The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation 9781442669055

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THE FEEL OF THE CITY Experiences of Urban Transformation

At the start of the twentieth century, the modern metropolis was a riot of sensation. City dwellers lived in an environment filled with smoky factories, crowded homes, and lively thoroughfares. Sights, sounds, and smells flooded their senses, while changing conceptions of health and decorum forced many to rethink their most banal gestures, from the way they negotiated speeding traffic to the use they made of public washrooms. The Feel of the City exposes the sensory experiences of city dwellers in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the century and the ways in which these shaped the social and cultural significance of urban space. Using the experiences of municipal officials, urban planners, hygienists, workers, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens, Nicolas Kenny explores the implications of the senses for our understanding of modernity. nicolas kenny is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University.

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The Feel of the City Experiences of Urban Transformation

NICOLAS KENNY

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4774-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1581-6 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Kenny, Nicolas, 1977–, author The feel of the city : experiences of urban transformation / Nicolas Kenny. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4774-9 (bound)   ISBN 978-1-4426-1581-6 (pbk.) 1. Urban ecology (Sociology) – Belgium – Brussels – History – 20th century.  2. Urban ecology (Sociology) – Québec (Province) – Montréal – History – 20th century.  3. Community development, Urban – Belgium – Brussels – History – 20th century.  4. Community development, Urban – Québec (Province) – Montréal – History – 20th century.  I. Title. HT241.K45 2014  307.7609493'32  C2014-900998-4

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

For Stephanie, Béatrice, and Olivier

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Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Abbreviations  xv Introduction: The Body Urban  3 1 Comparable Cities  24 2 Image Makers  42 3 Encounters with Industrial Space  78 4 Home for a Rest  120 5 Street Scenes  156 Conclusion: Keeping in Touch  200 Notes  213 Bibliography  255 Index  295

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Illustrations

1.1  Environs de Bruxelles  31 1.2  Island of Montreal  35 2.1  The Commercial Metropolis of Canada  45 2.2  Bruxelles  47 2.3  Montreal – A “Look Out” on Mont Royal 48 2.4  Le Palais de Justice – façade vers la rue des Minimes   50 2.5  View from Mount Royal  53 2.6  Les toîts de Bruxelles  55 3.1  Foundries, warerooms, etc., of H.R. Ives & Co. 83 3.2  Montreal from Street Railway Power House chimney, 1896  86 3.3  Usines Pipe  93 3.4  Le livre du travailleur  105 3.5  Ouvrier peintre  107 4.1  Les foyers et l’enfant  131 4.2  Family life  145 4.3  Dishonoured  147 4.4  Bruxelles féminin  151 4.5  Le Canada – l’expansion de Montréal  152 5.1  Place de la Bourse 163 5.2  Bruxelles cri-de-rue  166 5.3  Children and snow bank for Mr W. Birks, Montreal  168 5.4  Temptations of the street  180 5.5  Encens de foire  182 5.6  La Kermesse  183 5.7 Luxurious facilities 188 5.8  A public urinal in Brussels  192

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Acknowledgments

I’ve often been asked, with a mix of curiosity and interest, about my choice of Montreal and Brussels as focal points for a study on the connection between urban space and the body at the turn of the twentieth century. I hope the reader will be convinced by the many arguments that justify this project intellectually, but I wish to begin by acknowledging what some of the urban reformers discussed in this book would have called the équation personnelle underlying this research, that is to say my own sense of attachment to these places and to the many people who have accompanied me through my explorations of their atmospheres and histories. It was in the course of preparing and delivering a walking tour of the largely silent, then reviving, Faubourg des Récollets for the Biennale de Montréal that I first began to wonder about the ways people might have responded, in interior and subjective ways, to the landscape of massive, looming, yet intriguingly ornate factories and warehouses that shaped this neighbourhood, and the rest of the city, during its industrial heyday. And how did the experiences of Montrealers compare with those of residents of other industrial cities, I wondered. Michèle Dagenais immediately agreed to help me translate these questions into the groundwork for a doctoral thesis. I am glad now for this opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks to Michèle not only for supporting this project from the beginning, but also for continuing to offer invaluable insight, thoughtful criticism, and much-appreciated encouragement every step of the way, and to this very day. Merci pour tout. Brussels quickly appeared as an ideal setting in which to examine the possibility that urban dwellers’ visceral, bodily connection to the unique spaces of the industrial city elicited similar hopes and aspirations,

xii Acknowledgments

concerns and fears, as people were implicated in processes of global scope that stretched beyond local specificities and differences. Not only were Montreal and Brussels comparable in terms of size and regional influence, and transformed by industrialization and urbanization at much the same time, but research collaborations and institutional partnerships recently set up by scholars in the two cities provided me with a rich and vibrant network in which to undertake this study. Brussels, I knew, was an equally fascinating city in which to explore the legacy of industrialization, and on a more personal level, I looked forward to the chance to become more intimately acquainted with some of my own familial roots. Serge Jaumain enthusiastically accepted to work with me on the Brussels end, and I am deeply appreciative of the convivial welcome he provided, opening many doors, offering sage advice, and making my extended stays in Belgium truly enjoyable. The research and writing of this book were also made possible by the generous support of several institutions, which I gratefully acknowledge: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Fonds de recherché du Québec – Société et culture; the Department of History and the Direction des relations internationales of the Université de Montréal; the Centre d’études nord-américaines and the Bureau des Relations Internationales et de la Coopération of the Université Libre de Bruxelles; the Montreal History Group; Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec; Wallonie-Bruxelles International; and the Simon Fraser University President’s Research Grant. Teachers and colleagues in Montreal, Brussels, and many other places have pushed me to strengthen my argument and refine my analysis, offering welcome suggestions, recommending sources, and hearing me out as I mulled ideas. I have benefited immensely from feedback from and discussions with Denyse Baillargeon, Harold Bérubé, Amélie Bourbeau, Chloé Deligne, Richard Dennis, Denis Diagre, Michel Ducharme, Magda Fahrni, Donald Fyson, Simon Gunn, Ollivier Hubert, Michael Huberman, Tamara Myers, Mary Anne Poutanen, Jean Puissant, Jarrett Rudy, Amy Tector, Pierre Van den Dungen, Cécile Vanderpelen, Brian Young, and too many others to name here. As a student, I was warmly received into the Montreal History Group (MHG), a collegial and rigorous team of researchers who, collectively, have had an enormous impact on my scholarship. I would like to thank all of the members of the MHG for years of thought-provoking discussions, for their continued role in mentoring students, and for forming a rich intellectual community of which it is a pleasure to be a part. My thanks also to Maude-­Emmanuelle Lambert and Sonya Roy of the MHG for their research assistance in the later

Acknowledgments xiii

phases of this project. It has also been a privilege to join the History Department at Simon Fraser University, where I have had the good fortune to work with superior scholars and dedicated colleagues. For their astute comments on sections of this work, I wish especially to thank Jeremy Brown, Elise Chenier, Jack Little, Roxanne Panchasi, Jennifer Spear, Ilya Vinkovetsky, Sarah Walshaw, as well as Dimitris Krallis for showing me that west coast beers could be as delectable as those I had come to love in Belgium. At the University of Toronto Press, I am indebted to Len Husband for his good humour in guiding me through the publication process, to anonymous readers whose generous comments helped me improve this book considerably, and to Frances Mundy and James Leahy for their skilful editorial work. Any errors of fact or interpretation remain, as they say, entirely my own. Historical research is often a solitary task, but I have hardly noticed, so well surrounded have I been by family and friends. For their presence and confidence in me, my thanks and love to my parents, Françoise and Stephen Kenny, and to my sister Annelies. With them I acquired a taste for travel and adventure, and their influence pervades this book. My grandmother, Victorine Verhulst, affectionately facilitated many transfers between Canada and Belgium, and my godmother, Mariane Pâquet, offered both gastronomic hospitality and long-term cat-sitting services. Jean-Louis Pâquet and Anna Van Ermengen; my “Ontario Aunts,” MaryEllen, Anne, and Marion; as well as Louise, Gerald, and the entire Bolton family have also been unwavering in their support and encouragement. Christiane and Jean Verhulst, Barbara Lerda, and Frédéric Verhulst made sure my glass was never empty and made Brussels feel like it had always been my home. I have learned much about the city in the friendly company of Charles Van Hauteghem and Ahmed Gara-Hellal. Gabriel Malo and Jean-Sébastien Lénik have shared in countless urban discoveries in Paris, Montreal, Brussels, and many more places, while Dona Sévène and Paul Visse offered musical respite in their Norman paradise. Patrick Keating has always been up for walking through Brussels, Vicki and Laurent Roy’s impromptu layovers continue to be delightful, and Salim Hirji and Ayasha Valji helped make the move to Vancouver seamless. Over the years, this project has been shaped in more ways than they might think by Elizabeth Kirkland, David Meren, and Sean Mills. For the camaraderie, inspiration, and solidarity, for the utopian coffee breaks, late-night discussions, and laughter-filled dinner parties along with Greg Griffin, Anna Shea, and Megan Webster, I can only say thank you for your friendship. A final few words for three very special people … Stephanie Bolton has encouraged and reassured me from the very beginning. Through

xiv Acknowledgments

years of researching urban dwellers’ sensory experiences, it is you who have filled up my senses as we’ve tasted the thrill of life in so many exciting places. Since we were joined first by Béatrice, then by Olivier, our journey together has been enriched by new meaning and joy. This project has kept me away for longer hours than I might have hoped, but in providing the strength and motivation to complete it, the three of you are present on every one of its pages.

Abbreviations

AM CA CHS CIE CS AALO AEB AVB BAnQ BCB CPAS

Archives de Montréal Commission de l’aqueduc Fonds de la Commission d’hygiène et de santé Fonds de la Commission des incendies et de l’éclairage Fonds du Comité de santé Association pour l’amélioration des logements ouvriers Archives de l’état à Bruxelles Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Bulletin communal de Bruxelles Centre public d’aide social, Fonds affaires generals

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THE FEEL OF THE CITY Experiences of Urban Transformation

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Introduction

The Body Urban

“There are hundreds of loads of rotten and foul matter carted away from this city of Montreal that would win a prize for sickening and pungent stench in competition with the whole world,” bemoaned a disgusted sanitary engineer in a plea for stricter hygienic measures in the late nineteenth century. For their part, the authors of a promotional brochure on Montreal adopted a decidedly more celebratory view of the city’s atmosphere, affirming that “the incessant noise, the brouhaha, the busy crowd hurrying along, the nonstop traffic in the streets” made visitors immediately aware that they had arrived in a great metropolis.1 Although these two texts were written for very different purposes and express diametrically opposed sentiments, it is by evoking vivid sensory impressions that these commentators frame their respective readings of the modern city. This corporeal frame of reference was typical in the mass of both triumphalist and condemnatory representations that shaped ideas about the city at the turn of the twentieth century. More than a convenient rhetorical strategy, language like this reveals not just how urban dwellers discussed their environment, but more profoundly how they experienced it in their bodies and minds. With its wide boulevards, massive factories, and crowded neighbourhoods, the modern industrial city was indeed a place of heightened bodily sensation. New sights, sounds, and smells flooded the landscape, while increasing physical proximity among individuals, an economy predicated on workers’ bodily exertion, and evolving norms of privacy and decorum combined to transform and intensify the corporeal experience of city living. As the large cities of Europe and North America consolidated their metropolitan standing under the impulse of industrialization, ever-increasing numbers of people in Western

4  The Feel of the City

countries also shared in the challenge of finding meaning in the unprecedentedly hectic, dense, and febrile climate of smaller cities coming into their own as sites of influence and affluence. Drawing on the specific cases of Montreal and Brussels, two mid-sized urban centres fully immersed in the throes of a globalizing modernity, this book explores how it felt to live in the midst of this atmosphere of urban transformation. In examining the sensorial experiences and bodily practices that characterized urban life in the period, I argue that the body played a fundamental role in mediating the relationship between city dwellers and urban environments, propelling the tangible physicality of streets and buildings into the realm of individual consciousness and public discourse. Similar in size and regional influence, and in the timing of their industrialization, Montreal and Brussels lend themselves well to a search for the corporeal experiences of urban modernity.2 The heuristic value of this choice, however, does not so much derive from an examination of specific points of contrast and comparison as from what similar questions posed of different, yet in many ways analogous, settings reveals. Though both cities originated as sleepy riverbank settlements, Brussels traces its roots to tenth-century farmers who were already integrated in a network of northern European pathways of trade and communication. Conversely, when a small band of settlers sent by a French mystical society to convert Aboriginal populations to Christianity founded Montreal in 1642, the colony was a tiny outpost on a vast colonial empire. But when the forces of industrialization took root in the nineteenth century, both cities were in the process of becoming established commercial centres, possessing political and economic institutions, vibrant social structures, and community networks as well as flourishing cultural and artistic scenes. With regional populations hovering around the half-million mark in the opening years of the twentieth century, Montreal and Brussels were the dominant cities of nation-states that had existed in their contemporary form for only a few decades, though both were smaller in relation to nearby world metropolises on each continent. Large, diverse, and powerfully attractive, cities like Paris and New York garner such extensive scholarly attention that they are widely seen as the archetypes of urban modernity. In fact, these giant metropolises were anomalies on the general landscape of urbanization, and most city people tended to live in places like the lesser-known cities surveyed in these pages. Montreal and Brussels are also revealing precisely because

Introduction 5

they were less established as large cities. They offer the opportunity to delve into the particularities of experiences arising in sites where developments of such substantial proportions were not a matter of course, but a new and uncertain reality. As such they are representative of other counterparts across North America and Europe, the unique layout and cultural mix of each notwithstanding. Thus instead of isolating the particularities of each city, I explore them in reference to their similar and simultaneous experiences with unprecedented levels of industrialization and urbanization. Comparing two cities, one on each side of the Atlantic, shows how even when they lived in very different settings, residents of mid-sized cities shared in these challenges, participating in vast, global processes on the very local plane of their bodies and immediate environments. In this book, I discuss the way urban dwellers moved from home to street to factory, and how, in the process, their senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch were mobilized in defining conceptions of and attitudes towards city environments. This interaction between the mental and the physical, between ideas and the material spaces in which they were produced, was played out on varying but interconnected scales. These ranged from the intimate and bodily level of the individual, to the public setting of the urban community, and more broadly to the increasingly congested transnational channels on which circulated ideas that emerged from bodily experiences of the city. Both bodies and urban spaces are instrumental in this study as central and dynamic elements of social and cultural relations, directly involved in the expression of identity and community, their significance residing less in their brute materiality than in the fluidity with which they perfused the discourses of those who occupied them. By situating subjective corporeal experiences at the epicentre of urban modernity, this book contends that the individual body and the shared space of the city were mutually constitutive. As industrialization tightened its grip on places like Brussels and Montreal, people’s physical and cerebral interactions with urban space, their feel of the city, accentuated their awareness of their own bodies and set the terms on which they conversed and interacted, forging the bonds and the boundaries of urban community in the process. This reasoning diverges from established readings of modernity, discussed below, that see it primarily as insulating bodies and isolating individuals. The episodes of work, home, and street life examined in this book reveal a wide gap between efforts to render city life sensorially insipid and the constant,

6  The Feel of the City

unpredictable bodily experiences that made modern cities vital, alluring, and dramatic. It is by intertwining three concepts – modernity as paradoxically striving to desensitize the body even as it produced conditions of intense sensation; material space as a dynamic force in social relations; and experience as a genuine, not merely constructed, form of acquiring knowledge – that I wish to argue for the body’s central and active role in giving meaning to city life. These concepts are as widely mobilized as they are contentious. The present introduction therefore lays the theoretical groundwork that guides the journey through the colourful, noisy, and odorous streets of Montreal and Brussels proposed in the subsequent chapters. Modernity On a basic level, to affirm that cities like Montreal and Brussels were modern, and that living in them gave rise to a particular set of shared experiences, is to situate them within the currents of wide-ranging and fast-paced changes that swept through the West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 These were most dramatically reflected in the transformation of the built environment: in the spread of urban agglomerations as small towns swelled into thickly developed and densely populated manufacturing zones, and in the advent of new technologies that redrew the contours of daily life, from sewers and streetlights to tramways and telephones. Yet material, social, and institutional changes, sustained and far reaching as they may have been, did not in and of themselves constitute modernity. Rather, it was through the common and wilful postures adopted in response to them that such economic and political developments took on the aura of a more profound cultural shift. The circumstances of modernity – the machines and factories, trains and steamships, mass markets and fashions, what the geographer David Harvey identifies as the new conditions of production, circulation, and consumption – only actually became modern when their magnitude entered consciousness, when “ways to absorb, reflect upon, and codify these rapid changes” were sought out and “lines of actions that might modify or support them” were drawn.4 The perception of turn-of-the-century urban dwellers that their existence was bound up in constantly negotiating changes to established habits and customs is thus more central to this study than the measurable degree to which industrialization and urbanization modified

Introduction 7

the landscape. The idea of change mattered as much as the changes themselves, and a belief that the inventions of the day were inherently temporary, destined by their very nature to be soon replaced by newer and superior iterations, came to define the age.5 That confidence in this mentality swelled to exaggerated proportions, that absolute faith in the ineluctable superiority of Western notions of progress was invoked to justify the worst atrocities committed in the name of colonial expansion and military supremacy, has much to do with the profound discomfort with modernity raised in the second half of the twentieth century. Dismissing it as a catch-all and muddled term, critics have cast doubt upon the certainties and grand narratives of modernist interpretations in favour of a more piecemeal attempt to analyse the language and discourses through which the power relations and value judgments of modernity have been constructed and legitimated.6 Studying how modernity came to be understood as a force of social and cultural change, however, entails neither accepting it as a given nor buying into its narcissism. And while inquiry into modernity’s brutal excesses has resulted in a welcome critique of its legacy, it does not ex post facto nullify the impact of these material changes and corresponding comportments on residents of turn-of-the-century cities.7 On a deeper level, then, the modernity of Montreal and Brussels resided in the interplay between the perception and awareness of these changes, and the attempts to shape, regulate, and direct their outcomes. Modernity is the continual back-and-forth between efforts to rationalize the layout of cities and the behaviours of their residents, and the more intuitive ways in which people apprehended these transformations. As sociologist James Donald points out, interrogating the relationship between the city and modernity entails inquiring into “ways of feeling and acting” that not only shape and reshape space, but that require precisely that we follow the flow of ideas across the “fuzzy and porous” boundaries between reality and imagination, that we engage with “an economy of symbolic constructs which have material consequences that are manifested in an enduring reality.”8 While it may here be tempting to follow the critics and to throw out the modern baby with its muddled and cloudy bathwater, a more rewarding line of inquiry is to ask how people lived with, internalized, and experienced these contradictions in their daily interactions with the urban environment, the very space that has come to signify such vacillations. Rather than holding up modernity as a verifiable, empirical model applicable to various

8  The Feel of the City

cases, one that would attempt to impose a sense of order and clarity upon a world characterized by confusion and uncertainty, I view modernity’s contradictory meanings as a reflection of the profound shifts under way in cities like Montreal and Brussels and the various strategies people adopted in responding to these pressures. Some decried this current; others held it up as an ideal to live by. That the subjects of our historical inquiries saw themselves as modern requires that we attempt, in the words of geographer Richard Dennis, to “make sense of the messiness,”9 that we think about what that condition might have meant to them, as well as how it structured their views of themselves and their environment. In its rationalist guise, modernity sought above all to harness the threatening, seemingly uncontrollable forces of change, to ensure these transformations served the best interests of the newly valued, self-­ reliant, and forward-looking individual. The problems generated by urban modernity are well documented, and were present in both Montreal and Brussels: to the allure of innovation and profit was matched the threat of congestion and social disorder, the most frightening and destabilizing symptoms of which the urban bourgeoisie came to associate with what it saw as the overcrowded, disease-infested, and poverty-stricken working-class slums of central districts.10 The project of modernity, that is the self-conscious will to embrace and shape the nature of these changes, was spearheaded by a new class of reformers, municipal politicians and bureaucrats, doctors, public health experts, engineers, and philanthropists determined to impose a more methodical and efficient organization of urban society.11 Just as modern and rational economies required a separation of business from household and an ever more finely tuned division of labour, so too did cities require clear distinctions between industrial and residential districts, between vehicular and pedestrian traffic, between clean water and used, between sick bodies and healthy ones. Where the concept of modernity loses its limpidity, where the neatly stitched threads of order and rationality begin to fray, is in the equally predominant resistance to such constraints that characterized the actions and attitudes of numerous urban dwellers. The most formidable aspect of fin-de-siècle industrial cities was their “restless, fugitive quality,” the “surfeit of impressions” that gave the urban experience an air of “extreme impermanence.”12 This alternative reading of modernity has a long genealogy, its origins typically attributed to the poet Charles Baudelaire, who, in the 1860s, famously located the essence of modernity in “the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.”13 For all

