Investigations of the Future

by Brian Stableford

  “What supports the supposition that Hugo existed is that, not far from his tomb one finds a few ruined monuments of the Carnot dynasty.”19

  In the subsequent text, the word “gold” is substituted by “porphyry” and the last two paragraphs (which are retained even though the narrative frame has not been introduced) are modified as follows:

  “‘Messieurs, I demand to consult the Moniteur of the year six thousand, to see whether the world will continue its march to the point of vertigo.’

  “One skeptic, who had not said anything thus far, asked permission to point out that, after all, love, that beautiful invention of the ancients for the moderns; poetry, that supreme link between the finite and the infinite; the sky, constellated with stars that had been more beautiful to our wonderstruck eyes before science; and art, which reveals the gods among human beings—all those enchantments of vanished worlds—had not been rendered obsolete by what is proudly known as progress.”

  Victor Fournel: Future Paris

  (1865)

  “I have only to begin.”

  (Words attributed to M. Haussmann.)20

  “What remains to be done is at least

  as considerable as what has been

  accomplished.”

  (Speech made by the Prefect of the Seine

  to the Municipal Commission,

  29 November 1864.)

  At that time, I had a vision.

  It seemed to me that have slept profoundly for a long time, I suddenly woke up as the first hour of the year 1965 was chiming—and the angel sent by God to protect Paris lifted me up by the hair, and transported me to the top of a monument, from which he showed me the great city extended at my feet.

  This is what I saw.

  I saw a marvel that would have excited the admiration of Barrême and caused Monge and Legendre to fall down in ecstasy.21

  During my slumber, Paris had successively broken through its new boundary and overflowed in all directions into its surroundings, swallowing them up into its bosom. It was now more than a hundred kilometers around, and filled the entire département of the Seine by itself. Versailles was its royal vestibule; Pontoise was proud to form one of its suburbs. Every day the citizens of Meaux climbed the towers of their cathedral to see whether the Parisian wave had finally reached them. Step by step, the stumps of its boulevards, departing from the plain of Monceaux, came to expire on the edge of the forest of Chantilly, neatly remolded into an English park. The Boulevard de Sebastopol had driven its tip, as a scout, to the gates of Senlis, and islets of grandiose houses, scattered here and there across the bare and arid plain, in a disorder wisely regulated by the compasses of engineers, like as many surveyors’ poles and guide-stones, were helping Paris to flow rapidly along the road to Fontainebleau.

  The time was long gone when a timid and backward audacity had wanted to make the Arc de Triomphe the center of the city of which it had originally been the advance sentinel; overtaken by the rising tide which it thought it served as a lighthouse and rallying-point, Chalgrin’s monument was no longer anything but a wreck still afloat in the remotest distance of the bloated capital, and that entrance-gate, which had wanted to change its role, now punished for its ambition, resembled an exit-door to Old Paris. The city had made half its journey toward the Ocean, and the Ocean had advanced to meet it, to the extent that the old legend of Seaport Paris was finally a verity. The monstrous cancer, still spreading, had eaten into all the living flesh surrounding it, and, from one annexation to the next, all of France had become its suburb.

  By dint of transforming itself and embellishing itself, the great city had finished up donning a new skin from head to toe. No vestige any longer remained of the tenebrous past that still dishonored its splendor in 1865. A century of assiduous works, directed by half a dozen prefects who handed on as a sacred heritage the furious monomania of building and the delirium tremens of demolition, had made it the archetypal capital of modern civilization.

  In the center extended a vast square, a league in circumference, around which radiated in all directions, like the corridors of the Mazas22 around its chapel, fifty boulevards, not more beautiful than but just as beautiful as one another.

  Each of these fifty boulevards was fifty meter wide and, in compliance with regulations, was bordered by houses fifty meters high with fifty windows on the façade. All these houses, whose width was equal to their elevation, formed a long series of gigantic cubes, regularly aligned. Sage laws had determined, along with the uniform base, the mode of exterior decoration and interior distribution; each of them enclosed an equal number of apartments of equal dimensions. The same sage laws had similarly determined the location and form of shops of every sort. There were, for example, as with prefects, first class, second class and third class cafés, and for every category the number of rooms, tables, billiard-tables, mirrors, ornaments and decorations was regulated with care and foresight.

  Only first class cafés, of course, were admitted to the line of the boulevards. Thus, the eye was not wounded by the shocking disparities that the indiscipline of individual initiative produced, left to its own devices. The centralizing level, that instrument of complete civilization, had passed everywhere. Manufacturing industries, workshops and petty commerce were located in the intermediary quarters; there were main streets and service streets, just as there are main stairways and service stairways in well-organized houses.

  From that square one could, with a single glance, by pivoting around oneself, embrace the whole of Paris, perceiving all its gates. The middle was occupied by a huge monumental barracks, circular in form, surmounted by a lighthouse—an immense and vigilant eye from which, every night, a powerful beam of electric light launched forth over all points of the city—pierced, facing the fifty boulevards, by fifty embrasures, through each of which the muzzle of a cannon projected, and flanked by elegant rotundas, which were police stations.

