Drawing on Bachelard’s notion of “cosmicity” this article investigates the living conditions of Parisian working-class families in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century social critics claimed that the lack of privacy in urban apartments made decent family life impossible. However, evidence from judicial dossiers concerning attentat à la pudeur (intimate assault against children) illuminates the lived experience of children and their families in Paris apartments. Rather than a sharp divide between public and private, children experienced their apartment homes as the core of a social and spatial world under the surveillance of parents, neighbors, and other children.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994), 4.
2.
Ibid., viii.
3.
Ibid., 26.
4.
The Association des Amis de Gaston Bachelard maintains a photo of his home in Bar-sur-Aube at http://www.gastonbachelard.org/fr/gb/vallage/traces.htm .
5.
For more on the Haussmannization of Paris, see David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003); David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995); Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris before Haussmann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
6.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.
7.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space , 27.
8.
Frédéric Le Play, La Réforme sociale en France: Déduite de l’observation comparée des peuples européens, 5th ed., vol. 1 (Tours, France: Mame et fils, 1874), 378. All translations from published sources in French are by the author.
Eugène Tallon, La Vie morale et intellectuelle des ouvriers , 2nd ed. (Paris: Plon, 1877), 390.
14.
Ann-Louise Shapiro, "Housing Reform in Paris: Social Space and Social Control," French Historical Studies 12 (Autumn 1982): 506. For greater detail also see Shapiro’s book, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850-1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France, 1840-1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
15.
See Sylvia Schafer, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Andrew R. Aisenberg, Contagion: Disease, Government, and the "Social Question" in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).
16.
In his recent study of childhood in France, Colin Haywood cites autobiographical accounts of urban working-class housing but does not problematize the relationship between space and sociability. See Growing Up in France from the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 169-71.
17.
Alan Mayne has emphasized the importance of developing an "ethnography of place," specifically in the study of poor urban neighborhoods. See Alan Mayne, "On the Edge of History,"Journal of Urban History26 (January 2000): 249-58.
18.
Archives de la Ville de Paris (AVP), series D2U8.
19.
Occasionally trial dossiers include an artist’s rendering of the interior of the apartment and its floor plan. See, e.g., AVP, D2U8/90 Michet, September 30, 1879.
20.
Arlette Farge , La Vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs, et solidarités à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1986).
21.
Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Marcus highlights the contrast between multifamily apartment buildings in Paris and the Anglo-American attachment to single-family dwellings. In the United States, the trend toward multifamily buildings in the nineteenth century created great anxiety about the loss of privacy and the increased potential for sexual impropriety. See Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 9; and Elizabeth Collins-Cromley, Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
22.
Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); David Garrioch, Neighborhood and Community in Paris, 1740-1790 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Roderick Phillips, "Women, Neighborhood, and Family in the Late Eighteenth Century," French Historical Studies 18 (Spring 1993): 1-12. Also see Eliza Ferguson, "Reciprocity and Retribution: Negotiating Gender and Power in Fin-de-Siècle Paris," Journal of Family History 30 (July 2005): 287-303.
23.
AVP, D2U8/105 Lange, September 30, 1880. All translations from judicial dossiers are by the author. La femme was commonly used to designate a married woman of the working class in this era, rather than madame. The girl was taken in by the Couliau couple when her mother died five years earlier. The girl’s biological father was Aimée Couliau’s maternal uncle, and her mother was her close friend. On her deathbed, the mother made Aimée promise that she would care for the child. The girl herself told the investigating magistrate, "When I say maman, I am mistaken, I mean to say, my aunt, because I lost my mother, and I was raised by the person I was just talking about." It is not clear that being orphaned by one or both parents made a child more vulnerable to attack. In this study, twenty children definitely had both parents still living, in nine cases either the mother or father was dead, and in the others it is impossible to tell with certainty if both parents were still living.
24.
AVP, D2U8/90 Michet, September 30, 1879. In fact the Scharffs were the girl’s maternal aunt and her husband, and the man they were supposed to be protecting her from was her biological father, who had never legally claimed his paternity.
25.
AVP, D2U8/79 Delaporte, November 7, 1878.
26.
AVP, D2U8/156 Moret, January 7, 1884.
27.
AVP, D2U8/41 Bert, December 4, 1875.
28.
AVP, D2U8/ 3 Stoffaës, May 27, 1867.
29.
AVP, D2U8/41 Bert, December 4, 1875.
30.
AVP, D2U8/230 Guyot, December 8, 1887.
31.
AVP, D2U8/79 Kieffer, November 7, 1878.
32.
AVP, D2U8/34 Leroux, December 28, 1874.
33.
AVP, D2U8/79 Gostalle, November 7, 1878. The concierge locked the book deliverer into the apartment and went to summon the police. Although he escaped through the window, he was soon apprehended.
34.
AVP, D2U8/79 Jamain, November 6, 1878
35.
AVP, D2U8/105 Lange, September 30, 1880
36.
AVP, D2U8/62 Brizion, July 6, 1877; D2U8/19 Devoyon, June 26, 1873; D2U8/156 Hallet, January 10, 1884; D2U8/48 Mandrut, June 8, 1876 (a lodger); D2U8/2 Sanson, April 26, 1867.
37.
AVP, D2U8/3 Janiaux, May 31, 1867.
38.
AVP, D2U8/156 Moret, January 7, 1884.
39.
AVP, D2U8/79 Delaporte, November 7, 1878
40.
AVP, D2U8/35 Lassiège, January 19, 1875. The two girls lived in the same apartment building and usually spent their days together. When their mother and sister had to deliver completed piecework to their employer, the girls were sent to stay with another family member, who was not home, so they played in the courtyard where Lassiège found them.
41.
AVP, D2U8/3 Stoffaës, May 27, 1867
42.
By contrast, in one case, a child’s description of places she should never have been-a man’s apartment- added credibility to her claims about an attack. The man had picked her up in the street while she was on her way to a religious instruction class (AVP, D2U8/237 Daveu, April 16, 1888).