Introduction 9

the rationalist efforts to dictate the direction and outcome of social and economic changes, modernity as it was lived in the streets also sowed unrest, confusion, and uncertainty. The massive factories and rushing boulevards may have promised wealth and innovation, but their magnitude and hurried pace forced urban dwellers to come to grips, to make a conscious effort of understanding what it meant to live in a world where notions of time and distance were being annihilated and where the certainties of yesterday would seem to be irrevocably gone tomorrow. In this conceptualization, I draw on the work of the cultural critic Marshall Berman, who defines modernity in the realm of subjective experience, of tension between a haggard self and the turbulent world that besieges it, complicating the reading of modernity as rationalism. For the author, modernity is actualized through an awareness of and engagement with the contradictory simultaneity of its destructive forces and constructive potential. While modernity promises “adventure, power, joy growth, transformation of ourselves and the world,” it also “pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.”14 Doubt, uncertainty, and disorder have the upper hand for Berman, who echoes sentiments clearly expressed by urbanites of the period. Among the most notable of these was the sociologist Georg Simmel, whose reflections illustrate how this dialectic shaped the atmosphere of modern cities. In his celebrated 1903 essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel argued that the modern metropolitan experience created a type of individuality whose “psychological basis” was defined by a constant “intensification of nervous stimulation.” For this resident of Berlin, the frenetic atmosphere of modern life in big cities had a stultifying effect on people’s psyche. The atmosphere of modernity dehumanized urban dwellers, forcing them to calculate their every move as they negotiated the crowded streets, to rationalize their every choice, this as they found themselves regulating their daily lives – their watches and their movements – according to the rhythms of an ever-more-pervasive “money economy.”15 The Body in Urban Space In Montreal and Brussels, the rapid flow of traffic, the sudden appearance of taller and taller buildings, the looming smokestacks of factories, and the gathering of crowds on busy streets were instrumental in fuelling this atmosphere of nervous tension. While these cities have

10  The Feel of the City

been well studied in reference to the “manufacturing pathways, property dynamics, and growth politics”16 that drove them, this book examines instead how these spaces themselves functioned as central and dynamic elements of the modern experience. As theorist Michel de Certeau explains, a city is but lifeless matter until its occupants infuse it with significance. Geometric lines drawn by urban planners become meaningful elements of people’s lives as they are incorporated into what he calls “spatial stories”: the narratives through which individuals relate their experiences and define their identities.17 The significance with which space is imbued is often the product of conflicts and compromises between competing spatial stories, making the city a theatre for the affirmation of identity and status. In turn-ofthe-century Montreal, for example, an ideology of growth and development found expression in the increased scale and concentration of business and commercial buildings that projected the aura of an urban elite intent on consolidating its city’s metropolitan status.18 In Brussels, major public works projects, such as the tunnelling of the Senne River and the underground junction of the city’s northern and southern rail terminals, also served to reinforce portrayals of central working-class neighbourhoods as insalubrious and dangerous in order to justify their destruction, thereby ensuring the prestige of the capital.19 These were the actions of a bourgeoisie whose influence, though dominant, remained precarious, needing continuous affirmation and reinforcement. In both cities, the spatial stories of those who lacked the means to build skyscrapers or monuments of their own involved more “tactical transgressions.”20 Simple gestures like revelling late into the night at a local tavern, testifying in a public commission against abusive employers or landlords, or even hanging laundry to dry in public view jostled notions of urban sociability of the middle class, serving the bourgeoisie irritating reminders that people outside the main circles of power also laid claims to urban space. The production of spatial meaning, argued Certeau, depends on movement. While medieval and early modern cities were unquestionably places of vivid colour, odour, and cacophony, cities of the industrial era required ways of moving adapted to their hurried atmosphere and to the increasing concentrations of people travelling farther and faster through densely constructed neighbourhoods, making them especially propitious terrain for examining this process. The specific sensory stimuli produced by the machines, infrastructure, and spaces of industry made modern cities newly daunting, subjecting residents to pressures

Introduction 11

unlike what earlier generations of urbanites would have known. And the rationalist desire to purge the city of these sensations, even as their prevalence in spatial stories heightened, produced a uniquely modern tension. The advent of modernity in cities like Montreal and Brussels was an all-encompassing process; it took place as much “on the ground,” in the new spaces, scales, and technology that transformed urban geography, as “in the mind,” in the way people envisioned and represented their changing cities.21 The experiences at the heart of the spatial significance of the urban environment were located, above all, in the moving and sentient body, which incarnates the duality between the material and the mental realms of modernity, and of space itself. In the modern city, the transposition of physical reality into social meaning operated through an analogous experiential shift from the bodies to the minds of urban dwellers. Physical and sensorial experiences placed the body on the front lines of individuals’ interaction with space, and the spatial stories of the period were informed by their authors’ corporeal movement through, sensation of, and behaviour in the city. The turn-of-the-century city itself was an environment widely conceptualized in corporeal terms whereby fluid circulation from one constituent part to another was needed to ensure the health of the whole, and an ailment in one section was understood as a threat to the entire organism.22 In this context, allusions to the bodily form, senses, and functions, to physical experiences and movement, pervaded all types of representations of the city. It is precisely by excavating these corporeal references and placing the body at the forefront of the inquiry that this book seeks to build on understandings of the modern urban experience that tend either to understate the body’s vitality or discorporate it from the material environment in which its workings and significance were rooted. Ostensibly trivial bodily practices, argued the celebrated sociologist Norbert Elias, offer “clear and simple insights” into human psyche and relations, and are therefore no less central to our understanding of society than are the arts, science, politics, or economics.23 This postulate applies well to modern cities, where the meanings of body and space revolved around one another. Bodily practices – in this study the act of walking in the city, the performance of industrial labour, as well as more intimate practices increasingly relegated to the home environment such as personal hygiene, sleeping, or even the use of sanitary installations – were at once confined and defined by the spaces in which they were located. As sociologist Paul Connerton suggests, individuals

12  The Feel of the City

conceptualize the spaces they occupy as a function of their body. The “essentially embodied nature of our social existence,” and the specific practices to which this condition gives rise, he argues, is projected into the very language we use in defining the values associated with modernity. Oppositions between “high and low,” “rise and decline,” “superior and inferior,” “looking up to and looking down upon” correspond to the vertical plane along which the body is oriented and experiences space, providing the “metaphors by which we think and live.”24 In uncovering the feel of the city, I have listened in particular to how Montrealers and Bruxellois related their sensorial encounters with the urban landscape. As with bodily practices that appear inconsequential on the surface, the everyday sights, smells, and sounds of the industrial city reveal unsuspected texture to urban dwellers’ relationship with the charged environment of urban modernity. In the urban context, the most readily provoked of the senses is sight. Streets, buildings, people, and traffic kept urban eyes perpetually occupied, while the visual appearance of urban space is closely related to the ideas, means, and aspirations of its occupants.25 Thus does the changing urban skyline become a historical text from which to assess questions of space and interiority. The clash between the utilitarian factory smokestacks and the more prestigious skyscrapers and storefronts through which the city’s elite sought to express its ascendancy were clearly expressive of the visual nature of the tensions that animated modern cities. Seeing, particularly since the Enlightenment, has been the most respected of the senses, gendered masculine and considered rational and logical as opposed to the allegedly feminine, unreliable, and irrational nature of senses like smell and taste. The eye evolved as the sensory organ through which civilized individuals could affirm their modern and rational temperament, observing, measuring, and ultimately mediating their impulses by maintaining a distance between themselves and the object of their desire.26 Modern cities were consciously redesigned to enhance their visuality, the dark and dingy streets of medieval times replaced with bright, lighted, and geometric avenues that were amenable to public surveillance, the eye “imposing reason on society at large.”27 But if sight was the privileged sense of modernity, it was precisely in the years leading up to and following the First World War that Western intellectuals and artists began to lose faith in the supposed accuracy and realism of what the eye revealed, becoming increasingly attuned not only to more subjective ways of seeing, but also to the messages carried by the

Introduction 13

living body as a whole.28 Sight provides only part of the urban sensory portrait, and the complexity of this environment was detectable by the other senses as well. Sounds were key elements of the urban experience, constituting “a semiotic system” through which were navigated “time, space and … the social world of the city,”29 bringing people together into what Alain Corbin, a pioneer of sensory history, calls “acoustic communities.”30 Industrialization brought dramatic transformations to the urban soundscape as factory whistles, trains, automobiles, and large machinery replaced church bells, horses’ hooves, and artisans’ tools as the primary sources of sound, ascribing new significance to city life. The din of factories was frequently associated with the perceived disorderly and riotous nature of the working class, while silence was seen as the privilege of a bourgeoisie that sought refuge in quiet suburbs and peaceful gardens.31 And yet, just as smoke clouds could be seen as evidence of a booming economy, so too were the roars of industrial machinery sometimes perceived as unmistakable signs of modernity and progress. Social cleavages are also expressed in smell, long considered the least noble of the senses. Smells were omnipresent markers of conflict in industrial cities, where the fumes emanating from factory chimneys, stagnant waterways, refuse-littered streets, and outdoor privy pits infused the environment. Because they are ungovernable, obey no boundaries, thus betraying an apparent lack of control, urban odours were especially vexing for the devotees of rationalist modernity, who sought ways to control and eliminate them.32 Late into the nineteenth century, there remained a widespread popular acceptance of miasma theory, which held that the odours given off by decomposing organic matter carried diseases. Working-class districts, which typically revolted middle-class olfactory sensibilities, were thus seen as centres of infection, a condition exacerbated by the perceived immorality of their inhabitants. The discovery of bacteriology made people increasingly aware that imperceptible threats lurked around them, lessening the validity of smell as a weapon in the battle against disease and eroding middle-class confidence in the notion that keeping a safe distance from such districts was all that was needed to preserve their own health.33 But as Elias stated, olfactory repugnance predates germ theory, and the slow acceptance of bacteriology meant that foul odours encountered in the industrial districts of Brussels and Montreal continued to be perceived as signs of immorality and disease throughout the period, unpleasant smells remaining central to the class-based distinctions and stigmas that contributed to conceptions of urban space.

14  The Feel of the City

Finally, this reading of spatial stories through sensorial experience conceives of the modern city in reference to the haptic, that is to say in terms “of touch, of bodily motion and of the body in motion through space.”34 Touch involves more than fingers on surfaces – it mobilizes the entire body as it comes into contact with the environment, the skin collecting the information through which individuals orient themselves in space.35 In their increasingly rapid and structured movement through busy thoroughfares where they brushed against others in the crowd, in their handling of heavy tools and rumbling machinery in factories and workshops, in their retreat to the warmth and comfort of modern homes or the humidity and exiguity of ramshackle tenements, and whether they picked discarded rags on the streets or picked out the latest fashions in glitzy department stores, modern urban dwellers understood their changing world through a constant and intense tactile relationship with the texture of their surroundings. Questioning the validity of sight’s primacy among the senses, historian Mark Smith pleads for “intersensoriality,” an examination of “how the senses worked together, sometimes in complementary fashion, sometimes in tension.”36 Indeed, historians of the senses have typically delved with precision into the complexities of one sense at a time. I draw on this knowledge to reflect upon the simultaneous working of many senses that animated urban life. In considering the constellation of physical experiences and the way these informed urban dwellers’ intimate spatial stories – the way they at once felt and felt about the city – this book situates experiences of the city in the midst of what sensory geographer Mark Patterson calls the “conceptual slippage between touching and feeling,” in the fault line between touch and feeling as forms of physical contact and as forms of thought and emotion.37 The notion of feeling explored here thus refers both to intangible perceptions and sensibilities as well as to bodily and sensorial engagement with the landscape as it was being redrawn. Modern cities, with their myriad and simultaneous sensory stimulations, were particularly intersensorial places. As Montreal and Brussels swelled, their inhabitants became increasingly sensitive to the sensorial displeasures caused by the crowds and industrial nuisances. “The heightened sensibility in this direction generally brings much more suffering and repulsion than joys and attractions in its wake,” argued Simmel, anticipating the vocabulary Berman would use to describe the urban experience.38 These misgivings foreshadowed what was to become one of the most sustained critiques of modernity: that in its

Introduction 15

ambition to impose order and outwit chance, it has created an atomized society of individuals living in monotonous, dreary, and predictable environments. Simmel’s “blasé” metropolitan dweller came to symbolize a society in which once dominant bonds of kinship, church, or neighbourhood had broken down, where self-centred and egotistical individuals now competed for materialistic profit and monetary gain.39 The same logic has buttressed analysis of the body in modernity. As municipal bureaucrats, city planners, and health experts emerged as the authoritative voices in attempts to harmonize and sanitize the urban experience, they declared “a war on the senses.”40 Battling what they saw as the deleterious consequences of industrialization and urbanization on both moral and physical health, these agents of modernity spearheaded campaigns to reduce the unsightliness, the din, and the stench of the urban environment. It was with their noses, and by constructing the smells of poverty as markers of disease, backwardness, and incivility, that the urban bourgeoisie expressed its diminished threshold of tolerance for sensory nuisances, launching what Corbin calls a “hygienic revolution” aimed at purifying public space and increasing the separation and distance between middle- and workingclass neighbourhoods.41 In his magisterial recounting of how cities took shape through bodily experiences across Western civilization, Richard Sennett argues that “the Age of Individualism” ushered in by nineteenth-century industrial capitalism produced urban spaces that were designed to protect moving individuals from the crowd. The point was no longer to bring them together into the shared space of the city, but rather to whisk them through as quickly as possible. Comfort and silence were the new objectives as city planners fought against the throngs and aimed to discourage the movement of potentially threatening groups, favouring instead the claims of individuals seeking “speed, escape and passivity.” The result, for Sennett, is that modernity has created cities of “sensory deprivation,” the physical encounter with the environment has been numbed and desensitized, while bodily contact among people and between people and space is sorely lacking. Technologies of speed, sanitation, public health, and private comfort work together to “deaden the modern body; it does not connect.”42 Here arises once more the underlying tension of modernity explored in this book. Even as rationalist efforts to individualize bodies and dull the senses reacted against the material conditions of urbanization and industrialization, the body continued to push back. If it is difficult to argue with the general tendency towards desensitization that Sennett and

16  The Feel of the City

Corbin follow over long periods and across cities, a more confined and focused examination of specific urban centres like Montreal and Brussels reveals the sustained centrality, at the turn of the twentieth century, of bodily practices and the visual, olfactory, auditory, and tactile experiences that were borne out of intensified encounters between individuals and space. This was a time when people were condensed like never before into the tight quarters of cities whose populations grew faster than their surface areas. Urban dwellers could not escape each other’s physical presence. From this emerged the shared, albeit contested, experiences through which sensory impulses acquired widely recognizable meanings. Sennett’s own assessment offers a glimmer of hope against the otherwise bleak portrait he paints of modern urbanism. “Resistance,” he writes, “is a fundamental and necessary experience for the human body: through feeling resistance, the body is roused to take note of the world in which it lives.” For all that modern planners attempted to soften this resistance, to “suspend the body in an ever more passive relation to its environment,”43 the bodily connection to the environment remained vital in this period of flux. In Montreal and Brussels, we will see how urban dwellers complained of the odours and noises of manufacturing centres while workers experienced industrial modernity in the muscular pain and the risk of injury and diseases that characterized factory work. When these labourers went home to rest, they retired to dark, humid, and overcrowded homes, which hygienists and moralists denounced as threats to their health and to their souls. When they walked or took the streetcar from one place to another, or simply went out to consume the pleasures of the lively modern boulevards, urban dwellers came into direct, haptic contact with the crowds, the shops, and the circulation that reshaped cities. At a time when political leaders and health experts sought to rid the city of its loud, smelly, and unsightly characteristics, these encounters reverberated in the bodies of urban dwellers, bringing interior and subjective experiences to the heart of the public discourses that constituted urban modernity. Experience All of this raises a final theoretical question on the contested notion of experience, through which this book conceptualizes the corporeal relationship to space. In an influential essay, Joan Scott critiques fellow historians for too readily accepting accounts of experience in their

Introduction 17

sources as “the bedrock of evidence,” at the expense of examining how the nature of these experiences and their effect on identity formation are discursively constructed to begin with. To those who argue that categories of belonging are defined by sharing in the struggles of a particular class or gender group, for example, Scott retorts that experience in such cases is effectively nothing more than “evidence for the fact of difference” and does not account for the political processes through which this difference is created and perpetuated. On the contrary, she argues, “it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience.” Rather than seeing experience as the starting point of the knowledge individuals have of their place in the world, Scott urges us to think about experience as a “linguistic event,” to examine the contested ways in which this knowledge is produced and inserted into narratives of identity.44 If, in recommending we historicize experience rather than take it as the “origin of our explanation,” Scott stops short of eschewing the concept altogether, her argument has nevertheless come under fire from those who see her position as failing to consider the agency with which individuals resist the prescriptions of discourse and as setting up a false dichotomy between experience as the starting point of historical explanation or as its object, effectively creating a new set of foundationalist categories.45 The idea, taken up by Patrick Joyce, that experience “is in fact not prior to and constitutive of language but is actively constituted by language”46 certainly offers a persuasive reminder of the perils of ascribing to large swathes of people a shared sense of identity on the basis of outwardly visible characteristics like sex or socio-economic status whose significance indeed varies with discourse. Moving away from a macro-level conceit that would hold that broad categories of belonging like class, gender, or ethnicity were determined by experiences somehow shared by people operating in vastly different contexts, I problematize more explicitly the localized realm of quotidian life, where bodily and sensorial experiences did shape myriad day-to-day outlooks and attitudes. As Harvey notes, without losing sight of the conceptual and intellectual baggage with which we engage the world around us, “there are moments, events, people and experiences which impinge upon imagination in unexpected ways, that jolt and jar received ways of thinking and doing, that demand some extra imaginative or theoretical leap to give them meaning.”47 In the chapters that follow, I suggest that with their swelling crowds and proliferating skylines modern cities delivered precisely these clashes and collisions. People of different

18  The Feel of the City

backgrounds interpreted such moments in varying ways, often according to their expectations of class or gender belonging. But beyond these categories, giving meaning to these episodes was about defining, quite simply, what it meant to live in a city. Instead of dwelling on whether language or experience comes first, this book spans the busy crossroads of corporeal practices and their representations, arguing that the two are inextricably linked in the experience of the modern city. In the wake of Michel Foucault, bodies are often defined primarily as sites on which power relations are exercised.48 Without denying the impact of the classification, coercion, and violence often exercised on vulnerable bodies, these conceptions of embodiment as a discursive construct see the body above all as an “object of knowledge.” They typically exclude the possibility that the body is also in itself an “active and living” source of that knowledge, directly engaged in the formation of individuals’ sense of experience. If bodies are in many ways shaped by discourse, this does not mean that they are “reducible to it.”49 As sociologist Ian Burkitt explains, “we each have a specific ‘take’ on the world constructed from our own embodied location in culture and social relations.”50 This way of knowing, adds historian Joy Parr, is bound to bodily experience, the skin and the senses both proffering and storing for future use the information with which individuals adapt to their transforming environment. In modern industrial cities like Montreal and Brussels, incessant change more than ever made residents conscious of their embodiment, engaging them in a “process of habituation to habitat through the tuning of the senses and the honing of habit and reflex.”51 Factory reform, street design, the construction of housing, and strategies geared at protecting public health were thus not simply the manifestation of rationalist drives by planners and bureaucrats to educate and reform workers and the poor. They were also the product of what these urban actors’ own physical sensations told them about what these spaces signified, the resulting modifications to the environment in turn forcing all of its occupants to mobilize their senses in coming to grips with these new and tangible realities. Accepting the body as a locus of experience does not abrogate the need to remain attentive to the linguistic codes and conventions that governed it. On the contrary, that the historian’s only access to past experiences is through the words left by those who bore witness requires attentiveness to the ways in which inherently personal and subjective bodily sensations were exteriorized into public discourse. The

