This article examines the way in which public response to a municipal proposal concerning greenspace reduction in Paris during the Second Empire reflected not only political antipathy but also an ever-increasing understanding of public urban greenspace as part of the private domain. By examining archival records concerning the proposal, essays, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, this article argues that a particular proprietary sensibility, fomented by expansive public greenspace development in Paris, intersected with extant social constructs and political tensions to create a public, coordinated, and sustained challenge to the authoritarian regime. Thus, the battle over the Luxembourg Garden became more than just a fight to prevent a reduction in size of a particular public urban greenspace. Rather, public debate surrounding alteration of this garden underscores the extent to which public greenspace, in general, was urban space that blurred the public—private boundary and presented unique opportunities for community formation, social integration, and political action.
I have developed these themes at length in my dissertation, "Engineering Nature: Public Greenspaces in Nineteenth-Century Paris" (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2008).
2.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, 1966 (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 96, 132, 138-39, 177-78. The gardens and squares triggered a kind of spontaneous and direct social formation that anthropologist Victor Turner referred to "existential communitas." According to Turner, at times persons in societies may experience a moment of unification through a shared experience with strangers or acquaintances, a process he identified as "experiential communitas." The feeling of unity is so strong that the assembly or group identifies the experience as being shared and immediately seeks to organize its sense of itself as a group. This organizing impulse, he called "normative communitas." Turner’s communitas is then a "modality of social relationship," or a means of community formation, rather than a location. The ostensibly natural spaces of the parks and squares, liberated from the physical forms of the built environment, were fertile ground for the development of Turner’s spontaneous, organic process of communitas. Turner further argued that the sense of camaraderie can be so strong and its positive impact on social organization so great that the group seeks to reconstitute the sensation through repetitions of the experience, rites of passage, or rituals of communitas. Turner was primarily concerned with liminality, the secular and the sacred, social structure, and ritual as means of transcending social structures in societies, yet his concepts can be a helpful way of thinking about how people, who may have had a loose or even no connection to each other outside of the greenspace, might form bonds and coalesce into a recognizable group, by sharing the park space, an experience there (watching children at play, a romantic interlude, an hour of study), or interest in use of the space. Although the Luxembourg Garden had existed as a public greenspace for some time prior to 1865, the profusion of greenspace development throughout Paris during the Second Empire and the increase in a sense of communal ownership of parks, squares, and gardens throughout the city encouraged and even increased any existing sensibility among those for whom the Luxembourg Garden functioned as a neighborhood square as well as made that sensibility, and the desire to protect the garden, comprehensible to Parisians in other parts of the city.
3.
Historians have written about the dramatic physical transformation of Paris from a chaotic, closed medieval city to a rational, open, and modern city in the nineteenth century. Much of this discussion has focused on the Second Empire and changes to the urban infrastructure: thoroughfares, transportation and sewer systems, and housing. Whatever insights historians and scholars have provided vis-à-vis Haussmannization, their treatment of the parks and greenspaces has remained fairly superficial and focused more on the parks as secondary to the functional alterations to the cityscape, as representative of the commodification of nature within the urban environment, or as merely a costly beautification project and less on greenspaces as inhabited, lived environments with social, cultural, and even political implications. This neglect, while comprehensible in some cases given the focus of the work, is nevertheless problematic since it ignores a large portion of the renovation effort (one in which city residents were significantly engaged). Given this limited focus, it is not surprising that there has also been little attention paid to the battle to save the Luxembourg Garden. Mentioned only briefly in biographies of Haussmann and histories of the renovation of Paris, the "affair" can hardly be seen as an insignificant event in the history of the Second Empire.
4.
Richard Cleary, "Making Breathing Room: Public Gardens and City Planning in the Eighteenth Century," in John Dixon Hunt and Michel Conan, eds., Tradition and Innovation in French Garden Art: Chapters of a Hew History (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 68-69.
5.
Pauline Delafon, Mémoire du Luxembourg: du jardin des chartreux au jardin du Senat ( Paris: Paris musées, 2004 ), 91-95; Jacques de Givry and Louis-Michel Nourry, Le Jardin du Luxembourg (Les Loges-en-Joss, France: JDG, 1991), 15; Arthur Huston , Le Luxembourg: le palais, le Petit-Luxembourg, le jardin, le muse, les carrières (Paris: P. Mouillot, 1905), 134-35.
