Massacre (4 page)

The National Assembly provided funds for the enormous series of projects, augmented by a tax on goods brought into the city, assessed at the customs barriers (
octrois
) that ringed Paris. But, as costs soared, Baron Haussmann found ways of resourcefully raising money in addition to taxes, working around the Corps Législatif to do so. He demanded capital outlays from contractors who would in principle be paid with interest once their work was done. Haussmann then turned to issuing ‘proxy bonds’, backed by funds now owed by these contractors. The imperial rebuilding of Paris left the capital with a debt of 2.5 billion francs. By the late 1860s, the prefect of the Seine had raised 500 million francs. The Emperor was well aware of Haussmann’s financial machinations, but remained committed to his grand plans for Paris, which would continue to create jobs and build the prestige of his empire.
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Yet, the financing strategy was rather like a balloon mortgage that could burst at any time.

The rebuilding of Paris also entailed the destruction of 100,000 apartments in 20,000 buildings. The ‘Haussmannisation’ of Paris sent many Parisians packing for the urban periphery because they had been pushed out of rented apartments, their homes had been destroyed, or prices had skyrocketed in a city that was already extremely expensive. In some places in the central
arrondissements
, such as Ile-de-la-Cité, the population actually fell as people moved toward the periphery. About 20–30 per cent of the Parisian population moved, most into nearby or neighbouring
quartiers
, but also into the inner suburbs. These were annexed to Paris on 1 January 1860 for the purposes of increasing tax revenue, but also to make it easier for the government to police this restive periphery. Newcomers from the provinces had also moved to the inner suburbs, particularly Montmartre in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, La Villette in the Nineteenth, and
Belleville in the Twentieth. These districts became the residences, temporary or permanent, of an increasingly large number of poor workers, as did the growing suburbs beyond the walls of Paris.
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Rather than staving off class strife, however, the rebuilding of Paris only accentuated the contrast between the more prosperous western
arrondissements
and the poor eastern and north-eastern
quartiers
, the so-called ‘People’s Paris’. The flowering of western Paris had begun a half-century ago, as businesses and banks were established there. One could also find arcades and passageways of glass and metal – ‘veritable gallery-streets’ – whose shops anticipated the new department stores. But under Napoleon III the bourgeoisie’s day had truly arrived.

In the Ninth Arrondissement, for example, the
quartier
of Chaussée d’Antin, the centre of what Balzac described as ‘the world of money’, became a residence for the kings of finance and their ladies. The residence or
hôtel
of the Guimard family, which had been built in 1772, was converted into a store selling the newest in consumer novelties. Nearby stood another elegant residence that became the headquarters of one of the railway companies whose trains were slowly transforming France. The Grand Hôtel and its Café-de-la-Paix was built on boulevard Capucines a few steps from Charles Garnier’s new Opera, construction of which began in 1861. When Empress Eugénie asked the Parisian-born architect what would be the style of the new Opera, he supposedly replied without the slightest hesitation ‘pure Napoleon III’.
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On place Saint-Georges stood the sizable residence of Adolphe Thiers, who packed his mansion with
objets d’art
from around the world.

Nearby, the Champs-Elysées and the Eighth Arrondissement on the western edge of Paris also flaunted the privileges granted by wealth. Carriages and horses carried the rich out to the Bois-de-Boulogne, where ‘
tout Paris
’ could frolic. Magnificent private residences lined the avenue. Nearby stood elegant
cirques
(circuses), such as the Jardin d’Hiver, café-concerts (where revellers could go to drink and listen to live music), and restaurants. A lavish private residence had been purchased by the mother of Empress Eugénie, who of course would not allow her mother to live just anywhere. The Champs-Elysées fit the bill.
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On the other side of the Seine, the boulevard Saint-Germain, partially completed in 1855, paralleled the river. As it cut through the Seventh and Sixth Arrondissements, the boulevard also sported private residences offering privacy and elegance, many dating from the eighteenth century. Across the street, the Café Flore set up shop late in the Second Empire, bringing together, then as now, a clientele with money to spend.

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A world away from the opulence of western Paris, although not far in distance, rue de la Goutte d’Or bisected a proletarian neighbourhood. In his
L’Assommoir
, Émile Zola described Gervaise – a character who would ultimately drink herself to death – as she looked up at number 22:

Like Gervaise, many working-class Parisians began to feel alienated from the city they loved amid the dramatic and devastating changes orchestrated by Haussmann in the interests of the upper classes.
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Indeed, this sense of not belonging arguably contributed to an emerging sense of solidarity among those living on the margins of the capital. And, even as western Paris was being transformed into a gleaming city of wide boulevards and lavish apartments, eastern and northern Paris and its periphery were being remade by ongoing industrialisation. The edge of the city offered more space, access to the railways and canals of northern Paris, and a labour force perched at its gates (where the customs barriers could be found), making it an ideal location for manufacturing. Larger manufacturers were to be found in the inner suburbs (some of these factories predated the Second Empire) – those annexed in 1860 – including the Cail metallurgical factory in Grenelle, which employed about 2,800 workers. Entrepreneurs in the inner suburbs produced candles, soap, perfumes and sugar, bringing raw materials into northern Paris via the Ourcq Canal.