Introduction 19

difficulty resides precisely in the fact that experiences are filtered by language, that words must be given to “forms of non-intellectual, embodied cognition” that often “elude speech,” writes philosopher Sonia Kruks. And yet it is only when they are spoken, written, or otherwise shared with others that experiences derive cultural meaning, that what is felt individually becomes a social phenomenon, decipherable to many on the basis of common encounters.52 My purpose in listening to how residents of modern cities felt when looking at the landscape, hearing the rush of a steam engine, or smelling the dampness of a backalley tenement, then, is not to vainly attempt to know the exactitude of given sensations. Instead, it is to ask how urban dwellers described and outwardly expressed these inner sensations, mediating them, to be sure, through the linguistic conventions prescribed by gender, class, ethnicity, and other forms of social relations. Accounting for the many uses of language, whether as engrained cultural patterns or as wilful posturing, thus guards against the risk of assuming an unwavering correlation between what was said and what was actually felt. It allows for the question of how brute physiological responses to outside stimuli were transposed into the shared realm of experience through which unnervingly vast transformations were made intelligible.53 With this objective in mind, my examination of life in the modern city is guided by historian Martin Jay’s positioning of experience “at the nodal point of the intersection between public language and private subjectivity, between expressible commonalities and the ineffability of the individual interior.”54 Sources and Layout Urban growth during this period meant that city life constituted a daily reality for more people than ever before. Although individual experiences of the city were variable, the urban setting offers a distinct material frame of reference from which we can explore people’s relationship to the processes of modernity. Burgeoning skylines resonating with the boom of machinery and shrouded in thick smoke affected the lives of all residents. While wealthy and poor, men and women, certainly had different rapports to city life, they nonetheless had this setting in common and structured their lives in reference to it. What do these experiences, unwittingly shared by people whose paths never crossed, tell us about the ways in which the global forces of turn-of-the-century modernity played out within the industrial city and the bodies of its residents? To

20  The Feel of the City

answer this question I have brought together and overlapped a variety of testimonies that render thoughts and concerns about the material and cultural consequences of modernity and industrialization, and that relate the sensorial experiences and bodily practices underlying people’s connection to the urban spaces they inhabited. Working with cities on two continents has enriched the analysis by allowing me to juxtapose records produced by people facing similar challenges but in different cultural contexts. Of the institutional records produced by municipal administrations, labour relations inquiries, factory and housing inspectors, and philanthropic societies, I have interrogated the conceptions of individuals at the forefront of urban development, whose actions had a direct bearing on the shape of the landscape. I offer a reading of these outwardly positivist sources that shows how intuitive appreciations of the environment were never far beneath the piles of charts and figures billed as tools of efficient and rational governance and management. Because my principal intent is precisely to bring out the subjective dimension of modernity, I have been attentive to the way urban dwellers described their interactions with space, contemplated the material layout of their environment, and attributed cultural and ideological meanings to city life in a variety of settings. Treatises on the body, sociological surveys, architectural journals, popular hygiene manuals, and journalistic investigations offer place-specific observations on topical issues that speak to the way transnational flows converging in each city were perceived. I draw heavily on sources frequently glossed over in urban history scholarship, especially in Montreal and Brussels, but that offer insight into urban dwellers’ intimate musings about their environment. Analysing novels and poetry, magazines and almanacs, travel guides, memoirs, and commemorative books sheds new light on the various layers of meaning urban dwellers attributed to their corporeal experiences of the city. Many of these sources, to be sure, were left by individuals who were formally educated and who had access to the means to produce them, providing predominantly masculine, largely middle- or upper-class points of view. I refer to these government officials, reformers, and intellectuals as forming an “urban elite,” a term that encompasses a wide of array of urbanites who, while not always sharing the same socio­demographic traits, nonetheless expressed their point of view on the city from a position of social standing. I have also sought to include voices considered more marginal at the time, notably those of workers

Introduction 21

and of women of all social classes, available in letters to municipal administrations, literary sources, and in the popular press. By approaching all of these records less for the empirical information they contain, and rather as accounts of their authors’ encounters with modernity, I seek to explain how city dwellers shared in a relationship to the urban environment that, far from abnegating the body, was built largely in terms of their day-to-day corporeal engagement with the pulse of urban life. The first two chapters address urban dwellers’ relationship to the changing environment in a comprehensive sense. Chapter 1 briefly provides background on Montreal and Brussels as emerging industrial metropolises and explains the comparative and transnational approach that drives my inquiry. In chapter 2, I examine discourses that conceptualized the modern industrial city as a whole, focusing first on how panoramic views were used to give meaning to the city in its totality, and second on the way the realities of the industrial periphery of these cities conflicted with the image of order and prosperity put forth by urban elites. From this all-encompassing perspective, I move to a discussion of specific spaces that were most frequently evoked in representations of modern cities. During this period, labour groups emphasized the need to balance the length of the workday with other essential activities, advocating that a typical day should be separated into three eight-hour segments. One third of the day was to be devoted to work, another third to sleep, leaving the rest of the day for an assortment of other activities, including learning, leisure, and time spent with family.55 Nineteenthcentury understandings of the rules of bodily and mental hygiene were evoked to support the benefits of this system, and it was argued that all of society would prosper from the increased productivity that wellrested workers would bring to the job. Though for most it remained an ideal – a masculine one at that, since the work of women was often performed in the home – this breakdown of life in a modern environment sought to bring rhythm and structure to time and space in hectic industrial settings. In distinguishing between three parts of the day, comprising activities that occurred in specific spaces and that made specific uses of the body, this discourse emphasized the intrinsic connection between space and bodily practices in the minds of contemporaries. The last three chapters thus consider each beat of this rhythm in turn, discussing the spaces evoked in terms of the bodily experiences and practices that shaped the meaning of factories, homes, and streets. Chapter 3 focuses on the motors that propelled these modern

22  The Feel of the City

transformations, namely the industries, their place in the urban fabric and the bodies at work to make them function. The fourth chapter shifts to the working-class home, discussing how living conditions, and the debates over hygiene and morality that underpinned them, brought issues of privacy and intimacy to the fore of public conversation. Finally, in chapter 5, I examine the streets of Montreal and Brussels, and consider debates over their form and planning, as well as the mix of uses residents made of them, discussing circulation, public amusements, accidents, lights, lavatories, funerals, in order to assess how these open and public spaces that were occupied in various ways by all residents of the city also spoke to their subjective and interior joys and sorrows, concerns and aspirations. I discuss each city in reference to the continuum of central districts and neighbouring suburbs, as lived experiences of modernity permeated the rationalist boundaries drawn on maps. The same flexibility characterizes the periodization, which I situate at the turn of the twentieth century. And a very wide turn it was, stretching roughly from 1880 to 1914, a period not only of inexorable urban development, but of sustained commentary and critique of city life and of the social tensions that accompanied it. In the 1880s, economic recovery from a global recession resulted in renewed industrial and urban growth that continued until the outbreak of the First World War, an event that scarred urban economies and psyches, particularly in Brussels, occupied by German forces as of August 1914. As with the territorial limitations, these dates serve as markers that situate the link between urban environments and human interiorities within a period of particular social and cultural agitation, rather than as flat delineators of precise events. The timing of modernity itself, albeit contested, is much broader. However, as historian Patricia Seed points out, questions of chronology matter less than the extent to which the notion of the modern can be taken as “an empty signifier that we are free to fill with the content of our own awareness of what makes the present different from the past.”56 Between 1880 and 1914, residents of Montreal and Brussels were acutely aware that the times in which they lived were like nothing they or their ancestors had ever known. The relative shortness of this period also offers a workable frame in which to delve closely into their quotidian interactions with one another and with their environment, the better to assess the meaning with which they filled this signifier. The Feel of the City draws on two urban centres, or rather on the multiple spaces they comprised, to tell the story of how the inhabitants

Introduction 23

of modern cities felt, moved through, and appropriated their environments. Rather than present parallel narratives of Montreal and Brussels, I work thematically with issues surrounding factories, streets, and homes that were common to many cities, intertwining broader conceptual notions of modernity, space, and experience to emphasize the centrality of the body in urban life and during tumultuous times. I discuss how people’s senses and bodily practices were directly engaged in determining how the modern city was to be navigated and negotiated, revealing the fundamental correlation between these subjective and interior experiences of material space, and the exterior, public discussions and debates that made cities like Montreal and Brussels representative sites of modernity. This was a modernity continually made anew as the attempts to dull the body and desensitize the city were met with vigorous corporeal resistance, as feeling unrelentingly trumped numbness.

Chapter One

Comparable Cities

On 10 February 1883, Ferdinand Larcier, a well-known legal publisher whose printing presses were located in the shadows of Brussels’s gargantuan new courthouse, engaged his citizen’s prerogative and addressed a letter to the city council, protesting its plan to expropriate his property in order to move a school onto it. Indeed, the construction of this new temple of justice had taken such vast proportions and had so disrupted the urban fabric of the neighbourhood – displacing scores of the city’s poorest residents in the process – that municipal authorities now found themselves struggling to find a space in which the local school could pursue its activities. In the preceding weeks, the city had set aside the funds needed for this operation and had proposed to expropriate, “for the public good,” a vast lot at number 10, rue des Minimes.1 Some aldermen had wondered if the site was appropriate, asking whether it too would not end up engulfed by the ongoing expansion of the courthouse. But no one had given much thought to the property’s existing use. Convinced by the mayor’s assurances that the new school would be safe from further encroachment, the council had adopted the plan as a regular order of business. The councillors, however, had neglected to predict Larcier’s unwillingness to cede his property, giving rise to a protracted debate over the use of this space. This chapter begins by presenting both Larcier’s story and a similar conflict in Montreal as illustrations of the bodily experiences propelling the tensions of the modern city; it then sketches the primary traits of the development of these two cities to the turn of the twentieth century. The value of examining Montreal and Brussels in particular, I argue, lies less in identifying empirically comparable characteristics than in what the corporeal experiences of their

Comparable Cities  25

inhabitants tell us about the way modernity, as a transnational phenomenon, established itself in diverse locations on both sides of the Atlantic. In his letter to the Brussels municipal council, Larcier pleaded with the members to understand that his recently acquired lot had provided him with the ideal setting for his growing business. Finding it had been an “unhoped-for blessing” and enabled him to “remedy the intolerable situation visited upon my industry by installations becoming ever more defective as my business expanded.” With his bookstore, printing shop, warehouse, and private home previously spread about in several different places, Larcier saw a considerable advantage in concentrating his various pursuits in one convenient location. The “material and moral prejudice” caused by the council’s actions was such that his “health itself was altered.” Had the city simply sought to acquire an empty building, Larcier would have understood, he insisted, but surely now that the property was being put to such profitable commercial use, the councillors would withdraw their expropriation order and look for a suitably unused locale for their school. On the surface, this conflict was not exceptional: a prospering businessman found himself fighting over a tract of land with an elected body that claimed it was acting upon its mandate to provide public education. A closer reading of Larcier’s grievance, however, reveals that there was more at stake than questions of private property rights in a market economy. Before mailing his letter, Larcier had garnered the support of many other neighbourhood residents opposed to the building of a school in their midst. After debating the specific merits of the entrepreneur’s claims, the council heard a petition signed by several people who lived and worked in the area, broadening the issue beyond the interests of one individual. Their letter raised three principal objections to the project. With the first, the petitioners firmly established their conviction that private interests should find the space needed to flourish in the modern city. This particular part of the rue des Minimes, they pointed out, was already inhabited by shopkeepers and law offices for which “it will be a supreme nuisance to have in the vicinity of their establishments a school, where several times a day, children will come and go, committing all the mischief of their age.” The members of the bar had located their offices in the neighbourhood, counting on “the silence, and the tranquil character of the street, as well as the guarantees it offered in terms of discretion.” From the point of view of these lawyers and businessmen, this portion of the city suited professional

26  The Feel of the City

activities and was simply not compatible with the presence of noisy and rambunctious children. Such disinterest in the education of the city’s youth, the petitioners knew, would fall upon deaf ears at the council table. Undoubtedly to make their objections more palatable, they framed these pecuniary interests as merely secondary to the real issue at hand – the children’s physical and moral safety, both of which they felt would be compromised if the school were to be built in the proposed location. Situated nearby, the petitioners noted, was a brewery possessing neither courtyard, warehouses, nor stables. As a result, it was forced to manoeuvre its barrels, carts, and horses directly on the public thoroughfare, posing a serious risk to the schoolchildren’s safety. Presented as the greatest concerns to these citizens were the moral issues they wanted to bring to the council’s attention: the streets bordering the rue des Minimes were known to be of ill repute, harbouring prostitutes who “ambled along, exchanging obscene remarks. These streets are the constant theatres of quarrels, fights and scandals that perturb the neighbourhood. Are these spectacles to be put to the eyes of children?” they demanded.2 Beyond the expression of competing business and civic interests, this letter exposes revealing, though at times contradictory, constructions of urban space. At the heart of the matter was the way in which these residents perceived the space they occupied, the rhythms of city life it represented, and the material and bodily dimensions that conditioned this interaction. If they initially presented the rue des Minimes as unsuitable for a school because of the disruptions children would cause, the shops and offices were apparently not disturbed by the activities of Larcier’s publishing house or the daily commotions caused by the local brewery. Nor, in their search for tranquillity and “discretion,” did these merchants and lawyers seem to mind the presence of brothels, prostitutes, and their quarrels, from which innocent young eyes and ears had to be spared. Instead, it was the possible presence of a school that compromised the established spatial order. In this letter, the tensions of modernity are apparent in the transformations brought to the city by an industrializing economy, in the role played by an arm of a liberal state in attempting to reconcile its citizens’ varying priorities, in the rival interests vying to determine the shape of the city, and, above all, in the way the highly charged atmosphere of the rue des Minimes is recounted: where spaces and bodies combine to create a spectacle of paradox and contradiction. The rue des Minimes was what we might call a liminal space, running along the flank of the steep hill that defines Brussels’s physical

Comparable Cities  27

and social geography, separating, in the minds of many, the respectable, bourgeois, and aristocratic ville haute where courthouse, royal palace, luxurious shops, and homes were located, from the suspicious, dangerous, ville basse of prostitutes, paupers, and other pariahs who dwelt in shadowy blind alleys.3 Apparent in Larcier’s letter are the tensions that bubble to the surface when these spatial meanings collide, when opposing views of what city space is meant to represent meet headon. A school and a courthouse, the municipal administration, an expanding printing press and bustling brewery, prostitutes, lawyers, and merchants all made competing claims for the rue des Minimes. Each offered a different reasoning for what this area represented to the broader urban landscape, and through these tensions fuelled the atmosphere that characterized the modern city. Finally, these frictions were crystallized in the bodies of those who occupied this space: in the ears of the petitioners who feared sound nuisances, in the body of Larcier whose physical illness underscored his spatial demands, in the bodies of the schoolchildren, at risk in the dangerous setting of industrial activity, and in the bodies of prostitutes whose work and presence added an edge of intrigue and subversion to the mix. Conflicts involving perceptions and uses of space, and the social and bodily preoccupations underpinning them, were evident in Montreal as well. In one instance that occurred just a few years after Larcier and his neighbours had lobbied to keep a primary school out of their living and working environment, some fifty Montreal citizens pushed city authorities to prevent another public institution, a hospital, from expanding in their neighbourhood. These residents of the Saint-Louis district in the eastern part of Montreal were deeply troubled by the plans of the existing General Hospital to convert a nearby building into a sanatorium for patients suffering from infectious diseases. “This action is of a nature to cause great prejudice to the health of residents of the neighbourhood, as well as to depreciate the value of buildings situated with in it,” pleaded these francophone signatories, before adding that other locations, particularly in the Western – and, incidentally, more English – part of the city, would have been much more suitable.4 In a city that was growing bigger every day, and upon whose health and continued prosperity its residents depended, there was apparently no place for sickly bodies, particularly those perceived as a threat to healthy citizens. Modernity, which called for growth, progress, and forward movement, created a perpetual tension over urban space, and current economic and health imperatives nourished these spatial conflicts. As Montreal became more densely populated, sensitivities to these questions were

28  The Feel of the City

heightened and residents found themselves shaping and negotiating their environment in constant reference to these physical imperatives. In the end, Larcier won out, while the demands of the petitioners in Montreal were never met. Though the Brussels council was not particularly moved by the petition, Larcier wrote a second letter, threatening legal action against the city’s expropriation order. The question remained in abeyance for over a year, but by August 1884 the council came up with an alternative solution. Judging the complications in the rue des Minimes case too cumbersome, the councillors voted unanimously to accept an offer from the minister of finance to locate the school in a building formerly occupied by the courthouse. In Montreal, the city health department reacted to the petition by sending inspectors to have a look at the proposed sanatorium site. After examination and measurements, these officials found that sufficient space was left between the hospital and the private homes, noting that two streets, a square, and a yard provided enough of a buffer zone to keep the residents safe.5 These outcomes ostensibly speak to the relative influence private citizens could wield in the face of their respective city councils; in this sense, the conflicts over ownership and uses of space that preoccupied residents of rue des Minimes or the Saint-Louis district were not modern in and of themselves. Instead, it is in the terms upon which these debates were framed that we see some of the tensions of modernity at play. At a time when urban populations were swelling, conflicts over how space was to be apportioned and occupied heated up, producing the “highly contested articulation of discourses and practices” that gave these two conflicts their modern significance.6 As municipal officials attempted to appropriate these spaces, and to exert their authority by designating them for formally sanctioned uses that corresponded to rationalist principles, local residents attempted, sometimes successfully, to repel them. In so doing, these city dwellers drew on their tactile knowledge of the city, on their bodily movements and sensorial appreciations of these spaces, and finally on the perceived threats to health and morality posed by the bodies of others. These two episodes illustrate how similar corporeal preoccupations shaped the way urban dwellers dealt with the pressures of modernity on their otherwise distinct surroundings, and it is in this sense that Montreal and Brussels combine well for the purposes of a comparative analysis. Although these cities were the heirs to distinct geographies and cultures, their paths of development converged in the nineteenth

Comparable Cities  29

century as industrial and urban growth pushed each city to formulate its own metropolitan ambitions, albeit dwarfed by those of more sizeable neighbours. In many ways, regional particularities were secondary to the challenges they shared with other cities around the world in coping with a seemingly unbridled expansion. As dynamic, multifunctional, and mid-sized centres, Montreal and Brussels offer propitious grounds for exploring the very localized corporeal underpinnings of these developments that occurred on a much broader, increasingly globalized scale. Two Cities Relegated to secondary status under Dutch rule, Brussels had been the theatre of armed uprising as Belgium declared its independence from Holland, and by the time of the 1880 jubilee celebrations, the city was comfortably affirming its role as the capital of what many hailed as a young and thriving nation. Major urban renewal projects were undertaken at mid-century with the aim of replacing the medieval central core with luxurious boulevards and sophisticated promenades.7 As historian Jane Block argues, the decades around the turn of the twentieth century were for Brussels a period of “unbridled dynamism, experimentation and change,”8 fed by the currents of artistic and literary creativity flowing across Europe from Montmartre and other centres of cultural rebellion. Physically transformed by the planning and building initiatives funded in part by King Leopold II’s personal colonial enterprise, Brussels was seen to embody this spirit of renewal and was home to a vibrant community of avant-garde artists and writers. These were the years when a young Victor Horta broke from the dominant neoclassical architectural tradition to surprise observers with buildings designed with glass and steel, their sinuous curves appealing to contemporary appreciations of nature and the daring use of light and colour providing a pleasing contrast with the monotone greys of the industrial landscape. This cultural vibrancy was intimately bound up in Brussels’s role as the country’s economic and political centre. The city’s bourgeoisie prospered as Belgium’s highly industrialized economy, propped up by a regime of laissez-faire liberalism, flourished.9 While the country’s political life revolved largely around opposing liberal and Catholic factions, the capital was also home to a thriving socialist movement, which contested the political and economic structures in place and channelled opposition on behalf of workers who, on the strength of

30  The Feel of the City

their contribution to this industrial boom, demanded their fair share of the spoils. The increased presence of industrial workers, the visibility of their difficult living conditions, and the message of protest they carried in strikes and occasional riots provoked the imagination of artists and writers, and challenged a deeply entrenched conservatism in the city.10 Over the course of the nineteenth century, residents of Montreal also sought to establish their city’s position at the vanguard of the newly created Dominion of Canada. Before the country’s formal establishment in 1867, Montreal had briefly been the capital of the British colony, a status it lost after a fiery riot in 1849. While consolidating its economic prominence, Montreal did not possess the same aura of prestige or the rich cultural life that accompanied Brussels’s standing as Belgium’s political capital and the focal point of intellectual, educational, scientific, and artistic pursuits. But a creative spirit certainly animated the professed project of building a European-style metropolis on the rugged North American landscape, to whose original inhabitants little consideration was given. Montrealers gathered in the city’s theatres and concert halls, consumed the increasing number of books and newspapers coming off local printing presses, and came together in churches, colleges, art galleries, private clubs, and libraries to discuss international literary, artistic, and scientific developments. Waves of immigration from the Quebec countryside as well as from western and central Europe and Asia contributed to the development of a distinct urban culture, laying the groundwork for the city’s cosmopolitan character.11 Different geographical realities led to important distinctions in each city’s development. Montreal’s ability to become an active hub for manufacturing, shipping, and financial interests can be attributed to the presence of a vast hinterland that furnished the raw materials of industry and commerce. The much larger scale of construction in Montreal during this period, from towering skyscrapers to wide avenues, from gigantic factories to palatial homes and expansive public parks, can also be explained by the vast amount of available space surrounding the original town centre. Brussels, on the other hand, found itself in the middle of a considerably more restricted territorial schema. Circumscribed by a ring of independent municipalities, and also located on a smaller but much more densely populated territory, it was far more constrained than Montreal in its attempts to project its modernity on so grandiose a scale.12 The two cities shared a bilingual heritage, though it is important to avoid reading too deeply into what is in many ways a false similarity.

