The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870-1914.

Abstract

This study examines the modernization of Paris's built environment, mass transit, water supply and sewage systems from 1870 to 1914. While we often associate “modernity” with power, order, progress and mastery, Paris's modernization offers a different take on modernity, stressing its contingency, uneven development, heterogeneity and fragility. Existing histories portray this era (often called the “Second Industrial Revolution”) as one in which far-reaching changes in science and technology revolutionized everyday life in major Western cities. While both technology and everyday life changed in this era, these changes were not as beneficial or universal as we remember. Nor were changes in everyday life the result of 'more fundamental' technological changes. Paris between 1870 and 1914, undergoing massive public works and infrastructural modernization, is an ideal case for empirically demonstrating that new technologies were slowly and unevenly worked into everyday life. In this era the Paris authorities equipped the city with increasingly complex networks of roads, rails, pipes and wires. This bound technology, humans and natural forces in new relations, making Parisians dependent on industrialized distribution networks for basic needs like food, water and mobility. It increased the heterogeneity, complexity and fragility of the built environment, reproduced social inequalities, and increased ecological damage. While the ideology of France's civilizing mission kept the authorities identifying technological development with progress, results at the level of everyday life were mixed. Technological change had paradoxical effects: it encouraged comfort, health, and mobility, but also brought new dangers, anxieties, and risks. Industrializing Paris's transportation and water networks not only improved the city’s traffic and hygiene, but also brought new risks: failures in one network due to its dependence on others, mass shortages of resources, and vulnerability to natural forces like the catastrophic 1910 flood. But if a “capital of modernity” like Paris experienced such uneven development in this age of rapid modernization, then this case offers insights for rethinking conceptions of modernity more generally, highlighting the essential role of technological determinism in grand narratives of modernity, as well as the crisis tendencies, contradictions and fragility that come with it.