Journal of Historical Geography, 10, 4 (1984) 418458

Reviews

The British Isles and the European mainland

MAURICE AGULHON (Ed.), Histoire de la France urbaine. Vol. 4 La ville de f’bge industriel: le cycle haussmannien (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983. Pp. 671. Fr 190.00)

The Histoire de la France urbaine proceeds at a cracking pace. The first three volumes, on pre-industrial France, appeared in 1980 and 198 1, and Roncayolo’s fifth volume, on the contemporary town, cannot be far away. The whole represents a magnificent exercise in grande vulgarisation under the guidance of Georges Duby, following and complementing his Histoire de la France rurale. Richly illustrated (including colour plates), beautifully designed and immaculately produced, these volumes are a credit not only to all those involved in the enterprise, but to the French reading public whose mass support for quality publications permits their appearance at such a low price. We in Britain, ostensibly more advanced in urban history than the French, yet still lacking a general urban history of our country, need to look to our laurels.

This fourth volume, being the first to deal with the industrial era, posed special problems. Like its predecessors, it is divided thematically, with each member of the small team of authors expected to show outstanding powers of synthesis, drawing on a vast and fragmented literature. However, just as Asa Briggs discovered over 30 years ago when working on Birmingham, there is a dearth of secondary literature on recent urban history. In fact, as recently as ten years ago a volume of this quality on the 1840-1950 period could simply not have been produced. What has made it possible, for the most part, is the rise of social history which has generated a large number of monographs and theses on French topics, some of them written by American authors such as Scott, Merriman and Hanagan. Most of these studies were not intended as contributions to urban history but they were largely set within the urban environment which developed in association with France’s somewhat belated and uneven industrialization. Indeed, Yves Lequin and Maurice Agulhon, who carry the main weight of the socio-political contributions to this volume, are not urban historians either. However, together with the urban geographer, Marcel Roncayolo, and supported by Francoise Choay and Maurice Crubellier, they turn their impressively wide reading in French and English to good account. The result is a multi-faceted, free-flowing account of the life and structures of France’s urban areas in which the inevitable gaps and superficialities pass almost unnoticed.

The basic division of labour is simple enough. Roncayolo handles the evolution of the urban network and the physical form of the town. Francoise Choay discusses urban design, broadly defined, a brief which allows her to include ideas and images of the urban existence. Lequin, Agulhon and Crubellier deal with social, cultural and political phenomena. There are some overlaps but they are kept well under control and indeed are even welcome in a book of this length. Justifying the time frame is the idea of the ‘Haussmannic cycle’, beginning in 1840 with the French industrial upswing of the mid- nineteenth century and ending in 1950 on the eve of a new phase of industrialisation and modernisation which would complete the urbanisation of France. The intervening century is portrayed as a period of partially arrested development in which the initial

REVIEWS

impulse of the Second Empire was dissipated in a persistent demographic stagnation. Thus, a building stock renewed between 1840 and 1880 could provide the dominant urban environment in France until the irruption of the Tour Montparnasse and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Meanwhile, planning orthodoxy did not change much either, clinging to the Haussmannic ideal of centralized monumentality, and virtually ignoring the low-status suburbs which increasingly accommodated France’s mechanized manufacturing. Yet much of urban France, by-passed or only partially transformed in the mid-nineteenth century, retained its traditional rhythms virtually undisturbed. symbolised here by the almost surrealistic photograph of a grotesque hay wain in central Toulouse at the turn of the century (p. 38) and Albert Kahn’s exquisite colour-filtered photographs of Beauvais and other provincial towns on the eve of the First World War. The concept of a hundred-year urban cycle is bound to be a controversial one, as Roncayolo and Agulhon admit, but it is much more than a literary device, generated by scholars culturally inclined to the fongue duke. In particular, it allows a fuller integration of the spatial and chronological dimensions than is achieved in most British urban history which, as Harold Carter has recently pointed out, has come to shun the geographical perspective.

Most of the limited discussion of the economy of French urbanisation comes in Roncayolo’s opening analysis of the developing urban network, where he draws fully on the work of Georges Dupeux and Bernard Lepetit. he gives an enticing glimpse of the spatial distribution of newly created limited companies (pp. 67-69), and Lequin makes good use of some recent work on the distribution of personal wealth undertaken or inspired by Adeline Daumard. However, in the present state of our knowledge, demographic aggregates and trends have to serve as surrogates for economic data and the emphasis of the book soon shifts to topics such as public health, crime, voluntary organisations, and trade unions. Conforming to the concept of the hundred-year cycle, Lequin identifies a gradual mechanization of manufacturing which, by 1939, had

destroyed all hope of upward social mobility among manual workers except via a transition into shopkeeping. Meanwhile, a modernizing white-collar group had emerged, aggressively superior and distinct in its attitudes and ways of life. This dichotomy was expressed spatially in the widening gulf between Paris and the rest of France, but the authors are too subtle to fall into the trap of harping on Gravier’s mechanistic distinction. Their treatment of the capital pays due regard to the suburbs, drawing for instance on Jacquemet’s work on Belleville. In the industrial provinces they stress the leading role of factory and mining towns such as Le Creusot and Montceau- les-Mines. Most welcome of all, however, is the significance accorded to big provincial centres, with Marseilles and Lyons especially favoured by their respective local patriots, Roncayolo and Lequin. Appropriately, much of this provincial material is drawn from the excellent series of town biographies edited by Philippe Wolff and published by Privat, at Toulouse.

Favoured by two thorough indexes, nominal and thematic, and an excellent bibliography, the book is a ready source of specific information as well as a sheer good read. Above all, however, it is the illustrations that live in the memory, fully integrated into the text and captioned with care and imagination. On pages 522-523, for instance, we can compare two northern strike demonstrations, in 1913 and 1947, and marvel at the lack of superficial change through two world wars and a world depression. Meanwhile, the Renault management restaurant in 1917 (p. 551) looks forward to the technocratic world which will be the subject of the final volume in this series. In the age of photography, visual evidence can at last come into its own as a historical source, but rarely has the point been so well demonstrated. Yet all the traditional virtues are here as well, with Lequin’s texts particularly notable for their rich and balanced use of historical example. Complemented by an impeccable standard of printing, this book is a monument to scholarship and publication enterprise in a country which has once again become the most brilliant European centre of the historical sciences.

University of Shefield ANTHONY SUTCLIFFE