Comparable Cities  31

1.1  Environs de Bruxelles, showing central Brussels and neighbouring suburbs, the canal, the Senne, and the principal railway lines in 1910, in Louis Dumont-Wilden’s La Belgique illustrée. Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

32  The Feel of the City

While the history of Montreal’s French-speaking population during this period is typically viewed in terms of social and economic struggle in the face of a wealthier anglophone minority, the financial, political, and cultural life of Brussels during this period was resolutely francophone. Brussels gradually lost its historic Flemish character over the course of the nineteenth century as the French-speaking industrial bourgeoisie increased its political power and social influence, such that the previously Flemish-speaking working class became increasingly bilingual, often using French exclusively.13 And while linguistic tensions frequently polarized public opinion in Montreal, these frictions still remained of secondary importance in Brussels, where it was the ideological “pillars” of Catholic, socialist, and liberal traditions that forged the cleavages of civil society.14 Most importantly, at the turn of the twentieth century both Montreal and Brussels were indelibly marked by the abundant and diverse industrial activity concentrated in and around their respective territories. Whether in the Belgian capital or the Canadian metropolis, there was a good chance that one’s means of livelihood was in some way connected to this economic reality. From the elites who owned and managed industrial establishments to the foremen who ran them, to the masses of waged men, women, and children employed in them, industrial production and related activities occupied city dwellers of all social backgrounds. From the importing of raw materials to the factories, to their transformation as manufactured products, to the display and sale of goods in commercial establishments, through to their shipment and distribution on international markets, the economies of these cities were structured around the multiple facets of industrial production. Even among the poor, whose economic strategies stretched beyond these formal structures, the choices available, such as performing piecework or boarding lodgers, were predicated upon the broader industrial economy.15 In both of these cities, industrial manufacturing was characterized by its diversity. In Montreal, the province of Quebec’s most populous city, and by far Canada’s largest industrial centre in terms of production and employment during the period, the shift from small-scale manual production to massive, mechanized factories employing scores, even hundreds, of workers was largely complete by the 1870s. During this time, Montreal industries manufactured primarily consumer goods such as food, clothing, and shoes, while machinery and other mechanical equipment formed another branch of specialization. As the city’s

Comparable Cities  33

manufacturing force continued to expand through the turn of the century, production increased; among the main industries were textiles, tobacco products, electrical equipment, steelworks, and rolling mills. Between 1890 and 1910, both the value of manufactured goods and the number of people employed in industries doubled.16 For its part, the Brussels agglomeration also positioned itself as the main centre of industrial employment within its national sphere, Belgium being, for part of the nineteenth century, the most industrialized country in the world, after Great Britain.17 The intensification of industrialization in Brussels began in earnest at mid-century, as factories sprouted within the old city and in the ring of adjacent municipalities, producing foodstuffs, chemicals, paper and wood products, textiles, leather, and metals. Compared with Montreal, Brussels’s role as industrial capital was less visually spectacular, given the smaller scales of production. While enormous, multi-storey steelworks and factories lined the Montreal landscape, Belgian heavy industry was more typically located around Walloon cities such as Liège or Charleroi. Indeed, as historian Michel De Beule has calculated, a quarter of employees worked for small companies employing five or fewer people, while nearly half worked in mid-size concerns of up to fifty people.18 Once the headquarters of a fur trade that spanned the continent, Montreal took active measures to position itself at the helm of Canada’s industrial economy, consolidating its predominance not just in the manufacturing sector, but in transport and financial activities as well. Downtown manufactures and warehouses soon found themselves competing for limited space with municipal buildings, the courts, financial institutions, and business offices. As these establishments laid their territorial claim to the city centre in the form of prestigious public buildings, the ever-larger factories moved to the outskirts, forming the imposing ramparts of a bustling town and turning sleepy suburbs into industrial powerhouses of their own. Smaller firms, too, were attracted by the financial incentives offered by bordering municipalities, contributing to the central city’s loosening grip on manufacturing, and confirming that the history of Montreal’s industrialization must be understood in terms of this “elaborate metropolitan geography.”19 Lapping against the walls of this fortress of industry were the waters of the city’s moat, the mighty St Lawrence River. Industrial production was initially centred along the waterfront, but as it expanded, smaller workshops, especially textile producers, moved north along the central St Lawrence Boulevard and out of Montreal proper, into towns like

34  The Feel of the City

Saint-Jean-Baptiste and Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End. Larger installations requiring hydraulic power and direct access to shipping installations stayed close to the river. To the east, industries changed the make-up of older working-class districts and contributed to the construction of vibrant new towns geared exclusively to manufacturing, the city of Maisonneuve being the best example.20 To the west, the choppy waters of the Lachine rapids, which had prevented the original European settlers from landing any farther upstream, had been bypassed since the 1820s with the construction of an inland canal, frequently enlarged to make way for the ever-growing transatlantic vessels that sailed thro­ ugh Montreal. Communities bordering the canal – Sainte-Cunégonde, Saint-Gabriel, and Saint-Henri, for example – became the heartland of Montreal’s industrial boom. Most of the outlying municipalities would be formally annexed to the central city by the end of the First World War, but together they shaped the landscape of industrialization in Montreal. The spatial layout of the city’s industry, to the north, east, and west, thus took the overall shape of two perpendicular axes, the meeting point of which was the heart of a burgeoning metropolis. At this point of intersection stood state-of-the-art harbour installations, featuring towering grain elevators, massive docks and jetties, and, as of the early 1880s, the first complete electric lighting system in any port around the world. These infrastructures were built over the course of the nineteenth century under the aegis of a group of commissioners, eager both to accommodate the shipping needs of their city’s industries and to supersede other northeastern seaports rivalling for commercial superiority. Only the ice locks of the winter months could dampen their aspirations for growth in shipping activity. This quest to move goods and people ever faster and farther also marked the urban landscape with a complex and innovative network of transcontinental railway systems that would shape not just Montreal’s but all of Canada’s commercial, demographic, and political history. These transportation networks were key to ensuring outlets for the city’s manufacturing capacity and solidifying Montreal’s economic predominance in the country.21 Brussels, too, was transformed by industrial interests. In the tradition of medieval cities, the various trade corporations had long been based in the town’s inner core, notably around its central square, the Grand’Place. As the scale of manufacturing grew, there occurred an outward movement quite similar to Montreal’s. Though many smaller industries remained within the narrow city centre, the urban renovation

1.2  Island of Montreal, in the 1879 Atlas of the City and Island of Montreal by H.W. Hopkins. ­Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

36  The Feel of the City

projects undertaken throughout the century left progressively less space, and the presence of factories clashed with the objectives of embellishment. Workshops and factories found themselves pushed into a ring of independent municipalities, or communes, surrounding the central city, a process facilitated by the demolition of the fortification walls during the second quarter of the century and the subsequent abolition of the excise tax in 1860. Though Brussels shares with Montreal the particularity of being a riverside town, its main watercourse, the Senne, is much smaller, and its portion flowing through the city, used as an open sewer, was entirely vaulted in the mid-nineteenth century, when it was considered a nuisance and a public health risk.22 The main industrial transportation network crossing the capital consisted of a railway system, dating to the 1830s, and two canals that flowed on a north-south route, joined immediately to the west of the city centre, connecting Brussels to Antwerp, Belgium’s largest seaport, and to the coal-producing areas near Charleroi. It was along these canals that Brussels’s industries were based, such that the western portion of the city, and the neighbouring commune of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, constituted one of the most densely industrialized areas of the country. A heavy industrial presence was also evident in a number of peripheral communes such as Anderlecht, Saint-Gilles, and Forest. Analogous to Montreal’s perpendicular axes, industries thus occupied a crescent-shaped band of territory that encircled the western portion of Brussels.23 As in Montreal, however, these politically autonomous districts can be taken as forming a continuous whole on the wider landscape of industrialization. Growing demographic figures also attest to corresponding changes in these cities’ social geographies. In Montreal and its immediate suburbs the population jumped from 170,000 in 1881 to nearly 530,000 thirty years later.24 Brussels, too, experienced remarkable growth, the agglomeration’s population rising from 437,000 in 1880 to 757,000 in 1910.25 As the density of downtown cores increased, living quarters were pushed away from the centre and into the immediate periphery. In addition to workshops and warehouses, peripheral districts also attracted the workers who fuelled these establishments with their labour. It was this high density and incessant mix of people, movement, and activity that resulted in the highly charged atmosphere that characterized modern cities. For their part, the wealthier citizens of these cities sought to make their homes as far from the disagreeable environment of industrial

Comparable Cities  37

neighbourhoods as they could, and at an increasing distance from downtown neighbourhoods, often considered overcrowded and insalubrious despite the embellishment works under way. In Brussels, those who could afford it left the centre of the city for the newly built quartier Léopold or the wooded and breezy heights of communes like Ixelles and Uccle. Prestigious thoroughfares like the avenue Louise were built, lined with rows of trees and grandiose private homes, leading out to the scenic and refreshing Bois de la Cambre. In Montreal, it was upon the bucolic slopes of Mount Royal that the city’s wealthiest residents elected to build their castle-like houses. The political and bureaucratic structures of these cities were also tied to industrial growth, both in terms of national policies concerning tariff rates, safety regulations, or building codes, and, more locally, with respect to the priorities of municipal councils who were increasingly concerned with issues of zoning, nuisances, housing, and public health, as well as with promoting their city to investors and visitors. Roads had to be built and maintained, zoning and pollution regulations had to be elaborated and enforced, water and electricity had to be supplied, boilers and engines had to be inspected, and public health had to be protected, with the result that the municipal bureaucracies of these cities increasingly became the purview of engineers, architects, hygienists, and other professionals. In sum, municipal politics during this period involved a delicate balancing act in which industrial imperatives had to be met at the same time as voters’ desire for an environment free from the more sombre effects of industry had to be ensured. As the two stories related above show, questions of industrialization and urbanization were central to citizens’ engagement with local authorities. Comparison A classical comparative approach implies the discussion of “two or more historical phenomena systematically with respect to their similarities and differences in order to reach certain intellectual aims.”26 Historian Janet Ploasky, who has fleshed out parallels in labour reform movements in Brussels and London during this period, suggests that it is precisely on the basis of such similarities that comparative methods can most meaningfully reveal how unexpectedly similar historical patterns emerged from discrete national and cultural settings.27 Scratching at the surface of these cities’ histories thus shows that while the differences in the development of Brussels and Montreal were in some ways

38  The Feel of the City

as vast as the ocean that separated them, they did in fact share key similarities in the extent to which turn-of-the-century industrialization reshaped their spatial layout, economic structures, and social and political dynamics. Grounding questions of modernity and corporeality in two cities affords the opportunity to bring historical narratives into a wider frame of analysis, observing one in light of the other in order to bring out particularities of people’s relationship to the urban environment in ways that has escaped these cities’ historiographies, which typically treat each in isolation. Beyond this line of reasoning, though, the broader objective of this pairing is also in many ways different from this classical comparative approach. The overview presented above serves as a point of departure for a more conceptual examination of how the marked presence of industry contributed in subtle and phenomenological ways to the atmosphere of modernity that animated these cities and forged the way their inhabitants navigated through them, their bodies offering resistance to a well-heeled rationalist imperative. As historian C.A. Bayly reminds us, “an economy is, after all, as much a matter of culture, social links, discourses and representations as it is a matter of brute materialism.”28 My focus on Montreal and Brussels as industrial cities leaves aside mechanical issues of economic productivity or administrative restructuring in order to explore how this context informed these questions of culture and social links. Industrialization and urbanization themselves constitute the painted canvas placed behind a theatre stage, offering the colourful backdrop against which daily human preoccupations are played out. London, Paris, and New York are the cities most typically associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity.29 For their part, Montreal and Brussels offer the opportunity to explore the development of modernity in reference not to the handful of giant agglomerations, but to less lionized contexts in order to see how these forces operated in places that were not quite at the centre of this interconnected world but were constantly more attracted by this centre’s gravitational pull. While the great megalopolises that have long captured the imagination of artists and writers were certainly flourishing during the period, they remained the exception in the extensive tableau of Western urbanization.30 In a recent comparison of Manchester and Chicago, historian Harold Platt bases his juxtaposition on the fact that both constituted “shock cities,” representing “the horror and wonder of contemporary society on both sides of the Atlantic,” industrial cities

Comparable Cities  39

“different from the great centres of trade and the capitals of empires of the past.”31 Montreal and Brussels, however, were characterized by a significant diversity of economic activities, political functions, and cultural cosmopolitanism. They weaved together the horrors of industrialization with the wonders of important capitals and trade centres. At the turn of the twentieth century, they were dynamic places where power was affirmed and contested, where cultural expressions were formed and articulated. Under the impulse of industrialization, these cities were poles of attraction whose magnetism drew people from outlying areas and other parts of the world, concentrating the creative and destructive energy from which dwellers drew their individual and collective identities. Rapidly developing means of travel and communications made the turn of the twentieth century a time of increased transatlantic mobility.32 In particular, urban planners, municipal officials, and public health specialists took part in conferences and exploratory missions, exchanged correspondence and statistics, sought each other’s expertise, and shared a common set of professional references, bringing ideas about the city, the way it was experienced and managed, to the heart of these cross-cultural encounters. Thinking jointly about Montreal and Brussels, and the ways in which individuals engaged in processes whose scope far exceeded their immediate settings, then, requires us to go beyond comparison in order to situate these cities in their wider transnational contexts. Given the commonalities between the two cities – their simultaneous struggles to manage the upheavals of modern urbanization, and the use of French by commentators and decision makers in Montreal and Brussels – I have been attentive to references to one city in the other’s archival record. Formal and casual visits as well as written references to the other city’s experiences with and solutions to urban problems suggest that Montreal and Brussels found themselves well within each other’s transnational ambit. While transnational histories typically seek out the specific exchanges between two places, implying a high degree of communication between them, it must also be recognized that direct contact between residents of these two cities was outweighed by the attraction of the large metropolitan capitals and the easier accessibility of cities in closer proximity. Broadly seen as the paragon of modern urbanism, Paris garnered extensive attention from commentators and municipal actors in both cities, as did British cities that were recognized as having been the first to face the onslaught of urbanization. In Brussels, alliances

40  The Feel of the City

were formed primarily with cities in France, Germany, and Great Britain, while Montrealers looked for partnerships primarily with their counterparts in northeastern American cities. Direct linkages, however, were only part of the transnational story, which above all came alive on what historian Pierre-Yves Saunier refers to as a municipal web, woven by the back-and-forth movement of people and ideas among many different places.33 I conceive of Montreal and Brussels not just in terms of direct transfers, but in relation to how they were marked by this entanglement. Montreal and Brussels both strove to fit into this web, and the development of each was underpinned by the exchanges that took place upon its many and circuitous strands. Enhancing bilateral comparison with transnational sensibilities allows for a fuller examination of the way these common discourses, circulating around the world during this period, actually took root in subjective bodily experiences. That politicians, writers, and ordinary citizens in Montreal and Brussels held similar attitudes about their respective urban environments and perceived of their experiences in corresponding fashions reveals much about the way highly localized contexts were interconnected to global processes. Conclusion Reflecting on the animated nature of cities during this period, the American sociologist Robert Park, a member of the Chicago School and a pupil of Georg Simmel, conceived of the modern city as a “state of mind.” For him, the visible signposts of modern cities, its buildings, railways, and other structures, were not merely artificial constructions or lifeless artefacts. They “become part of the living city only when, and in so far as, through use and wont they connect themselves, like a tool in the hand of man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in the community.”34 Despite their historical differences, and beyond certain structural similarities, testimonies of corporeal experience in Montreal and Brussels uncover how these processes shaped discourse and representations, identities, and interiorities. When residents of Montreal’s Saint-Louis district or Brussels’s rue des Minimes actively contested new spatial accommodations on the basis of perceived physical nuisances, it was through their corporeal experiences and their understandings of the effect of their immediate environment on their bodies that the city’s materiality came alive in their minds. While Montreal and Brussels each has its own rich and unique history,

Comparable Cities  41

my purpose is less to expose their exceptionality than to illustrate more broadly how cities were experienced as ways of knowing and living. They were environments constituted by the interaction between new technologies, new forms of relationships among growing numbers of people, and the vivid corporeal experiences of spaces whose materiality and cultural significance were in corresponding flux. This tells us less about local particularities than about “the power of the city as a category of thought,” as “an abstraction that claims to identify what, if anything, is common to all cities.”35 To these ends, other Western industrial cities might also have been suitable for such an examination. Indeed, it is precisely the factors that made Montreal and Brussels typical, combined with similarities in terms of size and industrial development, that make these two cities prime locations for investigating how the everyday lives of more and more North Americans and Europeans were upended by the ferment of modernity. The two cities were thoroughly integrated into a worldwide system of industrialcapitalist economics and exchange, the very nature of which requires consideration of how it played out in different places. Pairing these two cities in this way allows for a reflection on what it meant to live within this system in a way that a focus on a single case could not. Let us now look at the viewpoints from which people contemplated the evolution of Montreal and Brussels, and consider not just what they saw, but also what and how they felt.