The populations in the industrialised parts of Paris shot up with the arrival of new factories. The population of the Twentieth Arrondissement, for instance, grew from 17,000 in 1800 to 87,000 in 1851 and continued to soar. Montmartre, which had only about 600 inhabitants in 1800, reached 23,000 in 1851 and 36,500 five years later. Chemical and metallurgical production transformed La Villette, which had risen from about
1,600 inhabitants fifty years earlier to more than 30,000 by 1860. Beyond the walls of Paris, the
arrondissement
of Saint-Denis grew from 41,000 in 1841 to an astounding 356,000 in 1856, as industries leap-frogged beyond the city.
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In 1834, a minister of Louis-Philippe had warned that the factories being built on the edge of Paris could ‘be the cord that will strangle us one day’.
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During the Second Empire, the staggering population growth in Paris’s working-class neighbourhoods accentuated the fear Parisian elites had of ordinary workers living on the geographic and social margins of their city. Belleville, a neighbourhood of nearly 60,000 people on the north-eastern edge of Paris, had been annexed to Paris along with the other inner suburbs. ‘Belleville is coming down the hill!’ became a compelling fear in the
beaux quartiers
below.
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Louis Lazare, a royalist critic of the Second Empire and the rebuilding of Paris, argued that instead of dispensing millions of francs on the wealthier neighbourhoods, the money would have been far better spent on the ‘dreadful Siberia’ of the periphery. Lazare warned that ‘around the Queen of Cities is rising up a formidable
cité ouvrière
’.
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Conservative Louis Veuillot shared a critique of Haussmannisation with republicans, who rejected the authoritarian structure of the empire and its privileged elite. The Catholic polemicist embraced the memory of old Paris destroyed by modernity, materialism, secularism and state centralisation. He saw the new boulevards as ‘an overflown river which would carry along the debris of a world’. Paris had become a ‘city without a past, full of minds without memories, hearts without sorrows, souls without love! City of uprooted multitudes, shifting piles of human dust, you can grow to become the capital of the world, [but] you will never have citizens.’
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Mounting opposition to Napoleon III’s regime was also infused by anti-clericalism both in the ranks of middle-class radicals and the urban poor. The Catholic Church was extremely visible in the Paris of the Second Empire, yet the Church was increasingly absent from the lives of Parisian working families. If the Second Empire had seen a revival of fervent Catholicism in parts of France, particularly after the sighting of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1856, Paris, other large cities, and regions like Limousin, Ile-de-France and large parts of the south-west had undergone ‘de-Christianisation’ – a decline in religious practice. In Ménilmontant, in the Twentieth Arrondissement, only 180 men out of a population of 33,000 performed their Easter duty, the obligation to receive Holy Communion. The situation of the Church was
even bleaker in the working-class suburbs.
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This was perhaps unsurprising given that the Church told the poor that this world is a valley of tears and that they should resign themselves to poverty – their reward for suffering would come in Heaven.

Intellectual currents during the middle decades of the nineteenth century also challenged the Catholic Church’s declared primacy of faith over reason. Positivism, based on the belief that rational inquiry and the application of science to the human condition were advancing society, was becoming more popular in universities across Europe. The papal
Syllabus of Errors
(1864), which denounced modern society, seemed to associate the Church with ignorance and a rejection of human progress. Popular literature, including works by Victor Hugo, George Sand and Eugène Sue, sometime presented the Catholic clergy in an unfavourable light. Anti-clericals believed French
paysans
to be under the thumb of the clergy, whispering instructions in confessionals.

If the parish clergy provided useful functions – baptisms, marriages and burials – the religious orders lived in isolated contemplation and prayer (‘they eat, they sleep, they digest’ went an old refrain). Moreover religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, were closely identified with the conservative political role of the Church, whose archbishops and bishops had supported Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état.

Many Parisians in particular objected to the Church’s dominant role in primary education. During the Second Empire, male religious orders rose in Paris from six to twenty-two for men and from twenty-two to an astonishing sixty-seven female orders. The number of men in religious orders increased from 3,100 in 1851 to well over 20,000 by 1870, and women from 34,200 to more than 100,000 in 1870. In 1871 52 per cent of Parisian pupils were in schools run by religious orders and staffed by teachers who were not required to take the examinations required of lay teachers. The Church’s virtual monopoly over the education of girls stood out, and yet literacy remained lower among women than men.
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The hardship facing the working poor also contributed to mounting opposition to the imperial regime. As prices raced ahead of wages and the gap between the wealthy and workers increased, workers found ways to combat these injustices. Although unions remained illegal (and would be so until 1884), the late 1860s brought the creation and toleration of more workers’ associations, which were basically unions. This came at a time when employers, particularly in larger-scale industries, were waging war against the shop-floor autonomy of skilled workers by aggressively posting rules
and regulations, increasing mechanisation, and hiring more unskilled workers. In 1869, there were at least 165 workers’ associations in Paris with some 160,000 members. Cooperative restaurants offering meals at reduced prices had more than 8,000 diners. Workers’ associations began to organise producers’ cooperatives (in which workers in a trade would own tools and raw materials, thus circumventing the existing wage system). The aims of these associations were political and even revolutionary, as well as economic. Indeed, many workers believed that the organisation of workers’ associations would ultimately replace the very existence of states.
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A number of Parisian women emerged as militants demanding rights and better working conditions. Countless women worked at home – many living in barely lit attics – in the putting-out system of textile work, an important part of large-scale industrialisation in France. Female workers earned about half as much as their male counterparts in workshops and factories. Yet calls for female suffrage were few and far between – the emphasis remained on economic issues and the struggles of working-class families and single women to survive. In a ‘Manifesto’ penned in July 1868, nineteen women demanded that a woman be given ‘possession of the rights which belong to her as a human person’. A year later, female militants organised the Society for Affirming the Rights of Women. They advocated the right to divorce and published a plan for ‘Democratic Primary School for Girls’, with the goal of the ‘conquest of equality’ and ‘moral reform’.
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