Paris After Haussmann: Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914 (History of the Urban Environment) - Hardcover

Soppelsa, Peter S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822948826 ISBN 13: 9780822948827

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026

Synopsis

Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage. Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Peter Soppelsa calls “secondary Haussmannization,” Parisians inverted them―revealed their hidden components to scrutinize their workings and costs for society, environment, and health―and in turn politicized them. Drawing on French government archives, engineers’ maps, the illustrated press, and a collection of over 100 photographic postcards, Soppelsa charts the diverse embodied, emotional, and everyday experiences of living with expanding urban infrastructures―streets, housing, tramways, subways, the water supply, sewers, and rivers―in Paris from 1870 to 1914. Parisians learned that infrastructures were not simply technical solutions for the social and environmental problems of city life but could also bring about new dangers and dependencies.

About this title

About the Author

Peter S. Soppelsa is an assistant professor in the University of Oklahoma Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His research combines environmental and urban history with the history of technology to explore the past of infrastructures, public works, public health, and the everyday experience of urban environments and technologies.

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Excerpt from the Introduction to Paris After Haussmann

On 15 June 1914, a powerful storm in Paris left sinkholes and explosions and fires from broken gas lines in its wake. As often happened during extreme events, photographers walked the battered streets documenting damage. Their photographs became postcards like the one shown in figure I.1, from the Paris printing firm ELD, named for its founder, the photographer Ernest Louis Désiré le Deley (1859–1917), which depicts a large sinkhole with the caption “The piping laid bare on the Rue du Havre.” The storm did what scholars call “inverting” or “surfacing” infrastructure, exposing the normally buried and hidden sewer tunnels, as well as water, gas, and electric lines, to air, light, vision, and scrutiny.1 Inversion also appears here as the contrast between the lamppost standing on the sinkhole’s edge at the top left amid the rubble, and the toppled lamppost, trailing its supply line atop the wreckage below. The photograph mimicked the storm in “laying bare” hidden infra-structures, visualizing them for people beyond Paris and for posterity.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822948826
• ISBN 13: 9780822948827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328