Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris

By Sun-Young Park

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780822986065

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Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment

Dianne Harris, Editor

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Edited by Daniel M. Abramson, Arindam Dutta, Timothy Hyde, and Jonathan Massey for Aggregate

Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania

Edited by Dianne Harris

Ideals of the Body

Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris

Sun-Young Park

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

This book was published with support from Furthermore: A program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Illustrations in this book were funded in part by the SAH/Mellon Author Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Textbook and Academic Authors Association.

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

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Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4528-4

Jacket art: Aimé-Henry-Edmond Sewrin-Bassompierre, The Deligny Baths in 1842. Photo credit: Scala/White Images.

Courtesy of Art Resource.

Jacket design by Alex Wolfe

Book design by Regina Starace

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8606-5 (electronic)

FOR MY PARENTS,

Seung Lan Whang and Byung Wook Park

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Soldier: Regenerating Nation and Masculinity in the Military Gymnasium

2. The Schoolboy: Forming Citizens, between the Schoolroom and the Barracks

Color plates

3. The Demoiselle: Reconstructing Gender in the Educational Space

4. The Lionne: Pursuing Health and Pleasure in Leisure Gardens

5. The Sportsman: Shaping Bourgeois Bodies in Urban Recreational Grounds

Epilogue. Rereading the Capital of Modernity

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book originated in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Harvard University, and it could not have come into being, much less completion, without the support, patience, and always-inspiring commentary of my mentors, Antoine Picon and Neil Levine. My interest in nineteenth-century France was first sparked by Antoine Picon’s lectures on Saint-Simonianism and Parisian maps in the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Buildings, Texts, Contexts course in 2005, when I was a first-year master of architecture student. The seminar he and Neil Levine co-taught in 2006 on nineteenth-century Paris allowed me to develop this interest, through an investigation of the Second Empire sewer system. As I made my way through the fetid depths of the Parisian underworld to the more wholesome spaces examined in this book, they were an unceasing source of intellectual and moral support, and I thank them for always providing me with just the right amount of encouragement and/or skepticism to keep my work moving forward.

In the course of beginning, developing, and writing this book, I have been intellectually indebted to numerous people who may or may not be aware of their influence on my work. At Harvard, I learned how to be both a scholar and a teacher through the examples set by K. Michael Hays, Alina Payne, Allan Brandt, Ann Blair, Charles Rosenberg, Erika Naginski, and Eve Blau. In Paris, Rebecca Rogers directed me to some key sources in the early stages of research, and provided detailed and incisive feedback on preliminary versions of several chapters. Gabrielle Houbre kindly welcomed me into her Genres et sociétés seminar in 2012, and gave me my first taste of French academic life. Annmarie Adams shared valuable insights on my project in its early draft, and in her continued, generous support, has served as a model for how I might myself assist junior scholars later on.

The Department of History and Art History at George Mason University (GMU) has been my academic home since 2014, as I have developed this project into the current publication, and I have been gratified by its warm, supportive, and collegial environment. Peter Stearns and Michele Greet read an early version of my manuscript and offered valuable advice on transforming it into a book. Sam Lebovic and Lincoln Mullen provided thoughtful feedback on my prospectus as I began seeking out a press. Brian Platt has been unstinting with his time and help as I have sought out funding for both the research and publication of this book. I am also grateful to my other colleagues in the department for the advice, anecdotes, and encouragements they have shared over conversations and meals in the past few years.

The research undertaken for this book could not have been completed without the generous assistance of various institutions and grants. At Harvard, funding from the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs allowed me to conduct archival research in Paris between 2011 and 2013. I am indebted to the staffs of several archives and libraries, including the Archives de Paris; Archives nationales; Bibliothèque nationale de France; Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris; Musée Carnavalet; Service historique de la Défense; Frances Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD); Monique Antilogus at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts; Patrice Grelet at the Musée national de la Légion d’honneur; and Lilian Noack of the Daumier Register. The Whiting Foundation funded a year of writing in 2013–14. In the second stage of developing this book, the Nelson Fund at GMU’s Department of History and Art History, generously provided by Alan and Gwen Nelson, allowed me to conduct additional archival research in 2015. The Mathy Junior Faculty Award, administered by GMU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Provost’s Tenure-Track Leave allowed me the time to complete manuscript revisions. The image program and production of this book were made possible by grants from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Department of History and Art History at GMU, and the Textbook and Academic Authors Association.

