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THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
A Politics of Regulation: Haussmann’s Planning Practice and Badiou’s Philosophy
Antoine Michel Paccoud
A thesis submitted to the Department of Geography and Environment of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, September 2012
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DECLARATION
I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).
The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent.
I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party.
I declare that my thesis consists of 103,470 words (including 6,232 words of footnotes, essentially the original French versions of material quoted within the text).
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ABSTRACT
This thesis is concerned with empirically determining whether a particular political sequence can be
interpreted through Badiou’s philosophy. It focuses on the public works that transformed Paris in the middle of the 19th century, and more specifically on Haussmann’s planning practice. From an
epistolary exchange between property owners, Haussmann and the Minister of the Interior during Haussmann’s first years as Prefect of the Seine, the thesis draws out a political event: the playing out in a singular context of an opposition over a political practice predicated on equality. In this case, the
opposition is in the field of planning as regulation: the sanctity of property rights against a planner’s
efforts to break the complacency of the planning apparatus towards property owners. The thesis argues that Haussmann was a Saint-Simonian state revolutionary that sought to make property owners contribute to the public works in equal relation to the benefits they extracted from them. In the face of sustained opposition, this planning practice was ultimately sacrificed by the imperial regime. Haussmann’s first years as Prefect are shown to have taken place in the temporality of Badiou’s events, while the commonly invoked process of Haussmannisation best describes the
situation that followed the demise of Haussmann’s planning practice. Badiou’s notion of the state
revolutionary gives us a way to think through the difficulty and evanescence of regulation. It can help us understand those fleeting moments when political will was used to break hierarchies of power and capital. Badiou’s philosophy is shown to be compatible with a social science that is concerned with isolating and singularising particular political sequences, of which early Haussmann is one.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am lucky to have received such generous support in the drafting of this thesis. I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Murray Low, for his invaluable feedback on my work and for his patience and encouragements over the years. I am also indebted to my review supervisors Prof. Andy Pratt and Dr. Asher Ghertner for their time and comments. I am grateful to Prof. Dennis Rodgers and Dr. Gareth Jones for having supported me in my application to the PhD programme and would also like to thank my examiners Prof. Erik Swyngedouw and Prof. Matthew Gandy for their very helpful comments and a stimulating discussion. I owe much to all who took the time to listen to my presentations or to read parts of my thesis: Prof. Andy Thornley, Dr. Nancy Holman, Dr. Alan Mace, Prof. Richard Sennett, Dr. Fran Tonkiss, Prof. Vic Seidler, NYLON members in London and New York, and my colleagues Jayaraj Sundaresan, Adam Kaasa and Dr. Sabina Uffer. And nothing would have been possible without the support of my family, my parents, Arlette Conzemius and Thierry Paccoud, and especially my wife, Ivana Spirovska Paccoud.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................................7
AN OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT........................................................................................7 THE SPECIFICITY OF BADIOU’S PHILOSOPHY.......................................................................................9 THE STRUCTURE OF THIS THESIS.......................................................................................................16
CHAPTER 1: HAUSSMANN IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES ............................................................................21
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................21 AN OVERVIEW OF SCHOLARLY WORK ON HAUSSMANN..................................................................21 BETWEEN UNFLINCHING SUPPORT AND LEGISLATIVE DEFEATS ......................................................33 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................................47
CHAPTER 2: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF AGENCY AND OPPOSITION.........................................49
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................49 FROM EMPIRICAL PROBLEMS TO THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS......................................................50 FROM THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS TO AN IDEA OF A SUITABLE FRAMEWORK.............................62 BADIOU'S FRAMEWORK: THE SEQUENCE OF THE EVENT.................................................................70 SUBJECTIVE FORMALISMS.................................................................................................................72 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................................77
CHAPTER 3: BADIOU AND EMPIRICAL RESEARCH.................................................................................80
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................80 BADIOU: AN EVENT WITHIN THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS?.....................................................81 FROM EVENT TO ARCHIVE.................................................................................................................89 FROM ARCHIVES TO ANALYSIS........................................................................................................100 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................................................109
