« Paris is the World », A History of the Construction of the Capital City, 1500 to the Present.

Cours de 12 heures, 6 séances de 2 heures
Mardi 10h30-12h30
A partir du mardi 5 novembre 2024

Date des cours : 5, 12, 19, 26 novembre, 3 et 10 décembre.

Campus Grands Moulins, 5 rue Thomas Mann Paris 13e
Ce cours est proposé sous forme hybride, en présentiel et à distance (via Zoom).

            “Paris is the world,” wrote Marivaux in 1734. “The rest of the earth is merely its suburbs.” Marivaux’s soaring elegy to the French capital captured the city’s central place in the imagination of the Enlightenment. This cycle of lectures will examine how Paris became synonymous with gleaming architectural wonders, harmonious facades, and numerous public squares, in the context of France’s social, political, and cultural upheavals from the Renaissance to the Present. Beginning with François I’s determination to bring urban grandeur to his home in the Louvre, Paris was transformed by and for its elites into a new Rome.

            At the same time, the Paris of the people, particularly in the overcrowded ghettos of the city centre, was repeatedly condemned as insalubrious and ripe only for the spread of infectious disease and seditious ideas. This other Paris was repeatedly condemned as a new Babylon. For the heart of Paris was still a horribly medieval city, wrote Voltaire in 1749, in which the creations of France’s greatest architects were marred by narrow, filthy streets and crumbling houses worthy of “barbarians and vandals.”

            At the time of the French Revolution, Parisians revolted against these social ills that were those of modernity itself. Paris as the new Rome and Paris as Babylon co-existed uneasily until the Revolution introduced imperfect but lasting urban reforms that began to recalibrate and remake the urban environment in vain pursuit of an elusive ideal to transform the life of Parisians.

            The issues at the heart of this cycle of courses in English on the construction of Paris, 1500 to the present, are at the crossroads of urban history, environmental history, and the history of cities.  In anticipation of the discussion surrounding the « Greater Paris » project and the Olympic Games in Paris in the summer of 2024, these lectures will examine Paris as a global model of modern urbanism.  Its international influence was first linked to the projects conceived and completed under Louis XIV: the Collège des quatre nations, the Place des Victoires, the Place Louis-le-Grand, the Pont royal, the Hôtel des Invalides, the Porte Saint-Denis and the Porte Saint-Martin. Paris was a model for many other cities around the world.  After the fire of London in 1666, plans to rebuild the city of London, such as that proposed by Christopher Wren, evoked the rationalism of Paris, with its royal squares and new streets in certain districts.  

Paris’ urban influence in the Anglo-American world lasted even beyond Pierre-Charles L’Enfant’s design for the construction of Washington, DC in 1791.  L’Enfant famously designed the future capital of the young American republic in the image of the Paris of Louis XIV.  But as the influence of the organization of the urban fabric in Paris reached the « global imaginary », a new Rome, a critical discourse focusing on heterogeneous, improvised private construction, rose to prominence. From the mid-18th century onwards, this discourse, which criticized the insalubrity of working-class neighborhoods in the heart of old Paris, inspired the Haussmannisation of the second half of the 19th century, and marked the desire to rebuild the City of Light with the imprimatur of a « modernity » that endures to the present day.

BIOGRAPHIE

Allan Potofsky is a historian (PhD in History, Columbia University, NY) who was appointed to the Université Paris Cité in 2009.  He is the author of Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (NY, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009 and 2012) and has published extensively on urban and architectural history as well as on transatlantic (French-US) history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.