In taking this project from manuscript to publication, it has been a privilege to work with Dianne Harris and Abby Collier at the University of Pittsburgh Press. Their interest, support, and timely responses have made a potentially stressful process a pleasure. I am grateful to the two anonymous readers arranged by the press, whose incisive comments and suggestions allowed me to sharpen the focus of my arguments. I would also like to thank David Van Zanten for his thoughtful review of my manuscript in its later stage, and for pointing me to some key, overlooked sources.

Finally, I would like to thank the family and friends who have seen me through the highs and lows of this project. At various points during graduate school, Paris, and my first few years at Mason, they have been on the receiving end of both my despairs and exhilarations. I would specifically like to mention Stacey Kim, Janine Yoong, Chiyan Chan, Naomi Sakamoto, Delia Wendel, Faye Hays, Nick Smith, Brian Goldstein, Janling Fu, Jamie Chan, Laura Johnson Faherty, Lisa Su, Melissa Lo, Jessie Hewitt, Christina Shim, and Cheryl Shih. At the GSD, it is difficult to imagine how I, or any of my classmates, could have navigated the complexities of academic life without the help of Barbara Elfman. My sister, Sandra Park, rightly pressured me into joining family vacations even at times when fun seemed an unattainable concept. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents for their love, generosity, and unflagging support, both physical and spiritual, and for instilling in me the love of learning that has sustained me all these years.

Image: FIGURE I.1. The permanent thermal swimming school, interior perspective (unrealized). Drawing by Emile-Antoine-François Herson, 1845. Courtesy of Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris, Topographie 164F.

INTRODUCTION

In March 1845, a certain Parisian enterprise published a proposal to erect a permanent thermal swimming school in the center of the capital, by the Quay de Billy, in the name of both amusement and health (fig. I.1). Citing the great increase in popularity of public baths and swimming exercise over the past twenty years, the authors argued for the importance of maintaining a year-round institution for this purpose. The establishment would be especially appreciated by the sedentary classes of the Parisian population, such as students, clerks, government employees, and military officers.¹ It would first uphold the most essential principles of hygiene, thereby ensuring the physical well-being of urban residents. Beyond these immediate salutary effects, the art of swimming would act on the social body as well. This practice was a means of action and defense against peril to which humanity owed countless great and generous acts, and which had been honored for such in civilizations past.² The proposed structure’s location, programs, design, and ornamentation were all intended to materialize and communicate these lofty motivations by combining spaciousness, elegance, and convenience. Situated along the fashionable Champs-Élysées, the grounds would incorporate a pool, café-restaurant, and magnificent garden outfitted with gymnastics equipment, interspersed with vast galleries and fountains (fig. I.2).

The main structure, as designed by engineer-mechanic Marie-Claude-Eugène Philippe and illustrated by Emile-Antoine-François Herson, exhibits a number of dialectics at play: a structure at once open and enclosed; a space accommodating recreation and exercise; a hybrid of modern iron and glass construction with orientalist detailing; an urban institution, and a feat of engineering and infrastructure, yet harnessing the elements of nature at its disposal. Its occupants could be both actors and spectators, engaging in invigorating movement or lounging on the surrounding decks and balconies, unfettered by the usual constraints of contemporary habiliment. One could frequent this venue for individual betterment or for social intercourse. These textual and visual depictions reveal how an urban culture developing around emerging ideals of the body brought together a confluence of narratives related to hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology, engendering a uniquely spatial experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary era.

