MARSHALL BERMAN '
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most wretched and most frightening neighborhoods, home to tens of
thousands of Parisians-razed to the ground. Where would all these
people go? Those in charge of demolition and reconstruction did not
particularly concern themselves. They were opening up vast new tracts
for development on the northern and eastern fringes of the city; in the
meantime, the poor would make do, somehow, as they always did.
Baudelaire's family in rags 's tep out from behind the rubble and place
themselves in the center of the scene. The trouble is not that they are
angry or demanding. The trouble is simply that they will not go away.
They, too, want a place in the light.
This primal scene reveals some of the deepest ironies and contra–
dictions in modern city life. The setting that makes all urban humanity
a great extended "family of eyes" also brings forth the discarded
stepchildren of that family. The physical and social transformations
that drove the poor out of sight now bring them back directly into
everyone's line of vision. Haussmann, in tearing down the old medi–
eval slums, inadvertently broke down the self-enclosed and hermeti–
cally sealed world of traditional urban poverty. The boulevards,
blasting great holes through the poorest neighborhoods, enable the
poor to walk through these holes and out of their ravaged neighbor–
hoods, to discover for the first time what the rest of their city and the
rest of life is like. And as they see, they are seen: the vision, the
epiphany, flows both ways.
In
the midst of the great spaces, under the
bright lights, there is no way to look away. The glitter lights up the
rubble, and illuminates the dark lives of the people at whose expense
the bright lights shine. Balzac had compared those old neighborhoods
to the darkest jungles of Africa; for Eugene Sue they epitomized "The
Mysteries of Paris. " Haussmann's boulevards transform the exotic into
the immediate; the misery that was once a mystery is now a fact.
The manifestation of class divisions in the modern city opens up
new divisions within the modern self. How should the lovers regard the
ragged people who are suddenly in their midst? At this point, modern
love loses its innocence. The presence of the poor casts an inexorable
shadow over the city'S luminosity. The setting that magically inspired
romance now works a contrary magic, and pulls the lovers out of their
romantic enclosure, into wider and less idyllic networks.
In
this new
light, their personal happiness appears as class privilege. The boule–
vard forces them to react politically. The man's response vibrates in the
direction of the liberal Left: he feels guilty about his happiness, akin to
those who can see but cannot share it; he wishes, sentimentally, to
make them part of his family. The woman's affinities-in this instant,
