Transforming Paris : The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann

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Summary: But where¿s the story?
Review: Is Jordan's book a popular history or a scholarly work? Professor Jordan is in a better position to say than I, but I had difficulty seeing it as a scholarly work, despite its fifty pages of endnotes. Mostly this is because Jordan uses the terminology of class struggle. Surely even academia has reached the point of recognizing that this is all nonsense, and not even important nonsense, despite the millions of lives it has cost. Jordan must be aware that the very word "bourgeoisie," which he uses in the belittling way you'd expect, literally means "city-dwellers." But he never points out that, for all the difficulties of the workers' lives, they evidently found the city, and specifically Paris, preferable to the alternatives.

It's also a bit hard to take Jordan seriously when he, more than once, uses the word "hoard" to mean "horde." The mind, violently derailed, seeks a subtle bon mot, but in vain, for there is no humour in this book. This may well be Jordan's editor's failing, but Jordan bears the responsibility. The writer's language is a chauffeur, carrying us effectively but above all unobtrusively to our destination.

Worse even than the fallacies inherent in class-struggle terminology is the simple fact that it's deadly boring. And that was the problem I had when I viewed the book as a popular history. Compare Jordan with Robert Caro's Power Broker, the popular biography-history of Robert Moses and the remaking of New York, quite similar in many ways to the haussmannization of Paris. Caro fills his book with characters and anecdotes. In sad contrast, Jordan has but a few characters, Haussmann and Louis Napoleon chief among them. The other humanity affected by their activities is lumped together into anonymous classes: the bourgeoisie, the landlords, the workers, the national assembly. But where's the story? Stories are about individuals, and there just aren't any!

Jordan tells us repeatedly, and with evident contempt, that Haussmann was an archetypal bureaucrat, an authoritarian, an opportunist, an autobiographer blindly in love with himself. Well, yes, but we don't want to be told this; we want to be shown. Where are the examples? Where are the stories? We get only a few self-aggrandizing quotations from the autobiography.

So the book fails as popular biography. We see Haussmann in one dimension only, and by the end, we really don't care to learn more. But there must have been more! There was a wife, there were daughters, there were colourful mistresses, about whom the wife exercised restraint. But we learn little more than what I write here.

Or if the real Haussmann was in fact deadly dull, how about the thousands of people whose lives he affected? Surely, some of their stories must have survived, and some of the surviving stories must be worth the telling.

Jordan tells us how the Louvre was extended, the Rue du Rivoli was punched through, the Opera was built, the Hotel de Ville and the Tour St Jacques were isolated from the city - these are but statements of brick and mortar. Even in brick-and-mortar terms, one suspects there is a story about, for example, the Sainte Chapelle, imprisoned by the court. The closest we get to the life of the city are remarks that the neighborhood of Les Halles was clogged with the daily traffic of the markets, that the boulevardiers adopted Haussmann's chestnut-lined avenues, and that the wide streets were barricaded by insurrectionists as effectively as the old passageways. Collective humanity, all of it, no stories, no interest. Even when Jordan cites Victor Hugo, he fails to capture our interest. Rather remarkable, that, when you think of it!

What was I expecting, what had I hoped for? Jordan himself (and thanks!) mentions Robert Moses, reminding me of Caro's book, which I hadn't read for some years. It's a good contrast. Caro doesn't explicitly discuss New York in the terms of Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, but it's easy for the reader to supply the analysis himself, and if he knows New York, to observe the effects of Moses' actions in the quality of the city. Sadly, Jordan doesn't give us enough to do the same with Paris. The material surely exists: even today, hotels on the left bank - which was neglected by haussmannization - advertise themselves as being "in the safe part" of Paris. Someone as intimately familiar with the geography and history of Paris as Jordan could have given us that view.

The first thing I had hoped for was, then, the ability to go somewhere in Paris, or perhaps on a map or only in my memory, and say, "This is how it was, and these interesting events were part of its transformation into what we see today." I already play these little mind games with Hugo's Paris.