Image: FIGURE I.2. Site plan of the permanent thermal swimming school projected for the Quay de Billy. From Herson, Ecole thermale et permanente de natation. Courtesy of Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

While theorizations of modernity are almost endlessly diverse, this unrealized project captures two dominant threads centralized in this book: its definition through discourses of reason, knowledge, and power, as investigated by scholars from Michel Foucault to Paul Rabinow, and its association with the fleeting and ephemeral pleasures of metropolitan life, as construed by Charles Baudelaire in his 1863 essay, The Painter of Modern Life.³ In a charged period of political and social reconstruction, current theories of medicine and the body informed the creation and design of this proposal, with its aim of producing healthy and disciplined norms of corporality and comportment. Yet in fostering physical culture through its engineered pool, gymnasium, and garden, the institution portrayed here also set the conditions for dynamic and liberating actions that could belie those very ambitions. Through this exchange between built forms and practices, ordinary citizens would encounter modernity as a spatial and embodied experience—one that united rational and scientific ideologies with novelty and thrills.

Alternatively referred to as the capital of modernity, capital of the nineteenth century, or even capital of the world, Paris of the nineteenth century has long exerted a fascination over the public imagination, and continues to influence contemporary analyses of urban culture, life, and form. This familiarity has situated Paris as a key locus for interrogations of modernity through the lenses of capitalism, technology, industrialization, bureaucratization, urbanism, class relations, consumerism, media, spectacle, and tourism, among others.⁴ This gamut of themes emphasizes both the rationalism and delirium characterizing a society transforming at breakneck speed. The focal point of these investigations has predominantly been Paris of the Second Empire (1852–70) and beyond, when the city emerged in new guise through the totalizing urban renovation projects put into motion by Emperor Napoleon III and his prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann. We identify the roots of our own commercial culture in its resplendent department stores, and we recognize our technological aspirations in the astonishing remnants of its World’s Fairs. Above all, we think we can trace the origins of our modern urbanism to the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system reconfiguring the cityscape from mid-century in pleasurable as well as sanitizing ways.

This urbanism of public health is one of the great legacies of nineteenth-century Paris. Yet what has been overshadowed by the amplitude of its networked infrastructure and imposing dimensions are preceding initiatives of more intimate scales, which shaped urban forms and culture in ways that have proved as enduring, if less conspicuous. Amid the fears of national decline accompanying the collapse of the First Napoleonic Empire (1804–15), reform efforts focused not on grand and comprehensive structural overhauls, but rather, on improving the bodily and mental well-being of the individual citizen. Just as public hygiene programs of the second half of the century were engineered through the spatial reorganization of streets and infrastructure, so too did this prior agenda find material expression—from the reconceptualization of military training grounds and boys’ and girls’ schools, to the creation of leisure gardens and community sports facilities. These spaces sought to accommodate healthy exercise and activity in a city whose physical degradations were feared to be blighting the future of the French race, as well as the moral and social order. Stemming from the efforts of numerous, often unrelated, individuals, enterprises, and institutions, these developments transformed the Parisian built environment from the inside out, targeting a range of sites—from the subjects contained within, and the equipment, programs, spaces necessary to their regeneration, to the city in which they would exercise their strength and understanding as engaged citizens. The 1845 proposal for a permanent swimming school in the city center was but one of numerous projects, built and unbuilt, which translated this budding culture of the body into modern urban architecture. And as suggested by Herson’s print, hygienic discourses could be both actualized and subverted therein, designed as they were for practices that simultaneously encompassed disciplinary intent and empowering potentials.

What follows is a history of these forgotten efforts to reform the health of the urban subject between 1800 and 1850. In the era when the bourgeoisie was first emerging to control the city, and before the networked urbanism associated with their dominance assumed recognizable form, a seemingly disparate range of everyday environments generated experiences perceived, then and now, as modern—in their cultivation of active principles, their democratic agenda of progressive and attainable improvement, and their culture of spectacle. In uncovering those spaces, this book undertakes several broad, thematic investigations: the role of material forms and artifacts in mediating historical change; the imbrication of larger social categories of gender, class, and citizenship in urban transformations; and the construction of modernity through a series of local processes, experiences, and negotiations, rather than a wholesale, mythic rupture with the past.⁵