Chapter Two

Image Makers

Bourgeois commentators interested in the changing form of turn-ofthe-century cities typically viewed them as organic entities comprising multiple, interconnected parts, upon each of which the moral and physical health of the citizenry depended. They portrayed cities in their totality, as the aggregate of the places, ideas, and activities that gave form to inhabitants’ aspirations and achievements. Panoramic representations, both written and visual, served these ends by showing the urban core from above and from a distance, and contributed to this totalizing ambition by displaying portraits of the city in which flaws were overlooked in favour of a coherent whole. Elevated vantage points allowed observers to appreciate the setting in all of its splendour and immensity, a mode of viewing that manipulated the relationship with space by defining it through notions of beauty, pride, and pleasure. This was a powerful rhetorical tool with which urban elites reinforced the rationalist project of modernity and inscribed upon the urban landscape the image of order and prosperity they wished it to incarnate. The panoramic genre was a well-used artistic and literary convention of nineteenth-century representations of both North American and European cities, and the landscapes of Montreal and Brussels offered much inspiration to its enthusiasts. While scholars have documented the evolving forms of panoramas, as well as the artistic, commercial, educational, and political regimes of planning and surveillance from which they derived,1 this chapter argues that the panorama of the modern city, and the rationalizing imperatives it carried, were both made and contested on the basis of urban dwellers’ sensorial experience of the scenery so depicted. From the heights of panoramic viewpoints, the sense of sight was directly engaged in presenting the physical

Image Makers  43

environment as proof of modernity’s hold on and governance of the city, its ability not only to keep its potentially unwieldy expansion in check, but also to thrive in its growth. When they looked out from a particular point of elevation, when their gaze swept across the landscape, taking in the geographical features and the various elements of a rapidly burgeoning skyline, urban elites produced ideas about the city and about themselves, about their place in the paradigm of modernity. If the panorama shaped conceptions, so too did viewers’ outlooks shape the panorama, in their choice of where to view it, of what to include and leave out of the picture, and in the way of describing the image. But the tone and emphasis changed as the vantage point shifted. When the body was situated in closer proximity to the individual elements that comprised the picture, the imperfections glossed over by all-encompassing visual representations could not so readily be hidden from the purportedly more instinctual, irrational senses of smell, sound, and touch. To urban reformers and hygienists who descended into the tangled industrial periphery, the ills of modernity were vividly apparent and felt in their bodies. From the ground, they portrayed the organic city as a frightening beast, spreading its tentacles in all directions, forming dark labyrinths that threatened physical and moral perdition. Visually, the city suddenly seemed barren and desolate, and from these outgrowths emanated troubling noises and odours. That some appreciated these experiences as indicators of authenticity speaks to the fractious nature of how corporeal sensations of modernity were interpreted. The proponents of rationality, seeking to efface their discomfort with the realities of industrialization, however, could do little but attempt to normalize the presence of these spaces upon the urban landscape by ascribing to them nothing less than a panoramic image of tidiness. Contemplating the Panorama Montreal and Brussels share the geographical particularity of being situated on rather steep slopes that offer splendid vistas of both the cities themselves and the surrounding countryside, rendering their skyline prone to musings from both above and below, from atop the hillside as well as from afar, looking upward. Proud of their city’s accomplishments, many saw in the panorama a grand layout of modernity’s promises for wealth and progress, the material realization of human intellectual and entrepreneurial potential. Others, however, noted that

44  The Feel of the City

this development could not have been possible without the polluting factories that tarnished the horizon with their black smoke and the hovels of misery hiding behind the dark plumes. Montreal businessman, city councillor, and urban reformer Herbert Ames aptly characterized this duality in his 1897 survey of poverty in which he famously distinguished between the city “above” and the city “below” the hill. “Looking down from the mountain top upon these two areas,” he noted, “the former is seen to contain many spires, but no tall chimneys, the latter is thickly sprinkled with such evidences of industry and the air hangs heavy with their smoke.”2 Through his sociological research, and political and philanthropic engagement, Ames actively sought out the city below, but many who shared his social rank preferred simply to view the city from the hill. Maintaining this panoramic perspective allowed for a reconciliation of these troubling contradictions. Though the various discourses were by no means uniform, the texts and images I refer to circulated in novels, journals, monographs, studies, travel guides, and political debates accessible mainly to those leisured enough to consult such works – those, in essence, who would have lived in what Ames called the city above the hill. Orderly Cities In Montreal and Brussels, viewing the landscape in “pleasurable ways”3 allowed elites to tap into the language of optimism, even utopianism, in which Western cities were frequently described. Whether the city was observed from above or from afar, panoramic representations consolidated elites’ sense of mastery over the complex realities of the urban context. In the prevailing atmosphere of modernity, in which twinges of uncertainty always simmered beneath an outward veneer of confidence, feelings of mastery could hardly be taken for granted. A scene viewed from a distance can hide many details, in these cases the more unpleasant aspects of industrialization. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the expansion of the urban fabric into the surrounding countryside, by the insalubriousness of working-class tenements, by the rapid pace of movement and traffic in the city’s busy streets, panorama viewers could instead retreat to what they felt was a safer distance and watch the action from above the fray, taking comfort in the ideal of the orderly city.4 Consider, for example, the panoramic representation of Montreal printed on the cover of a commemorative book published in 1907 by

Image Makers  45

2.1  The Commercial Metropolis of Canada, cover image of a 1907 commemorative volume celebrating Montreal’s industrialization, published by The Gazette, the city’s oldest daily newspaper. Reproduced with the permission of The Gazette. Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

the city’s oldest daily, The Gazette5 (figure 2.1). Its authors couched the advertisement of their newspaper within the glorifying discourse of Montreal as the hub of exchanges for the whole country, describing it with the pleasant, confidence-inspiring terms that held currency at the turn of the century. This strategy commences on the cover page with a view of Montreal from its harbour, one of the city’s trump cards in the promotion of its image on an international commercial scale, over which block letters boldly announce “The Commercial Metropolis of Canada.” In the foreground, a number of large vessels are sailing into the port and docking at its imposing jetties, recently built at considerable expense in order to attract shipping interests from around the world. The smokestacks on the boats are active, giving movement to

46  The Feel of the City

the picture and showing that Montreal’s port is one of perpetual animation. But their exhaust is not voluminous enough to spoil the clear blue sky and the vivid light in which the city basks. A few individuals, on foot or with horse and cart, provide a human presence to the scene and show Montrealers busy at work. As our eyes leave the harbour, the adjacent warehouses, grain elevators, and factory buildings further testify to Montreal’s ambient industrial activity. In the background, the buildings spread out in an orderly fashion towards Mount Royal, the imposing landmark which dominates the scene, adding a touch of nature to the urban frame, its peak furnishing the image with an almost stoic sense of security. The colours used to depict the city are warm, while the soft hues of the image create a tranquil atmosphere, evoking a pleasurable impression of the industrial city. The hustle and bustle, the noise and the heavy smoke that we might otherwise associate with industrialization are clearly underplayed. Indeed, observing the city from this angle, viewers would have had their backs turned to the neighbourhoods in which industrial production was concentrated. A similar message is conveyed in the portrait of Brussels (figure 2.2) that appears in a richly printed volume, La Belgique illustrée,6 in which several prominent writers outline the country’s history and current state of economic and social development. The section on Brussels heralds the city’s rustic charms while emphasizing its predominant role as the hub of economic, political, and cultural activity in the fledgling Belgian state. The city is also viewed from afar, but instead of being at its doorstep, as in the Montreal image, the viewer here is placed in the surrounding countryside. The city itself is off in the distance, a garland atop the scenery, its greatness implied rather than overtly stated. Here, the specific details of the industrial city are distinctly subtle, and the viewer is left with the impression of a quiet stroll through the countryside, dimly aware that something big looms in the distance. Barges float smoothly along the canal, carrying the coal that fuels the city’s industrial production. Farther along their route, a pair of smoking chimneys hint at the presence of this industrial landscape, but the path the viewer would take into the capital follows a tree-lined and unpaved road, past an old castle, with horse-drawn carts plodding along. Visually, the city’s physical modernity is minimized. Nevertheless, the symbols of industrialization are not far beneath this romantic surface. Their presence is felt, but not enough to dampen the pleasurable sentiment evoked by the panorama. Industrialization is in the distance, an outward sign of

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2.2  E. Puttaert and C. Laplante, Bruxelles, illustrating the section on the Belgian capital in Émile Bruylant’s La Belgique illustrée (1889). Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

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2.3  Montreal – A “Look Out” on Mont Royal. Terrasse d’observation du Mont-Royal, photographer unknown, no date. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre d’archives de Montréal, Collection ÉdouardZotique Massicotte, P750 Album 3-53-a.

prosperity within an urban environment that has protected itself from the potentially chaotic forces that nourish its growth. Both of these illustrations represent the city from afar, subtly elevating it as the jewel in a crown of natural beauty and human ingenuity. More typical of panoramic representations during these years were those that viewed the city from a point of elevation, giving the viewer a sense of dominance over the scene. As the turn-of-the-century panorama vogue hit Montreal, a belvedere was constructed on the summit of Mount Royal (figure 2.3). The Montreal Parks and Playground Association (MPPA) noted that the construction of this lookout mobilized considerable public interest, especially given the popularity of the site. Vaunting its influence on the matter as it stood before the city council, the MPPA reported that “the plan finally settled on by the Council secures, for the first time, a solid, simple, and dignified structure, befitting the outlook, which may now well stand comparison with other famous points of view in the great cities of the continent.”7 The comment in the organization’s annual report brings to light significant aspects of panoramic observations during the period. The

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specific vantage point was crucial to the overall experience, the MPPA insisting upon the “dignified” allure of the terrace.8 The scene had to be properly set and the installations had to be worthy of the most distinguished individuals who would visit the summit and for whom an agreeable decor had to be provided. In addition, the presence of a suitable lookout point is presented as a necessary condition for Montreal to rank among the most modern and prestigious of cities. The image presents the observatory as a distinctly bourgeois space. The visitors are dressed in elegant garb, while the body language of their casual postures and the outstretched arm of the man in the foreground display a confident sense of ownership over the city at their feet. As there is no topographical equivalent to Mount Royal in the capital of the plat pays, panorama viewers flocked to the vast esplanade located in front of the newly constructed courthouse. This massive, architecturally eclectic edifice dominated the entire skyline from atop the steep escarpment that divides Brussels geographically and symbolically into its upper and lower halves. The decorative walkway offered an unobstructed view of the urban horizon, beginning with the working-class Marolles neighbourhood immediately below and stretching to the industrial districts and green prairie to the west. The parasols and top hats, the horses and penny-farthing, depicted in figure 2.4 clearly suggest the social rank of those to whom the square was destined. A Natural Frame But even before the fateful moment at which one’s eyes caught sight of the view, one first had to reach the lookout point in question. In Montreal, the very act of viewing the panorama was more than just about seeing, as the journey to the top of Mount Royal in itself implicated the whole body. Walkers made their way upward along a winding path, “by steps suggestive of lungs and nerves, and a swimming head and death by falling.”9 One visitor to the city, preferring to forgo such thrills in favour of a carriage ride, described the journey to the top as “delightful.” Writing in 1912, the American author Eleanor Farrell reminisced about the “winding drive around the mountain, through a long stretch of picturesque wood-land, with its varied beauties of foliage, ferns and flowers, with here and there frequent glimpses of tiny, silvery rivulets, trickling and tumbling in miniature cascades down the mountainside.” Along the way, she was struck by the palatial homes of the city’s wealthiest residents, surrounded by imposing trees –

50  The Feel of the City

2.4  Le Palais de Justice – façade vers la rue des Minimes, in Bruylant’s La Belgique illustrée. Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

“monarchs of the forest” – as well as humble “little cottages nestling in the mountain.” The short trip thus offered a transitional moment in which visitors removed themselves from the city, the better to appreciate its vastness from afar. Breathing the fresh air afforded both a physical and mental tranquillity, thus marking the beginning of this pleasurable experience. “Once the summit is gained,” continues Farrell, “an indescribable, beautiful panorama of the city and surrounding country presents itself to view.” The eyes feast on the city peacefully resting below, “with no sound of the bustling activity of the city, save the shrill whistle of the locomotive and the sounding blast of the passing steamboat on the majestic St. Lawrence.”10 Farrell’s account highlights the extent to which the panoramic perspective was constructed on pleasurable sensory

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experiences. While Farrell describes her romantic appreciation of the mountain and the city in visual terms, the elements of nature she encounters – the singing brooks and lush greenery – also offer a tactile, soothing impression. And the mountain itself provides enough distance from the city to escape the unpleasant noises of bustling industry. Her sense of hearing is not jarred as it would have been had she found herself directly in the harbour. Instead, the locomotive and steamboats she hears in the distance are noble and powerful, pleasantly representative of Montreal’s commercial superiority and symbolizing the merchant princes’ valorous accomplishments.11 To this day, one of the founding symbols surrounding the origins of Montreal remains the story of a Breton explorer’s encounter with the view from the mountain upon setting foot there in 1535, apparently unable to stifle a cry of admiration at the grandiose scene. Commentators embellished Jacques Cartier’s narration of his climb to the summit to present it as a transcendent experience, with the journalist and author Julius Chambers even imagining the mariner standing by his side as he scrutinized the view.12 One contemporary poem relates the author’s emotion, steeped in sensuality, at the idea of sharing this view with Cartier across the centuries. She could almost see him gazing over the scene “by October’s golden light,” his “dark eyes, earnest, thoughtful/ Lit up with a softer ray/As they dwelt on the scene of beauty/That, outspread, before him lay.”13 Much as nature was used as the frame within which to present the city’s modern accomplishments, the story of Cartier’s voyage served to underscore Montreal’s continuous, and apparently unceasing, march towards progress. “The scene has much changed since,” notes one author, pointing out that the trees Cartier would have seen had been replaced by a forest of domes, bell towers, and chimneys.14 And where Cartier would have “heard only the rippling current” of the river, the modern soundscape is now filled with ships “ply[ing] the rushing waters” and the resounding “shrieks of the locomotive.”15 In a particularly impassioned commentary, the doctor and poet William Henry Drummond marvelled at the changes wrought to the landscape by the centuries since Cartier. “Then the savage tribes of Iroquois and Huron were the sole inhabitants of our Island city,” he remarks. “The red children of the forest have gone, and where once stood the rude wigwams of these dusky warriors a great and beautiful city has sprung up, a ‘city of churches,’ a city with its magnificent cathedrals, hospitals, colleges and schools of learning; a city with one of the finest

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harbours in the world, and one of the strongest banking institutions on the continent of America.”16 The condescending reference to Aboriginal populations and their distinctly un-urban ways of occupying the land leaves little doubt as to the author’s broader social beliefs in the progress of modern civilization, while the wild forest’s replacement by an urban landscape filled with magnificent public and private institutional edifices is a source of manifest pride. Though the river, hills, and pastures offered a beautiful framework, nature was nonetheless associated with a time and a way of life that preceded the self-styled progressive modern city. Hidden Industries Playing with the contrast between images of the past and those of the contemporary city, panoramic representations thus clearly situated this perceived “uninterrupted progress”17 within a narrative of economic, commercial, and industrial development. Particularly striking in many of these types of representations, however, is the conspicuous absence from the picture of the actual forces that fuelled this movement. Aside from the occasional and highly symbolic wisp of smoke or the distant sound of a steamboat or locomotive horn, the panorama of the industrial city often not only diminished but actively concealed elements that might have irritated the observer’s senses. One might wonder, for instance, where the city’s factories and tenements might have been located when contemplating the image shown in figure 2.5, typical of those reproduced in books and pamphlets about Montreal at the turn of the century. Appearing in a turn-of-the-century collection of photographs assembled with the objective of displaying Montreal’s metropolitan status, this image presents a panoramic view that gives visual form to the written descriptions above.18 The mountain’s greenery is still abundant at its base, and as nature meets the city, trees continue to line the streets of Montreal’s most prestigious residential neighbourhood, at the end of which the dome of the Saint-Jacques Cathedral is clearly visible. In the background, the St Lawrence River and the hills of the south shore round out the city’s natural landscape. Also clearly visible, the Victoria Bridge, a celebrated engineering exploit and a powerful symbol of Montreal’s metropolitan success, proudly spans the river. The city’s commercial district, located between the riverbanks and the foot of the mountain, is out of focus, with only a large grain elevator visible through the smudge. While we might give the photographer

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2.5  View from Mount Royal, published in an early twentieth-century photo album entitled Montreal: The Metropolis of Canada. Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

the benefit of the doubt on account of early photographic equipment and techniques, the visual impact of the industrial buildings lining the riverfront would certainly have clashed with the tranquil atmosphere conveyed by the image. What is perfectly clear, however, is that the cut-off point of the picture is at the foot of the bridge, near the mouth of the Lachine Canal, at the precise location where Canada’s most highly industrialized urban district began its westward sprawl. These industries would have been clearly visible from the lookout, but by removing them from the picture, the anonymous photographer creates a fanciful image, emphasizing the orderly aspects of the panorama that pleased the senses and corresponded to modern ideals about the urban landscape. In the late 1890s a Belgian engineer, Georges Kaïser, recalled the feeling of “gaiety” he experienced as he arrived in Montreal after visiting Boston. He marvelled at the width and brightness of the streets, the

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stylish garden-adorned houses, and the fresh briskness of the air. But the professor and factory inspector did not write a single word about the busy industrial districts west of downtown through which his train would have taken him. Kaïser was perhaps just waking up as he arrived in Montreal early in the morning. Or perhaps the comforting realization that he would meet at every step “people speaking my language” made him oblivious to the more sombre aspects of the city’s environment, and he more than likely forgot about the sights and sounds of industry the instant he checked into his room at the luxurious Windsor Hotel and wandered down to its reputed dining room. If we return to Kaïser’s homeland for a moment, we see that a similar dynamic shaped panoramic representations in Brussels. From the courthouse and other nearby vantage points, boasted one guidebook published by the municipality, “one discovers superb panoramas of the outstretched horizon, of the countryside to the west of the city.” Here, too, the emphasis is on the natural beauty that surrounds the city. The author fails to mention that the city’s most densely industrialized neighbourhoods were also located directly to the west of the city – they are erased from the panorama, as if the viewer could somehow look straight over them and see only the verdant pastures beyond. Indeed, the author of the guidebook, Alfred Mabille, explicitly stresses the pleasurable nature of Brussels, noting that visitors would feel a sense of “comfort and well-being” as they gaze on the city’s large and clean streets, the “cheerful and smart appearance” of the residents’ homes, and the gardens and sidewalks adorned with majestic beech trees.19 Moreover, to many commentators, such as the art critic and author Camille Lemonnier, Brussels’s charm lay in its ability, threatened though it was, to resist the onslaught of industrialization and preserve a sense of its historic identity in its urban landscape. Though Lemonnier cannot completely ignore the “whirl of smoke from industrial neighbourhoods,” the physical presence of industry has no bearing on the way he views the panorama. For Lemonnier, the historic rooftops of Brussels are a line of defence against the tidal wave of industrial growth. In factory towns like Antwerp, he notes, “life gasps and rumbles,” as “machines roar” and “the depths of the earth are ploughed.” But Brussels has retained a more refined appearance, “a symmetrical and exulted colonnade, raised like a décor above the blazing landscape.”20 The author creates a physical and symbolic distance between the tremors of industrialization and the overall progress associated with it. The illustration accompanying his words shows a tranquil panorama of Flemish

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2.6  Les toits de Bruxelles, in Camille Lemonnier, La Belgique. Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

architecture, at the centre of which the famous spire of the city hall towers over the surrounding rooftops (figure 2.6). These same sentiments were periodically echoed within the building itself, as in 1908 when, during a debate on construction by-laws, a council member pleaded that permits not be granted for the erection of skyscrapers within the limits of the city. From every point of elevation, argued the councillor, Brussels offers “a panorama constituting one of the city’s marvels, and to which I ask that nothing be spoiled.”21 Signs of Progress Those who would not hide the smokestacks and factories typically attempted instead to rehabilitate the physical traces of industry in order to present them not as nuisances but as evidence of growth and

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prosperity. In one celebratory portrait of Montreal, for instance, smokestacks were the concrete symbols of the city’s unquestionable progress and defined its “metropolitan character.” Describing the panorama as it might strike a “stranger from the old world,” the authors present industry as the city’s most visible feature: “The smoke emitting from thousands of busy chimneys hovering like a vast cloud in mid-air bespeaks the great manufacturing centre.” The Victoria Bridge is “light and fairy-like” in the distance; inland, futuristic “electric cars – shuttles in the loom of industry – fly back and forth among market gardens and suburban residences.” Further along, they continue, “axemen are busy felling the trees of a beautiful orchard, preparatory to the commencement of work upon the construction of terraces of mechanics’ residences. Here is a new factory ready for the machinery; there, and there, and there, other new hives of industry just beginning operations.” The destruction of the natural landscape has a brutal quality to it, but in the eyes of the commentators it is an obvious sacrifice to make. At the same time, the allusion to the hive underscores the frenzy of this development, while the repetition of the word “there” in pointing to the ubiquitous spread of industry emphasizes the nature of this growth and heightens the emotional charge of the panorama.22 In Brussels, glorification of the industrial landscape was much less frequent and commentators often expressed a sense of nostalgia at the changes occurring in their much older city. “Thanks to its location, to the unceasing development of railways, to its dignity and charm of a vast city expanding daily,” wrote the journalist Franz Mahutte in the 1890s, “Brussels, some will regret, has become cosmopolitan.”23 Many saw in the charged fin-de-siècle landscape evidence that the city’s true identity, rooted in centuries of beer brewing and joie de vivre, was being sold out to modern imperatives of progress and profit. The celebrated Belgian architect Jules Brunfaut, speaking before his fellow members of the Royal Commission for Monuments, recounted the distressing experience of climbing to the top of the “old Sainte-Catherine tower” in the city centre and experiencing “the feeling that Brussels’ panorama was slowly dying, dismembered by the incoherent layout of streets and trivialized by cumbersome buildings, whose atrocious outlines replace the delicious documents of the eighteenth century and submerge older monuments,” which, he argued, should instead have formed the principal ornamentation of the newly developed neighbourhoods.24 How would the city have looked, asked the author Émile Leclerq, if, “while eliminating the foul-smelling alleys and tearing down those old

