Walter Benjamin - Haussmann or The Barricades

VI
Haussmann or the Barricades

Jai le culte du Beau, du Bien, des grandes choses, De la belle nature inspirant le grand art, Quil enchante loreille ou charme le regard; Jai lamour du printemps en fleurs: femmes et roses. Baron Haussmann: Confession dun lion devenu vieux14 Das Blthenreich der Dekorationen, Der Reiz der Landschaft, der Architektur Und aller Szenerie-Effekt beruhen Auf dem Gesetz der Perspektive nur. Franz Bhle: Theater-Katechismus15
Haussmanns urbanistic ideal was one of views in perspective down long street-vistas. It corresponded to the tendency which was noticeable again and again during the 19th century, to ennoble technical exigencies with artistic aims. The institutions of the worldly and spiritual rule of the bourgeoisie, set in the frame of the boulevards, were to fnd their apotheosis. Before their completion, boulevards were covered over with tarpaulins, and unveiled like monuments. Haussmanns effciency ftted in well with the idealism of Louis Napoleon. The latter encouraged fnance capital. Paris experienced a great speculative boom. Speculation on the stock-exchange pushed into the background the forms of gambling that had come down from feudal society. To the phantasmagoria of space, to which the flneur was addicted, there corresponded the phantasmagoria of time, to which the gambler dedicated himself. Gambling transformed time into a narcotic. Lafargue defned gambling as a miniature reproduction of the mysteries of the market-situation. The expropriations caused by Haussmann engendered a wave of fraudulent speculation. The judgments of the Court of Cassation, which drew its inspiration from the bourgeois and Orleanist opposition, increased the fnancial risk of Haussmannization. Haussmann attempted to shore up his dictatorship and to place Paris under an emergency rgime. In 1864 he expressed his hatred for the rootless population of the great city in a speech in the Assembly. This population kept increasing as a result of his works. The increase of rents drove the proletariat into the suburbs. The Paris quartiers thereby lost their characteristic physiognomy. The red belt appeared. Haussmann gave himself the name artiste dmolisseur.16 He felt a vocation for his work and stressed the fact in his memoirs. Meanwhile, as far as the Parisians were concerned, he alienated their city from them. They no longer felt at home in it. They began to become conscious of the inhuman character of the great city. Maxime du Camps monumental work Paris owed its origin to this consciousness. The Jrmiades dun Haussmannis gave it the form of a biblical lament. The real aim of Haussmanns works was the securing of the city against civil war. He wished to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for all time. With the same purpose, Louis Philippe had already introduced wooden paving. Nonetheless, the barricades played a role in the February Revolution. Engels gave some thought to the technique of barricade fghting. Haussmann intended to put a stop to it in two ways. The breadth of the streets was to make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets were to provide the shortest route between the barracks and the working-class areas. Contemporaries christened the undertaking: Lembellissement stratgique. 17
Fais voir, en djouant la ruse, O Rpublique, ces pervers Ta grande face de Mduse Au milieu de rouges clairs. Chanson douvriers vers 185018
The barricade was resurrected anew during the Commune. It was stronger and safer than ever. It extended across the great boulevards, often reached frst-storey level, and shielded the trenches situated behind it. As the Communist Manifesto ended the epoch of the professional conspirators, so did the
Commune put an end to the phantasmagoria that held sway over the freedom of the proletariat. It shattered the illusion that the task of the proletarian revolution was, hand in hand with the bourgeoisie, to complete the work of 1789. This illusion dominated the period from 1831 to 1871, from the Lyons Uprising to the Commune. The bourgeoisie had never shared this misapprehension. Its struggle against the social rights of the proletariat began right from the great revolution, and coincided with the philanthropic movement, which masked it and which experienced its most signifcant development under Napoleon III. Under him, there appeared the movements monumental work: Le Plays Ouvriers europens. Side by side with the concealed position of philanthropy, the bourgeoisie had at all times occupied the open one of the class struggle. As early as in 1831 it recognized in the Journal des Dbats: Every manufacturer lives in his factory like the plantation-owner among his slaves. The failure of the old working-class insurrections was brought about by the fact that no theory of revolution showed them the way, but on the other hand this was also the condition of the immediate power and enthusiasm with which it set about the construction of a new society. This enthusiasm, which reached its peak in the Commune, at times won over to the working class the best elements of the bourgeoisie, but in the end led it to defeat at the hands of its worst elements. Rimbaud and Courbet declared themselves for the Commune. The burning of Paris was a ftting conclusion to Haussmanns work of destruction.
My good father had been in Paris Karl Gutzkow: Letters from Paris (1842).
Balzac was the frst to speak of the ruin of the bourgeoisie. But it was surrealism which frst allowed its gaze to roam freely over it. The development of the forces of production had turned the wish-symbols of the previous century into rubble, even before the monuments which represented them had crumbled. This development during the 19th century liberated the forms of creation from art, just as in the 16 th century the sciences freed themselves from philosophy. A start was made by architecture as engineering. There followed the reproduction of Nature as photography. The creation of fantasies was preparing to become practical as commercial art. In the feuilleton, creative writing bowed to the exigencies of layout. All these products were on the point of entering the market as commodities. But they still lingered on the threshold. From this epoch spring the arcades and the interiors, the exhibition-halls and the dioramas. They are residues of a dream-world. The utilization of dream-elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thought. Hence dialectical thought is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch not only dreams the next, but while dreaming impels it towards wakefulness. It bears its end within itself, and reveals itas Hegel already recognizedby a ruse. With the upheaval of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.
NOTES:
14. I worship the Beautiful, the Good, great things, beautiful nature inspiring great art, whether it enchants the ear or charms the eye; I love the spring in flower: women and roses. Baron Haussmann: Confession of a lion who has grown old 15. The wealth of decoration, the charm of the countryside, of architecture and of all scenery-effects only depend upon the law of perspective. 16. Artist in demolition. 17. Strategic beautifcation. 18. Reveal, by exposing the fraud, O Republic, to those evil men your great Medusas face amidst red lightning-flashes.

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VI

Haussmann or the Barricades

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