Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital by Alexia M Yates (review)

Modern Paris owes its shape to Georges Haussmann and Napoleon III, who collaborated to reshape the city’s spatial fabric. This duo’s effort to renovate the city was driven from above and financed with municipal dollars. Yates begins her study of the emergence of a property market in Paris in 1872, at a moment when the city was recovering from physical and fiscal ruin, the result of a Prussian siege and an uprising by the city’s residents. When peace was restored to Paris, one of the most pressing issues confronting the municipal government, the city’s residents, and Paris’ commercial community was how to rebuild the city to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders. As Yates shows, in contrast to the earlier Haussmann era, this period of rebuilding was fragmented, undertaken by multiple actors, and financed by private funds, driven by the imperatives of the market.

In taking this time of crisis as her starting point, Yates demonstrates how “housing and property came to be considered, and to act, as commercial objects” during the last third of the nineteenth century (8). This process was extraordinarily complicated, requiring not only the combined action of multiple parties to conceive of, build, finance, and sell these commercial objects but also a new conception of buildings not simply as spaces defined by their functions but also as circulating, exchangeable consumer products with a value defined by how much they could fetch in the marketplace. The transition from one measure of value to another fostered the emergence of entire groups of professionals devoted to building a private real-estate market.

Yates’ approach emphasizes the combined work of property developers, lenders, real-estate agents, and others, all of whom sought to create the housing and public facilities that Paris desperately needed while seeking a handsome return on their investment. Each chapter is loosely organized around one of the actors in the emerging Paris property market. This approach has the merit of allowing Yates to explore the ways in which developers, architects, and other parties responded to one another and to changing market imperatives in an attempt to maximize their profits. Yates uses an impressive array of primary sources—advertisements, tax rolls, legal texts, court depositions, notarial contracts, and sales agreements—to demonstrate the complexity of this process. The only voice that is surprisingly mute in her telling is that of the national government. In Yates’ view, the development of Paris was largely a local affair, negotiated primarily by the municipal and departmental government on the public side. A deeper consideration of the role of the national government would have enhanced this work.

That point aside, Yates book deftly weaves together rich archival material and challenging theories of market creation, finance, and capitalism to present a compelling explanation of how Paris’ real-estate market emerged in the nineteenth century.