This article uncovers the visual narratives embedded within the photography of the 1910 Paris flood. Images offered Parisians multiple ways to understand and construe the significance of the flood and provided interpretive frameworks to decide the meaning of this event. Investigating three interlocking narratives of ruin, beauty, and fraternité, the article shows how photographs of Paris under water allowed residents to make sense of the destruction but also to imagine the city’s reconstruction. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of visual culture in recovering from urban disasters.
For a full account of the story of the flood, see Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 ) and the accompanying Web site http://www.ParisUnderWater.com .
2.
H. Warner Allen, "The Seine in Flood,"The Cornhill Magazine 28 (January-June 1910): 364.
3.
Allen, "The Seine in Flood,"365.
4.
Louis Dausset, Rapport général au nom de la commission municipale et départemental des inondations (Paris: Conseil Municipal de Paris, 1911), 8; Marc Ambroise-Rendu, 1910Paris Inondé (Paris: Hervas, 1997), 6.
5.
Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
6.
There are seemingly countless photographs of the flood, some of which are reproduced in Ambroise-Rendu, 1910 Paris Inondé; Philippe Mellot, Paris inondé: photographies janvier 1910 (Paris: Editions de Lodi, 2003); and Serge Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux" in La Belle Epoque: les années 1900 par la carte postale (Paris: Larousse, 1990). In addition, there are large photographic collections at the Archive de Paris (3Fi and 8Fi) and the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Photographs also appeared in newspapers and periodicals of the day. I have also consulted additional images that exist in particular archives, such as the Archive of the Archdiocese of Paris, the Archive de la Préfecture de Police, and the Archive Nationale, in collections relating to the flood. This article is based on viewing as many images as possible. For photographic evidence of photographers taking pictures, see a postcard reprinted in Claude Bourgeois and Michel Melot, Les Cartes postales: Nouveau guide du collectionneur (Paris: Editions Atlas, 1983).
7.
Bourgeois and Melot, Les Cartes postales. Bourgeois and Melot note that by the early 1900s, postcards became an important way of capturing the most significant events of the day, in effect another form of journalism. They remark that "the most famous series released was that of the Paris floods of 1910." The overall number of postcards produced annually in 1889 was about 8 million but by 1910 the number reached approximately 123 million (24). Serge Zeyons reports that there were "more than 3,000 different cards produced by some forty publishers" of the 1910 flood (184).
8.
Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography (Cologne: Konemann, 1998), 365; Ulrich Keller, "Photojournalism Around 1900: The Institutionalization of a Mass Medium," in Kathleen Collins, ed., Shadows and Substance: Essays on the History of Photography (Troy, MI: Amorphous Institute Press, 1990), 288.
9.
On photography and the picturesque, see Wolfgang Kemp, "Images of Decay: Photography in the Picturesque Tradition," trans. Joyce Rheuban, October 54 (Autumn 1990): 102-33.
10.
Archive de la Préfecture de Police, DB 161.
11.
See Michael S. Roth, et al., Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997). The discussion in this work has been especially useful at conceptualizing the idea of ruins more generally.
12.
Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (eds.), The Resilient City ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
13.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux," 212. Many of the images I discuss here are found in printed collections of flood photographs and are referred to by the corresponding page from that published volume. These and other similar images can be found in various archival collections. I have offered citations of representative examples.
14.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 71.
15.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 78.
16.
Jeffrey H. Jackson, "Solidarism in the City Streets: La Société protectrice contre les excès de l’automobilisme and the Problem of Traffic in Early Twentieth Century Paris,"French Cultural Studies20 (Fall 2009); Matthieu Flonneau, Paris et l’automobile: un siècle de passions ( Paris: Hachette, 2005).
17.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 116-17.
18.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 120-21.
19.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 179.
20.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 9.
21.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 200.
22.
Mellot, Paris inondé , 23.
23.
Archive de Paris, 3Fi 10899.
24.
Archive de Paris, 3Fi 10441.
25.
Archive de Paris, 3Fi 10725
26.
Mellot, Paris inondé, 198-99; Archive de Paris, 8Fi 55; Archive de Paris 8Fi 115.
27.
Ambroise-Rendu, 1910Paris inondé, 37; Mellot, Paris inondé, 198.
28.
Matthew Gandy , "The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space,"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers24 (1999): 23-44; Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 165-72.
29.
William Cohen and Ryan Johnson (eds.), Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen; Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973 [1958]); David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995); David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2005); Gandy, "Paris Sewers."
30.
Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2003). On nature reasserting itself, see also Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
31.
Jeannene M. Przyblyski, "Moving Pictures: Photography, Narrative, and the Paris Commune of 1870," in Vanessa Schwartz and Leo Charney (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and "Revolution at a Standstill: Photography and the Paris Commune of 1871," Yale French Studies 101 (2001): 54-78; Alisa Luxenberg, "Creating Désastres: Andrieu’s Photographs of Urban Ruins in the Paris of 1871," The Art Bulletin 80 (March 1998): 113-37; Donald E. English, Political Uses of Photography in the Third French Republic, 1871-1914 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984); Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
32.
