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PARTISAN REVIEW
traffic increased, the two proved
to
be ill-compatible." The situation
was especially trying and terrifying to the vast majority of Parisians
who walked. The macadam pavements, a source of special pride to the
Emperor-who never walked-were dusty in the dry months of sum–
mer, and muddy in the rain and snow. Haussmann, who clashed with
Napoleon over macadam (one of the few things they ever fought
about), and who administratively sabotaged imperial plans to cover the
whole city with it, said that this surface required Parisians "either to
keep a carriage or to walk on stilts." Thus the life of the boulevards,
more radiant and exciting than urban life had ever been, was also more
risky and frightening for the multitudes of men and women who
moved on foot.
This, then, is the setting for Baudelaire's primal modern scene: "I
was crossing the boulevard, in a great hurry, in the midst of a moving
chaos, with death galloping at me from every side. " The archetypal
modern man, as we see him here, is a pedestrian thrown into the
maelstrom of modern city traffic, a man alone contending against an
agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy, fast and lethal. The
burgeoning street and boulevard traffic knows no spatial or temporal
bounds, spills over into every urban space, imposes its tempo on
everybody's time, transforms the whole modern environment into a
"moving chaos." The chaos here lies not in the movers themselves–
the individual walkers or drivers, each of whom may be pursuing the
most efficient route for himself-but in their interaction, in the totality
of their movements in a common space. Thi makes the boulevard a
perfect symbol of capitalism's inner contradictions: rationality in each
individual capitalist unit, leading to anarchic irrationality in the social
system that brings all these units together. (We should note that this
experience of "moving chaos" antedates the traffic light, an innovation
developed in America around 1905. The traffic light is a wonderful
symbol of early state attempts to regulate and rationalize the chaos of
capitalism.)
The man in the modern street, thrown into this maelstrom, is
driven back on his own resources-often on resources he never knew he
had-and forced to stretch them desperately in order to survive. In
order to cross the moving chaos, he must attune and adapt himself to
its moves, must learn to not merely keep up with it but to stay at least a
step ahead. He must become adept at
soubresauts
and
mouvements
brusques,
at sudden, abrupt, jagged twists and shift -and not only
with his legs and his body, but with his mind and his sensibility as
well.
