The Vertical City: A New Geography of Paris
The Vertical City: A New Geography of Paris
On a Tuesday evening in March 2019, a maintenance worker named Christophe slipped through an unmarked door at the Porte de Bagnolet and descended forty meters below the Boulevard Périphérique. By the time he emerged, blinking, into the sodium-yellow dawn, he had walked eight kilometers through tunnels that did not appear on any map his fellow Parisians would ever consult. He had replaced a section of rail, inspected a floodgate, and eaten his sandwiches in a void carved out of Lutetian limestone that had been a quarry two centuries before it became a metro maintenance gallery. Christophe is not a literary invention. He is one of roughly four thousand agents of the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP) who, every night of the year, perform the labor that makes the visible city possible. Their work is the empirical starting point for this book. If we are to understand Paris as a vertical city, we must begin by acknowledging that the vertical city is not a metaphor. It is a place where people go, where they labor, where they die, and where the city's memory is stored in strata as legible, in their way, as the rings of an old tree.
The historiographical problem this book addresses is not the absence of writing about underground Paris. Victor Hugo gave us Jean Valjean's flight through the sewers; Émile Zola sent his characters into the limestone galleries of the Buttes-Chaumont; Louis-Sébastien Mercier imagined a subterranean Paris in his *Tableau de Paris* of 1781. The catacombs have had their chroniclers. The metro has had its corporate and popular historians. What has been missing is not information but structure: a framework that allows the reader to see these spaces not as curiosities or settings for melodrama but as constitutive of the urban system we call Paris. The argument of this book is straightforward in its claim and far-reaching in its implications. Paris cannot be understood from the surface alone. The vertical city is not a hidden second city beneath the visible one; it is the same city, viewed in three dimensions, and the omission of the third dimension has distorted every major interpretation of modern French urbanism.
The 'Visible Paris' as Historiographical Construction
The phrase *Paris visible*—or, more often, the unmarked assumption that *Paris* simply *is* what one can see from street level—has a history, and like all histories it has authors. To recover the vertical city is first to recognize how thoroughly the historiography of the French capital has been organized around visibility. This recognition is not a counsel of despair. It is the precondition for the different kind of reading the rest of this book attempts.
The intellectual genealogy of the visible Paris is long and partly geological. It begins with the seventeenth-century view of the city as a stage set for monarchical display, runs through Haussmann's mid-nineteenth-century remodeling, and culminates in the twentieth-century cult of the skyline. At each stage, the underground was not absent but subordinated: treated as inert substrate, as menace, or as raw material to be exploited and then forgotten. Hugo himself, in a passage of *Les Misérables* that is often quoted and rarely examined, observed that Paris has a second city beneath its first, "a city of sewers, which has its streets, its squares, its lanes, its arteries." Yet Hugo's underground is overwhelmingly allegorical. It is the sewer of the soul, the dark mirror in which the social contradictions of the visible city are reflected. The catacombs, which Hugo knew and visited, are mentioned in the same novel only glancingly. The quarry network, which had begun to collapse beneath the faubourgs in 1774 and would famously swallow a house on the rue d'Enfer in 1777, receives almost no literary treatment. The Parisians of Hugo's century lived above voids that they pretended were solid, and the great realist novelist, despite his legendary sympathy for the wretched of the earth, accepted this pretense.
What the realist tradition could not do, the historians of the Third Republic also failed to accomplish. The municipal historians of the late nineteenth century, drawing on archives opened after 1879, produced monumental works on the streets, the buildings, the boulevards, and the fortifications. They treated the sewers as engineering, the quarries as a public safety problem, and the metro as a contemporary achievement. They rarely asked what these three networks had in common. The institutional history of the Préfecture de Police, of the Inspection Générale des Carrières, of the Service de l'Assainissement, and of the Compagnie du Métropolitain ran along separate rails that never converged. The Archive Nationales, the Archives de Paris, and the archives of individual companies jealously guarded their collections, and no synthetic history existed. When such a history was attempted, in the great collective works of the interwar period, it took the form of the visible city with footnotes about the underground rather than an integrated vertical reading.
The mid-twentieth century shifted the problem rather than solving it. The Annales School, in its classic formulations, broadened historical inquiry to include material life, climate, and the longue durée. Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre insisted that the historian must descend from the political surface into the depths of mentalities, economies, and environments. But the Annales historians were primarily interested in rural France, in agrarian structures, in the longue durée of peasant civilization. When they turned to Paris, they wrote about the markets, the population, the politics. The underground appeared in their work primarily as a curiosity or as an example of the Baroque imagination. The great Fernand Braudel's identification of the Mediterranean world with its sea—its liquid geography—had no parallel identification of Paris with its substratum. The vertical city remained, even in the work of the most sophisticated historians of place, unmapped.
The absence is even more striking in the postwar generation that rewrote French social history from below. The historians of the *Annales* and their successors—the practitioners of the new social history, the urban historians of the 1970s and 1980s—rediscovered workers, women, immigrants, and the daily textures of life in the capital. They produced extraordinary work on housing, on labor, on the social geography of the faubourgs. And yet the underground is conspicuous by its near-absence. When the underground does appear, it tends to do so as setting—Jean-Paul Kauffmann's 1990 memoir of captivity in Beirut, by contrast, reminds us how powerful the metaphor of the underground can be for the writing of captivity, confinement, and resistance—or as cautionary tale. The collapse of the quarry network beneath the faubourgs is treated as a public safety problem resolved in the nineteenth century by the heroic Consolidation Program. The sewers are treated as the triumph of hygienist modernity. The metro is treated as a transportation system. None of these treatments is wrong. Each is partial in a way that distorts the whole.
What the historiographical tradition has constructed, in sum, is a vertical hierarchy in which the visible city is the text and the underground is the page on which it is printed. The page is acknowledged; it is rarely read. The consequences of this hierarchy are not merely academic. They have shaped urban policy. They have shaped public memory. They have shaped, most importantly, the lived experience of those whose labor maintains the vertical city and who remain, by virtue of being below, invisible to the inhabitants of the surface. To recover the vertical city is therefore not to add a chapter to the history of Paris. It is to reread the entire history with attention to a third dimension that has always been there.