See Ambroise-Rendu, 1910 Paris inondé, 33; and Mellot, Paris inondé, 122-23.
33.
Mellot, Paris inondé, 123.
34.
Vanessa Schwartz, "Eiffel Tower" in the electronic multimedia "Urban Atlas" supplement to Urban History 33 (2006) [http://journals.cambridge.org/fulltext_content/supplementary/Urban_Icons/atlas/intro.htm#].
35.
Pierre Pinon, Paris, biographe d’une capitale (Paris: Editions Hazan, 1999), 228ff; Anthony Sutcliffe, The Autumn of Central Paris: The Defeat of Town Planning, 1850-1970 (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), chapter 7.
36.
Sutcliffe, Autumn of Central Paris, 187.
37.
See Pinon, Paris, 260-61.
38.
James Borcoman , Eugène Atget, 1857-1927 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1984); Peter Barberie, Looking at Atget (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005). To my knowledge, Atget did not produce any photographs of the flood itself.
39.
On Parisian photography and nostalgia, see also Rice, Parisian Views, especially chapter 5. On fin de siècle fears of destruction, see W. Warren Wager, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams draws on the work of Michael Barkun’s book Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) to argue that "Accidents are episodes that may severely affect a community but that do not lead to fundamental social change. Disasters, on the other hand, are repeated shocks that result in the collapse of what has variously been called the ‘true’ society or the ‘mazeway’-‘the perceived primary environment, that combination of people and things that an individual regards as inseparably linked to his own sense of meaning and well being.’ Accidents temporarily damage this primary environment; disasters . . . transform it" (200). She also suggests that the real "disaster" was the fact that "the streets of Paris are torn up for years on end" (201). I would argue that Haussmannization was, indeed, more traumatic and "disastrous" to the city, but that the flood must be read against the backdrop of these larger transformations in the city’s landscape to understand its larger psychological and cultural impact. This theme also resonates with the larger fascination with decay and "decadence" in late nineteenth-century Parisian culture, particularly in artistic and literary circles. For more on the social construction of notions of "disaster," see Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman (eds.), The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1999).
40.
William Dûval with Valerie Monahan, Collecting Postcards in Colour, 1894-1914 cited in Naomi Schor, " ‘Cartes Postales’: Representing Paris 1900,"Critical Inquiry18 (Winter 1992): 222.
41.
Schor, "Cartes Postales, 222.
42.
See Mellot, Paris inondé, 69; Archive de Paris 8Fi 36; Ambroise-Rendu, 1910 Paris inondé, 26.
43.
Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker, 1953); David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Paul Zucker, "Ruins: An Aesthetic Hybrid," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (Winter 1961): 119-30; Kemp, "Images of Decay"; Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 85; Weber, France. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003), 76-7.
Janet E.Buerger, PierrePetit: Photographer Exhibition Catalogue (Rochester, NY : International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1981).
46.
On similar examples in the context of other disasters, see Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, Angry Earth; Beverley Raphael, When Disaster Strikes: How Individuals and Communities Cope with Disaster (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground and the work that influenced her, Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium; Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Havidán Rodríguez, Joseph Trainor, and Enrico L. Quarantelli, "Rising to the Challenges of a Catastrophe: The Emergent and Prosocial Behavior Following Hurricane Katrina," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604 (March 2006): 82-101. The idea of "improvisation" that this last set of authors depicts is particularly interesting in that it parallels closely the kinds of prosocial behavior undertaken by Parisians during the flood. Here, they draw on Tricia Wachtendorf, "Improvising 9/11: Organizational Improvisation Following the World Trade Center Disaster" (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2004).
47.
In this respect, the flood photographs, like other forms of urban visual and literary representation, create links between city dwellers and form a kind of urban consciousness, allowing people to have knowledge of others with whom they would not normally come into contact. See, for instance, Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin de Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). The difference, however, is the context of disaster. We cannot say much about many of the photographers given the nature of postcard production. Schor discusses this point in "Cartes Postales," 207 fn. 27.
48.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux,"192; Archive de Paris 3Fi10900.
49.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux,"192-93.
50.
Keller, "Photojournalism Around 1900,"286.
51.
Keller, "Photojournalism Around 1900,"203-04.
52.
Mellot, Paris inondé, 24.
53.
Mellot, Paris inondé, 43.
54.
Mellot, Paris inondé, 185.
55.
Archive de Paris, 8Fi 91.
56.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux," 195-96; see also La Croix Rouge Française, La Société Française de secours au blessés militaires et les inondations de 1910 (Paris: Croix Rouge, 1910).
57.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux," 199. For a depiction of the Navy, see Archive de Paris 3Fi 10896.
58.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux," 201-02. On the use of postcards for political purposes, see John Fraser, "Propaganda on the Picture Postcard," Oxford Art Journal 3 (October 1980): 39-47.
59.
On the visual artifacts from the Dreyfus Affair, see English, Political Uses of Photography, especially chapter 6; The Modiya Project, "The Dreyfus Affair Through Postcards" [http://modiya.nyu.edu/ modiya/handle/1964/375] and the Dreyfus Archive at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme [http:// dreyfus.mahj.org/docs/index.php]; Paula Hyman, "The Dreyfus Affair: The Visual and the Historical," Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 88-109.