  On the fronton of the barracks, a bas-relief (utile dulci)23—the work of a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, regenerated by the salutary intervention of the administrative element—represented the Glory of Public Order, in the uniform of an infantryman of the line, with an aureole around his head, slaying the hundred-headed Hydra of Decentralization. A frieze distributed around the edifice the most gripping episodes of that great battle, finally terminated.

  Fifty sentinels, posed in the barracks’ fifty sentry-boxes facing the fifty boulevards, were able, by means of telescopes to see the fifty sentinels of the barrière twenty kilometers away. A vast system of electric wires, radiating from the center to the perimeter, put all of those hundred posts in communication, and sent each member the necessary signals from headquarters within a single second.

  A first circular boulevard, a hundred meters broad, bordered with arcades, made a circuit of the square. The last, of identical breadth, made a circuit of the city, following the enclosure of the new ramparts on the inside. The old fortifications, destroyed and filled in, were no more than a subject of dissertation or archeologists, like Philippe Auguste’s walls.24 In the interval, arranged at one-kilometer intervals, ten boulevards half as wide were concentrically arranged, for Paris in the year 1965, ideal in its symmetry, and in which, by a prodigious effort of the municipal imagination, a means has even been found of subjecting curved lines to the principles of straight lines, offered the inestimable advantage of being rigorously founded on the decimal system. One could go through it and study it like a problem in mathematics.

  At each intersection of the ten circular boulevards with the fifty boulevards forming the spokes of the vast wheel, a square was situated, in accordance with the purest geometrical theories, the perimeter of which was exclusively composed of monuments—for monuments were not permitted to be scattered everywhere, without order and method. They were centralized.

  Provincials and foreigners had no need of any guides to visit Paris; it was sufficient for them to follow the boulevard directly in front of them on leaving their hot
el; by nightfall, they found themselves back at their point of departure, having seen all the curiosities of the first circle, without having had to go into lateral streets, abandoned to the necessities of ongoing life. The next day they began again for the next circle. They knew in advance where to find all the town halls, barracks or theaters, which alternated like the rhymes in an epic poem, and they could determine by a mere glance at a map of the city in which direction it was necessary to seek the various categories of edifices, just as mathematicians determine the fourth term of a proportion. No Englishman ever felt the need to venture beyond the boulevards, and no Parisian remembered having encountered a single one of them in the street. The monuments had their lines, just like the omnibuses; monuments with domes here, monuments without domes there; antique style to the right, modern style to the right.

  The city’s chief engineer had invented a powerful machine for transporting the ancient edifices that had been preserved into the alignment. By that means the Hôtel de Ville had been moved five hundred meters, and the Hôtel des Invalides had been obliged to rotate on its axis in order to take its place in the new city. The Buttes de Saint-Roch, Saint-Geneviève and others had come to take their places meekly in the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes and the Parc de Monceaux, where they figured among the natural curiosities, hollowed out with caves and fitted with waterfalls. Mont Valérien had been carved into the Colossus of Rhodes, each of whose hands held a gigantic torch over the city, while each of its feet accommodated a hydraulic machine, which fed the waters of the Seine into countless channels. Montmartre was topped by a dome ornamented with an immense electric clock-face that as visible two leagues away, extending to four, which served to regulate all the clocks in the city.

  The great goal pursued for such a long time had finally been fulfilled—that of making Paris an object of luxury and curiosity rather than usage, an exhibition city, placed under glass, a universal hostelry, a object of admiration and envy for foreigners, impossible for its inhabitants but unique for the comfort and enjoyments of every sort that it offered the sons of Albion. When a Parisian had the pettiness to complain, the reply was that only contemptible individuals would not sacrifice their personal comforts to the masculine joys of patriotic pride.

  The monumental system followed in the Paris of 1965 had produced certain consequences that I remembered having seen appearing elsewhere. As the construction of buildings and their architectural genre were determined a priori by the general plan of the city, instead of being adapted prosaically to needs and functions, it resulted that edifices were sometimes employed for unforeseen purposes. Primary schools and fire-stations were accommodated under domes. There were palaces that were only occupied by their concierges, and others that only lodged fountains. Once a palace was built, no one knew what to do with it, and hastened put in statue or a garden, or to have a fresco painted, or even to make it available, in order to utilize it, to a senior civil servant with nothing to do. Furthermore, every palace, even the ones that only lodged a fountain, had its sentry, its guards, its governor and its administration.

  The principal roads invariably reproduced the same disposition: along the houses ran a sidewalk divided into two sections by the two streams of pedestrians walking in opposite directions; along the sidewalks ran a causeway for vehicles, which, according to their direction, took one side of the street; in the middle, separated from the roadway by a parapet, there were four sets of railway tracks for the trains that furrowed Paris in every direction. At intervals, footbridges connected the two sides of the embankment, and even in the streets into which they trains did not go, at all the crossroads and all the most crowded locations, overpasses like the one I once saw on the Canal Saint-Martin aided pedestrians to cross the ocean of omnibuses and fiacres swirling beneath his feet without any risk of being splashed with mud or crushed.