Spatial Modernities

During the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, French citizens witnessed the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire and its dissolution in 1815, the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and its collapse with the 1830 Revolution, the ensuing constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe, the Duke d’Orléans, and its demise with the 1848 Revolution, leading to the creation of the short-lived Second Republic of France. Given this turmoil, literature on this period has tended to focus on the fitful political and administrative developments of the successive regimes.⁶ Yet these decades also witnessed great social and cultural change, and scholars have increasingly sought to bring the experiences of ordinary people to light. Through emergent practices of consumption, leisure, and education, and in newly created spaces of mixed-sex sociability, various opportunities for social mobility and disrupting the separate spheres presented themselves.⁷ In Paris, the nation’s political and cultural capital, these developments took place amid the birth pangs of early industrialization and rapid urbanization, as the population doubled from around 550,000 in 1800 to over a million in 1850. Against the ensuing congestion and health crises, and alongside the violence and unrest, the ideologies and practices informing the reconstruction of class and gender identities shaped both the built environment and the bodies that filled them.

To trace this relationship between urban forms and their subjects, we begin here with an overview of the early nineteenth-century metropolis, and the various elements of an emerging modernity that historians have previously located in its architecture and geography.⁸ Before the 1860 annexation of the suburbs and its administrative redistribution, Paris comprised twelve arrondissements, subdivided into forty-eight districts, or quartiers, bound by the Farmers-General tax wall (unless otherwise stated, this book uses the pre-1860 arrondissement designation) (plate 1). Each neighborhood was distinguishable by its material specificities as well as its social composition—from the spacious lots and wealthy inhabitants of the 1st arrondissement to the narrow, muddy streets and working-class population of the 9th arrondissement.

The most familiar features of this era are those typically seen to presage Second Empire urbanism, characterized by a shift in scale and increased potentials for mobility, both physical and social. The celebrated arcades (passages) flowered in the early decades, fueling, and fueled by, the rise in consumer culture and presence of women in the public sphere. Pioneering modern techniques in glass and iron construction, arcades interiorized city streets and transformed a moment of passage into a gathering space. As some of the first paved and gaslit public venues, they provided protected environments wherein strolling and flânerie became pleasurable activities. While short-lived in their popularity, reaching their heyday in the 1820s and mostly clustered around the dense 4th arrondissement (present-day 1st and 2nd arrondissements), arcades conflated circulation and commerce to create an exhilarating and unprecedented urban experience.

By the 1830s, the grands boulevards on the Right Bank (the ring formed by the boulevards, from west to east, of Madeleine, Capucines, Italiens, Montmartre, Poissonnière, Bonne-Nouvelle, Saint-Denis, Saint-Martin, Temple, Filles-du-Calvaire, Beaumarchais) had replaced arcades as the favored sites of fashion and leisure, forming a new ideal of urban modernity with their ample, airy thoroughfares. Originating in the promenade grounds designed on the site of the old Louis XIII ramparts at the end of the seventeenth century, these boulevards presented a model for aerating and structuring the city to be emulated later by Haussmann.⁹ Lined with trees, separating pedestrian from vehicular traffic, and increasingly populated by cafés and entertainment establishments, especially around the boulevard des Italiens, the boulevards shifted the city’s social and physical center of gravity toward the margins of the urbanized districts. This centrifugal momentum followed on the popularity of various pleasure gardens of the Restoration, such as Idalie and Tivoli, which had appropriated empty and abandoned lots on the city peripheries, the majority at the edges of the 1st and 2nd arrondissements. The flocking of Parisian masses to these amusement parks had first revealed the commercial and financial potential of this geography, triggering subsequent real estate ventures.

Most notably, the displacement of the city’s social core corresponded with the creation from scratch of several residential neighborhoods (nouveaux quartiers) beyond the grands boulevards, accommodating the exponential population growth and exploiting rising property values. These neighborhoods were products of the 1820s building boom, during which private speculators subdivided undeveloped sites within the boundaries of the Farmers-General wall into urban lots. Entire new districts were quickly constructed, specifically those of Beaujon, François-Ier, Saint-Georges, Poissonnière, and Europe, taking over open fields and the abandoned or expropriated grounds of former aristocratic mansions. Here, developers pioneered an apartment building typology that prefigured the Haussmannian streetscape. As Sharon Marcus has argued, these blocks not only introduced urban dimensions to residential architecture but also fostered greater continuity between the private and public spheres, with their outward-facing rooms and street presence. While the modern apartment building offered increased privacy for each domestic unit, it gathered a larger number of strangers under one roof, thereby linking individuals materially and ideologically to greater society.¹⁰

