Modernism In The Streets

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Part Three

This post covers the next chapter of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air where Berman uses Baudelaire to explore the importance of Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards. Read parts one and two.

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The Modern Allure

Berman begins this chapter by lauding Baudelaire (1821-1867) as perhaps the most important modernist, claiming he “did more than anyone in the nineteenth century to make the men and women of his century aware of themselves as modern” (p. 132). He was able, according to Theodore de Banville, “to give beauty to sights that did not possess beauty in themselves.” For reasons that we will see, Baudelaire offers us an insightful way for understanding the modern world through the built environment.

Baudelaire didn’t like the dualistic way of conceiving the world into modernist art and culture, on the one hand, and the modernization of science and the material world, on other. He thought both were intertwined (p. 132). His stories and poems are known for lyrically celebrating modern cities and urging us to find wonder in everyday life. This is most obvious in his preface to “Salon of 1846” (an essay where he reviews several art pieces from that year). Baudelaire celebrates the energy of the bourgeoisie. In their “intelligence, willpower, and creativity in industry,” he finds “a natural affinity between material and spiritual modernization,” arguing that “the groups that are most dynamic and innovative in economic and political life will be most open to intellectual and artistic creativity (pp. 136-137).

While praising the bourgeoisie for entrepreneurship, he did not think that meaningful art would flourish in the upper class. Far from envisioning art as an isolated, holier than thou activity, Baudelaire argued that it should find inspiration in the modern energy of everyday life. Because the world was changing so fast—because everyday relations were dissolving and being reinvented: “all that is solid melts into air”—Baudelaire thought vibrant energy was present even in the mundane. While inventions such as steam trains, sewing machines, and cameras might seem boring today, for the average person it was exciting and inspiring. The camera alone caused debates about the meaning of art and whether it represented Truth being valued more than Beauty.

If Baudelaire is inspired by this rich, modernist spirit, he is also cautious. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” he describes everyday life as “...a system of dazzling appearances, brilliant facades, glittering triumphs of decoration and design” (p. 136). He worries that what may seem to be physically entrancing might hide something dark beneath. His reflections point out how easy it is to be fascinated by “the latest fashion, the latest machine…the latest model regiment” yet blinded by their negative potential. Military parades encapsulate this dichotomy, with their “glittering hardware, gaudy colors, flowing lines, fast and graceful movements” (p. 137). Present day photographer David Shields explores this issue in his book, War Is Beautiful. War photographs, when composed in a certain way, can “glorify war through an unrelenting parade of beautiful images whose function is to sanctify the accompanying descriptions of battle, death, destruction, and displacement,” Shields says in an interview with Vice (2015).

Baudelaire himself realizes how easy it is to dissociate from the modern world: to move from fascination to despair when realizing that society has confused material progress with spiritual progress. What modernism eventually becomes for Baudelaire is something that is in fact beautiful and exciting yet also filled with “misery and anxiety” (p. 141). While he wants spiritual progress to flow along with material progress, he is absolutely weary of progress for the sake of progress alone. He wonders if “indefinite progress might not be [humanity’s] most cruel and ingenious torture” (p. 142). This is a possibility that Marx, as I discussed in the last post, was not as willing to deal with.

His writings, Berman explains, flirt with the excitement that modern life offers while remaining skeptical of modernization that is solely superficial:

His heart and his sensibility draw him irresistibly toward the city’s bright lights, beautiful women, fashion, luxury, its play of dazzling surfaces and radiant scenes; meanwhile his Marxist conscience wrenches him insistently away from these temptations, instructs him that this whole glittering world is decadent, hollow, vicious, spiritually empty, oppressive to the proletariat, condemned by history (p. 146).

His writings represent a relatable figure: someone who “wants to be saved, but not yet” (p. 146). My instinct is to laugh at the idea of being dazzled, tempted even, by a vibrant street scene. How quaint this sounds in an era where we are drastically over-stimulated by technology that intelligently plays to our psychological tendencies to keep us distractingly engaged with meaningless media content.

But this is more than that. It’s about how the conveniences of modern life and the consumptive nature of capitalism distract people from the underlying fissures in society: the social injustices, the poverty, the war crimes, the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many. Like every generation before us, we’re distracted by shiny things. That in itself is the mistake: to become deluded by material progress alone without asking how far we are progressing socially. This is why a 19th Century philosopher is still relevant.

Haussmann’s Boulevards

In his poem, “The Family of Eyes,” Baudelaire explores the way that Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal projects in Paris, namely the construction of his many boulevards, gave way to a uniquely modern experience of urban life. Baron Haussmann is famous in urban planning and design for overseeing the construction of public infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, sewers, and parks. He would inspire important figures such as Robert Moses (who Berman will address in the last chapter), known for large scale public works projects such as the Cross Bronx Expressway. Haussmann represented a modern, top-down approach to urban planning that saw the city as a complex whole. In this light, Haussmann saw his new boulevards “as arteries in an urban circulatory system. These images, common today, were revolutionary in the context of nineteenth-century urban life” (p. 150).