CHAPTER 4: FROM ARCHITECT TO PLANNER: PRESENTING THE HAUSSMANN EVENT......................111
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................111 THE WORLD OF THE HAUSSMANN EVENT ......................................................................................112 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PLANNING BEFORE HAUSSMANN.......................................................116
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A CHANGE IN THE WORLD: HAUSSMANN’S PLANNING PRACTICE .................................................122
CONCLUSION: FROM ARCHITECT TO PLANNER ..............................................................................139
CHAPTER 5: FROM LETTERS TO PRINCIPLES, THROUGH EMOTIONS..................................................141
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................141 SUBJECTS, PRINCIPLES, AFFECTS, EMOTIONS .................................................................................142 FINDING EMOTIONS AND DETERMINING THEIR JUDGMENT .........................................................152 FROM EMOTIONS TO PRINCIPLES...................................................................................................162 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................................................173
CHAPTER 6: SUBJECTIVE FORMALISMS ..............................................................................................175
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................................175 HAUSSMANN AS A STATE REVOLUTIONARY ...................................................................................176 THE OTHER SUBJECTS OF A POLITICAL EVENT ................................................................................190 SUBJECTS, TRUTH AND THE UNFOLDING OF THE EVENT................................................................199 CONCLUSION...................................................................................................................................205
CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................................207
ANSWERING THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS: BREAK, EQUALITY, TRUTH............................................207 ANSWERING THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS: THE TRACE OF AN EVENT.............................................209 ANSWERING THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS: AN EVALUATION OF BADIOU.......................................217 FINAL THOUGHTS ............................................................................................................................223
WORKS CITED......................................................................................................................................225 OTHER WORKS CONSULTED ...............................................................................................................230 APPENDICES ........................................................................................................................................231
APPENDIX 1: ARCHIVAL RESOURCES USED AND CONSULTED ........................................................231 APPENDIX 2: TRANSLATIONS OF THE ARCHIVAL MATERIAL USED .................................................233
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INTRODUCTION
Much of the Paris we know today – the wide, tree lined and monumental boulevards bordered by lines of uniform facades and the perspectives they create – can be traced to the work of Baron Haussmann and Emperor Napoleon III during the Second Empire (1853-1870). The city’s transformation was profound, ranging from the most monumental (the boulevards, the architecture, and the perspectives) to the most mundane of planning activities (such as street levelling and widening, sewer construction, enforcing building standards). It deeply affected the lives of the almost 2 million inhabitants in the wider urban region, who saw their properties expropriated and destroyed, their leases revoked, their livelihoods endangered and their communities uprooted by massive public works. The Parisian public discovered how the limits between the public and the private could be redrawn by an activist and rigorous municipal administration and the impact this could have on their understandings of the urban environment. Property owners had both much to gain and much to lose from the public works: they meant sharply increasing property values and speculative opportunities but also construction freezes and expropriations. In this rapidly changing environment, the planning apparatus and its regulatory power were also being redefined.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT
Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine who is best known for the programme of public works he conducted in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, was fundamentally a planner who sought to regulate private activity over the urban form. The aim of this thesis is to provide the theoretical framework and the evidence to support this claim which runs counter to the vast majority of the literature on the transformation of Paris. But this thesis is also an attempt at
introducing into the social sciences the concepts in Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This contemporary
thinker has been defending a philosophical project that puts at its centre short-lived sequences in which structural considerations are bracketed out and a particular type of agent resurrects, through its actions, a universal principle that had previously become a dead letter. This thesis will argue that
his concepts can be invoked to investigate these intense sequences, of which Haussmann’s
transformation of Paris is one. It will then propose a method to find these concepts within empirical material and exploit the material through them to contribute a different, yet complementary, perspective on the public works.
