(This is the second of three stories that look at how cities and their economies recovered from historic epidemics. You can read the first one on Amsterdam here.)
When cholera first arrived in Paris in March 1832, some refused to let it affect their social lives.
The German poet Heinrich Heine, then living in the city, describes a masked ball held just as the first cases were announced, at which revelers danced the chahut, the high-kicking dance that later evolved into the Can-Can. Suddenly hit by shivering cold, one dancer dressed as a harlequin removed his mask, and struck horror into the crowd: his face had turned violet. This was a sign of the so-called “blue death,” caused by extreme dehydration as cholera bacteria spread in the small intestine. Some laughed and assumed it was face paint, but soon other dancers fell ill around him and were rushed to hospital. They died so quickly that some were buried still wearing the costumes they were dancing in just hours before.
Heine’s description, written for a German newspaper, may have been embroidered hearsay, but the terror that cholera struck in Parisians — and the speed at which it spread — were nonetheless real enough. The disease had arrived in Europe, says Ed Cohen, author of “ A Body Worth Defending : Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body” as a form of “colonial blowback” from India. It was part of a global pandemic spread along trade routes between European states and the growing network of colonial possessions they were seizing in South Asia, where cholera was endemic.
It likely came via Britain to Paris, where during 169 days of public health crisis, it killed 18,500 people, or roughly 2% of the city’s population, including French Prime Minister Casimir Pierre Périer. Delivering a swift, grisly death to around half of those who contracted it, cholera also brought Paris’ economy to a standstill. Anyone who could, fled, while those who remained sometimes adopted elaborate (and, it turned out, futile) protective costumes to stave off infection. The strain of the epidemic even catalyzed a small insurrection against France’s new constitutional monarchy, where a small band of rebels clashed with troops in Paris’ most cholera-stricken districts, an event later remembered in the climactic scene of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
A Plan for Rebirth
This acute shock has uncomfortable echoes of today’s pandemic, much like Amsterdam’s experience of bubonic plague in the 17th century. It is what happened afterwards, however, that might be most relevant today. Paris’ cholera epidemic may have hit hard, but, as a new study exploring the city’s post-pandemic housing market shows, it was followed by a swift economic recovery. Housing prices did drop sharply during the pandemic itself, the study by Marc Francke of Amsterdam Business School and Matthijs Korevaar of Rotterdam’s Erasmus School of Economics notes. But by 1836, four years after the pandemic hit, property price growth in cholera-hit areas regained parity with areas that had been largely spared.
As in 17th century Amsterdam, one reason for this recovery was the metropolis’ magnetic draw, which saw migrants fleeing penury in the French countryside prepared to take health risks to access Paris’ economic opportunities. The study also highlights another vital factor in the recovery. The pandemic sparked a major rethink of how Paris should be planned and built.
From an irregular city of narrow medieval lanes — hard to clean and easy to block and barricade by discontents such as the rebels of 1832 — Paris was reimagined as a place of wide, regular avenues and boulevards, re-plotted to ease flows of citizens, of traffic, of soldiers and police, of garbage and of sewage. In doing so, Paris became a template emulated across the world: the quintessential example of how health crises that shake cities to their core can ultimately provoke a vigorous rebirth.
A New Geography of Death
This transformation of Paris stems partly from the perplexity of medical researchers seeking to find patterns in the aftermath of the cholera pandemic. An official commission appointed by the government that looked at data on who had died and where noticed that the disease’s spread seemed to have ignored many of the factors then widely believed to influence contagion and mortality. Mapped across the Paris street plan, there was no apparent co-relation between the death toll and the age or sex of victims.
Deaths did not — as assumptions dating back as far as Hippocrates might have anticipated — cluster in places of either high or low elevation, or where conditions were notably hotter, colder or damper than average. Ignoring both physical boundaries such as ridges and political boundaries such as boroughs, the official report noted, cholera seemed to be selective striking “only one quartier of an arrondissement in four, and in this quartier only some streets and in these streets only some houses.” So what was behind it?
A secondary set of metrics made things much clearer. Here, the researchers looked at population density, where certain professions lived, whether prisons or barracks were nearby, and crucially, whether or not the housing was “insalubrious.” The co-relations between these factors and higher death rates were striking: Cholera may not have been acting the way they had expected an infectious disease to, but it was clearly hitting the poor and badly housed. In one notoriously crowded street near Paris’ City Hall, there were 304 fatalities alone. “Wherever a wretched population found itself encumbered in dirty, cramped lodgings” the researchers concluded, “there also the epidemic multiplied its victims.”
This linkage of poverty and mortality was, of course, not entirely new. The researchers’ data did nonetheless spark a new interest in urban planning as a sanitary measure that, while it did not yet grasp the true cause of cholera (bacteria passed via contaminated drinking water), did likely improve public health.
