Barricades and Boulevards: Material transformations of Paris, 1795-1871

Abstract

Destroying and constructing are equal in importance, and we must have souls for the one and the other". 1 Large-scale urban violence is a tumultuous, messy and distressing affair.Materials and patterns of everyday life are blown apart.Amongst death and disarray, important spatial operations that take place in urban conflict are easily overlooked.However, the construction of street barricades and boulevards in Paris between 1795 and 1871 transformed the city.The struggles over these transformations can be described as both the disruption and the policing of what Rancière calls the "distribution of the sensible".2 The barricades built in the streets of Paris in the revolutionary years that followed the Great Revolution of 1789, and closed with the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, were not the first or the last artefacts of urban insurgency.Nor was Paris the only city in history -even European history -to be barricaded.However, in Paris, barricading became a revolutionary technique, the development and decline of which can be traced with some precision.Barricading served complex social purposes, of which defense was only one, and not always the most significant.Thus, barricades are also an ephemeral city-scale architecture occasioned by, and changing, the social.3 History and Tectonics of a Rubbish HeapAt first, the Parisian barricades were temporary barriers, or walls erected quickly across streets.They were built by anonymous groups of insurgents from whatever loose materials could be found nearby: carts, furniture, barrels and, most typically, paving stones torn up from the roadway.They were constructed en masse.In July 1830 there were over 4,000 barricades; in June 1848 there were as many as 6,000.

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