Charles Marville and the politics of the urban sublime

Abstract

Beginning in the 1850s, the city of Paris underwent an unprecedented transformation. At the instigation of Baron Haussmann, urban planner to Emperor Napoleon III, the city’s maze of narrow streets was systematically torn down to make way for grand, modern boulevards. The daunting task of documenting the city in transition fell to one Charles Marville, who was granted the official title of “photographer of the city” in 1862 and would spend the next two decades photographing old and new Paris on municipal commission (Kennel 2013, 28–29). Marville was remarkably prolific, producing hundreds of photographs during two periods of work for the city government before and after the Paris Commune, and received accolades for his photographic skill during his life. Yet perhaps because most of the work Marville did in the 1860s and 1870s was destined for government archives, he was not even given an obituary upon his death in 1879 (Kennel 2013, 40). He remained largely forgotten until 1980, when the first major show of his work cemented Marville’s status as a premier urban archivist, fostered by the burgeoning post-modern fascination with the archive as genre. As such he often appeared in scholarly debates about attempts to canonize other “archival” photographers, particularly Eugene Atget, as the rock to which such arthistorical pretensions were bound and sunk. More recently, a major show of his work at the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014 took precisely the opposite approach, attempting to reposition him as an underappreciated artist and to show the breadth of Marville’s talents, from the early days of his career as an illustrator through his turn as the photographer of Paris. No attempts to rehabilitate Marville, however, can shake one enduring blot on his reputation: his purportedly bad politics. While Marville and his contemporaries left few traces concerning the perceived political implications of his work, twentiethand twenty-first-century scholarship of Marville has been nearly unanimous in its stance on the issue. Shelley Rice has called Marville “Haussmann’s advance man,” and accused him of using the camera to redefine the streets in “the same terms used by his ‘boss’” (1999, 86; 88). In this view, Marville’s photographs of Paris are, in the words of one critic, “part of an official discourse meant to produce the built forms [of the new Paris] and to control their reception” (Lee 2013, 110). Recent work on Marville that valorizes his work both in aesthetic and documentary terms, such as articles and book chapters by Kennel, Locke, and Clayson, complicate Rice’s claim but do not go so far as to argue for a total reconsideration of his reputation as a shill for