60.
Keller, "Photojournalism Around 1900,"283-303. The phrase "pseudo event," of course, belongs to Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage, 1992).
61.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux,"197-98.
62.
For a firsthand account, see Robert Capelle, La Crue au Palais-Bourbon (Janvier 1910): Emotions d’un sténographe (Paris: L’Emancipatrice, 1910), 14.
63.
Tricia Wachtendorf and James M. Kendra, "Considering Convergence, Coordination, and Social Capital in Disasters" (Preliminary Paper No. 342a, University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 2004); J. M. Kendra and T. Wachtendorf, "Reconsidering Convergence and Converger Legitimacy in Response to the World Trade Center Disaster," in Lee Clarke (ed.), Terrorism and Disaster: New Threats, New Ideas (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2003); Kathleen J. Tierney, "Strength of a City: A Disaster Research Perspective on the World Trade Center Attack" (Preliminary Paper No. 310, University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 2001); E. L. Quarantelli, "Disaster Related Social Behavior: Summary of 50 Years of Research Findings" (Preliminary Paper No. 280, University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 1999); Rodríguez, Trainor, and Quarantelli, "Rising to the Challenges of a Catastrophe." See also Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave.
64.
"Maintenant, l’Avenir,"Le Matin, January 31, 1910.
65.
Rebecca Solnit, "The Ruins of Memory," in Mark Klett, et al., After the Ruins 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
66.
See Roth, Irresistible Decay.
67.
Schor, "Cartes Postales."
68.
Schor, "Cartes Postales," 222. Peter Bacon Hales makes a similar argument about a wide range of photographs of urban settings in the United States in his Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). Vanessa Schwartz also emphasizes this point in "The Eiffel Tower."
69.
See Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn of the Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Schwartz, Spectacular Realities; Gregory Shaya, "The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860-1910," American Historical Review 109 (February 2004): 41-77.; Richard Thompson, The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005).
70.
Jeffrey H. Jackson , "Walking in the Flooded City: The Limits of Flânerie in the 1910 Paris Flood,"Paper presented at the Society for French Historical Studies, St. Louis, March 2009.
71.
On postcards and the "civilizing mission," see David Prochaska, "Fantasia of the Phototheque: French Postcard Views of Colonial Senegal," African Arts 24 (1991): 40-7, as well as his book Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Elizabeth Edwards, "Postcards-Greetings from Another World," in Tom Selwyn, ed. The Tourist Image: Myths and Mythmaking in Tourism (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 1996): 197-221. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), emphasizes the "otherness" of colonial subjects in photographs; Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). More generally, on photography and empire, see James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Sylvester, and Patricia Hayes (eds.), The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1998). Terence Ranger discusses photography and empire from both the perspective of the colonizer and the colonized in "Colonialism, Consciousness, and the Camera," Past and Present 171 (May 2001): 203-15. The application of the mission civilisatrice to France itself is addressed in Eugen Weber’s classic book Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
72.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux,"202.
73.
Cover of Le Petit Journal, February 6, 1910.
74.
Zeyons, "La France sous les eaux,"200-02.
75.
Schwartz, Spectacular Realities , 192.
76.
On Apaches, see Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, Peurs privées, angoisse publique: un siècle de violence en France (Paris: Larousse, 1999); and Dominique Kalifa, "Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Paris," French Historical Studies 27 (Winter 2004): 175-94.
77.
Archive de Paris, D3 S4 27.
78.
Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Carl Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981).
79.
Susan Sontag , "The Imagination of Disaster," in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1966), 223.
80.
Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster,"227.
81.
Jeanne Przyblyski, "Revolution at a Standstill,"57-8.
82.
The Third Republic claiming the mantle of the city’s rebuilder required actively forgetting its own role in the Commune. See Karine Varley, "Under the Shadow of Defeat: The State and the Commemoration of the Franco-Prussian War, 1871-1914,"French History16 (2002): 323-44.
83.
Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Kevin Rozario, "Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America," in Vale and Campanella, The Resilient City, 27-54.
84.
Vale and Campanella, The Resilient City, 340.
85.
Rozario, "Making Progress,"30-31.
86.
Max Page describes a similar optimism in New York in the many stories of destruction and recovery told over the decades. See Max Page, "The City’s End: Past and Present Narratives of New York’s Destruction," in Vale and Campanella, Resilient City, 75-93.
87.
Steinberg, Acts of God, 35. See also Klett, After the Ruins.
88.
Marcia E. Vetrocq , "New Orleans, Lost and Found,"Art in America (March 2007), 142-43.
89.
Vetrocq, "New Orleans, Lost and Found,"143.
90.
Jeff L. Rosenheim, "Do You Know What It Means . . . ," in Robert Polidori, After the Flood (Göttingen: Steidl , 2006), 11.
91.
Aric Mayer , "Aesthetics of Catastrophe," Public Culture20 (2008), 179.
92.
Mayer, "Aesthetics of Catastrophe,"180.
93.
Susan Stewart , On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
