Baudelaire, Haussmann, Fustel de Coulanges: The Modern Metropolis and the Ancient City

Abstract

One of the first metropolitan heroes is homeless: the protagonist of Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840) — terrible, mysterious, decrepit — is an old man who wanders day and night in London. The narrator tries to follow him, day after day, night after night: impossible to see him resting anywhere.¹ ‘The big city’s genius’ is continuously rushing, running, retracing his steps ‘with a mad energy’. To the narrator’s surprise, there is no rationale in the old man’s circuits. Disquieting allegory of the city, the man of the crowd inhabits the streets, condemned to be eternally outside, without a home, without a name. If he gets inside, it is in a public place, in ‘one of the huge suburban temples of Intemperance’, in ‘the most noisome quarter of London, where everything wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime’,² next to anonymous, wretched people, drinking gin, mixing misery and despair.

— Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your

father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?

— I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

— Your friends?

— Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.

— Your country?

— I do not know in what latitude it lies …

Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris