Haussmannization

 I'm been reading the early novels in Émile Zola's landmark Rougon-Macquart series, and just finished the second one, The Kill. There's something deeply emotionally gratifying about reading these books in our present moment. Zola chooses as his subject the moral and economic world of the Second Empire, which he depicts as a society of bottomless corruption and rapacity, founded in an act of ruthless democide. This atmosphere of constant mendacity, greed, and cronyism in high places, which pervades the novels, seems all-too familiar to us now, at the start of the second Trump presidency.

The author started publishing these novels after the Second Empire had already fallen—but as a young journalist, Zola had cut his teeth criticizing the imperial government; and he had originally planned and started writing the novel while Napoleon III was still in power. So, the early novels in the series still have a freshness and immediacy to their anger. These are raw works of explosive political fury, directed against still-fresh wounds to the French republic. Zola is hardly, then, the detached naturalist that he sometimes imagined himself to be; here, he does not disguise his political and moral indignation. 

The Kill picks up where the previous volume, The Fortune of the Rougons, leaves off. Napoleon III has carried out his coup d'état. The republic has been destroyed. Everyone who demonstrated any patriotism or courage in the first novel has been gunned down, leaving only the greediest, crudest, and most cowardly to inherit the carcass of French society. The novel is called The Kill because it depicts the division of the spoils among this band of predators, after they have dispatched their victim. It follows the trajectory of the speculators and cynics who dismembered the freshly-killed corpse of the French republic. 

Central to this process is the program of urban renewal carried out by Baron Haussmann. Zola sees in the uprooting and carving up of the old Paris, by means of the new system of boulevards, a metaphor for the division of the spoils between the victors of the illegal coup d'état that brought the Emperor to power. The new policy of "expropriation"—what we might call "eminent domain"—has enabled the imperial government and its hand-chosen band of cronies—property speculators and developers—to cut each other corrupt deals and artificially inflate property values in order to make a "killing." 

This, then, is the second aspect of the story Zola tells that has certain Trumpy overtones. Not only does the novel depict a political society forged through a brutal coup (shades of January 6)—but specifically one fitted to serve the interests of big property developers. Trump himself, of course, made his fortune through eminent domain and the building craze of urban renewal. And the way the bigwigs of the Second Empire go about artificially propping up each other's bogus investment scams seems very reminiscent of how Trump and his cronies today are trying to boost Tesla share prices or crypto values. 

A group of hyenas picking over the remains of the democracy they destroyed, and cooperating with each other only in so far as it serves to help them glut themselves at the expense of everyone else—sound familiar? And how about Zola's description of the process of Haussmann's urban renewal? In the book's closing chapter, several characters tour the landscape of a gutted Paris, where half-demolished buildings offer a cross-sectional view of what were once working-class homes. The poor who used to be able to live there will never be able to afford to do so again... Has the same not happened in all of our cities? 

But there is an argument to be made that some of our current social and political problems in the United States—including the lack of affordable housing—are actually due precisely to the Left's overcorrection against the excesses of the urban renewal period. We have spent decades warning against the dangers of gentrification and property speculation, and erected a variety of barriers to both. The sum result—according to Ezra Klein and the other "abundance" liberals—is that we've simply made it all but impossible to build. Housing has become even more scarce, therefore—and much more expensive.

But the thing about Haussmannization in Paris is that it was designed to decrease urban density. This may have been part of a strategy of political control on the part of the new Empire—preventing the formation of the barricades that had played a role in earlier republican insurrections. Or maybe it was—as Zola argues at one point—simply a means of keeping the working class so occupied with building projects that it did not have time to perceive the political crime that had been perpetrated against it. But either way, the urban renewal of Paris in the nineteenth century depleted the housing stock, rather than adding to it. 

The same happened in many of our cities in the late twentieth century. We tore down multi-family units and replaced them with freeways and parking lots where no one could live. The process of gentrification, therefore, not only displaced working class people who had been living in these neighborhoods for decades—it also made it harder to build new units. So—the trade-off between urban renewal and the excesses of the left-wing backlash to it in subsequent decades is somewhat of a false dichotomy. The way urban renewal was accomplished gave us the worst of both worlds—gentrified housing and less of it. 

In some ways, this has been the same story of greed and dispossession that has been playing out since the dawn of capitalism and modernity. Oliver Goldsmith's great work of eighteenth century social criticism, The Deserted Village, is in part a story of gentrification. It is a tale of urban renewal and "Hausmannization" avant la lettre. It describes the displacement of working class farmers at the hands of a lord who wishes to seize their land, so that he can build a park for his private use. Trump and his ilk using eminent domain, or Haussmann using the new law of "expropriation," follow in his footsteps. 

The Left has made it too hard to build, we are told—and this may be true. But we also need to ask what we are building. If we are removing red-tape in order to make it easier to build more affordable housing, then I am all for it. But if we are doing so in order to build more parks for the rich, or parking lots for their cars, or boulevards where no one can live—then we truly are just enriching big developers and property speculators, without creating any new housing stock that could help us meet our current supply constraints. We are serving greed in just the way social critics like Goldsmith and Zola depicted. 

Zola was right, therefore, to see in the urban renewal campaign of Baron Haussmann a metaphor for the murderous coup d'état that brought the Second Empire to power in the first place. Both were crimes against the working class. And so too—history often tending to rhyme—there is a certain parallelism between Trump forging his reputation in the era of urban renewal, and his autocratic betrayal of our democratic institutions today. In both cases, the republic bleeds for the sake of satisfying the greed of one narcissistic man and his band of rich cronies.... The hyenas today are still disputing over the carcass of "the Kill."