Paris In The 19th Century Essay

In order to understand the lives of the working class in Paris in the 19th Century, it is necessary to understand how their lives were not simply shaped by larger influences such as the economic forces of capitalism or the regulating role of the state. Instead, it is important to unveil how the city itself spatialized and constructed social and gender difference for the working class, while they, in a mutually constitutive manner shaped modes of sociability in the city. Analysis of the works by Faure, Ferguson, Haine, and Ross, makes clear that Shane Ewan’s three features of urban history are vital to a discussion of the working class. The use of interdisciplinarity, ‘history from below’ and the city-as-agent elucidate the hidden history of the working class and their daily relationships with their environment and each other. The working class in Paris created a family, community and gendered life that depended on their spatial context, but through interdisciplinary study it is clear that the working class were active agents in their own lives. A study of the working class through urban history creates a lens with which to understand more than just events and dates. Particularly, subjects less focused on by formal channels of history, such as the family life. The family life of the working class in Paris has long been criticised by philosophers such as Bachelard and sociologists such as le Play. They argue that the close confines of the city and the cramped living quarters of working class families led to the “end of the family”. Thus the city becomes, as Ewan states, an agent, by constructing working class neighbourhoods and a lack of space that in turn shapes sociability. This has often resulted in assumptions that neighbourhood communities constituted of people whose lack of space forced them to orient outward. However, urban history looks beyond external forces towards the human agency of the working class, often revealing it through interdisciplinary study. Both Alain Faure and Eliza Ferguson argue that the working class maintained agency in their family life and thus shaped the spaces they inhabited, as much as the spaces shaped them. Faure argues that the working class created within their space, patterns of sociability that allowed for an internal and private family life. This includes the spatial divide between communal areas such courtyards and hallways, and the door to the family rooms, which was protected by customs that were developed to stop invasion into private life. Ferguson, using Bachelard’s concept of ‘centrality’, argues that the family apartment was an “epicentre” from which space was carefully controlled within sociable divides measured in time and space to denote acceptable limits within the neighbourhood for children to roam. Ferguson and Faure both imply therefore, through understanding of ‘history from below’, the working class themselves were agents who controlled and reacted to spatial challenges based on their urban environment. Urban history therefore allows the hidden, particularly women and children, to become agents in their lives, ones who created modes of sociability borne out of these cramped quarters. Through interdisciplinary resources such as police reports, demographic studies of marriage certificates, literature and cultural study, it is possible to gain perspective on the events of the private sphere. There is a tension between Faure and Ferguson over the extent to which neighbourhood companionability developed, but both argue against the …show more content…
The cafes in the bourgeoisie centre’s wide streets became avenues of display and pleasure. As part of the proliferation of mass consumer culture, cafes in this area were no longer political, but rather places of pleasurable pastimes. They became sites for the integration of the working class worker with the white collar worker. They thus became a reflection of the changed urban environment, using a “shared set of rituals for interaction” associated with drinking, to create camaraderie between strangers. Haine notes novels which romanticize ‘café friendships’. However, Haussmannisation also caused the displacement of the working class from the city centre and exacerbation of the housing problem, so that cafes also flourished in the fringes of the city for the working class. Ross notes that the destruction of many brothels also led to the drinking establishment as a site for what the police feared was ‘clandestine