Looking through the Parisian Window

Caillebotte, Zola, and the Post-Haussmann Interior 1

By Jennifer S. Pride

I
n 1870, the French Second Empire
came to its end as Emperor
Napoleon III surrendered in the
Battle of Sedan (Franco-Prussian
War). The year also marks the
official end of the Emperor’s nearly
two-decades long aggressive urban
renewal project commonly referred to as
Haussmannization, a neologism based
on the project director’s name, Baron
George-Eugene Haussmann. In this paper,
I examine Haussmannization through
the lens of trauma studies to understand
why artists and writers such as Gustave
Caillebotte and Émile Zola turned inward
in the 1870’s.2 I use the term cultural
trauma to denote the latent experience
of a cultural or social event that shatters
and fragments social cohesion. Cultural
trauma demands distance, mediation,
and representation.3 Haussmannization
as cultural trauma involves the repetitive
shocks and disruptions encountered in
a city that was rapidly disappearing and
reappearing as something different and
unfamiliar. The latent artistic and literary
visualization of this traumatic period
emphasizes closed interior and fragmented
exterior spaces. In his paintings of the
modern metropolis, Caillebotte uses a
window motif to enclose spaces and convey
a sense of subjective interiority. Likewise,
Zola situates the entire plot of his novel
Pot-Bouille, in the isolated interior of
a newly constructed Haussmannian
apartment. I argue that Caillebotte and
Figure 1. Honoré Daumier, “Behold our Nuptial Chamber,” Le Charivari, December 13, Zola utilized the window motif and
1853. Author’s personal collection. interiority to counter the cultural trauma of
Haussmannization. By looking at shared
techniques specific to each medium, I show

secac art i n q u i r i e s • 17
how these signifying devices represent
a social discourse on cultural trauma.
Both the painter and the writer reveal
social conditions in medium-specific
binary terms that play against one
another to create meaning, such as
interior/exterior, escape/contain, conceal/
reveal, and subjective/objective vision.
Part I: Haussmannization
as Cultural Trauma
Louis-Napoléon became familiar
with modern urban planning during
his exile in London in the 1840’s.4
After taking the French throne in
1852, he sought to emulate and
outdo the British capital’s urban
design in the capital of his new French
empire. Despite previous attempts
at urban modernization, Paris was
still a medieval city that had grown
organically over hundreds of years
in a haphazard fashion.5 The tangled
web of dark alleyways, narrow streets,
random architectural styles, and
dangerous building structures did not
match the vision Napoleon III had
for his Parisian capital. Moreover,
the population of Paris had more
than doubled in the first half of the
nineteenth-century so that just over
a million people were occupying just
under fifteen square miles in the city
center.6 Housing shortages led to
illegal, often dangerous dwellings such
as shoddy additions to half-timbered
houses that were easily susceptible
to fire. The old houses that lined
the bridges in the heart of the city,
around the Île de la Cité, were built
up to dangerous heights, supported
by leaning timber beams that could
give way at any moment and collapse
into the Seine river below. Because
the city lacked a sanitation system,
it was a veritable cesspool with open
gutters lining the streets for raw
sewage that people dumped out of
their windows and which emptied
into the Seine river, the city did not
have clean running water, nor were
there open green spaces for fresh
air circulation or sunshine within
the labyrinthine city. Paris’s organic
18 • Vol. XVII, No. 1, 2016
structure and unsanitary environment
made the city vulnerable to the plague
and other epidemics that ravaged
the city repeatedly over the centuries,
most recently in the cholera outbreak
of 1832 which killed nearly twenty-
thousand people. The narrow streets
also enabled the city’s impoverished and
disenchanted working class to build
barricades across entire streets in their
efforts to topple unpopular regimes.7
If Paris were to become a leading
modern metropolis, the city needed a
major overhaul. The process of
Haussmannization ostensibly began
with a law enacted by Napoleon III in
1852 that allowed for the
expropriation of private property as
needed for the creation of new streets
through the existing urban fabric.8
Baron Haussmann was appointed
Prefect of the Seine the following year
and this law enabled him to demolish
most of the narrow and secluded
streets and passageways of the
medieval city.9 Between 1853 and
1870, the congested neighborhoods
were replaced by large public squares
and sidewalks where Parisians could
stroll among the crowds. The Prefect
instituted many modern conveniences
such as a clean water supply, a sewer
system, improved sanitation, better
traffic circulation, and healthier air
quality.10 Haussmann’s most notable
achievement was the creation of broad
boulevards. To map
out these boulevards, he laid maps of
Paris on his desk and drew lines across
them to signify the new wide boulevards
for which Paris is known today.
Haussmann’s lines, or percements as
they were called, literally pierced
through the heart of the city, wiping out
entire neighborhoods with the stroke of
a pen. Paris became unrecognizable to
those who lived in the city during these
sweeping transformations.
Part II: Second Empire Visual Culture
The visualization of cultural trauma
takes the form of satirical caricature in
the early years of Haussmannization.
In daily news journals, caricatures
and satirical articles chart the process
and effects of Haussmannization on
the people of Paris. 11 These urban
changes came at a high cost to the
city’s inhabitants, not only financially,
but ethically and psychologically. The
Parisian lower-classes were displaced
from the city center to the newly
developed suburbs. This displacement
caused transportation problems
for those who labored in the city
center. Cultural changes were equally
challenging for the Parisian bourgeoisie.
Many families lost their generational
homes and property; women gained
a new level of autonomy in the new
boulevards and parks; café-concerts and
bars brought people out of their homes
and into social establishments; and the
social and cultural distinctions that
were so valued by Parisians became
blurred and confused. The process
of Haussmannization reshaped the
urban environment which, in turn,
reshaped the socio-cultural dynamic
of Parisian life. Caillebotte was born
into a bourgeois family in Paris at
the onset of Haussmannization. The
artist developed his artistic sensibilities
during this era of confusion and social
upheaval and absorbed this coded
visual culture as he matured artistically.
Caricatures by artist Honoré
Daumier in the daily satirical
newspaper, Le Charivari, document
the confusion and anxiety inherent in
the ongoing erasure and remarking
of the city’s physiognomy and,
consequently, social and cultural
traditions. In his December 13, 1853
caricature, Daumier satirized the speed
with which Haussmann’s renovations
occurred and the effect of this on
people’s psyche (Fig. 1). Here Daumier
shows a couple gazing upon the
demolished city and lamenting the loss
of their home to Haussmannization.
The caption reads: “Just look at that,
Adelaide, that used to be our bedroom
… these masons have no respect for
anything, they don’t honor memories!”
This sense of loss and nostalgia for
a life that was ripped away without
any shred of dignity recurs repeatedly