6.
A quartier is an administrative municipal division approximating one-quarter of an arrondissement, although the term is often used to denote the social community in Parisian neighborhoods-a kind of urban village.
7.
Alfred Delvau , Les Plaisirs de Paris: guide pratique et illustre (Paris: A. Faure, 1867), 44; Victor Fournel, "Le nouveau plan de mutilation du Luxembourg,"Le Correspondant67 (January-April 1866): 744.
8.
Delvau, Les Plaisirs de Paris, 41-44; Adolphe Joanne, Sauvons le Luxembourg (Paris: Sausset, 1866), 15-16.
9.
Le Moniteur universel, November 26, 1865.
10.
Patrice de Moncan and Claude Heurteux, Le Paris d’Haussmann (Paris: Mécène, 2002), 201.
11.
Adolphe Joanne , "La Question du Luxembourg,"letter to the editor of Le Temps, June 7, 1866.
12.
Ibid.
13.
This dynamic was not unique to the Luxembourg Affair or to Paris. The gendered nature of particular urban spaces outside of the home presented an opportunity in the nineteenth century for women’s collective political action and participation in the public sphere prior to obtaining political rights; see Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880, Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Indeed, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, Parisian women of all classes engaged in successful petitioning campaigns to obtain increased access to parks and squares, to alter the design of the spaces, to include or exclude particular concessions from the parks, to obtain the removal of particular park employees, and to affect urban planning policy; see Hopkins, "Engineering Nature," chaps. 5 and 6.
14.
Ernest Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes (Paris: J. Hetzel et cie., 1860), 355-66. Also see Susan K. Foley, Women in France since 1789: The Meanings of Difference (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 130-31; Philip G. Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 218-19.
15.
Joanne, Sauvons le Luxembourg , 2-3.
16.
Le Temps, December 2, 1865.
17.
Ibid.; Le Temps, December 8, 1865.
18.
For example, in editorials published December 2 and December 7, 1865, Le Constitutional, accused other publications of joining in the protest too hastily and of making far to much out of the impact of the changes on the garden. The newspaper’s editor, Louis Boniface, attempted to silence critics of the project by resurrecting one of the initial arguments for the massive redesign of the city of Paris: public health and the prevention of cholera. He told readers that there had also been petitions in the past against "the wide thoroughfares that cut across the city today, saving the population of Paris from the ravages of cholera." The petitioners, he claimed "must regret and have been blissfully unaware during these past years all the benefits that they would have liked to have prevented from being realized." In the Luxembourg Affair, it was common for those who supported the government’s plan to speak of the "public utility" and the "public good" and dismiss opponents as petty and self-interested.
19.
Ferdinand Hérold , quoted in Joanne, Sauvons le Luxembourg, 4; Le Temps, December 14, 1865.
20.
Ibid. Opponents of the regime, such as Jules Ferry, Adolphe Crémieux, Jules Grévy, Odilon Barrot, and others, signed the justice’s opinion. Notable republican deputies, such as Sadi Carnot, Jules Favre, Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès, and Adolphe Thiers, signed the response letter.
21.
Le Temps, November 29, 1865.
22.
Le Temps, December 2, 1865.
23.
Victor Fournel , "Le jardin du Luxembourg et le décret du 25 novembre," Le Correspondant66 (January- April 1866): 992.
24.
Adolphe Joanne , letter to the editor, Le Temps, June 7, 1866.
25.
Fournel, "Le jardin du Luxembourg et le décret du 25 novembre,"1003.
26.
This sentiment would emerge even more fully during the Third Republic and help shape public policy. See Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), chap. 3.
27.
Fournel, "Le jardin du Luxembourg et le décret du 25 novembre,"1003.
28.
"Le Jardin du Luxembourg,"Le Monde illustré17, no. 452 (December 9, 1865): 384.
29.