Alongside these novel settings for leisure, consumption, and domestic life, the incipient modernity of early nineteenth-century Paris has been studied through the heightened order, legibility, and efficiency that public health initiatives imprinted on the city. Roiling epidemics and social turmoil triggered infrastructural and sanitation improvements, giving direction to the budding hygiene movement. These were the decades when key French physicians such as Louis-René Villermé and Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet were shaping this nascent field through their research on urban salubrity, sewer construction, and improved workers’ housing.¹¹ Congregated around the Paris health council (formed in 1802), the journal Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale (founded in 1829), and various government-run establishments and forums, many public hygienists believed that the state should assume primary responsibility in regulating and administering health-related matters. The Paris health council in particular, one of the earliest municipal bodies for public hygiene, was instrumental in conducting investigative work, making pioneering use of statistical analysis and empirical methods, and initiating new measures and programs. Convened by the first prefect of police, Count Dubois, under Napoleon’s reign, the council’s activities grew from a limited range of duties in its early years, such as the examination of factories, ateliers, and prisons, to gradually encompass the entire spectrum of public health issues in the city. Many of these concerns were intimately tied to rapid demographic growth, the beginnings of industrialization, and the deteriorating living conditions that ensued. Its members (initially four, increased to seven in 1807) created investigative reports on, among other topics, epidemics, markets, cemeteries, slaughterhouses, insalubrious industries, garbage disposal, water drainage, sewer systems, and building construction codes.¹²

The hygienic plights of the congested, central arrondissements in particular became increasingly pressing after the ravages of the 1832 cholera epidemic, hitherto unknown in Europe and a formative public health calamity in the early years of the July Monarchy. Medical professionals correlated the dense, overpopulated inner districts to higher outbreaks of the disease, as confirmed by the official map comparing mortality rates per neighborhood.¹³ The reaction from this outbreak strongly marked Claude-Philibert Barthelot Rambuteau’s tenure as the prefect of the Seine (1833–48). While Rambuteau’s efforts typically appear timid in comparison to Haussmann’s later initiatives, the projects he instigated set the foundations for the various layers of Paris’s hygienic urbanism. Between 1833 and 1848, the city’s underground sewer network grew to encompass 140 kilometers, compared to 36 kilometers in 1824. Alongside the expansion of the water distribution network from 39 kilometers in 1832 to 358 kilometers in 1850, the number of public fountains increased throughout the city, from 124 in 1828 to 1,840 in 1848. To combat the urban sanitation problem of public urination and defecation, the prefect of police Henri Gisquet had conceived a plan around 1835, never implemented, to construct 200 latrines and urinals around the city.¹⁴ Rambuteau revived this idea in the 1840s and installed a series of public urinals, called pissoirs or pissotières (cheekily referred to as the Rambuteau column in common parlance), on the streets of Paris—a measure much mocked at first, but one that became widespread during Haussmann’s tenure. Taken together, these developments generally tell a triumphant tale of scientific advancement and increased control over the pathological city.

The need to sanitize, ventilate, and facilitate circulation in the busy heart of the capital also led to numerous studies and projects to create, widen, and lengthen streets in the 1830s and 1840s. As urged in an 1832 report on the cholera epidemic: It is especially imperative to decongest the center of Paris by streets pierced in all directions, by public squares that are spacious enough to be planted with trees . . . and finally spread light and life in these gloomy neighborhoods where half the population stagnates so sadly, where . . . the air is so rank, the streets so narrow, and death so active that it strikes there more than anywhere else.¹⁵ Improvement schemes during the July Monarchy touched on some 237 streets, the most significant of which was the creation of the rue Rambuteau between 1838 and 1845, opening up an east–west passage through the congested districts around the central marketplace of Les Halles.¹⁶ This project served as an important precedent for the state system of property expropriation and demolition that reached new heights during the Second Empire. During its construction, the government of Louis-Philippe passed the law of May 3, 1841, allowing private property to be expropriated by the government for public interest, a legal framework foundational to Haussmann and Napoleon III’s urban schemes.¹⁷