This thesis, like all theses, thus has three components: a theory, a method and empirical material. What makes this thesis particular is that in turning to philosophy for a theoretical framework, a
7distance is created between the level of theory and the level of empirical research. It then becomes difficult to join these different components of the thesis together. The decision I have taken here is to reduce this distance by extracting the method of analysis from the philosophical project itself: the method through which the empirical material is analysed has been developed to allow Badiou’s concepts to be invoked in the analysis. A further complication that emerged was that this framework could only be legitimately utilised for a limited set of empirical material: this material had to be located within one of these short lived sequences Badiou calls events. All three components of this
thesis can thus be traced back to the initial decision to make Badiou’s philosophy contribute to the
advancement of social scientific theorisation. This decision has meant that each part of the thesis is dependent on the other: the material collected must be within an event; what constitutes an event is defined through the theoretical framework; and the method developed to allow the theoretical framework to say something about the material collected from within an event is derived from the wider philosophical project.
It is probably true that this thesis would have been easier to write if the case study had been more
immediately relevant to the nature of Badiou’s philosophy. Haussmann’s transformation of Paris does not seem to correspond to Badiou’s insistence that any political event has the affirmation of
the maxim of equality at its core. Quite the contrary, it would seem, if the impressive scholarship on his seventeen year tenure as prefect of the Seine is anything to go by. This choice of a case study can be traced back to an initial intuition that the philosophical text I was reading in 2006, Badiou’s Logics of Worldsi, was in some sense connected to the historical sequence that occurred more than a century and a half ago in Paris. The distance covered since the MA thesis of that same year on the relation between Badiou and Haussmann is vast. From a simple application of his concepts through the analysis of secondary literature, I have since been confronted to the tasks of justifying this relation, both theoretically and empirically, and of reconciling these seemingly opposed characters in a way that productively contributed to an already vast literature. In any case, I can only say that the contradiction between a philosophical project predicated on equality and an urban transformation that has been accused of exacerbating social segregation only made me look for
things that previous studies had ignored. One such thing is Badiou’s concept of the state
i This thesis is the product of a sustained an in-depth engagement with this book, Badiou’s sequel to his 1988
Being and Event and his 1982 Theory of the Subject. It is a long and complex work on which Badiou worked for over 15 years: it presents his most recent reworking of his larger conceptual system. In addition to these three books, Badiou has published a series of commentaries on current events, discussions with other theorists and investigations into the lives and ideas of political and artistic figures. My work on this book (and others by Badiou) was done entirely on the French versions. Where official English translations exist, I will provide these translations in the text and insert the original French versions in a footnote.
8revolutionary or the possibility of a political event that takes place from within the state apparatus. This is a new concept in Badiou’s philosophy and one that this thesis will attempt to isolate empirically.
The facet of the public works that has received scant attention, and which is the central object of
this thesis, is Haussmann’s planning practice. By this term, I am referring to the decisions taken by
Haussmann in his carrying out of the planning interventions afforded to him by the legislative
framework of the time. This thesis sets out to identify how Haussmann’s planning practice broke
with the way in which his predecessors had made use of planning regulations; what political principles were carried within this planning practice; and how the reactions this planning practice
garnered ultimately led to its demise. This parallels the sequence that binds Badiou’s three central concepts. We must first argue that Haussmann’s planning practice can be conceptualised as a
political event in Parisian planning. This means answering two related questions: was Haussmann’s planning practice fundamentally different from that of his predecessors? And, does this planning practice carry within it the affirmation of equality? In a second stage, we must uncover the universal political idea that his planning practice constructed in the world of Parisian planning – what Badiou calls the truth of an event. This is equivalent to the following question: what was the political
principle that motivated Haussmann’s planning practice? These three questions will form the basis
of the empirical chapters. In the conclusion, we will able to answer two more: what consequences
did Haussmann’s planning practice have on the world of Parisian planning? And, is a social scientific investigation based on Badiou’s concepts fruitful?