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houses no longer in harmony with the necessities of modern life,” this development had taken place not through countless demolitions, but through the renovation of medieval and Renaissance architecture? “Instead of these unending streets, of these right-angled checkerboards, of these houses all built on the same cold model of a luxuriously monotone architecture,” he regrets, constructors could have maintained a diversity in form, colour, and architectural detail: in sum, the ornamentation that made Brussels unique. Like Mahutte, he denounces the city’s growing “cosmopolitanism,” seeing in the atmosphere of change and modernity not a forward movement, but the renunciation of a collective identity. Embarking on the trends of wide avenues and large modern buildings, Brussels was becoming “foreign” and losing its “personality.”25 This sense of loss was unmistakably inscribed on the urban skyline, and for commentators like Leclercq, Brunfaut, and Mahutte, the deeper meaning of the material landscape, as it was viewed from a distant perspective, lay in the visual effect impressed upon the viewer by the scenery. To them, the panorama had much to say about the direction in which their society was going, prioritizing profitability over aesthetic considerations. They also believed that the experience of viewing the panorama was fundamentally about the pleasurable sensation through which the viewer felt a bond of attachment with the urban environment. Pleas for preserving the memory of bygone urban forms were, to be sure, sensorially selective. If the visual splendours of the past should be maintained, no one much complained about the elimination of the foul odours often associated with the medieval city. Even the critics did not necessarily propose to stop urban transformations altogether, but rather to adopt a tamer approach to modernity, one whose break with the past was less radical and whose sensorial atmosphere held on to at least some of the perceived comforts of yesterday. The Crushing Weight of the Urban Landscape The panoramic trope was also used to put forth more acerbic criticisms of modernity. The journalist Louis Dumont-Wilden, for instance, considered the Brussels panorama to be dark and sinister, “a monstrous heap of mysterious lives.” Evoking the excessive stimulation of modern urban life that so preoccupied Simmel, Dumont-Wilden explains how his nerves, “quivering to the point of dizziness,” his soul, “hesitant and failing,” often kept him awake at night. To lighten this mental

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burden, he would take long walks through the silent streets and along the endless boulevards of the sleeping city. But the bodily and affective experiences he had were painful, he explained: “Plunging into the modern city” was like escaping to a “nostalgic land, beyond nature, of artificial dreams.” This was an age of increased and accelerated mechanized transport – trains, tramways, and automobiles – that separated the individual from the physical act of movement. Walking, in the direct, corporeal contact with the city it afforded, thus became a privileged method of gaining spatial knowledge. As Michel de Certeau explains, walking is central to the constitution of spatial narratives, as a way of appropriating one’s surroundings, of actualizing the relationship with the environment through movement, and of understanding points in the city in reference to one another. Indeed, the spatial stories of the period were frequently narrated in the setting of a walk through the city; as historian Joachim Schlör notes in the case of turn-of-the-century metropolises, “walking aimlessly,” particularly at night, was a way not just to know the city, but to “search for oneself” in it.26 Dumont-Wilden’s walks took him through the suburbs and into the city centre, where he followed the boulevards to the heights of the courthouse and its esplanade. To him, this was not a space of prestige and luxury, but the “ominous catafalque of a dying city,” from which there was no ignoring the physical presence of industrialization. As he gazed out over the city from the same place at which Mabille had seen only verdant pastures, he was struck that “here and there stood tall factory chimneys, and dark masses, indistinguishable monuments: in places, the moon, when clouds uncovered it, casting a brutal ray on some glass roof, making the ditches that form the streets blacker still.” Rather than seeing in the Brussels panorama a tale of economic growth and industrial development, he decries the suffering these changes have engendered and portrays his city as nothing more than an “immense cemetery” where people fall like overworked animals. “An unspeakable horror emanates from all these thwarted lives,” he continues, “from all these unsatisfied individualities, all these bodies piled one atop the other, united only in the fraternity of pain.” If those who used the panorama to express a confident vision of the city considered that the actual lookout point formed part of the overall picture, Dumont-Wilden also reinforced his criticism in reference to the place on which he stood. Leaving the courthouse along the large ramps leading to the lower city, he noted the massive structure’s dominance

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over the panorama, the long, oppressive shadow it cast over the poor neighbourhoods below. The building represents not a just and generous law, but a law “that sets the routine according to which all these men will tear each other apart for their daily bread,” a law whose authority rests upon “centuries of pain and labour patiently endured by this ‘large herd’ eternally renewed for eternal sufferance.27 One wonders how much his walk alleviated his insomnia that night. The Workers’ Panorama Though comments on the panorama made by industrial workers themselves are absent from the sources, the novels of the Belgian author Marius Renard, a socialist politician directly engaged in workers’ causes, offer a perspective on the skyline that is sensitive to the concerns of those who toiled on the front lines of industry. The plot of one of his most successful books, Notre pain quotidian (Our Daily Bread), revolves around the burgeoning relationship of a young working-class woman recently arrived in the city with a politically engaged machinist, also attempting to adapt to the industrial suburbs of Brussels after migrating from the Walloon countryside. Both are faced with material and emotional hardship, but through the author’s moralizing prose they come into their own as responsible adults striving for the uplift of the working class. Renard draws an explicit parallel between the interiority of the characters, their personal journeys, the confrontation between their sense of self and their place in a society driven by an industrial economy, and their appropriation of the city. The character development is solidly rooted in the urban setting: as they physically move through the streets, as their senses reveal to them the atmosphere of the modern city, its lights, sounds, and energy, Madeleine and François develop a fuller understanding of their own selves. Renard presents the two characters’ interaction with the panorama at a crucial turning point in the story. Having overcome the odds, managing to secure a regular income and establish a decent home, the young couple appear to be reconciling themselves to their new urban reality. But their life is about to change dramatically as François will be imprisoned for his participation in a worker’s uprising, leaving a pregnant Madeleine to fend for herself. In a moment of calm before the storm, the two are taking their regular Sunday walk on the outskirts of the city. François asks his wife to stop for a moment on the top of a hill to better appreciate the “poetry of the falling day, the beauty of the stirring scene

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formed by the enormous city.” Immediately before them they see the industrial suburbs of Anderlecht and Molenbeek, and, along the sinuous banks of the canal, they observe the factories and chimneys jutting upward. “The golden light of the evening cast a luminous haze that seemed to vibrate on the red rooftops, the large glass canopies of the workshops and the mirroring waters,” writes Renard, emphasizing the impressionistic feel of this vivid tableau. Brussels itself, however, lay farther afield, “appearing as a gray ocean on which raged enormous waves.” Here too, the author evokes the city’s distant beauty, likening the skyline to the rhythms of the sea under the day’s falling shadows. But compared with the warm tint of the industrial suburbs, the impression created by the central city is quite different. The scattered clouds of smoke fluctuating through the atmosphere evoke a tremulous existence: From the tide emerged the spires of churches and towers, the weighty masses of buildings, the heavy silhouette of the courthouse. The lights from the streets were not yet visible. But toward the shadow a pinkish halo rose like the light of an invisible sun. Creating a mysterious impression were the rumblings escaping from this immense chaos, a hollow sound from which nothing could be distinguished, but that had the heavy force of a panting, monstrous beast hidden beneath the shadows. And this was the only sign of a human presence, of vast life in movement, of a destiny fighting without respite.28

While the industrial areas where the couple had begun to feel at home bask peacefully in the evening light, Brussels, at the same moment, casts an eerie halo. Under the shadow of the courthouse, amid chaos and disorder, the city emits a low rumble whose beastly quality seems to intensify the city’s peculiar ambience. But beneath this disquieting surface shines a ray of hope. In the eyes of the characters, Brussels is also a place where battles for a better fate are waged, and François’s own dreams are closely bound to his vision and physical experience of the city as he walks through and around it. As Renard expands on this connection, he describes how the distant city brought to the surface all of the young man’s deepest emotions: his pain, his rancour, but his longings as well. For François, social struggles were about creating a better life, and although he saw himself as only a humble worker who could not quite grasp the grand strategies devised by the party he supported, “he looked forward to the day when

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the needy would have their joys and their share of bread.” Though the class dynamic is very different, François’s experience is strikingly reminiscent of Balzac’s young protagonist Rastignac, who famously came of age as he visually devoured and defied the Parisian skyline: à nous deux, maintenant! 29 Of Tentacles and Labyrinths Ideas about the city as an organic whole were thus fraught with tensions and contradictions. Against predominantly pleasurable and orderly images of forward-moving places that epitomized modern ideals were contrasted the panoramas of destructive cities whose sprawl oppressed residents and destroyed nature, making explicit the link between the material landscape and the broader ideas about society it embodied. Both favourable and critical visions were based on bodily interaction with the scenery, constructed on the walk to a vantage point, eyes spanning the horizon, ears tuned to the sounds exuded by the city. But as Bruno Latour and Émilie Hermant remind us, the very notion of a panorama is a “utopian fiction,” an illusion created to impose a false sense of order, able at best to succeed only partially in its totalizing ambition because the point from which it is observed is by necessity blocked from the view. The city must be imagined from the ground up, they argue, from the multiplicity of individual spaces that together make it come alive.30 In the nineteenth century, this perspective from the street was often likened to the dizzying experience of a labyrinth, notes literary scholar Wyn Kelley. The street produced a tense, more restricted impression of urban space, where “often the urban environment closes in on the viewer, cutting off the spectator’s freedom of movement and breadth of vision.”31 In Montreal and Brussels, these labyrinths were the growing industrial districts located adjacent to the central cores which urban elites sought to construct as symbols of wealth and prestige. Urban planning ideals of the time called for a city centre “surrounded by gardens and open spaces,” “representing the triumph of civilized values over market forces.”32 The realities of industrialization, however, meant that market forces occupied increasingly large swathes of territory around the centre of Montreal and Brussels, evidence of factories’ thirst for vast and affordable spaces on which to build ever-expanding installations and for direct access to transportation routes and sources of energy. As their gaze shifted away from the comfort of the broader panorama to the sites on which industrialization

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was transforming the city, urban commentators grappled with the significance of these spaces. Here, too, bodily movement and sensorial experiences gave rise to deeply felt preoccupations, expressed through discourses that ran the gamut from misery to splendour, from ruthless criticism to attempts to cast these developments in a more humanizing light.33 As we come down from the vantage points overlooking central Montreal and Brussels and step into their peripheral industrial districts, we might reflect on the words of Charles Buls, mayor of Brussels during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, concerning this outward expansion: Around Brussels … is growing and developing a band of faubourgs where, unfortunately, no effort is made to attenuate the banal aridity, the absolute insignificance of long and uniform streets, of districts zoned only with lot sales in mind … no monument, no plantations redress the lack of interest that characterises this shapeless mass of houses, already more numerous than in the mother city.34

From a member of Brussels’s liberal bourgeoisie, we might have expected more enthusiasm about the expansion of the city and the corresponding economic opportunities. But his tone is sad, almost discouraged when he refers to this growth. The very word faubourg, used to designate the industrial municipalities surrounding the central city, possessed a slightly pejorative connotation.35 At the heart of the matter lay the difficult relationship between the image of the older central districts of these cities – the distinguished avenues and edifices that elated panorama viewers – and their periphery, expanding in time with the successive waves of the Industrial Revolution. Disappointed by the lack of attention paid to the built environment of these areas, weary of the purely speculative considerations pushing this soulless development, Buls’s emotional language was indicative of how individuals’ relationship to urban space was constructed through the interplay of their intimate preoccupations, fears, and aspirations – through their interiority. Though Buls himself was highly interested in urban planning,36 his comments can be situated in a broader contemporary debate taking place in many industrial cities like Montreal and Brussels. Though some panorama viewers ignored what they did not wish to see, image makers concerned with promoting their city as a reflection of modern

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achievements were nonetheless forced to reconcile their totalizing vision with the more unpleasant effects of industrialization on the urban landscape, in particular smoke nuisances and the growth of workingclass neighbourhoods, characterized as sources of the vice and disorder that were seen as threatening the city’s well-being. These developments were taking place in close proximity to the prestigious town centres, both within formal city limits and in former faubourgs, once sparsely populated rural villages that were being transformed into veritable cradles of industrialization. This proximity created a paradoxical relationship. While industries were indispensable to the realization of the dream of progress and prosperity inscribed on the panorama, their concentration around the centre was an impediment to the celebration and exaltation of this same dream. These spaces, easily overlooked from panoramic heights, were, in the eyes of many observers, the unpleasant labyrinths referred to by Kelley, the sickly sores that compromised the overall health of the city. They haunted the cities’ politicians, hygienists, journalists, writers, and promoters, who, in constructing the image of their city, alternatively condemned these spaces, continued to ignore them, or attempted to rehabilitate their image as symbols of prosperity. Dullness and Desolation As Buls’s lament demonstrates, one of the principal reactions to this tension between aspirations of growth and the negative perception of suburbs was to denigrate the environment created by industrialization, the better to elevate the image of the central city. The author Émile Leclercq expressed the feelings of nostalgia provoked by such development: after vaunting the intelligence, taste, and refinement with which Brussels’s “fathers” had shaped the city, Leclercq deplores the shape of modern industrial districts. Citing the example of Laeken, a predominantly working-class suburb which nonetheless also housed the royal family’s residence, the author bemoans the lack of “art” in the streets, the absence of “picturesque” homes, the mastery of only “the necessary and the functional.”37 Thus, for some, the main problem was aesthetic. If industrialization promised progress, the neighbourhoods in which it took place threatened the city’s heritage and historical identity by creating spaces devoid of beauty and sophistication. Though he notes the effervescent human activity that animates the city, Leclercq’s equation of the spread of industrial suburbs with the predatory tentacles of an

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octopus creates an unmistakable sense of anxiety, conferring upon the urban environment an inhuman and menacing quality: We could just as well compare Brussels … to an octopus armed with its tentacles, as to a heart or a brain and its tributaries. Railways, canals, highways, innumerable roads leading to a hectic centre, where life seethes with activity, where the mind is always in movement … The suburbs are outgrowths of this terrible animal, which prays on anything that happens into its reach. And from the many arteries leaving its monstrous body, it spreads the output of its varied factories.38

These troubling metaphors were echoed by other writers who blamed the urban environment for the perceived physical and moral degradation of its inhabitants.39 The socialist poet Émile Verhaeren popularized the expression “ville tentaculaire” in his 1895 anthology, which offers a grim portrait of the modern city, especially with respect to the industrial suburbs: Along the endless old canal, Across the immensity of misery Of dark paths and stone roads, Nights, days, always, Rumble the continuous hollow beats, In the faubourgs, Workshops and symmetrical factories.40

Verhaeren’s verse depicts a forbidding place that oppresses its surroundings with the dull throbbing of machines. Tellingly, the poem situates this misery along the canal, where the industries of Brussels, like those in Montreal, were located, constituting the physical and imaginary frontiers between the central areas that municipal authorities strove to make clean and uplifting, and the adjacent gloomy industrial zones. Indeed, while officials in both cities vaunted their initiatives to sanitize an environment sullied by industrial activity, the neighbouring suburbs typically lacked necessary infrastructures, leaving a tenacious stain on the image of the city and further emphasizing the sense of contrast between centre and industrial periphery. The Montreal health inspector, Alphonse LaRocque, for instance, noted that the challenges posed by the city’s rapid population growth made sanitary measures

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indispensable to its “destiny” as a burgeoning commercial centre. In his 1883 annual report, he insisted that Montreal’s economic viability “requires that the condition of the surrounding municipalities, separated from us only by an imaginary line, should likewise be of such a character as not to expose public health.”41 LaRocque’s words are noteworthy, for if the boundary between Montreal and its industrial suburbs was indeed “imaginary,” his anxieties demonstrate that it held real physical implications. Doctor and Belgian Workers’ Party organizer César de Paepe also addressed the issue of public health as a division between centre and periphery in his appearance before the 1886 Labour Commission, but struck a very different tone: Brussels is certainly one of the most salubrious capitals of Europe … suffice it to say that I am referring to Brussels, the city, and not the agglomeration … The poor have been chased into the faubourgs, and the good accomplished in Brussels has brought about fatal congestion in the agglomeration: salubriousness has increased in the centre, for the rich; it has decreased in the outskirts, for the poor.42

With these words, Paepe differentiates Brussels from its industrial suburbs, rooting his argument in the discourse that connected urban environment and health. Whereas central areas have been transformed to ameliorate the physical experience of the city, its industrial periphery has been neglected, charges Paepe. As a result, it was the bodies of the working-class residents of these districts who, through threats to their health, bore the brunt of this spatial inequality. By presenting urban space in these terms, both Paepe in Brussels and LaRocque in Montreal drew on conceptions of the city inherited from nineteenth-century reformers like Edwin Chadwick and Ebenezer Howard, who had popularized the idea that the solution to the social ills of impoverished neighbourhoods rested in cleanliness and sanitation.43 These distinctions, between clean and unclean, healthy and unhealthy, shaped mental maps of the city. Ames, for instance, connected the city’s physical geography with a social geography whose poignancy could be felt in the transition from the city’s wealthy areas to its industrial zone at the mouth of the Lachine Canal. “To pass from the former into the latter,” he wrote, “it is necessary to descend a considerable hill and with this descent becomes noticeable a marked change in the character of the inhabitants and in the nature of their surroundings.”44 Ames’s imagery

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also foreshadowed the concentric rings model of the Chicago school, applied to Montreal in the 1920s by the sociologist Carl Dawson. Dawson’s musings on “the city as an organism” made the centre the “heart” of the city, with its theatres, businesses, shops, and public buildings. The immediate periphery was characterized by “light manufacturing,” resulting in high rates of land speculation and a concomitant deterioration of housing conditions. The result of this material degradation, notes Dawson, were “underworlds of vice and crime,” contributing to the dissolution of the “social order.” “It is the ‘city-bad-lands,’” he writes, “the home of the border drama and the burlesque show.” Such “shack-towns,” he concludes, “are the most inexcusable of all ills in a city.”45 Industry and Nature in the Urban Periphery The tensions surrounding the changing spatial significance of the city as it radiated away from its historical centre were also expressed in terms of its clash with the surrounding countryside. Although many commentators viewed the modern city as the showcase of human achievement, its image as a place of harmony and well-being depended largely on the availability and proximity of nature. Received wisdom in the period assumed that life in the clean air of the countryside was healthier and more invigorating than life in the thick and congested environment of the city. Yet the growth of industry and opportunities for employment fed a constant flow of migrants from the countrysides of Quebec and Belgium towards the industrial neighbourhoods of urban centres. The Belgian scholar and critic of city life, Edmond Nicolaï, framed this situation in specifically corporeal terms, arguing that this exodus contributed directly to the deterioration of people’s bodies. Recognizing that cities were places of intellectual and cultural activity, and that modern trends like the construction of gymnasiums favoured bodily well-being, it was to him “undeniable” that rural dwellers, particularly farmers, enjoyed more favourable conditions. “Owing to his profession, he spends most of his days doing physical exercises, so beneficial to muscular development and to health, and he has the advantage of performing them in a salutary and fortifying atmosphere.”46 If the urban landscape incarnated production and prosperity, many in Montreal and Brussels believed this had to be balanced with opportunities to escape the bustle of urban modernity. Peripheral industrial districts must thus also be understood in terms of the contradiction