Representative of modernity partly because of their pursuit for a grand, ideal vision for urban life, they also represented the costs of so-called progress. Haussmann’s new boulevards came at the cost of impoverished neighborhoods. The neighborhoods impacted by the boulevards tended to be some of the most impoverished, beset by overcrowding, mass unemployment, food shortages, and disease. While some historians claim that even the locals were glad to see their neighborhoods wiped clean, Berman points out that there was no plan for accommodating displaced residents. And nothing to be done, of course, about the underlying social structure that allowed those neighborhoods to exist. As Baudelaire illustrates in his poem, this grand planning effort reconfigured the relationship the city had with its poor.

The poem depicts two lovers out at dinner at a cafe along one of Paris’ new boulevards. The cafe, being new, is beyond dazzling. It is adorned with a “ridiculous profusion of…nymphs and goddesses bearing piles of fruits, patés and game on their heads…all history and all mythology pandering to gluttony” (Baudelaire, p. 149). It represents a style that today we might call Camp: “an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element” (Wikipedia). The modern day equivalent might be a Cheesecake Factory.

During dinner the couple are confronted by a poor family gazing in from the street. The family said nothing but their eyes spoke of admiration, desire, and ultimately resignation. They were taking in the sights of a restaurant in which they didn’t belong. The boyfriend, noticing more the ostentatious design of the restaurant, the abundance of food around him, felt ashamed. Turning to his girlfriend, hoping for consolation, he finds her accusing the family of staring and asking him if he can find the manager to tell them to go away.

This social encounter illustrates the contradiction of modern progress. In fact, the boulevards themselves make the city more accessible and therefore poverty more transparent:

Now, at last, it was possible to move not only within neighborhoods, but through them. Now, after centuries of life as a cluster of isolated cells, Paris was becoming a unified physical and human space (p. 151).

The boulevards, the shops that lined them, the sight lines they created for monuments around the city, made Pairs “a uniquely enticing spectacle, a visual and sensual feat.” Cafes like the one Baudelaire’s couple found themselves in were shiny and decadent, but in their brightness they illuminated more clearly the social inequality of the city.

As the couple basks in discomfort, one ashamed and the other enraged, their “happiness appears as class privilege. The boulevard forces them to react politically.” And in that moment their romantic night out loses its innocence. But neither of their political responses, liberal sentimentality or reactionary ruthlessness, seem very hopeful. However, “we can hope,” Berman says, “for a future in which the joy and beauty, like the city lights, will be shared by all” (p. 155).

Le Corbusier’s Failed Utopia

The boulevards, grand in their size and design, exciting in their social atmosphere, were not all orderly. Many were “...especially trying and terrifying to the vast majority of Parisians who walked” (p. 158). Their “moving chaos” posed challenges for pedestrians trying to navigate a street full of horses, carriages, streetcars, and automobiles. Many found themselves “...contending against an agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy, fast and lethal.”

These kinds of chaotic street scenes would create another modernist ideal, far more destructive than Haussmann’s boulevards: the separated highway. Birthed partly out of a rational discomfort with dangerous city streets in which mixed traffic left pedestrians exposed and vulnerable, the idea for the separated highway would have theoretically removed dangerous traffic from local city streets. The obsession with functional separation would fundamentally reshape how American cities were designed. And it would far from accomplish its goal of safe streets.

Le Corbusier is commonly known as the father of the highway, what he envisioned as “a machine for traffic” (p. 167). In his book, The City of Tomorrow, he envisioned a radical redesign of cities that completely separated automobile traffic from pedestrians and replaced current urban development with tall towers permeated with parks. His vision, far too radical to ever be realized, was bastardized and implemented in piecemeal in the worst ways. His towers in the park became the model for public housing that isolated poor residents into residential towers (Pruitt-Igoe being the most infamous). This scheme was so disastrous it arguably ended the US government’s involvement in building and managing affordable housing. And his separated highways blasted through neighborhoods, often the most poor and disadvantaged, destroying communities and economically decimating downtowns for decades.

It was Jane Jacobs, through her advocacy and her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that pointed out the “moving chaos” of modern cities—the chaos Le Corbusier was trying to solve by removing completely—“was in fact a marvelously rich and complex human order, unnoticed by modernism only because its paradigms of order were mechanical, reductive and shallow” (p. 170). A city built around the primacy of the automobile and a segmentation of urban life leads to cities that feel lifeless—not to mention unhealthy and unsustainable. The obsessively functional approach to modern city building in the US—roads streamlined for cars, residential, commercial, and industrial uses cordoned into their own areas—turns out to not be so functional after all. And we’re left with, Berman argues, a contemporary desire for an “openly troubled but intensely alive” city, a bargain to accept the liveliness of cities before the highway and single-use zoning, even if that means it comes with the messiness of diverse urban life.¹

Rather than seeking to erase the friction that comes with living in cities, the contradictions, the social unrest, the cultural differences, a modern approach can see these qualities as worthy of embracing. Berman’s main point in this chapter is that Baudelaire’s modernism, one that embraces diversity and complexity, is one that city planners are advocating for now, having realized we have gone astray with the motorized modernism that destroyed neighborhoods for transportation convenience. This insight, that Baudelaire has something to offer 20th Century cities (arguably 21st Century as well), is precisely why I’m engaging with books like this. I find time and again that old ideas are often far more relevant than one might expect.

1. Richard Sennett discusses this in his book, The Uses of Disorder.

Thumbnail art: “The Boulevards.” Pierre Bonnard. 1900. Art Institute of Chicago: Albert H. Wolf Memorial Collection.