Already by 1833, the city had started work that expanded its sewers by 14 kilometers — a small amount that nonetheless increased the network overall by a third. This redevelopment accelerated under the influence of the Count de Rambuteau, who that year became the city’s prefect, the predecessor office to the current mayoralty. Promising to give Parisians “ water, air and shade” Rambuteau greatly multiplied the number of drinking fountains, switched oil-fueled street lamps for gas, and initiated a replanning of the city that he hoped would widen streets and transform the urban map.
Sweeping the Map Clean
This drive was arguably as political as it was sanitary. In the years between 1801 and 1831, Paris’ population had increased by almost a third. Without a physical expansion of the city, this meant that impoverished Parisians packed its core at ever higher densities. Paris’ (and France’s) rulers had also changed three times during the period, with a revolution establishing France as a constitutional monarchy in 1830. This conflict had seen groups within the Parisian elite harness the insurrectionary power of this newly expanded population to further their own ends. Some in the winning camp worried that, now that the bottle was uncorked, the same forces might in turn ultimately topple them.
A desire to rid Paris of dingy, insanitary corners was thus not solely powered by a drive against cholera, but also by fear of the ever-growing mass of people who inhabited the places where the disease appeared to thrive. “It has been impossible for the commission not to believe that there exists a certain type of population,” read the 1834 post-pandemic report, “which, like a certain kind of place, favors the development of cholera, rendering it more intense and its effects more deadly.”
These poorer, disease-prone Parisians were thus seen by the authorities as not solely the most likely victims of the disease, but also as sort of potential infectious agent that could erupt to cause chaos and even threaten the body politic. Reconstruction in inner Paris would thus initiate a long, slow process of low income displacement, in which poorer Parisians shifted away from the city’s heart, where its main institutions were located, to peripheral, slightly less dense neighborhoods such as Belleville, then later on to today’s suburbs.
Despite Prefect Rambuteau’s zeal, this drive to open up Paris initially stalled, largely because of landlord resistance. The city did demolish a narrowly planned, densely built section on the Seine’s right bank where cholera hit particularly hard, replacing it with today’s Rue Rambuteau, a broad street linking the Marais district with the city’s main produce market at Les Halles. On the left bank the city also got the Rue Soufflot, which used demolition and reconstruction to create a now famously photogenic vista in front of the Panthéon.
Initially, that’s as far as things went, as the authorities found their redevelopment plans stymied by a lack of firm expropriation laws, and a court system primarily sympathetic to appeals by landlords. It was still possible in 1845 for socialist Victor Considerant to call Paris “a vast workshop for putrefaction, where poverty, plague and illnesses work in concert, where light and air scarcely penetrate.”
Considerant wasn’t entirely wrong: In 1849, Cholera struck Paris again, killing marginally more people than it had in 1832. But even while it proved just as deadly, Paris’ next pandemic did serve to validate Rambuteau’s efforts. In the areas he had demolished on the right bank, as Francke and Korevaar’s study notes, death rates were notably lower than they had been during the previous pandemic.
This success, along with a more muscular approach to expropriation, helped to power the next, considerably more effective replanning of Paris in the 1850s under Baron Haussmann, which finally and definitively created the architecturally uniform Paris of concentric boulevards and axial avenues, of yellow limestone, wrought iron and austerely pruned trees we know today. This can hardly be deemed an architecture of fear, but somewhere in its roots still lurks the shock of a sickly, bluish face at a ball.
The Perils of Inaction
In a period when many cities are starting to emerge from another pandemic, Paris’ swift recovery might be encouraging. Included toward the end of Francke and Korevaar’s study, however, is an acknowledgement that Paris’ revival was not necessarily an automatic reflex. This is borne out by the example of London, the study notes, which experienced a localized and much smaller cholera outbreak in 1854.
This outbreak has since become legendary, because its exploration by epidemiologist John Snow succeeded in pinpointing cholera’s transmission via fecally contaminated water: Snow managed to trace back cases in the Soho neighborhood to a single faulty water pump. But while the investigation of London’s outbreak advanced medical knowledge, a paper published last year found that it did little to improve conditions in the affected area, largely due to official inaction. While London in general made great leaps in sanitation and housing conditions in the later 19th century, Soho itself gained no notably improved infrastructure. Its poor reputation ever more entrenched following the crisis, Soho’s rents dropped further and its courtyards and alleys retained a reputation for poverty and criminality well into the 1960s.
Paris’ example may suggest that thinking hard in the aftermath of a public health crisis can see cities thrive. Just across the channel, however, the experience of Victorian Soho is a warning of the stagnation that can linger in the absence of meaningful action.