The architectural and urban changes enacted during the July Monarchy were significant in physically and ideologically shaping the modern city as a bourgeois city. The need to penetrate the center served as a spatial, social, and political metaphor in this era, symbolic of the need to sanitize and aerate the stagnant, unhygienic streets of the city’s core on one hand, and to mitigate the insurrectionary impulses fomenting in working-class districts on the other. In studying the local nature of these interventions, which occurred at the scale of the neighborhood, Douglas Klahr has argued that Rambuteau consciously shied away from a comprehensive overhaul of the road network, recognizing the threat of social disequilibrium at a time when the street space was already associated with violence and confrontations.¹⁸ The ideology of hygienism guiding Rambuteau’s projects was thus both medical and moral—beyond its practical scientific and salutary effects, carefully calibrated public health measures would also secure social order in postrevolutionary France.¹⁹ The naturalist, anthropologist, and physician Julien-Joseph Virey had claimed in 1828 that republican, middle-class values of moderation and healthy activity would guarantee the stability of empires and resist anarchy and despotism.²⁰ The hygienic city would accordingly be a disciplined, regulated, bourgeois city.

In many ways, then, pre-Haussmannian Paris prefigured at a smaller scale later transformations to come, bringing to light continuities across the nineteenth-century regimes. Indeed, historical literature of the past ten to fifteen years has increasingly contested and problematized the conceit of Haussmann as the hero who ushered spatial modernity into Paris—a myth partly cultivated by the man himself, through his memoirs, as well as through later scholarship that depicted him as the key protagonist of Paris’s transformation from medieval relic to glittering modern capital.²¹ A number of historians have argued that far from initiating the modernization process, Haussmann responded and reacted to an already-present modernity. Some of these studies have demonstrated that a modern metropolitan ideology was already at play in the early nineteenth century, fueled by the joint processes of industrialization and urbanization; others have shown that Rambuteau set state initiatives of urban renewal in motion during the 1830s; and still others have claimed that Haussmann’s planning theories actually had a deeper intellectual lineage than he cared to admit.²² For the most part, these analyses have relied on a narrative of progression, viewing the first half-century as a transitional, rather than transformational, moment in the making of modern Paris.

Yet focusing on such continuities tends to direct our attention to the more visibly public spaces of the metropolis, seen to come into maturation at full scale during the Second Empire, whereas modernity could be experienced in a variety of in-between spaces, neither completely public nor private. In his influential 1935 essay, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Walter Benjamin presents the early nineteenth-century city as a series of enclosures, but with thresholds between interior and exterior that are always characterized by slippages—such as the arcades, at once architectural and urban, discrete and permeable; or the panoramas, capturing the intensified, global scope of movement, communications, and transport within their great interiorized exteriors.²³ Alongside the grand boulevards and expanded sewer networks described above, spatial modernity found expression in a range of programs and spaces that exhibited similar dialectics. The gymnasiums, pools, and green spaces inserted into pedagogical and recreational institutions appropriated and abstracted elements of nature for urban consumption. These environments were designed as protected enclaves for the cultivation of health, yet could serve as scenes of theatrical display viewable to the public. They linked the private, individual body to hygienic imperatives about discipline and order in the public sphere. In these localized confines, ordinary Parisians experienced the qualities of speed, mobility, and productivity characterizing the modernizing metropolis, and made sense of their place therein.

This investigation of the physical and social space of Paris follows in a long line of research conducted on the capital’s geography and urban morphology, from the work of Pierre Lavedan and David Pinkney in the 1950s, to subsequent explorations that have made use of digital methods, such as those of Jean Castex, Philippe Panerai, Bruno Fortier, and Maurizio Gribaudi.²⁴ Gribaudi’s recent publication is particularly innovative in its analysis of urban typologies alongside representations and the social relations structured by physical environments. In shifting from the macro to the micro scale, he identifies a workers’ modernity in the dense urban fabric and social networks of the often-overlooked central arrondissements to counter the familiar narrative of a bourgeois modernity that fully developed in the second half of the century. My book complements Gribaudi’s in chronology and method, while employing fine-grained analyses to complicate the generalized conception of the latter in terms of a large-scale, networked urbanism. Before that recognizable moment, bourgeois urban modernity also took shape as a bottom-up endeavor, constructed and experienced through a series of disparate, local projects.

