Anthropocene Under Paris? Rethinking the Quarries and Catacombs

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay takes the Paris underground as a ‘naturalcultural contact zone’ that allows us to consider what current eco-critical discussions of the Anthropocene might contribute to nineteenth-century French studies. Although the origin-point of the anthropocene era continues to be debated, some scholars point to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century geological theories of deep time as causing a crisis of representation; the Paris basin emerges as a stratigraphic site that makes visible the incommensurability of human and Earth timescales. I put recent critical work on non-human agency of la terre into dialogue with writings by Nadar, Simonin, and Balzac.