Though a Jane-Jacobs analysis might well disagree with the conclusion, both Jordan and Caro lead us to the view that, thirty, fifty, a hundred years later, when the ruined have died and the bonds have been paid off, the city is the better for having undergone her ordeal, that eventually, the end justifies the means. Even if we were to accept the conclusion as a matter of pragmatism, however, we cannot accept it morally or ethically. Surely there must be a way for men to build congenial and functional environments by mutual consent, without having to despoil one another. Can a city be renewed - probably a continuous process, not an overhaul - without the use of authoritarian force or major disaster? London had her fire, Germany had the war, Paris had Haussmann, New York had Moses. Hong Kong, maybe?

To the best of my knowledge, this question has never been addressed by any author. The writer who does this, with intellectual rigor, imagination, lots of examples, and a lively style, will make a real contribution. That's the book I'd really like to read.

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Summary: Author and Subject Share Similar Qualities
Review: Jordan has marshalled his impressive research and writing skills to tell the story of how such an arrogant, unsentimental, and philistine man created one of the most magnificent urban centers in the world. When Jordan discusses how certain roads and venues were decided upon, the laying of the sewers, the struggles that the Prefect of the Seine had with his political opponents and landlord antagonists, how he cooked the books to raise the necessary cash for the effort, and Haussmann's inglorious fall, the book is a first-rate monograph. The author's presentation makes us see how Paris became the prime example of "authoritarian urban planning" and yet also bravely suggests that such iron-fisted control was needed to defeat the coterie of landlords, politicans, and entrepreneurs whose personal interests lay in defeating Haussmann's schemes. Yet Jordan's prose is a bit too Haussmann-like itself. Jordan conceives of Haussmann as the prefect did of Paris -- in a singularly determined way -- and repeatedly insists that we share this view. He constantly hammers away at Haussmann's arrogance, contempt for democratic procedures, his political ruthlessness and his disdain for the poor. And while these details are not correct, they're repeated so constantly that they ultimately detract from Jordan's achievement -- it's as though the author came to resent spending all those years and efforts researching a man who ultimately repelled him. Jordan is so insistent that we see Haussmann on his terms that he doesn't let us enjoy for ourselves the paradoxes and foibles of his protagonist. When the baron writes some feeble pastoral poetry about his youth, Jordan doesn't trust us enough to relish the absurdity of this autocrat imagining himself as a romantic, he insists on telling us how absurd it is and why we should think so. We're also constantly and needlessly told each time he took credit for the work of someone else and how much his arrogance was flattered by the attentions of Napoleon III. Jorda! n grounds his protagonist's character so early on that these repeated instances of his appalling behavor seem petty. Inasmuch as he criticizes Haussmann for creating a Paris that orders around its citizens, Jordan himself overly-directs his readers. Moreover, the book spends less time than I would have liked discussing the myriad problems of transforming Paris -- there's less here about the expropriations, the architecture of the new Haussmann buildings (virtually non-existent in the book despite the early presence of the intriquing quote that "Haussmann's Paris represents a paradox in that he created an architectually fascinating city without creating any memorable buildings"), and the forced relocations of the poor into the banlieue than on Haussmann's bullying tactics in the Yonne and Bordeaux (fascinating as those episodes are Jordan overly relishes them as evidence of the Baron's ruthlessness). In other words, there are several instances where there's more build-up than pay-off. Why issue it a seven despite these critical flaws? For one thing, Jordan has turned an administrator's career into a compelling read -- no mean achievement -- and he successfully alters our traditional view of the Second Empire as a "carnival empire" to show how it had serious modernizing concerns. Aside from Jordan's personal interjections, all of the episodes in the book are fascinating and well-written if a little disproportionately represented and the author gives us the first clearly written book in English as to how Paris became the city it did. Mostly, like Haussmann's achievement, Jordan's book, despite being a bit overbearing and contemptuous, shows us how the most mundane details of bureaucratic life can produce a work of fascination and, yes, beauty.