Daniel Sweren-Becker

Birth of Modern Europe

 

The Social Geography of Paris

 

“Everything in this bizarre city forms a unique contrast, it is a baffling mixture

 of colors that clash and repel and form a breathtaking whole that charms a

person without his being able to give the real reason for it.” –Auguste Luchet [1]

 

There is a natural tendency in all cities for people of similar backgrounds to live with each other.  While this trend may not always be based on the simple desire to live with like-minded people, it is often a result of money or convenience.  Sometimes the cost of housing or the proximity to other commercial neighborhoods indirectly cause neighborhood segregation.  Like a tree growing towards to sky, it is hard to stop this tendency once it has gained momentum.  This resistance, though, is what defines the social topography of Paris.  Despite the natural inclination of a city to develop homogenous sections, Paris, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, strove to maintain socially diverse neighborhoods.  This uphill struggle was both a conscious decision and the product of a set of circumstances unique to Paris.  The result was a city as diverse as it was big, where the rich and the poor lived side by side unlike no other city in the world.

Paris rose from humble beginnings, but even in its medieval form, the origins of contemporary social boundaries can still be seen.  Paris, originally confined to the Ile de la Cite in the middle of the Seine, was first developed as a Roman colony.  In its formative years Paris embodied the classic representation of the ideal city as church and state resided in perfect harmony on the center island, which was home to the cathedral and the palace.  In the ninth century, Paris’ first neighborhoods began to develop, as a market place grew on the right bank and the left bank focused on agricultural production.  By the thirteenth century the two riverbanks had further strengthened their identities as the right bank became more and more populated by merchants and artisans and the left bank became the home for numerous secular and religious colleges.  It is incredible to think that the neighborhood lines of nineteenth century Paris had been preserved for a thousand years.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Paris’ residential diversity was the uncontrollable population growth.  For centuries Paris was considered a fortress city, but the population kept outgrowing its walls and soon made this idea laughable.  The growth of Paris, “which no government could control or check, the need to police and feed an expanding population, are as fundamental to the city’s history as any buildings or physical features.” [2]   Paris simply did not have enough houses available for the masses of people that were either being born or moved there.  This fact was important because it led people to move into houses wherever they could find them, and not necessarily based on where they were located.  If a wealthy merchant and a working class family were both moving into the city, they may both move to the same street, or even building, because that was the only thing available. 

Another thing that made Paris unique prior to eighteen-fifty was that the areas of the city had not yet become specialized.  In modern cities, there is a tendency for a neighborhood to serve only one specific purpose, whether it is producing textiles or handling banking.  Paris, on the other hand, still had not been hit with Haussman’s single-function urban development.  Each neighborhood was able to sustain itself, and thus became its own little city.  The production of goods, along with the wholesale and retail distribution of it, often took place on the same street, and this connection encouraged people from different classes –like the workmen, their employers, and the merchants –to live in the same place, close to their businesses.   A perfect example of this idea was the construction of the Place Dauphine in the beginning of the seventeenth century.  The Place Dauphine was a combined residential and commercial square, and this made the inhabitants of the surrounding neighborhood very socially diverse.  The connection between the commercial and residential sector of the city gave Paris the feel that, “any given quartier, if not perhaps any given street, would contain a rough cross-section of society as a whole.” [3]

Before 1845, the most significant reason why Paris’ social topography remained so diverse was that the city wanted it that way.  For many different reasons, people approved of the intermingling between classes.  For one, it provided a check on the power of the upper class, who were dispersed throughout different parts of the city.  Others liked the diversity because they thought the upper class was setting a good and necessary example for the lower classes to live by.  As social segregation became more of a problem in 1845, Municipal Councillor Lanquetin declared that,

The municipal interest, the general interest, the political interest demand equally, in the present state of our manners and customs that all classes of the population live spread out and intermixed in all quartiers of Paris…The day when these classes become separated, and we have aristocratic quartiers, proletarian quartiers, financial quartiers, and quartiers of poverty will see destroyed the essential basis of public order and the way paved for fearful calamities for our country. [4]

The social diversity gave Paris an egalitarian feel, and it was reassuring to think that a workman and his boss may be living in the same building, eating in the same cafes, and working in the same store.

            The middle of the nineteenth century was to be a turning point for the social geography of Paris.  It was an era in which each neighborhood was a microcosm of the city, in that it was self-sufficient and had members of every social class.  Soon this would give way to a completely reconstructed Paris, one that would begin to define its neighborhoods on socio-economic lines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Gould, Robert V.  “Trade Cohesion, Class Unity, and Urban Insurrection:  Artisanal Activism in the Paris Commune”

American Journal of Sociology, (Jan, 1993), pp.721-754

 

Jordan, David P.  Transforming Paris,

New York, The Free Press, 1995

 

Olsen, Donald J.  The City as a Work of Art,

New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986

 

Saalman, Howard.  Haussman: Paris Transformed,

New York, George Braziller, 1971

 

Willms, Johannes.  Paris: Capital of Europe

New York, Holmes and Meier, 1997