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they posed to the notion that the health of the urban population depended on the availability of green spaces. Here, too, we see attempts to minimize the presence of industry in the urban landscape. Travel guides, for instance, recommended to visitors that they stroll through some of the more picturesque faubourgs in order to take in their peaceful, authentic atmosphere. One such volume recommended a walk away from the centre and to the west of the city, towards BodeghemSaint-Martin and its nearby woods. The stroll is splendid, remarks the author, who guides visitors along tree-lined roads on which they can taste the charms and invigorating qualities of nature. Interestingly enough, the route takes the promeneur directly through the “industrial and highly populated suburb” of Molenbeek, but this section of the walk is quickly glossed over, and we can only suppose that the intention was to avoid the uneasy contrast in atmospheres that would be felt along the way.47 Though he ignored the presence of industry when contemplating the panorama of Brussels on the eve of the First World War in the municipally commissioned guidebook cited above, Alfred Mabille had earlier expressed his discomfort with the transformations under way in the city. In a guide devoted entirely to Brussels’s greener and lesser-known suburbs, he expresses his anxiety about the changing landscape: “­everything is changing bit by bit,” he notes. “The city is becoming packed, houses are going up unendingly, the Bruxellois is starting to lack air, and already, like the Parisian, he feels the need to take flight on Sundays and to go, with his family, cleanse his lungs of the impure air he breathes during the week.” In the interplay of modernity and body, the former was typically seen as a threat to the latter. Frequent trips to the countryside were considered the best antidote to the physical pressures of the city. The problem, however, was that this remedy was becoming increasingly scarce. Referring to Molenbeek, Mabille observed that upon its outskirts, Brussels’s towers and turrets had been supplanted by factory chimneys: massive, dark, smoky, and interspersed with rows of tenements. The countryside was constantly receding, he deplored, and each day “the city takes, as an ogre never sated, a strip of land on which to build a street, replacing the hawthorn hedge with paved sidewalks.” Those who took these cleansing strolls now had to walk farther to encounter places unspoiled by pretentious villas and tacky guinguettes, and to find respite “where the big city has not yet spread like an oil stain.” Only after pushing on in this way could one purify both body

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and soul and escape the “fetid atmosphere breathed by four hundred thousand mouths.” Having reached this distance, one is again able to dream, to experience the impression of a calm and steady hand caressing the brow and removing from it the wrinkles of worry and anxiety. Farther along this path, adds the author, the constant buzz of the city became softer, the overexcitement, passions, and fears it produced, subdued. From this distance, Mabille seems happily indifferent to the remote panorama: “For all that the domes and towers of the city display their mass and spires in the distance, soliciting our imagination back to the oppressive city: the leaves and the trees soon dissipate the nightmare and keep our hearts at peace.”48 The growth of industrial suburbs, grey zones between city and nature, was seen as compromising the balance one’s body and soul needed to survive, and to thrive, in the modern city. In Montreal, the artist and businessman John Fraser underlined the virtues of walks to the surrounding countryside in a similar way. He encouraged young men to avoid the nocturnal temptations of the metropolis and to rise early to enjoy pleasant summer morning strolls, “far away from the dust and turmoil of the town.” As he awakes on a June morning, his appreciation of the city is fully sensorial, but here, too, the absence of the industrial landscape is striking. His senses are instead titillated by the plum, cherry, and apple orchards, the scent of the hawthorn, and the cool spring breeze, while his “inward feelings” are uplifted by golden fields, flowery meadows, and bubbling brooks. “There is an unspeakable pleasure,” writes Fraser, “to pace at early morning the streets of our city, when silence reigns supreme and naught is heard save the sounds of one’s own footsteps on the stone pavements, or the shrill chirp of some disturbed sparrows.” The author’s subjective appreciation of Montreal, the personal meaning he constructs, is thus premised on an evacuation of the sensory stimuli that typically characterize the urban environment. Encounters with the tangible evidence of industrialization, however, were inevitable on these daybreak walks. Leaving from the foot of McGill Street, Fraser inhales “the fresh morning air from the noble St. Lawrence as it flows silently but majestically past the sleeping city.” He marvels at the “mammoth sea-going steamers” in the port but is disappointed that Montreal’s riverfront has been destroyed by an “unsightly” dyke, the usefulness of which he nonetheless concedes. As he enters the industrial suburbs to the west, Fraser thinks back longingly to a time when “there was not over a score of buildings between Grey

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Nun Street and the Lachine Canal bridge.” He recalls when the canal was much smaller and is almost shocked to watch the passage through “this now enlarged canal” of steamers “drawing from 10 to 12 feet of water.” Looking out at all the factories and workshops, he remembers open fields all around, interrupted only by a few modest farms. “Those days have passed away,” he comments as he enters into Wellington Street at sunrise, “and those fields are now no longer fields, but form two large suburbs of the city of Montreal,” namely Pointe Saint-Charles and Saint-Gabriel.49 If Fraser accepts the inevitability of development, his writing also echoes Mabille’s melancholy view of Brussels. This is further reinforced by his recounting of historical anecdotes along his stroll, and his stated objective to sensitize the fading historical memories of contemporary youth. As in Brussels, Montrealers too had to walk farther and farther to clean their lungs from the soiled air of a factory-laden city, and the industrial suburbs they traversed on these strolls were a constant and forceful reminder of the extent of these transformations. While Fraser and Mabille mused upon the expansion of industrial suburbs with a resigned, if nostalgic, tone, others were more virulent in their criticisms. The writings of Franz Mahutte again provide a telling example of how deeply the spread of modern industry could resonate within people’s personal and emotional understanding of urban space. As he immerses himself in various neighbourhoods, new and old, his despair at the extent of the spatial transformations he observes on his “walks through the city” colours his writing. Recounting the story of different buildings and monuments, he makes his way to the AlléeVerte, once a favoured stroll of the bourgeoisie, now the nocturnal oasis of ruffians and prostitutes, littered with the bricks, barrels, and wagons of the nearby industries. He continues along to where the river Senne, vaulted to protect residents from its stench and infection, once flowed freely through the city, and the memory of the buried river provokes in the author a venomous diatribe against modern industrialization. He bemoans the destiny of the ill-fated waterway that has been “confiscated” by the “needs of industry” – an industry, he adds, that could not care less about the needs of the river, about its “claim, legitimate after all, to meander, unpolluted, through the golden countryside.” Mahutte proceeds with a tirade against industrialization, against the profiteering mentality “corrupting” public officials at every level of government. Having bought off the integrity of state, the forces of industry were claiming not just human affairs but all of nature as well.

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“Industry ruins nature,” he writes, it rips open the bedrock and devastates the forests, poisoning the “innocence” of the rivers. One April morning, he recounts: I saw two sheep by the side of a factory, under a mute piston emitting a constant stream of whitish vapour; in front of them the current, a shade of leaden soot, was weighing down; though they were there to graze, they did not seem to believe what had happened, and with a sceptical nibble, they mowed a fabulous grass … suddenly, the piston, impatient in its silence, belted a piercing blare; the sheep, terrified, leapt away, bleating: Industry had chased away the eclogue.50

Mahutte’s language and the mood he sets, both thickened in the original French by his choice of obscure vocabulary, denounce the suburban clash between industry and nature by evoking sensorial experiences and physical discomfort. Where he could once stroll through the quiet countryside and watch animals graze in the pastures, the city had extended its tentacles of industry, chasing away the elements of nature and terrorizing innocent creatures with its noise and pollution. Later in the text, when he names the commune of Molenbeek specifically, he evokes massive brick buildings that block out the sunlight, the miasma-ridden courtyards where no plant could grow, the corrosive smoke spit out by brick chimneys, and the heavy and dull sounds of machines and motors, giving rhythm to the pulsations of labour. “One imagines that hundreds of beings toil away and snuff it in there; nothing could be more moral: this toiling engenders gold and we are not anthropophagous,” he comments with an irony that once again underpins his construction of the spatial meaning of the modern factory upon the body – in this case workers’ bodies, their physical labour, and their premature death. Mahutte’s broader criticism of the capitalist economy is forcefully underscored by the image of cannibalism, one of Western society’s most fearful taboos regarding human corporeal interaction.51 Suburbs of Optimism Representations of industrial suburbs were not always so grim. Even the tentacles of industry could be reconciled with sensorial enjoyment and with optimistic, and in some cases triumphant, conceptions of the modern city. Marius Renard, for instance, represented these spaces as the liveliest, most “authentic” areas of the city. Contradicting bourgeois understandings of faubourgs as places of vice and disease, he sees them

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as the incarnations of virtue and hard work. He chides his readers for not knowing these suburbs intimately, emphasizing the importance of walking through them and engaging their own bodies and senses. “You live in it without feeling it … Have you looked at it? Have you heard it?” he asks his readers, whom he imagines as his walking companions. Making his way through the maze of streets, he describes the warm and busy atmosphere, the sight of homes filled with activity, and the sounds they emitted: children playing, the hum of sewing machines, even the disputes that arose from these cramped living quarters. These neighbourhoods were also marked by their distinctive odours, he continues. Cleanliness was expensive for working-class families, and only periodical laundry days could wipe away the smells, as hanging linens and bleached staircases refreshed the atmosphere. For Renard, the poor suburbs of factories and tenements, where drink and prostitution extended the life of the street into the home, constituted the “real” suburbs, free of the “ostentatious pomp” that reigned in the city’s more prosperous areas. Describing the ambience of a typical morning when workers flock from all direction and fill the streets with their presence, he dwells upon the unique soundscape as they end their conversations in preparation for the day’s labour: The doors of the workshop are open. Bells ring. Sirens pierce the space. One enters. Behind the doors, now closed, there is another minute of silence. Then a light hum. Indistinct things. Finally, at once, a great racket. The signal is given. And the pestles pound, and the ventilators vroom, and the shears screech, and the steam exhausts puff, and the printing presses and turbines rumble and rattle the sheet metal, the girders and the tillers that are manoeuvred, the coal that is unloaded, the waters that gurgle as they flow into the branches of the Senne. The heavy breathing of man is lost, only the sound of raw material, of tools, of machines is left.52

Here Renard privileges hearing over the other senses in relating how industrialization defined the spatial environment. The noise of machines drowning out people gives nuance to his generally sympathetic portrait of the industrial suburbs, but significantly, the sounds of mechanization are not presented as nuisances or seen as destructive, as they were by Mahutte. Rather, they are the heartbeat of the neighbourhood. Renard’s attribution of such qualities as hard work and authenticity to these areas, his corresponding sympathy to the labour cause, and his belief in the possibilities of workers’ moral redemption emerge, in no small measure, from his sensorial experiences of space.

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Not surprisingly, however, the rehabilitation of industrial neighbourhoods, the attempt to present them not as threatening tentacles, but as integral parts of a larger, harmonious whole, also served the interests of the bourgeois and governing classes seeking to reinforce their image of the city centre. This was quite deliberate in Brussels, where massive beautification efforts in the downtown area involved the wholesale destruction of working-class neighbourhoods, whose residents, it was hoped, would relocate to peripheral areas. Despite these initiatives, large sections of the centre remained inhabited by working-class families, often in conditions that did not correspond to the sanitized ideal promoted by political and economic leaders. Within this context, municipal authorities found themselves in conflict with low-income families who refused to be removed from their homes. Commenting on the discourse of an unnamed “popular politician” who asserted that workers had the same “absolute right” as anyone else to live within their native city, a prominent housing reformer refuted the very notion, arguing that it was “a right for which everyone must pay.”53 Those wishing to benefit from the sanitized environment being created in the centre had to be able to contribute, went the message. The rest would have to be convinced that they could be lodged just as well somewhere else.54 This was precisely burgomaster Émile De Mot’s objective in addressing a working-class audience gathered at city hall. Endeavours to transform the city’s older neighbourhoods and narrow streets into large boulevards were part of the city’s “imperious duty” as national capital and in strict conformity to the laws of hygiene. And the needs of the capital superseded those of its workers. Though he acknowledged to his audience that they were the ones who would have to move, he expressed puzzlement at the apparent “neighbourhood patriotism” holding them back. But, he consoled, those who sought more air, more light, and more space in surroundings districts would be rewarded in the long run. “Ah! How I would prefer that each housewife in Brussels no longer live in narrow garrets, in blind alleys or back lanes, but rather in the cheerful scenery of our countryside, or in a modest house in our faubourgs.55 The mayor’s speech is revealing, not simply in the way it pressures members of the working class to leave the centre, but also in the way the image of the industrial suburbs to which they were being sent has been cleared of their negative, polluted, and diseaseridden aura. By sleight of hand, these districts are metamorphosed into the pleasant, comfortable, and spacious neighbourhoods promoted by housing specialists.

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Intellectuals and reformers discussed the issue in similar terms on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Addressing the elite Canadian Club of Montreal, the political scientist Adam Shortt declared that the remedy to the “great problem” of urban overcrowding in industrial districts was to build extended transportation infrastructures in order to enable workers to live farther away from the central city.56 Promoting this discourse required the rehabilitation of the image of industrial suburbs. In their insistence on the bodily discomforts associated with overcrowded tenements and the greater physical well-being that would ensue if their recommendations were followed, these proposals revealed the extent to which the physical experience of neighbourhoods pervaded understandings of where people should live and work, of how space should be arranged. Peripheral areas were presented to workers not as physically and morally dangerous, but as a healthy solution to their housing problems, offering an environment in line with the moral order of modernity.57 Rarely was it mentioned that such strategies might result in a relocation of urban problems as they existed in the overcrowded districts. These examples suggest that the central, if unstated, objective of authorities in the matter seemed to have less to do with the fate of working-class families than with a will to render the sensorial climate of central urban spaces more amenable to the image of order and prosperity that, as we have seen throughout this chapter, held a profound resonance among political, economic, and cultural actors. Finally, even the most triumphant images of the modern city could draw upon the tentacle analogy, provided that a safe distance was maintained. Referring to the manufacturing suburbs, Montreal’s building inspection department confidently predicted that “if the growth of the City of Montreal continues at its present pace, it is safe to say that in a few years the whole Island will be within the City limits and Montreal may become the most important city of the North American continent.”58 This enthusiasm was palpable in historian Adrien Leblond de Brumath’s description of his arrival in the Canadian metropolis on a morning steamer, seeing “Montreal appear in all its splendour with its innumerable tall chimneys bearing witness to its industry; the forest of masts from its ships, the religiously pitched steeples of its churches; its sumptuous residences laid out on the hill; and, in the background, the imposing Mount Royal dominating the whole scene.”59 Here the chimneys of industry do not chase away the pastoral ideal, but rather combine with other powerful symbols – and symbols of power – in a forceful visual expression of elegance, wealth, and prestige.

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Meanwhile, in Brussels, a pair of authors rejoiced at the “eternal youth” promised to their city, waxing lyrical about the new neighbourhoods stretching in every direction, some populated by factories and workshops from which emerge enormous chimneys, casting over the roofs the shadow of their smoke, others criss-crossed with well-ordered, parallel streets, intersecting at right angles, lined with sumptuous dwellings of monumental facades. Small towns … are now attached to the big city, forming with it a single body, living a single life.60

The reconciliation between the modern, prosperous city and its industrial periphery seems complete here, as chimneys and luxurious residences combine gracefully on the landscape. The neighbourhoods growing on the edges of the city are not seen as terrible tentacles, but as vital organs essential to the health of the entire urban body. Yet this rehabilitation can only occur from a distance, looked at but not smelled, heard, or felt. While the faubourgs are specifically mentioned, these authors are decidedly not writing from within the dank and clamorous labyrinth. The harmonious image of the industrial neighbourhoods they present functions only when these are seen in the wider context of the entire city, alongside its churches, homes, and assorted public buildings. This brings us full circle – back to the panoramic perspective. If some image makers had purposefully left the industrial districts out of their panoramas, these writers recognized the utility of this rhetorical device in celebrating their vision of the modern city as progress. In light of the distinctly sensory descriptions of the city discussed above, the olfactory, acoustic, and haptic silence in accounts like these is revealing. Far from suggesting that the modern city had numbed the body, it is a strategic silence that speaks volumes of these commentators’ desire to conceal that which they felt acutely, writing these unpleasant sensations out of congratulatory representations of a landscape that could safely include factories, workshops, and dark smoke after all. Conclusion Historians have correctly identified inaccuracies in panoramic representations of modern cities, “qualifying the scale of artistic imagination” in such portraits and arguing that attempts by economic and

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political elites to attract investors and encourage civic pride led to a considerable amount of exaggeration.61 But if accuracy was sometimes sacrificed, the artistic imagination was no less revealing. The nineteenth century witnessed a shift in the way people saw the world around them. New instruments and “techniques” of visuality emphasized the subjectivity of the observer over the empirical reality of what was being observed, placing the act of seeing in an increasingly personal framework.62 While visual representations attempted to confer order and rationality on the landscape, noses, ears, and skin complicated the picture. Whether the tone was proud and optimistic or nostalgic and even despairing, the language framing these spaces illustrates how the transformations shaping modern industrial cities reverberated through the bodies of urban dwellers. On late-night or early-morning walks, travelling from the centre to the suburbs and into the surrounding countryside, looking at the view, listening to the bustle, smelling the flowers or the smoke along the way, urban dwellers gave meaning to their environment through these everyday movements and gestures. These physical interactions translated into expressions of both confidence and inquietude about the city’s future, such that the widespread understanding of modernity as a pervasive atmosphere of change and uncertainty was the product of a relationship with space characterized, above all, by its embodied nature. Panoramic and labyrinthine images were mobilized by supporters as well as critics of the modern urban form. From both standpoints, commentators created a wealth of contradictory ideas about the modern city, some praising the philosophy of progress it symbolized, others condemning the destructive force it represented, attesting to the multiplicity of impressions, emotions, and values it reflected on their bodies. But certain broader tendencies also emerged from the spatial perspective from which one viewed the city, from contemplating a sweeping vista of the landscape to confronting its individual elements in a direct, sensorial encounter. As urban historian Françoise Choay explains, planning debates in this period were shaped by tensions between “descriptive” tendencies that sought rational and orderly solutions to the problems posed by urban growth, and “polemic” approaches put forth by critics whose sensitivities were confronted by the expansion of industrial cities.63 In a general sense, panoramic representations, which relied on the sense of sight and were considered the most rational, best translated the descriptive perspective that put forth the elegant image of a broad, powerful, and forward-moving city. In the labyrinth

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of industrial neighbourhoods, on the other hand, the seemingly less rational senses of smell and sound were stimulated, inspiring more intuitive, polemical diatribes against the path which industrial society was taking. In its ability to create a harmonious image, one that reinforced widespread understandings of the city as a total object by glossing over more unpleasant details, the panorama was the favoured visual perspective of businessmen, promoters, and other individuals who had a vested interest in the development of the city and who worked to project their achievements upon the urban landscape. Responding to developing cultural standards of beauty and refinement, pleasurable representations of panoramic scenes were a useful strategy in this process of self-affirmation. By summing up the city in one broad scene, these individuals wanted to express their mastery over the landscape, their ability to step back and understand the complex environment as a single, manageable entity designed according to their values and aspirations. The urban panorama thus had to exude a balance of professional accomplishment and cultural sophistication, leaving little room for the dark and smoky realities of an industrial economy. When they discussed the peripheral industrial districts, they did so in ways that rehabilitated the image of these criticized areas, that cast them in an optimistic light, and, ultimately, that presented them in reference to the broader panorama. This perspective stood in marked contrast to that of writers and urban reformers who were more critical of what they saw and who could not help but notice the smoking chimneys in the distance. For them, the changes they witnessed provoked a fear of decay, a sense of loss, and in some cases a betrayal of their heritage. As their gaze narrowed from the breadth of the skyline to the mesh of entangled streets below, their criticism became more severe and their reservations about modernity more acute. The pleasurable atmosphere one could experience by looking at the panorama was much harder to feel in the streets of the faubourgs. While some preferred to ignore these realities altogether, such as guidebook authors who discussed the outskirts with no reference to industrial districts, others openly criticized and denigrated these suburbs, bringing out a more prosperous and orderly image of the centre, and deploring the effects of industry on the natural environment. As with panoramic descriptions, the tone and language used in reference to these images of industrial suburbs were personal and emotional, betraying the effects of urban modernity upon the interiority of its denizens.

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Exalted panoramic references were more common in Montreal than in Brussels. This can be attributed in part to the presence of Mount Royal, a topographical symbol that not only offered an unrivalled lookout point, but was also celebrated, by residents and visitors alike, as the crowning gem of the panorama itself. However, this contrast is also indicative of nuances in cultural traditions and understandings of the city that underlay global processes of industrialization and urbanization. Brussels, where we find more allusions to labyrinthine industrial suburbs, was the product of layer upon layer of built forms inherited over the centuries; streets, buildings, and natural elements were imbued with deeply rooted feelings of attachment. The apparently unbridled spread of industry, often seen in Montreal as heralding the advent of progress over the vast and open hinterland around the city, was experienced in Brussels with a greater sense of irrevocability. As we stroll back down the hill, our focus will now shift to the powerful motors that propelled these modern transformations, namely the industries and the bodies at work to make them function.