  Every night, at two o’clock in the morning, after the theaters had closed and when the entire city was plunged in the arms of Morpheus, steam engines passed through the streets, removing the day’s mud and driving filth into the sewers. Five or six regiments of sweepers, followed by an army of floor-polishers, spread out along the sidewalks and maintained the bitumen like the parquet of a drawing-room.

  The fifty boulevards that radiated from the center to the circumference bore the names of the principal cities of France, and the fifty corresponding gates those of the départements of which each of the cities was the principal place. The names of the capitals of Europe had been reserved for the concentric boulevards. The most important squares and bridges were baptized with the names of the empire’s victories; the secondary squares and crossroads with the victories of royalty. The names of generals, ministers, industrialists, and even a few writers, had been distributed, in a logical and maturely studied order, to the intermediary streets, with the result that a knowledge of history and geography helped one find one’s way around Paris, just as a walk through Paris was a lesson in history and geography. Merely by guiding heir horses, coachmen had become the most knowledgeable men in France, and they were thinking of presenting themselves en masse to the Institut. Every Thursday and Sunday, one saw schoolteachers and parents walking groups of children through the city methodically, carefully pointing out the names and the directions of streets. Paris had become a huge mnemonic display, both synchronic and chronological, and the map of the capital was one of the elementary texts adopted by the Imperial Council of Public Education for the mutual schools and the inferior classes of the lycée.

  Needless to say, the vile labels that once inscribed tenebrous stories of the mores and customs of old Paris at every street-corner, were nowhere to be seen. No more Rue des Juifs, de la Truanderie, du Grand-Hurleur, des Mauvais-Garçons, du Fouarre, des Francs-Bourgeois, de Tire-Chape and de Vide-Gousset. Away with all that! It reeked of the Middle Ages and bad company.

  The eye was no longer saddened by those great black and somber monuments in the Gothic—which is to say, barbaric—style that had been spared by a residue of superstition. By virtue of restorations, Notre-Dame finally looked presentable. Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois had been razed in order to augment the Place du Louvre, and, while regretting the belfry of the Mairie, the inhabitants had applauded that sage determination. The three clock-faces and the carillon of the belfry had been transported to the Tour Saint-Jacques, whose ground floor had become a National Guard post, in order that it should at least serve some purpose.

  I searched for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but it had disappeared; the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, but there was no trace of it; the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had been thrown into the dustbin The fifty-meter boulevards were enthroned everywhere, with the equality of their splendor. On the sites of the large houses in the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Rue de Varennes, those obsolete refuges of aristocratic idleness, and the locations where the colleges and cloisters of the old University—the debris of feudalism and scholasticism—had opened, long rows of sparkling department stores and gilded cafés extended as far as the eye could see.

  From whatever angle one looked at the new city, it was always the same Paris, the majestic and splendid Paris, as befit the capital of the world. It no longer had any head or tail, any beginning or end; one thought that one was at its heart everywhere, which furnished poets—a few of them remained, alas; the administration even tolerated those madmen benevolently, nourishing them at its own expense in a prytaneum in order that they might write cantatas for feast-days—with a ready-made opportunity to compare the great city to the vault of heaven.

  On looking at the houses more closely, I observed two details that had initially escaped me, and which singularly intrigued my curiosity. To the façade of each one, a small instrument was fitted, similar to a meter, the purpose of which I could not understand. My guide explained to me that it was an aerometer, serving to measure the number of cubic meters of respirable air strictly necessary to each apartment and to verify that each tenant enjoyed the share of oxygen to which he was entitled. On
all the roofs series of little outbuildings were aligned, which, I soon learned, were designed for supplementary tenants; the houses had their imperials, just like trains and omnibuses. While the ground-floor shops cost fifty to a hundred thousand francs to let, and the smallest apartment was about ten thousand, the price of these outbuildings was not above a thousand écus. They were the usual abode of government employees and unmarried journalists. As for workers, relegated to beyond the city wall, they traveled five or six leagues every day by rail to go to work, but they were allowed to go into palaces in their smocks and caps, and candidates for election to parliament occasionally reminded them that they were “the sovereign people.”

  Every twenty meters, along all the boulevards, there were charming public urinals, each with three compartments, in the form of Gothic towers—for the administration, in order to respond to the calumnies of certain pamphleteers lodged in roof-kiosks, had set out to prove that it understood all styles.

  Newspaper-sellers had stalls at every street-corner. Thanks to the pressure of public opinion, enlightened by long experience, and the salutary measures taken by a paternal administration, undiscouraged by persistent ingratitude, the number of responsibly-edited papers had multiplied in a fashion reassuring with regard to public order. Service at these stalls was provided by a special corps of uniformed agents, to whom other agents in the service of public security brought bundles of papers every morning and evening containing the free appreciations of superior agents, without uniforms, regarding the government, which paid them very well in order to keep stricter control of them.