The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870-1914 by Peter S. Soppelsa A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Joshua H. Cole, Co-Chair Associate Professor Gabrielle Hecht, Co-Chair Professor Richard Abel Professor Geoffrey H. Eley Associate Professor Dario Gaggio Copyright 2009 Peter S. Soppelsa For Jen, who saw me through the whole project. ii Contents Dedication ii List of Figures iv Introduction: Modernity, Infrastructure and Everyday Life 1 Chapter 1: Paris, Modernity and Haussmann 35 Part One: Circulation, The Flow of Traffic 99 Chapter 2: The Dream Life of the Métropolitain, 1872-1895 107 Chapter 3: Paris Under Construction, 1895-1914 182 Part Two: Hygiene, The Flow of Light, Air, Water and Waste 253 Chapter 4: Opening the City: Housing, Hygiene and Urban Density 265 Chapter 5: Flows of Water and Waste 340 Conclusion: The Fragility of Modernity 409 Bibliography 423 iii List of Figures Figure 1: Morice's Marianne on the Place de la République 74 Figure 2: The departmental commission's 1872 Métro plan 120 Figure 3: A standard CGO horse-powered tram 122 Figure 4: CGO Mékarski system compressed air tram, circa 1900 125 Figure 5: Francq's locomotive sans foyer 127 Figure 6: Albert Robida, L'Embellissement de Paris par le métropolitain (1886) 149 Figure 7: Jules Garnier’s Haussmannized Viaduct, 1884 153 Figure 8: From Louis Heuzé's 1878 Pamphlet 154 Figure 9: From Louis Heuzé's 1878 Pamphlet 154 Figure 10: Le Chatelier's 1889 Métro Plan 156 Figure 11: 1890 Métro plan from Eiffel and the North Railway Company 163 Figure 12: J.B. Berlier's 1892 Tubular Tramway 179 Figure 13: Two views of the Diatto system stud mechanism 211 Figure 14: L'Assiette au Beurre’s November, 1901 cartoon “dangerous toys” 220 Figure 15: The rue de Rivoli, June 30, 1899 240 Figure 16: The Arc de Triomphe overlooks a chaotic scene 242 Figure 17: Average rents by district, 1891 275 Figure 18: Number of Unclean Dwellings Service visits by district, 1877-1883 276 Figure 19: Ad for the Touring Club’s “hygienic night stand,” Hygea 323 Figure 20: Deaths from tuberculosis by quartier, 1913 325 Figure 21: Block of houses on the rue des Etuves slated for demolition in 1909 326 Figure 22: Houses on rue Aubry le Boucher slated for demolition 327 Figure 23: Cross-section view of a Métro tunnel ventilation shaft, 1913 329 Figure 24: View from the fortifications to the Zone near Saint-Ouen 370 Figure 25: Le Petit Parisien’s photograph of the shanties in Pantin without water 371 Figure 26: Improvised passerelle, Porte d’Ivry 396 Figure 27: passerelles on the rue de l’Hôtel Colbert 397 Figure 28: “Les Resignés” (The Resigned), L’Éclair, August 1, 1911 402 iv 1 Introduction: Modernity, Infrastructure and Everyday Life We tend to associate “modernity” with power, control, order, progress, durability and mastery. We also associate it with Western cities in the grips of the twin historical transformations unleashed by the nineteenth century: industrialization and urbanization. We often hear that Western cities became safer, cleaner, healthier, more comfortable, efficient and rational places to live in the nineteenth century because Europeans judiciously applied reason, science and technology to organizing and managing everyday urban life. While Europe underwent fundamental social, spatial and technological changes (urbanization, industrialization and globalization), so the familiar story goes, European ways of life became more civilized, rationalized, standard, advanced, efficient, democratic, humane, or even universal. But what would happen to this view of modernity if I told the story of a city in the grips of industrialization and urbanization, whose leaders were anxious to improve life by applying science and technology, which, however did not only become more rational, more efficient and more humane in many ways, but also more complicated, more risky and more fragile? What if that city was Paris, so-called “capital of the nineteenth century,” “capital of modernity” and “capital of the world”?1 In this study, I argue that Paris between 1870 and 1914, the scene of massive 1 (1) Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” from The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard, 2002), pp. 3-26; (2) David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2003); Patrice Higgonet, Paris: Capital of the World (Harvard, 2005). 