THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION SPRING 2012 THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION The Yale Historical Review provides undergraduates an opportunity to have their exceptional work highlighted and SPRING 2012 encourages the diffusion of original historical ideas on campus VOLUME II by providing a forum for outstanding undergraduate history ISSUE I papers covering any historical topic. For information regarding submissions, advertisements, subscriptions, and contributions, please visit our website: WWW.YALEHISTORICALREVIEW.ORG With further questions or to provide feedback, please email us at: [email protected] Or write to us at: THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW P.O. BOX 203338 NEW HAVEN, CT 06520 The Yale Historical Review is published by Yale students. Yale University is not responsible for its contents. ON THE COVER: “Plan de Paris: Nouvelle Édition,” Yale University Library Map Department, 38 P21 1890A. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SECTION EDITORS EDITORIAL Katherine Fein, PC ’14 Jacob Anbinder, ES ’14 Jack Bisceglia, PC ’12 BOARD MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Giambrone, PC ’14 Noah Remnick, SY ’15 Charles Gyer, SM ’13 Elinor Monahan, JE ’13 DEVELOPMENT CHAIR Caitlin Radford, PC ’14 Benjamin Kline, BK ’14 Brendan Ross, BK ’13 Teo Soares, SM ’13 COMMUNICATIONS CHAIR Christian Vazquez, BR ’13 Molly Ma, TD ’13 Annie Yi, CC ’13 EDITOR-AT-LARGE COPY EDITORS Caroline Tan, BK ’14 Annie Loeb, TD ’12 Spencer Weinreich, PC ’15 DAVID BLIGHT ADVISORY Class of 1954 Professor of American History; Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the BOARD Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition JOHN GADDIS Robert A. Lovett Professor of History BEVERLY GAGE Professor of History GLENDA GILMORE Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies STEVEN PINCUS Director of Undergraduate Studies for History NORMA THOMPSON Director of Undergraduate Studies for Humanities DONALD KAGAN Sterling Professor of Classics and History CONTENTS AT LARGE 7 The Essence of Paris: The Growth of the Métro and Ideas of Space, 1900-1914 Henry Grabar Sage JUNIOR SEMINAR 25 “The Loyal and Most Ancient Colony” at Its Most Loyal: Newfoundland and the Battle of Beaumont Hamel Chelsea Janes DIRECTED STUDIES 42 Herodotus’s The History as a Self-Referential Work Claire Horrell INTERVIEW 46 Christopher Rogers: Editorial Director, Yale University Press Teo Soares OUTSIDE OF YALE 52 Rock ‘n’ Revolution: How the Prague Spring’s Cultural Liberalism Transformed Czech Human Rights Julia Bumke FRESHMAN 76 Pride, Prejudice, and Pre-Modern Punishment Zach Schloss SENIOR ESSAY 82 “Pero Pa Mi Era Otra Cosa”: Contentious Memories of Pinochet’s Chile Emma Sokoloff-Rubin ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Yale Historical Review Editorial Board gratefully acknowledges the support of the following donors: FOUNDING PATRONS Matthew and Laura Dominski In Memory of David J. Magoon Brenda and David Oestreich Sareet Majumdar Stauer Derek Wang Yale Club of the Treasure Coast Zixiang Zhao FOUNDING CONTRIBUTORS Peter Dominksi J.S. Renkert Joe and Marlene Toot Yale Center for British Art Yale Club of Hartford CONTRIBUTORS Greg Weiss AT LARGE THE ESSENCE OF PARIS: THE GROWTH OF THE MÉTRO AND IDEAS OF SPACE, 1900-1914 By Henry Grabar Sage, MC ’12 Written for “Paris and London: Metropolitain Trajectories,” Professors John Merriman and Jay Winter, Fall 2011 Faculty Advisor: John Merriman Edited by Christian Vazquez and Annie Yi This paper examines the development of the Paris Métro system between 1900 and 1914. Henry Grabar Sage, a senior American Studies major, traces the development of the transit the Métro brought different social classes together, it also created a city-banlieue divide that - 7 AT LARGE INTRODUCTION At retirement age, so the adage goes, the average Parisian has spent two years of his life underground.1 It is a bewildering statistic for any city, let alone one nicknamed the City of Light, but such is the importance of the Paris Métro. The gently arched ceilings of the stations, the stiff metal toggles on the doors, the blue-tiled signs with the white-tiled names of poets, politicians, and places: these are the most visceral symbols of the city. The tangled, multi-colored map is perhaps the most enduring icon we have of Paris as a whole. The Métro is a unifying experience as powerful and as common as the buying of the morning bread. It links every neighborhood and comes within four hundred meters of every point within the city.2 For the French novelist Alexandre Arnoux, a Parisian by choice, the Métro was “that ribbon that ties together scattered Parisians . the emblem and the organ of their communion.”3 By the mid-20th century, such appraisals— romantic, astounded, and superlative—were common. The Métro had become