Paris, Capital of Modernity

David Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135945855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

Collecting David Harvey's finest work on Paris during the second empire, Paris, Capital of Modernity offers brilliant insights ranging from the birth of consumerist spectacle on the Parisian boulevards, the creative visions of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, and the reactionary cultural politics of the bombastic Sacre Couer. The book is heavily illustrated and includes a number drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier, one of the greatest political caricaturists of the nineteenth century.

PART ONE

REPRESENTATIONS PARIS 1830–1848

CHAPTER ONE

THE MYTHS OF MODERNITY

BALZAC’S PARIS

“Balzac has secured the mythic constitution of the world through precise topographic contours. Paris is the breeding ground of his mythology—Paris with its two or three great bankers (Nucingen, du Tillet), Paris with its great physician Horace Bianchon, with its entrepreneur César Birotteau, with its four or five great cocottes, with its usurer Gobseck, with its sundry advocates and soldiers. But above all—and we see this again and again—it is from the same streets and corners, the same little rooms and recesses, that the figures of this world step into the light. What else can this mean but that topography is the ground plan of this mythic space of tradition, as it is of every such space and that it can become indeed its key.”

—WALTER BENJAMIN

Modern myths, Balzac observes in The Old Maid, are less well-understood but much more powerful than myths drawn from ancient times. Their power derives from the way they inhabit the imagination as indisputable and undiscussable realities drawn from daily experience rather than as wondrous tales of origins and legendary conflicts of human passions and desires. This idea, that modernity must necessarily create its own myths, was later taken up by Baudelaire in his critical essay “The Salon of 1846.” He there sought to identify the “new forms of passion” and the “specific kinds of beauty” constituted by the modern, and criticized the visual artists of the day for their failure “to open their eyes to see and know the heroism” around them. “The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; though we do not notice it.” Invoking a new element, “modern beauty,” Baudelaire concludes his essay thus: “The heroes of the Iliad are pygmies compared to you, Vautrin, Rastignac and Birotteau” (all characters out of Balzac’s novels) “and you, Honoré de Balzac, you the most heroic, the most extraordinary, the most romantic and the most poetic of all the characters you have produced from your womb.”¹

Figure 13 Daumier’s view of the new Rue de Rivoli (1852) captures something of Balzac’s prescient descriptions of Paris, beset by “building manias” (witness the pickax being wielded in the background) and appearing as a “rushing stream,” as “a monstrous miracle, an astounding assemblage of movements, machines and ideas” in which “events and people tumble over each other” such that “even negotiating the street can be intimidating.”

Balzac painted in prose, but could hardly be accused of failing to see the richness and the poetry of daily life around him. “Could you really grudge,” he asks, “spending a few minutes watching the dramas, disasters, tableaux, picturesque incidents which arrest your attention in the heart of this restless queen of cities?” “Look around you” as you “make your way through that huge stucco cage, that human beehive with black runnels marking its sections, and follow the ramifications of the idea which moves, stirs and ferments inside it.”² Before Baudelaire issued his manifesto for the visual arts (and a century before Benjamin attempted to unravel the myths of modernity in his unfinished Paris Arcades project), Balzac had already placed the myths of modernity under the microscope and used the figure of the flaneur to do it. And Paris—a capital city being shaped by bourgeois power into a city of capital—was at the center of his world.

The rapid and seemingly chaotic growth of Paris in the early nineteenth century rendered city life difficult to decipher, decode, and represent. Several of the novelists of the period struggled to come to terms with what the city was about. Exactly how they did so has been the subject of intensive scrutiny.³ They recorded much about their material world and the social processes that flowed around them. They explored different ways to represent that world and helped shape the popular imagination as to what the city was and might become. They considered alternatives and possibilities, sometimes didactically (as did Eugène Sue in his famous novel Les Mystères de Paris), but more often indirectly through their evocations of the play of human desires in relation to social forms, institutions, and conventions. They decoded the city and rendered it legible, thereby providing ways to grasp, represent, and shape seemingly inchoate and often disruptive processes of urban change.

How Balzac did this is of great interest because he made Paris central—one might almost say the central character—in much of his writing. But “The Human Comedy” is a vast, sprawling, incomplete and seemingly disparate set of works, made up of some ninety novels and novellas written in just over twenty years between 1828 and his death (attributed to drinking too much coffee) in 1850, at the age of fifty-one. Exhuming the myths of modernity and of the city from out of this incredibly rich and often confusing oeuvre is no easy task. Balzac had the idea of putting his various novels together as “The Human Comedy” in 1833, and by 1842 settled on a plan that divided the works into scenes of private, provincial, Parisian, political, military, and rural life, supplemented by a series of philosophical and analytical studies.⁴ But Paris figures almost everywhere (sometimes only as a shadow cast upon the rural landscape). So there is no option except to track the city down wherever it is to be found.

