greenery. Esther da Costa Meyer provides a major reassessment of this ambitious project, which resulted in widespread destruction in the historic center, displacing thousands of poor residents and polarizing the urban fabric.
Drawing on newspapers, memoirs, and other archival materials, da Costa Meyer explores how people from different social strata-both women and men-experienced the urban reforms implemented by the Second Empire. As hundreds of tenements were destroyed to make way for upscale apartment buildings, thousands of impoverished residents were forced to the periphery, which lacked the services enjoyed by wealthier parts of the city. Challenging the idea of Paris as the capital of modernity, da Costa Meyer shows how the city was the hub of a sprawling colonial empire extending from the Caribbean to Asia, and exposes the underlying violence that enriched it at the expense of overseas territories.
This marvelously illustrated book brings to light the contributions of those who actually built and maintained the impressive infrastructure of Paris, and reveals the consequences of colonial practices for the city's cultural, economic, and political life.
"Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852-1870 offers a new look at the ambitious urban changes that transformed the city of Paris during the Second Empire, when Paris became a template for urban renewal in many large cities in Europe, North, and South America. Esther da Costa Meyer looks at the social and historical of context of these urban changes--what Napoleon III, his prefect Georges-Eugene Haussman, and their team of engineers planned, as well as how the diverse and deeply stratified public responded to them. Along with broad streets and boulevards intended to enable crowds and merchandise to circulate and, also, impede the chances of popular insurgency, Haussman's project of urban renewal called for ample water supply, sewerage, and public parks and gardens. These changes radically altered the old, tightly-knit weave of the medieval city, serving the needs of the industrial bourgeoisie while forcing the urban poor to the outskirts. Dividing Paris is the first architectural history of the city that takes into account the larger part of the urban territory annexed in 1860, a ring of settlements and villages which became increasingly class-specific. Instead of relating the story of Haussmanization as a top-down administrative effort, as Haussman's critics and admirers have both tended to do, it draws on primary sources, especially newspapers and memoirs, to investigate the degree to which Parisians' experiences of modernity were class and gender-specific and to ask what strategies working class men and women in particular used to cope with and in some cases resist the changing world around them. At the same time, da Costa Meyer resists the familiar narrative of Paris as "capital of the 19th century" that has endured, at least since Walter Benjamin's famous essay, as euro-centric and misleading insofar as it fails to situate Paris's urban developments in a broader global context or to acknowledge the extent to which Haussmanization was itself implicated in the broader imperial project on which France was embarked at the time"--
"And what an important book it is. One of the most stimulating I've come across on cities, a city and Paris."
---Andrew Kelly, Director of Festival of the Future City and Creative Programmer