a de facto symbol of Paris. This paper chronicles the rapid growth of the Paris Métro system between 1900 and 1914, and the way that growth changed Parisian concepts of space. On the one hand there emerged the trope of the Métro as a grand unifier, in the mold of Arnoux’s appraisal. Franz Kafka, visiting Paris for the first time in 1911, observed that the Métro “is what provides the best chance to imagine that one has understood, immediately, correctly, and quickly, the essence of Paris.”4 By uniting the city underground in a fast, efficient rail network, the Métro bridged social divides, brought people together, and enabled a comprehensive urban identity that the novelist Jules Romains called “unanimisme,” a common, collective consciousness.5 To the pleasure and wonder of artists and writers, physical distances shrank, and it was often posited that social differences would melt alongside them. But even as it united the proletarian East and the bourgeois West underground, rich and poor in every car, the Métro reorganized spatial relations above ground with the opposite result. If we wish to see the Métro as part of the foundation of a citywide identity, we must also acknowledge its role in creating the city-banlieue divide that today governs Parisian spatial relations.6 As it righted the wrongs of the nineteenth century marginalization of the peripheral neighborhoods inside the city limits, it allowed a 1 Métro-Cité: Le chemin de fer à la conquête de Paris, 1871-1945 (Paris: Paris musées, 1997), 186. 2 Ibid., 41. 3 Georges Verpraet, Paris, Capitale Souterraine, 220. Author’s translation. 4 Franz Kafka, Journal, Translated by Marthe Robert (Paris: Bernand Grasset, 1954 (1933).), 619, “Lugano. Paris. Erlenbach—August-Septembre, 1911.” Author’s translation. 5 Evelyne Cohen, Paris dans l’imaginaire national de l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Sorbonne, 1999), 272. 6 Banlieue is the French word for suburb, which I have chosen to use in this essay because besides location, the Parisian banlieue shares very little with our typical American suburb. 8 HENRY GRABAR SAGE twentieth century equivalent to emerge in the banlieue. The perception of the Métro as a unifying force belied the paradoxical, centrifugal forces of its expansion, which reduced urban density and sent the working classes sprawling into the suburbs, where the system never followed. THE EARLY YEARS OF THE PARIS MÉTRO With the exception of a short-lived carriage system proposed by the philosopher Blaise Pascal in 1658, there was no public transportation in Paris until 1828. That year, the city introduced the omnibus, which, along with its gradual replacement, the tramway, defined Parisian circulation during the nineteenth century. For thirty centimes, a passenger could travel anywhere on the line. Because the omnibus stopped whenever a passenger wanted to get on or off, this system was highly inefficient. Yet for Parisians who did not own a horse-drawn carriage, the city offered no other transportation options. Since the buses were open to everyone, the bourgeoisie usually shunned them. Exceptionally, the Duchess of Berry once crossed Paris incognito via omnibus as a part of a bet, but blew her cover when she accidentally handed the conductor the gold piece she had received from the wager.7 By 1854, eleven different companies operated bus services on the tangled streets of Paris. M. Piétri, the prefect of the Paris police, bemoaned the general disorganization of the system, which he considered far insufficient to the needs of the rapidly expanding city. “It serves certain neighborhoods and not others,” Piétri wrote. “The best thing to do it to create one company, with the least general costs, to provide transportation at the lowest possible price.8 The following year, at his behest, the eleven companies consolidated to form the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus (CGO). That year saw 40 million trips on 25 different lines named for the letters of the alphabet. In many ways, the monopoly was at odds with French laws regarding the freedom of industry established during the Second Republic, and the CGO was sometimes accused of treating its horses better than its workers, who toiled an average of seventeen hours a day. Conductors, for example, typically worked shifts from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. or 9 a.m. to midnight.9 However, the city counter-balanced the concession by forcing the CGO to continually expand its network and run new lines to the city's poor, outer neighborhoods. These lines became a necessity after Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal projects of the 1860s created wide boulevards lined with expensive housing, gutting central Paris and pushing workers to the periphery. The desire to link the city's center with its expanding proletarian surroundings also inspired the