The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870-1914 by Peter S. Soppelsa

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/62374/psoppels_1.pdf

Introduction: Modernity, Infrastructure and Everyday Life
 We tend to associate “modernity” with power, control, order, progress, durability
and mastery. We also associate it with Western cities in the grips of the twin historical
transformations unleashed by the nineteenth century: industrialization and urbanization.
We often hear that Western cities became safer, cleaner, healthier, more comfortable,
efficient and rational places to live in the nineteenth century because Europeans
judiciously applied reason, science and technology to organizing and managing everyday
urban life. While Europe underwent fundamental social, spatial and technological
changes (urbanization, industrialization and globalization), so the familiar story goes,
European ways of life became more civilized, rationalized, standard, advanced, efficient,
democratic, humane, or even universal.
 But what would happen to this view of modernity if I told the story of a city in the
grips of industrialization and urbanization, whose leaders were anxious to improve life by
applying science and technology, which, however did not only become more rational,
more efficient and more humane in many ways, but also more complicated, more risky
and more fragile? What if that city was Paris, so-called “capital of the nineteenth
century,” “capital of modernity” and “capital of the world”?1
 In this study, I argue that Paris between 1870 and 1914, the scene of massive
work in infrastructural modernization, can help us uncover a different perspective on
modernity that highlights its contingencies, contradictions, complexity and fragility.2
This study is about what I call “the fragility of modernity,” meaning the special
difficulties that confront cities dependent on increasingly complex networked
infrastructures which bind humans, technology and the natural environment in new ways.
Although we often hear that everyday life was transformed by science and technology in
these years (often called the “Second Industrial Revolution”), Paris's modernization from
1870 to 1914 is better characterized as uneven development. In 1900, Paris became the
world’s fourth city to open an electric-powered subway, but as late as 1928, 18% of its
houses did not enjoy direct to sewer drainage.3
 Parisian responses to modernization were equally uneven, expressing both
optimism and anxiety about technological change, and a number of never-completed
fantasies of perfecting, optimizing, and controlling humans, the city, technology, nature,
and their relations.4
 While France’s civilizing mission kept Paris planners, engineers and
politicians on a technological-determinist track that identified infrastructural development
with progress, results on the terrain of everyday life were quite mixed. Technical
accidents, bureaucratic inefficiency, and shortages of crucial resources like water and
affordable housing called this progress into question. In this study we will hear many
voices in Paris questioning the familiar narrative of infrastructural modernization as
progress, as well as many defending it.3

 Infrastructural development did not influence everyday life in predictable ways.
As the Paris authorities used networked infrastructures to solve urban problems
(distributing water and power, public transportation, etc.), they increased the
heterogeneity, complexity and fragility of the city, helped reproduce social inequalities,
and increased the city’s ecological impact. In this study, I show that what Parisians
recognized as urban modernity between 1870 and 1914, which after Haussmann revolved
around the application of networked infrastructures for solving urban problems, was an
increasingly heterogeneous and fragile assembly, vulnerable to disruptions of social

routine, technological function, and the forces of nature.


1 (1) Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” from The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard, 2002), pp. 3-26; (2) David Harvey, Paris, Capital of
Modernity (Routledge, 2003); Patrice Higgonet, Paris: Capital of the World (Harvard, 2005).

2 This idea is inspired by a long line of critical theorists who stress the “duality of modernity.” Ideas drawn from classic German theorists like Marx, Weber, Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin have been
retooled by more recent scholars like Raymond Aron, Marshall Berman , Jürgen Habermas, Detlev
Peukert and David Harvey.
3 Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (Yale, 1978), p. 208.
4 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (University of

California, 1992).