Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann by David P. Jordan, and: The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption, ” and Progress in Washington, D.C., 1861–1902 by Alan Lessoff

Abstract

370 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE connections to other Great Lakes cities. A more careful definition of the heartland would make for a more convincing argument for a particular regional consciousness. Teaford could also add to his admirable description of the growth and decline of heartland industries a deeper analysis of the region’s postwar manufacturing malaise. He presents the region’s workers as hapless victims ofglobal economic shifts and of decisions by automo­ bile corporations to disperse manufacturing throughout the United States. One would like to know if there is more to the story. For instance, heartland examples may bear outJohn T. Cumbler’s argu­ ment that 20th-century American industrial cities saw a diminution of effective civic loyalty on the part of local business leaders due to the loss of local control over manufacturing to the boardrooms of national corporations. (See Cumbler’s A Social History of Economic Decline: Business, Politics, and Work in Trenton [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989].) In establishing this point, Teaford could also analyze weakening civic citizenship as a factor in the in­ creasing cultural diffidence of the post-1920 heartland. Yet, as it stands, Teaford’s work serves as a useful introduction to the history of the rise and fall of rust-belt cities. Brian O’Donnell. S.J. Dr. O’Donnell's 1994 dissertation concerned the reaction of Merrimack River textile towns to the collapse of the New England cotton textile industry. He is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Detroit Mercv. TransformingParis: The Life and Labors ofBaron Haussmann. By David P. Jordan. New York: Free Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+455; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $28.00. The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption, ” and Progress in Washing­ ton, D.C., 1861-1902. By Alan Lessoff. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+337; illustrations, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $45.00. In 1958 David Pinkney published his classic Napoleon III and the Rebuilding ofParis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press). With his glowing evaluation of Baron Haussmann’s oeuvre, Pinkney cele­ brated the accomplishments of authoritarian technocracy atjust the time Charles de Gaulle was preparing to reintroduce it to France. American historians of Pinkney’s generation thought the French lacked that certain entrepreneurial je ne sais quoi, but Pinkney saw city building as an activity the French did better than the Americans. The way things were going in New York City, he crowed, “its citizens may wish for a man with Haussmann’s determination and his disre­ gard of the orthodox rules.” Even Pinkney’s criticisms of Haussmannization were in the spirit ofthe project: there should have been Technology and culture Book Reviews 371 another thoroughfare cut; Haussmann got certain alignments and proportions wrong. Now another American historian, DavidJordan, has turned his at­ tention to Haussmannization. In contrast to Pinkney, Jordan has a late-20th-century ambivalence to Haussmann’s Paris. It is the Paris he knows and loves, but he recognizes that there may have been some­ thing monstrous about its origins.Jordan finds the key to his ambiva­ lence—and its resolution—in the figure of Haussmann himself, whose life takes up halfofTransformingParis. There is somethinginhu­ man in his portrait of a Haussmann oscillating between absence and excess.Jordan tells us that, despite years ofstudy, he never could think of Haussmann as an individual, but only as a “type” (p. 370): the “modern bureaucrat avant la lettre' (p. 7) whose “appetite for power was voracious . . . and probably insatiable” (p. 211). Haussmann despised the Parisian bourgeoisie from which he sprang, though “had he pursued a private career, [Haussmann] would doubtless have shared the hostility of his class” to the Second Empire (p. 178). This break with his origins manifested itself in his appreciation ofParis: “The historical coherence and integrity ofpar­ ticular neighborhoods was of little concern . . . He himself had no roots in Paris, despite having been born there. He razed his natal neighborhood with the same businesslike indifference he showed to the slums” (p. 218). In fashioning his own past, Haussmann aban­ doned “historical coherence and integrity” in giving himselfPrince Eugène de Beauharnais as a godfather and in foregrounding an...