Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World

Nostalgia for an Older Paris and the Political Right

AT FIRST this  counter-myth of old  Paris was politically .innocuous. For writers  like Hugo  and Nerval,  the defense of old Paris was a literary  phenomenon, even an emotional  necessity, but  not a political  or sociological  issue. Things stayed that  way until  about  188o, when suddenly everything changed.

Now everyone came to understand that the real Paris, the Paris of Haussmann or the revolutionaries, had  been  the  ideologized  expression of a political  will to change, to modernize,  to "Americanize," to accept  a bourgeois  present  and perhaps  also a mildly democratic  future. The demolition of an aging, sordid city had represented -- they now understood -- the"irresistible march  of progress."  . . . .  

Afrer  1880, however, public  opinion  shifted somewhat in the opposite direction. For a new Parisian  right, which was soon to become populist  or  Boulangist   and  which  in  some respects  was the  precursor  of twentieth-century fascism, the cult  of old Paris ceased to be merely a romantic gesture,  as it had been for Hugo, the apostle of progress and republicanism. Henceforth the nostalgia  for old Paris was to be one of the new right's  most powerful weapons  in the war against  the party (or parties) of the Enlightenment -- parties of the revolutionary  or socialist  left and the capitalist, Haussannian center.

Haussmann and modernization: for some these terms now became synonymous with capitalism, Jews, and  money: ''The more I study  the eighteenth century," Jules  de Goncourt  wrote in  1861, "the  more I see that its principle and purpose  was amusement, pleasure, just as the principle and  purpose  of our century is enrichment, money ... Life in the eighteenth century was for spending money.  Modern life is for amassing it."

The great predecessor of this new sensibility was undoubtedly [the mid-19th century novelist Honoré]Balzac the inspired -- and reactionary -- enemy of modernity and  industry.  "In working for the  masses,"  he  wrote,  "modern industry goes  about destroying the creations  of ancient  Arr,  whose works were as personal to the consumer  as they were to the artisan."

"City  without a past,  full  of minds without memories, hearts without  sorrows,  souls  without love! City of  uprooted multitudes, shifting piles  of human dust, you can grow  to  become the  capital of the  world, [but] you will  never have citizens ... Who  will  live in his father's housewho will pray  in  the  church where he was baptized? Who will  know  the  room  in which  he first heard a child's cry or gathered in a final sigh? ... My house has been  torn  down,  and  the earth has swallowed it  up … The  ignoble pavement has covered everything."

And  after  these  premonitory signs  came  a flood  that   began  with Edouard Drumont, one of  the  prime   movers   behind   populist anti­ Semitism in France. . . . Drumont's book Mon vieux Paris [My old Paris]first  published in 1878,  was quite restrained. . . .

By contrast, the 1893  edition  of the  same  book was ferocious. The myth  of old Paris was no longer  just a pleasant  dream:  it had become a political  weapon. What was modern, Haussmannian Paris? The distillation  of a poison  called  the  "Parisine," an "exquisite and lethal  essence ... a subtle  poison."  Drumont had  recast  his argument in resolutely anti-Semitic, xenophobic terms. Paris was a new Babylon,  the capital  of "European interlopism." It  stood  for  rootlessness,   noxious  foreigners, and  "Jewry."  

Edouard Drumont's Anti-Semitic Journal