Introduction: Paris Revisited

Nearly three centuries ago, a guidebook to Paris marveled at the city's "infinite diversities" and its "prodigious number of inhabitants." ¹ Early in the twentieth century, a Parisian boy named Julien Green expressed similar awe: How could such a small word, Paris, "designate so many things, so many streets and squares, so many parks, so many houses, roofs, chimneys"? ² Historians today have even more reason to be awed—if not overwhelmed—when they take up Paris as the object of their study. How does one write and teach the history of the multifaceted, vast metropolis? How does one describe it, analyze it, and recount its formative events and development? How does one do justice to the sprawling "agglomeration" of current Paris, with its ten million inhabitants, its many ethnic "colonies," its varied quartiers and banlieues?

This special issue demonstrates multiple ways of answering such questions. The underlying premise is that Paris in all its vastness and heterogeneity calls for many kinds of historical treatment. Every account ends up incomplete in some way. (The twenty-one thick volumes of the Nouvelle histoire de Paris—more than fifteen thousand pages—are no exception.) ³ Every writer and teacher of the city's history has to choose some limited number of themes and approaches, leaving others aside. Most historians also choose certain parts of the whole to treat in greater detail, and that opens up the problem of relating the parts to the larger entity called Paris. As guest editors for this issue, Rosemary Wakeman and I have given priority to work that illumines the city as a whole and widely shared facets of Parisian life over fairly large swaths of time. The varied approaches and topics chosen, we hope, will spark new research as well as offer fresh understanding.

One of the major themes of Parisian history since the last decades of the Ancien R�gime has been the city's intractable problems and recurrent crises—crises du logement, crime and disease, street congestion and traffic jams, revolts and revolutions, insalubrious slums, and banlieues beset by anomie and delinquency. In our first article, Allan Potofsky gives us a close look at the capital's multilayered problems in the late eighteenth century, when Paris was already huge (for its time) and crowded. Housing was inadequate for the growing population, heightening worries about social unrest. The shoddy construction of many new buildings reflected the ramshackle system of conflicting authorities, regulations, and payoffs under which they were built. A "building boom" was bringing discontents and social antagonisms to the point of explosion. Dealing with these problems entailed resolving conflicts not only in the building trades but also in the larger social and political order. The complexity and political importance of the huge capital, as Louis-S�bastien Mercier emphasized, made reforms of the construction sector particularly difficult. A series of failed reform efforts, Potofsky shows, finally opened the way to the revolutionary approach, replacing the old institutions with new state supervision of construction combined with the liberated play of demand and supply.

In treatments of the following century, the motif of urban crisis has been a historiographical mainstay, particularly since Louis Chevalier's classic Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses. ⁴ Bernard Marchand's excellent history, for example, begins with a chapter titled "Paris Grows Too Quickly (1815–1850)." His later headings "The Capital Becomes Pathological" and "The Discovery of the Urban Crisis" make the point even clearer. ⁵ In recent years some historians have questioned the notion of crisis as an organizing frame, arguing that "catastrophizing" has obscured the positive, adaptive capacities of cities and the historical specificities of each period's problems and failings. For the nineteenth century in particular, some historians have worked to retouch the portrayal of a pathological city overwhelmed by rapid growth and immigration. ⁶

In our second article, Alain Faure contributes to that revisionist work with a reexamination of the old notion of Paris as a deadly "abyss" for its inhabitants. Probing long-held assumptions about...