Indeed, greenspace as a safe space for children’s play was a key concern of the parks service. That agency worked to provide play areas and improve children’s safety in the parks. It went as far as banning the use of mignonette in city parks because it lodged in children’s shoes, hurting their feet. (Mignonette is a kind of paving material that landscape architects today refer to today as pea gravel.) For more on the city’s concern about play areas and safety, see Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris: histoire-description des embellissements-dépenses de création et d’entretien des Bois de Boulogne et de Vincennes, Champs-Élysées-Parcs-squares-boulevards-places plantées, Étude sur l’art des jardins et arboretum (1868; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984), lix; William Robinson, The Parks, Promenades, and Gardens of Paris, Described and Considered in Relation to the Wants of Our Own Cities, and the Public and Private Gardens (London: J. Murray, 1869), 114, 126 ill.; Square Montholon; Grilles laterales, Rapport du Conducteur, Département de la Seine, Ville de Paris, Ponts et Chaussées Service Municipal des Travaux Publics, April 24, 1869, AP 1304W 210 dossier 8.
30.
Hopkins, "Engineering Nature,"chaps. 5 and 6.
31.
Le Temps, December 1, 1865.
32.
Achille Arnaud, La pioche et le Luxembourg: lettre d’un amateur de jardins aux Parisiens de la rive gauche (Paris: Charlieu frères et Huillery, 1865), 16.
33.
Joanne, Sauvons le Luxembourg, 6; Victor Fournel, "Le nouveau plan de mutilation du Luxembourg," Le Correspondant 67 (January-April 1866): 745. Fournel was less optimistic about the surprise visit than the crowd in the garden that day, and he likened it to one that a condemned man might receive before being sent to be tortured.
34.
Le Moniteur universel, February 21, 1866. The newspaper published a letter from the emperor to the marquis de La Valette, the minister of the interior: "I have visited the Luxembourg Garden to review personally the merit of the complaints addressed to me concerning the estrangement of certain portions of this garden," Napoleon III told the minister. "I was convinced that there is good reason to not extend the rue Férou, to leave intact the western part of this public promenade, and to detach only the sections indicated on the attached map."
35.
Le Moniteur universel, February 24, 1866; Le Temps, March 1, 1866; Le Monde illustré, March 3, 1866; Fournel, "Le nouveau plan de mutilation du Luxembourg," 748-49.
36.
Henri Dabot, Souvenirs et impressions d’un bourgeois de quartier Latin de mai 1854 à mai 1869 (Péronne, France: Impr. E. Quentin, 1899), 197.
37.
Although the revision spared the western sections of the garden, all but a sliver of the Pépinière remained lost to the public. Nonetheless, E. Lemoine of Le Temps was encouraged by the emperor’s revision of the plan, and he urged the public to remain active. "Public opinion must not, therefore, abate," he told readers, "it has obtained a first success on an important point, it must at least try to obtain a second. . . . It is imperative that the petition campaign continue; the Emperor can be brought around, if he can be shown that the population of Paris truly wishes to conserve the Pépinière. . . . All is therefore not finished for the Luxembourg." Le Temps, February 26, 1866.
38.
Ludovic Halévy, Carnets. Publiés avec une introduction et des notes par Daniel Halévy. tome I, 1862- 1869 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1935), 90-91; Moncan and Heurteux, Le Paris d’Haussmann, 201.
39.
Halévy, Carnets, 91; Dabot, Souvenirs et impressions, 195-96.
40.
Ibid.
41.
New York Times, April 22, 1866.
42.
Le Temps, March 25, 1866.
43.
Dabot, Souvenirs et impressions, 195.
44.
Ibid., 196.
45.
Ibid., 195.
46.
Ibid., 195.
47.
Le Temps, June 18, 1866.
48.
Conseil constitutionnel, Constitution de1852, Second Empire, http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/conseil-constitutionnel/francais/la-constitution/les-constitutions-de-la-france/constitution-de-1852-second-empire.5107.html (accessed July 12, 2009).
49.
Le Temps, August 20, 1866.
50.
Adolphe Alphand, Les promenades de Paris: histoire-description des embellissements-dépenses de création et d’entretien des Bois de Boulogne et de Vincennes, Champs-Élysées-Parcs-squares- boulevards-places plantées, Étude sur l’art des jardins et arboretum, 487 gravures sur bois, 80 sur acier, 23 chromolithographies (1867; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984), n.p.