Reading through much of “The Human Comedy” as an urbanist (rather than as a literary critic) is a quite extraordinary experience. It reveals all manner of things about a city and its historical geography that might otherwise remain hidden. Balzac’s prescient insights and representations must surely have left a deep imprint upon the sensibility of his readers, far beyond the literati of the time. He almost certainly helped create a climate of public opinion that could better understand (and even accept, though unwittingly or regretfully so) the political economy that underlays modern urban life, thus shaping the imaginative preconditions for the systematic transformations of Paris that occurred during the Second Empire. Balzac’s supreme achievement, I shall argue, was to dissect and represent the social forces omnipresent within the womb of bourgeois society. By demystifying the city and the myths of modernity with which it was suffused, he opened up new perspectives, not only on what the city was, but also on what it could become. Just as crucially, he reveals much about the psychological underpinnings of his own representations and furnishes insights into the murkier plays of desire (particularly within the bourgeoisie) that get lost in the lifeless documentations in the city’s archives. The dialectic of the city and how the modern self might be constituted is thereby laid bare.

BALZAC’S UTOPIANISM

The “only solid foundation for a well-regulated society,” Balzac wrote, depended upon the proper exercise of power by an aristocracy secured by private property, “whether it be real estate or capital”⁵ The distinction between real estate and capital is important. It signals the existence of a sometimes fatal conflict between landed wealth and money power. Balzac’s utopianism most typically appeals to the former. What the literary theorist Fredric Jameson calls “the still point” of Balzac’s churning world focuses on “the mild and warming fantasy of landed property as the tangible figure of a Utopian wish fulfillment.” Here resides “a peace released from the competitive dynamism of Paris and of metropolitan business struggles, yet still imaginable in some existent backwater of concrete social history.”⁶

Balzac often invokes idyllic pastoral scenes from the earliest novels (such as The Chouans) onwards. The Peasantry, one of his last novels, opens with a long letter composed by a Parisian royalist journalist describing an idyllic “arcadian” scene of a country estate and its surroundings, contrasted with “the ceaseless and thrilling dramatic spectacle of Paris, and its harrowing struggles for existence.” This idealization then frames the action in the novel and provides a distinctive perspective from which social structures can be observed and interpreted. In The Wild Ass’s Skin, the utopian motif moves center stage. Raphael de Valentin, seeking the repose that will prolong his threatened life, “felt an instinctive need to draw close to nature, to simplicity of dwelling and the vegetative life to which we so readily surrender in the country.” He needs the restorative and rejuvenating powers that only proximity to nature can bring. He finds “a spot where nature, as light-hearted as a child at play, seemed to have taken delight in hiding treasure,” and close by came upon:

a modest dwelling-house of granite faced with wood. The thatched roof of this cottage, in harmony with the site, was gay with mosses and flowering ivy which betrayed its great antiquity. A wisp of smoke, too thin to disturb the birds, wound up from the crumbling chimney. In front of the door was a large bench placed between two enormous bushes of honeysuckle covered with red, sweet-scented blossoms. The walls of the cottage were scarcely visible under the branches of vine and the garlands of roses and jasmine which rambled around at their own sweet will. Unconcerned with this rustic beauty, the cottagers did nothing to cultivate it and left nature to its elvish and virginal grace.

The inhabitants are no less bucolic:

The yelping of the dogs brought out a sturdy child who stood there gaping; then there came a white-haired old man of medium height. These two matched their surroundings, the atmosphere, the flowers and the cottage. Good health brimmed over in the luxuriance of nature, giving childhood and age their own brands of beauty. In fact, in every form of life there was that carefree habit of contentment that reigned in earlier ages; mocking the didactic discourse of modern philosophy, it also served to cure the heart of its turgid passions.⁷

Figure 14 Daumier often made fun of the pastoral utopianism of the bourgeoisie. Here the man proudly points out how pretty his country house looks from here, adding that next year, he plans to have it painted apple green.