In analyzing the relationship between everyday practices and their material frameworks, I rely on the concept of the threshold, as a spatial metaphor. While referring to the boundary of crossing to enter a building in its literal and formal meaning, this term can be applied more figuratively to indicate a frontier, the beginning of a state or action. In this sense, the environments studied in this book, though having defined architectural limits, were social thresholds in their totality—varied, multiform and hybrid spaces of experimentation, at the juncture of the private and public spheres, where emerging class identities, gendered constructs, and experiences of modernity were forged.²⁵

The Hygiene Movement and Modern Bodies

The creation of those spaces must be situated against the particular preoccupations of a budding, wide-ranging hygiene movement—a key subtext in the history of the modern city, as seen above. At first glance, the public health initiatives that developed in piecemeal fashion during the postrevolutionary period appear as mere stepping-stones toward the comprehensive networks of roads, sewers, and pipes we identify with Haussmannian Paris. Yet this perspective largely relies on a contemporary definition of hygiene—related to habits of cleanliness, waste management, and disease prevention—that has limited the study of its urban applications to a narrow subset. In fact, the nineteenth-century hygienic discourse encompassed a far more extensive terrain of ideas that intersected with the era’s political and social anxieties. As Bruno Latour has observed, Sometimes the hygienists [gave] a definition of their science that [was] coextensive with reality. They [claimed] to be acting on food, urbanism, sexuality, education, the army.²⁶ Latour was discussing the battle against germs and disease in the wake of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, when the overriding concern of doctors was regeneration—not just of France but of mankind in general and, more particularly, the urban masses.²⁷ Although historical scholarship on the discourse of hygiene and national decline has typically concentrated on the Third Republic, the apprehension over racial degeneration and its attendant panoply of hygienic concerns had an earlier iteration that pervaded medical thought and its material translations in unexpected ways.²⁸

Following the series of military defeats that culminated in Napoleon’s 1815 fall at Waterloo, general opinion made out that the nation was ailing, in body and in spirit. Against a physical environment being visibly corroded by demographic and industrial pressures, medical investigations and statistical studies indicated that the health, height, and even morality of the French were in decline. In response, doctors and social reformers applied hygienic thought to a range of issues, from epidemics, sanitation, and the categories listed above by Latour, to physical exercise, emotions, clothing, and even beauty. Under the cloud of the mal du siècle, hygienists argued that the medical community had failed to consider how human beings, like animals, could be bred to modify and refine their biological condition. The study of hygiene, they claimed, needed to extend beyond health maintenance to address the progressive improvement and perfection of the human body: Hygiene is the part of medicine that teaches us to regulate man’s life so as to ensure the free exercise of all his functions and the complete development of all his faculties. It does not simply intend to preserve health, prevent illnesses; it also wants to improve, perfect the instruments of life, extract from this human source all that he can produce, lead the organism without danger to the greatest deployment of force of which he is capable.²⁹ This proto-eugenic ideology shaped the emergence of a new physical culture in the early nineteenth century that advocated exercise, movement, and bodily fitness with a view to national renewal. The trope of the regenerated man that had formed an important strand of revolutionary discourse assumed additional political charge after the collapse of the Empire and the consequent narrowing of France’s horizons. What was the citizen of the modern political and social order to embody, and how and where was he to be formed?

That new order was, of course, largely fashioned after the ideals of the primary beneficiaries of the 1789 Revolution: the bourgeoisie. While class distinctions remained murky and variable in the early nineteenth century, I apply this label to the expanding middle class that included landed proprietors, professionals, government employees, other salaried workers, and the self-employed.³⁰ Especially during the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the emerging social elite based distinctions on merit, accomplishments, and talents, in contrast to the aristocratic privileging of wealth and birth—a philosophy that coincided with the hygienic discourse of improvement and breeding (in