2 work in infrastructural modernization, can help us uncover a different perspective on modernity that highlights its contingencies, contradictions, complexity and fragility.2 This study is about what I call “the fragility of modernity,” meaning the special difficulties that confront cities dependent on increasingly complex networked infrastructures which bind humans, technology and the natural environment in new ways. Although we often hear that everyday life was transformed by science and technology in these years (often called the “Second Industrial Revolution”), Paris's modernization from 1870 to 1914 is better characterized as uneven development. In 1900, Paris became the world’s fourth city to open an electric-powered subway, but as late as 1928, 18% of its houses did not enjoy direct to sewer drainage.3 Parisian responses to modernization were equally uneven, expressing both optimism and anxiety about technological change, and a number of never-completed fantasies of perfecting, optimizing, and controlling humans, the city, technology, nature, and their relations.4 While France’s civilizing mission kept Paris planners, engineers and politicians on a technological-determinist track that identified infrastructural development with progress, results on the terrain of everyday life were quite mixed. Technical accidents, bureaucratic inefficiency, and shortages of crucial resources like water and affordable housing called this progress into question. In this study we will hear many voices in Paris questioning the familiar narrative of infrastructural modernization as progress, as well as many defending it. 2 This idea is inspired by a long line of critical theorists who stress the “duality of modernity.” Ideas drawn from classic German theorists like Marx, Weber, Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin have been retooled by more recent scholars like Raymond Aron, Marshall Berman , Jürgen Habermas, Detlev Peukert and David Harvey. 3 Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (Yale, 1978), p. 208. 4 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (University of California, 1992). 3 Infrastructural development did not influence everyday life in predictable ways. As the Paris authorities used networked infrastructures to solve urban problems (distributing water and power, public transportation, etc.), they increased the heterogeneity, complexity and fragility of the city, helped reproduce social inequalities, and increased the city’s ecological impact. In this study, I show that what Parisians recognized as urban modernity between 1870 and 1914, which after Haussmann revolved around the application of networked infrastructures for solving urban problems, was an increasingly heterogeneous and fragile assembly, vulnerable to disruptions of social routine, technological function, and the forces of nature. Provincializing Paris: Remembering Passepartout and Rothal In 1872 Paris had a new republican regime. It was a time for national self- reflection. Parisians had spent the last year and a half sieged by the Prussians and then at civil war with one another. Now as they rebuilt the capital, they looked to London for inspiration. The Prefecture of the Seine was studying London's urban railways to imitate them in Paris, while French ex-patriots in London wrote home with excited accounts of the ride.5 Meanwhile, Jules Verne was publishing Around the World in 80 Days as serial fiction in Paris newspaper Le Temps.6 The story opens in London that same year. In 1872, London was a jealously-regarded mirror of Paris's future, a city further along the evolutionary curve of industrialization, a model modern metropolis. The capital of 5 Historian Hippolyte Taine, French ex-patriot in London, wrote a starry-eyed review of London's urban railways for Le Temps, as we'll see in Chapter 2. Poet Arthur Rimbaud, also traveling in London that year, wrote the throbbing prose poem Métropolitain, which one critic has speculated was written about his experience riding the city's railways. See: Michael Spencer, “A Fresh Look at Rimbaud's "Métropolitain",” The Modern Language Review, Vol. 63, No. 4. (Oct., 1968), pp. 849-853. 6 See Chapters I-IV of the free, public Wikisource version: (http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Tour_du_monde_en_quatre-vingts_jours. 4 Victoria's empire was the world's largest city and the hub of the world economy, a global cosmopolis. So Verne's story follows the networks of the British Empire.7 Verne's linchpin—the wager that Phileas Fogg can go around the world in 80 days, thanks to the speed of locomotives and steamships—was a question about how industrialized, steam- powered means of transportation had changed time, space, and ultimately human life. Verne's book was a textual tool for coming to terms with London's perceived developmental leg up on Paris, for exploring the differences between England and France (personified in the odd couple of Fogg and Passepartout), and for exploring the human impact of