Utopian visions of this sort operate as a template against which everything else is judged. In the closing phases of the orgy scene in The Wild Ass’s Skin, for example, Balzac comments how the girls present, hardened to vice, nevertheless recalled, as they awoke, days gone by of purity and innocence spent happily with family in a bucolic rustic setting. This pastoral utopianism even has an urban counterpart. Living penniless in Paris, Raphael had earlier witnessed the impoverished but noble life of a mother and daughter whose “constant labor, cheerfully endured, bore witness to a pious resignation inspired by lofty sentiments. There existed an indefinable harmony between the two women and the objects around them.”⁸ Only in The Country Doctor, however, does Balzac contemplate the active construction of such a utopian alternative. It takes a supreme act of personal renunciation on the part of the doctor—a dedicated, compassionate, and reform-minded bourgeois—to bring about the necessary changes in a rural area of chronic ignorance and impoverishment. The aim is to organize harmonious capitalist production on the land by way of a collaborative communitarian effort that nevertheless emphasizes the joys of private property. Balzac hints darkly, however, at the fragility of such a project in the face of peasant venality and individualism. But again and again throughout “The Human Comedy” we find echoes of this utopian motif as a standpoint from which social relations can be understood.

Balzac looked for the most part to the aristocracy to provide leadership. Their duties and obligations were clear: “Those who wish to remain at the head of a country must always be worthy of leading it; they must constitute its mind and soul in order to control the activity of its hands.” But it is a “modern aristocracy” that must now emerge, and it must understand that “art, science and wealth form the social triangle within which is inscribed the shield of power.” Rulers must “have sufficient knowledge to judge wisely and must know the needs of the subjects and the state of the nation, its markets and trade, its territory and property.” Subjects must be “educated, obedient,” and “act responsibly” to partake “of the art of governance.” “Means of action,” he writes, “lie in positive strength and not in historic memories.” He admires the English aristocracy (as did Saint-Simon, as we shall see) because it recognized the need for change. Rulers have to understand that “institutions have their climacteric years when terms change their meaning, when ideas put on a new garb and the conditions of political life assume a totally new form without the basic substance being affected.”⁹ This last phrase, “without the basic substance being affected,” takes us back, however, to the still point of Balzac’s pastoral utopianism.

A modern aristocracy needs money power to rule. If so, can it be anything other than capitalist (albeit of the landed sort)? What class configuration can support this utopian vision? Balzac clearly recognizes that class distinctions and class conflict cannot be abolished: “An aristocracy in some sense represents the thought of a society, just as the middle and working classes are the organic and active side of it.” Harmony must be constructed out of “the apparent antagonism” between these class forces such that “a seeming antipathy produced by a diversity of movement.… nevertheless works for a common aim.” Again, there is more than a hint of Saint-Simonian utopian doctrine in all of this (though Saint-Simon looked to the industrialists rather than to the aristocracy for leadership). The problem is not, then, the existence of social differences and class distinctions. It is entirely possible for “the different types contributing to the physiognomy” of the city to “harmonize admirably with the character of the ensemble.” For “harmony is the poetry of order and all peoples feel an imperious need for order. Now is not the cooperation of all things with one another, unity in a word, the simplest expression of order?” Even the working classes, he holds, are “drawn towards an orderly and industrious way of life.”¹⁰

This ideal of class harmony fashioned out of difference is, sadly, disrupted by multiple processes working against it. Workers are “thrust back into the mire by society.” Parisians have fallen victim to the false illusions of the epoch, most notably that of equality. Rich people have become “more exclusive in their tastes and their attachment to their personal belongings than they were thirty years ago.” The aristocrats need money to survive and to assure the new social order; but the pursuit of that money power corrupts their potentialities. The rich consequently succumb to “a fanatical craving for self-expression.”¹¹ The pursuit of money, sex, and power becomes an elaborate, farcical, and destructive game. Speculation and the senseless pursuit of money and pleasure wreak havoc on the social order. A corrupt aristocracy fails in its historic mission, while the bourgeoisie, the central focus of Balzac’s contempt, has no civilized alternative to offer.

These failures are all judged, however, in relation to Balzac’s utopian alternative. The pastoralism provides the emotive content and a progressive aristocracy secures its class basis. While the class perspective is quite different, Marx could nevertheless profess an intense admiration for the prescient, incisive, and clairvoyant qualities of Balzac’s analysis of bourgeois society in “The Human Comedy” and drew much inspiration from the study of it.¹² We also admire it too because of the clarity it offers in demystifying not only the myths of modernity and of the city but also its radical exposure of the fetish qualities of bourgeois self-understandings.

PARIS AND ITS PROVINCES: THE COUNTRY IN THE CITY

While Balzac’s utopianism has a distinctively landed, provincial, and even rustic flavor, the contrast with actual social relations on the land and in the provinces could not be more dramatic. Innumerable characters in Balzac’s works undertake (as did Balzac himself) the difficult transition from provincial to metropolitan ways of life. Some, like Rastignac in Old Goriot, negotiate the transition successfully, while a priest in César Birotteau is so horrified by the bustle of the city that he stays locked in his room until he can return to Tours, vowing never to set foot in the city again. Lucien, in Lost Illusions and The Harlot High and Low, never quite makes the grade and ends up committing suicide. Still...