“Fictitious Capital”: Haussmannization and the (Un-)making of Second-Empire Paris

This article makes the case for a re-assessment of the emergence of (the) Second-Empire capital, focusing on the temporal implications of the fiscal instruments, such as productive expenditure, controversially deployed during the Transformations, in order to shift focus away from the material, or purely spatial, impact of Haussmannization. Through the modality of fictitious capital, and its implied dependence of futurity following Marx, the temporal nature of the correlation Haussmannization establishes between capital-building and capital generation is explored. Parisian Transformation emerges as a radical re-temporalization by virtue of the movements of abstract forms of capital, for which the city becomes an ephemeral embodiment.