Chapter Three

Encounters with Industrial Space

Upon completing his nearly twenty-year reign as first magistrate of Brussels, Charles Buls devoted himself to the study of urbanism and embarked on a series of trips that took him across Europe and around the world. In the late summer of 1903 he travelled to North America, first visiting New York, Toronto, and Niagara Falls. On 11 September, he described in his diary his “fantastical arrival” into Montreal. From the first moment of his encounter with the city’s industrial landscape, Buls’s senses were irritated and offended: The sun was setting and cast a red glow in the sky, the city, fully wrapped in black smoke, was definable only by the silhouette of its factory chimneys, of its elevators and of a few skyscrapers, vaguely reflected in the pallid billows truly infernal city – Dantesque city – electric streetcars await you, and carry you through a blackened city, poorly lit, lacking fine shops as in Toronto, and of a dirty and sinister aspect –1

Buls’s judgment of the city was premised on his bodily appreciation of the environment: the light, the smoke, and the dirt affected his senses in displeasing ways. Seeing the glowing red sky, the city covered in a shroud of black smoke, and the outline of a few towering industrial buildings, Buls had the impression not of arriving in a place of modernity, progress, and prosperity, as many in Montreal described their city, but of descending into the pits of hell, an impression reinforced by his reference to Dante.2 As he explored the city the following day, he

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noted only its uninspiring architecture, its wooden sidewalks, its neglected streets. Nor was he particularly impressed with the panoramic view from Mount Royal, mentioning once more the omnipresence of smoking chimneys. That these impressions were hastily scribbled into a private journal further attests to the intimate and visceral nature of his reaction. It might well be argued that Buls overstated his reaction, that his known aversion to industrial landscapes skewed his observations of Montreal. Nevertheless, the sometime mayor touched upon a sensitive matter that was felt in many industrial cities. As historian Stephen Mosely has demonstrated in his study of Manchester, exposure to thick clouds of smoke was a daily reality for inhabitants of industrial towns. To arguments that industrial smoke symbolized productivity and prosperity, that it signified a steady source of employment, and even that the patterns it formed in the sky were a source of beauty, middle-class reformers and health professionals increasingly retorted that such emanations were instead signs of waste and inefficiency, whose harmful nature was compounded by the health risks it posed.3 In both Europe and North America, smoke abatement campaigns picked up steam during these years; the dark soot covering cities raised the ire of townspeople, who increasingly resented its incompatibility with modern bourgeois notions of cleanliness.4 Montreal’s boiler inspector, Édouard Octave Champagne, frequently denounced the effect of what he called the “scourge” of industrial smoke on the city’s image. Only a few years after Buls’s visit, he noted that, despite smoke abatement measures for factories, the 320 trains rolling into the city each day and the numerous steamboats filling its harbour continued to sully the landscape, and suggested that until the federal government moved to regulate the nuisance, “there will remain reasons for objecting to this interference with views of the city and landscape.”5 In this context, Buls’s condemnation vividly demonstrates how, in cities like Brussels and Montreal, whose status as modern metropolises rested largely on the rate of their industrial production, bodily experiences with the spaces of industry conditioned the relationship to the environment. Buls does not mention whether the Montreal melon, river trout, grilled lamb, and quail he ate at the Windsor Hotel the next day sufficiently pleased his senses to change his impressions.6 This chapter examines the way representations of urban factories and workshops drew on both sensorial experiences and ideas about the body. Because these establishments transformed cities in such a marked

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fashion, we will first examine them from the outside, reflecting on the messages their architectural form etched onto the landscape, but also on the way nearby residents interpreted, indeed resented, their loud and smoky presence. Crossing the threshold of their imposing doorways and drawing on labour commission proceedings and factory inspections, we will see that the tensions between employers and labourers that marked this period found an embodied form in workers’ experiences of the factory atmosphere. Finally, the paramount role of corporeal experiences in navigating industrial spaces resulted in new understandings of the body itself. Doctors, hygienists, factory inspectors, and writers mused on the meaning of the worker’s body in particular, representing it as a metaphor for industry and as the incarnation of their views about work, hygiene, and class and gender dynamics in modern urban society. From distant impressions to direct contact with the manufacturing process, the industrial activity of the turn of the century intensified bodily experiences and nourished perceptions of the body, both of which underlay the spatial stories told by inhabitants of these cities as they looked for ways to make sense of the monumental changes reshaping their working and living environments. The Industrial Landscape Palaces of Industry The industrialists whose fortunes materialized in these transformations were predictably eager to present this new landscape as a welcome result of modernity. The Montreal Board of Trade, for instance, boasted that thanks to “the foresight and perseverance of the great princes and captains of trade and manufacture,” the city “is rapidly, very rapidly, becoming a veritable hive of industry.” The spread of industrialization propelled Montreal’s metropolitan status, and the prominent smokestacks on the skyline were seen as the foundations on which entire communities were built.7 While the overall industrial landscape exercised an undeniable sensorial and psychological impact on urban dwellers, the individual constructions that comprised it were also designed to provoke the sense of sight and to shape mentalities. Indeed, many of the new factories and workshops displayed innovative architectural qualities and frequently displayed elaborate ornamentation and aestheticism embellishing their exterior appearance. These installations were the outward and visible expression of the economic elite’s sense of

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pride and accomplishment. As historian John Kasson has argued in reference to the American industrial landscape, “the desire to fuse beauty and use, to see technology not simply as prosaically utilitarian but a source of aesthetic satisfaction” was widespread.8 To be sure, industrialists did not invest in gigantic structures out of simple megalomania – they needed space in which to house the machines, materials, and workers with which they attempted to keep pace with the growing opportunities for production. New construction techniques and innovative building materials played a determining role in the look of industrial buildings.9 This landscape emerged from the actions of investors, legislators, bankers, and industrialists whose influence rested in the amount of capital they controlled and whose motivations lay in their will to maximize profits while maintaining the social order.10 In this light, some scholars are uncomfortable contemplating nineteenth-century manufacturing space from the point of view of its supposed beauty. To architectural historian Adriaan Linters, the decorative elements on such structures constituted only an inopportune and inappropriate form of aestheticism, one hastily applied to the facade in the hopes of “erasing the content of the building, of rubbing out the functional.” The rosettes, cartouches, and engravings that decorated factories thus were merely cosmetic touches. And if they could be said to express a message, it was simply one of deceit, a false representation on the part of industrialists wishing to conceal the social realities that hid behind a seemingly unbridled rate of production.11 Without denying these utilitarian considerations, however, interpreting the industrial landscape as purely the result of brute economic forces fails to account for the complexity of the reigning atmosphere of modernity, and for the roles played by economic transformations and material developments in the ways individuals understood their sense of self vis-à-vis a society defined by constant change. As historian Anders Aman reminds us, the bourgeoisie of the period combined pragmatic efficiency with a keen interest in the symbolism and aesthetics of the built environment.12 Beyond their primordial economic and functionalist surface, what do the forms of these new and unique urban spaces express about the interiority, the ambitions, and preoccupations of those who, in conceiving them, were major players in the reconfiguration of the urban environment? The industrial bourgeoisie desired a setting that corresponded both to its economic ambitions and to the aspirations of artistic refinement it entertained. Their buildings thus conveyed a distinctive visual imagery,

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one that was rooted in an idyllic vision of the past, inspired by ancient Roman or Gothic styles. The decors were designed to intimidate workers, impress clients, and display a “dramatized factory environment” that reflected the educated elite’s passion for historical dramas and romantic operas.13 Here, an important distinction arises between the imposing presence of industry in Montreal and its more discreet form in Brussels, where factories tended to be of small or medium scale, housed in correspondingly diminutive installations, or often hidden from public view behind rows of shops and houses. Brussels presents somewhat of a paradox in this regard, as the subtlety and simplicity of many of its industrial buildings did not correspond to the city’s overall importance as a manufacturing centre during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.14 But while the capital did not display gigantic industrial installations like those in Montreal, or even like those of the coal and steel centres of Wallonia, many of its structures contributed to the powerful visual language of modern industrialization. Striking examples include the AJJA tobacco manufactory in Molenbeek, with its five large arches crowning three storeys of windows in symmetrical and rhythmic force, the central Palais du Vin, with intricate coloured engravings in the arches that represent major wine-producing regions,15 and the Établissements Delhaize, also in Molenbeek, which typified a modern and rational structuring of industrial space, each constituent “sub-space” used for a distinct, precise, and coordinated activity.16 In Montreal, gigantic mills, refineries, breweries and shipyards had a more forceful presence, their impact compounded by the scores of elaborately decorated smaller workshops that completed a highly industrialized urban fabric (figure 3.1). With its stone foundations, layered brick facade, metallic window frames, and enormous decorative œilde-bœuf, the Royal Electric headquarters in the heart of the Griffintown district, for example, reminds the observer more of a temple of worship to the miracle of electricity than a simple power plant.17 Around the corner, the airy and nuanced patterns of the Arts and Crafts movement–inspired Darling Brothers Foundry contrasted starkly with the hot and heavy smelting going on inside.18 As people moved through these neighbourhoods, their senses were stimulated not just by the loud hum of industry, but also by an aesthetic language that espoused much softer and more pleasing accents, aimed at taming the harsh physical realities of industrial work and putting a celebratory face on changes that some saw as disfiguring the city.

3.1  Foundries, warerooms, etc., of H.R. Ives & Co. A prominent Montreal firm in the city’s main industrial district, along the Lachine Canal. From the 1891 Special number of the Dominion Illustrated. Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

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Monuments of Decay “Our chimneys are our minarets, often more beautiful that the minarets of the cities of the Orient which travellers rave about, always obsessed with finding beautiful elsewhere that which they do not notice at home,” proclaimed the Belgian architectural journal L’Émulation in 1893.19 Descriptions of factory chimneys that evoke elegance, refinement, exoticism, and religiosity reveal the extent to which industrial architecture was understood in terms that surpassed simple functionality. But if this architecture was to strike the senses in pleasurable ways, offering a formal aesthetic that sought to legitimize industry’s appropriation of space in the urban context, the impact of industrialization could hardly be dissimulated under such polished facades, and these factories were also responsible for the plumes of black smoke, the clouds of harmful dust, and the loud and repetitive noises that conditioned the experience of city living. Playing on the familiar pastoral theme in which the city consumed the now mournful and gloomy plains surrounding it, the poet Émile Verhaeren described the factories not as architectural accomplishments but as “formidable” and “criminal” spaces. The arms of these “hyperbolic machines” slaughter the angelic sheaves of wheat and scare away the melancholy old farmer, while the smoke and its trails of soot have soiled the wind and reduced the sun to an empty shell. Where bright houses and golden orchards formerly stood, “One sees, to infinity, from south to north,/The dark immensity of rectangular factories.” In this dreary context, Verhaeren relates his understanding of how industry affects not just the physical environment, but also the bodies of those who occupy it. Behind the walls of these beastly factories, “The rumblings are heard, rhythmic and hard/Of nocturnal boilers and grindstones.” The ground vibrates as if in fermentation, the sewers carry a “villous sludge” (  fange velue) towards a polluted river, while a twisted mass of ruined trees, nettles, and manure frame the scene. Referring explicitly to industrial materials, he continues in a venomous tone: “Oily cement, rotten plaster, cracked cinder blocks,/Along the old ditches and dark riverbanks/Raise, at night, their monuments of decay. First decrying the destructive environmental impact of industry, the author continues by expressing his dismay over the physical degradation of those who toil under these “thundering and heavy hangars, by day and by night,” without air, sleep, or sunlight. Evoking the difficult

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realities of factory work, these lines seem to blur the very distinction between machine and human body: Pieces of life in the enormous mechanism Pieces of flesh fixed, ingeniously, Piece by piece, layer by layer From one end to the other of the vast whirl, Their eyes are the eyes of the machine, Their backs give way beneath them and their spines20

Verhaeren’s representation of industrialization as an undesirable encroachment on a pristine landscape conveyed a familiar message. Yet his arresting imagery shows how this emotional response was constructed in reference to bodily sensation, not just in reaction to unpleasant sightlines, but more forcefully in the overall impression that machinery subsumed the body, figuratively crushing it under its oppressive weight. In Montreal, where literary traditions were less established, such criticism was typically expressed in more down-to-earth, though no less spatial and corporeal language. In a 1910 investigation into tuberculosis in Quebec, the doctor R. Leduc blamed Montreal’s industrial establishments and transport infrastructures, and the thick clouds of smoke they sent over the city, for the poor health of many citizens. People were prevented from “breathing normally,” he commented, “resulting in a diminished oxygenation of the lungs and blood.” Furthermore, he added, the cloud of smoke over the city reduced people’s exposure to sunlight and its therapeutic effects. The physical layout of Montreal’s industrial neighbourhoods was especially relevant here, as the high density of construction, the narrowness of the streets, the elevation of the buildings, and the lack of open space surrounding them were all said to contribute to the contamination of the air that people breathed (figure 3.2).21 If Verhaeren and Leduc’s comments illustrate stylistic distinctions in the way critiques of industrialization were expressed, their interpretations of the changing spatial character of the city, framed in terms of industry’s disagreeable and dangerous consequences, were constructed in strikingly similar ways. Bodily experiences with industry were, in both cases, at the heart of the matter, and it is through this physical interaction that this space emerges as a critical framework from which the modern city was analysed. Indeed, one commentator’s reliance on science and the other’s recourse to art reflect a duality of modernity,

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3.2  Montreal from Street Railway Power House chimney, 1896. Wm. Notman and Son. Smoke spews from chimneys and hangs over Montreal’s busiest industrial neighbourhood. McCord Museum VIEW-2944.

the interplay of ideas deemed rational and passionate. But the dramatic conclusions of both evoke the layers of interiority at play and reveal how corporeal concerns underlay the varying discourses through which the urban environment was constructed. Citizens Speak Up In addition to the published words of scientists and poets, archival sources offer a glimpse into the way the connections between the body and ideas about the city shaped widely held attitudes among the general population. The Montreal municipal administration, especially the health and hygiene and the fire and lighting committees, frequently received letters and petitions from citizens protesting against the nefarious effects of industry in their neighbourhoods. These complaints

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were filed in an ad hoc and spontaneous manner. In Brussels, however, they were formulated through a more established and formal method of consultation, a procedure based on national laws called commodo et incommodo inquiries. Under these rules, in existence since the early nineteenth century, communal and provincial authorization was required for anyone wishing to operate an industry deemed dangerous, unpleasant (incommode), or insalubrious. Notices were posted in the area surrounding the proposed site, residents and landowners were invited to voice their opposition or support, and a detailed verification was conducted by expert bureaucrats.22 The existence of such an elaborate process for managing the implementation of industries in urban areas is in itself revealing and testifies to public authorities’ will to systematize and oversee this process. As historians have demonstrated, the comfort and well-being of urban dwellers was often of secondary importance in the face of potential for economic growth, and even as they surveyed the impact of industries and sought to minimize nuisances, local authorities tended to favour the requests of industrialists in the face of opposition from their neighbours or from hygienists. Though they may not have held very much sway, the letters people wrote employed vivid tones and evocative language, decrying the degradation of the environment and affirming a sense of attachment to the city.23 The emotional quality of these missives can thus help us better understand people’s interior responses to these transformations, while the numerous allusions to intense and unpleasant sensorial experiences, particularly smells and sounds, highlight the importance of the body and of the senses in their authors’ perceptions of these industrial spaces. To be sure, these are the words of individuals possessing the ability and motivation to verbalize their complaints in written form. At the same time, they offer the perspectives of men and women of diverse backgrounds, reflecting also the thoughts of the neighbours and tenants who agreed to add their names to these petitions. Around factories and workshops, the air hung heavy with the smells of coal and gas, and vibrated to the rumbling tune of engines and motors. Urban residents deplored the effect these sensory stimulations had on their quality of life and wondered how local authorities could allow such degradation of their milieu. Their pleas often sought to de-legitimize industry’s claim to urban space by pointing to existing activities deemed worthy of a peaceful environment, including education or religious worship. The Montreal Seminary, for instance, objected to a proposal from the Royal Electric Company and the Box Factory to rebuild a recently

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burned building on Dowd Street on the grounds that the neighbouring Saint-Patrice school would be inconvenienced. One of the primary arguments put forth was that the school was attended by over 500 girls of the parish, who already “suffer in their classrooms from the thick smoke coming from these factories.”24 In Brussels, a woman protesting the expansion of a nearby boiler industry noted that the tenants of her building found it impossible to sleep, “unable to go to bed until late in the evening, and awakened to a deafening tom-tom at 5 or 6 in the morning, through the entire week and often even on Sundays.”25 Letters like these show the similar preoccupations of residents in different cities, who saw the growing sensorial nuisances of industry as threats to their health, their finances, and, in most cases, to both. In a time when miasma theories were gradually being replaced by knowledge of microbiology, and residual fears that smells bore disease, combined with a growing awareness of the deleterious nature of industrial exhaust, residents frequently expressed concern that the “noxious, unhealthy and unbearable” air emanating from manufacturing establishments constituted a “threat to public health.”26 But it was also the fear of financial loss that moved citizens to pick up their pens. Noted one Brussels landlord, whose property was located near the canal, a planned rag and bone depot would undoubtedly “depreciate the value of my house, and could make me lose my current tenants.” The boulevards in the vicinity of the canal, suggested another, should be embellished for the benefit of strollers rather than subjected to the filth of such an establishment.27 If, in this age of economic liberalism, authorities tended to favour industrial expansion, residents likewise expected that their private interests would be protected. A “smoke nuisance which causes us serious damage although we are compelled to pay City Assessments just as though we were treated like other citizens of the city” was thus considered unacceptable by a group of Montreal petitioners.28 While we might expect to find considerable numbers of such complaints in industrial neighbourhoods, where people were daily exposed to bothersome noises and smells, it was when industrial establishments attempted to open their doors in wealthier neighbourhoods that the grumbling was most vociferous; residents of such districts were keen to preserve the tranquillity of their living spaces as the forces of industrialization approached a little too closely for comfort. Various factors can explain this, not least that workers were undoubtedly more accustomed to the sensory environment of industry and therefore less inclined to protest than someone employed in an office and residing in a quiet district. Historian Christophe Verbruggen adds that labourers had

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“other priorities in life: surviving,” and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud notes that, when they participated in the investigations, it was often to speak in favour of industrialists, whose going concerns they depended upon for employment. The educated elite, she also points out, had the advantage of being able to commit their complaints to paper and wield convincing rhetoric.29 In both Montreal and Brussels, residents of wealthier areas drew explicitly on sensorial considerations to insist that industry had no place in their neighbourhoods, contrasting their ideals to the damage factories would cause. One Montreal petition bearing eighty-eight signatures, for instance, contested the opening of a sausage factory by pleading that “this is one of the most beautiful and sought-after stretches of all of Craig Street, surrounded by private residences, business establishments, religious communities, convents, schools, churches, presbyteries, etc., etc.”30 In Brussels’s quartier Léopold, a residential district developed in the middle of the nineteenth century and marketed to the city’s wealthiest residents, commodo/incommodo inquiries often yielded much more virulent protests than in places like the industrial suburb of Molenbeek. On 17 March 1901, for example, notification was posted that a foundry was to be opened on Toulouse Street, near the Luxembourg train station. “To allow such a thing! But, this would go against all the efficient measures we have taken, and continue to take every day, in the interest of public hygiene,” responded one resident before enjoining the industrialists to take their “deathly miasmas to some desolate and deserted land.”31 These initial reactions demonstrated an ingrained fear that the arrival of a foundry would transform the quality of life in the district, but the investigators judged that the complaints formulated were “manifestly exaggerated” and they authorized the project. However, when, six months later, the entrepreneurs requested permission to expand their business, a new pile of letters and petitions flowed in. In them, it is evident that the terms of the discussion changed considerably after the establishment had opened its doors. Having beheld the effect of the foundry in their midst, the neighbouring residents now had had direct physical experiences with the atmosphere of industrialization. Their senses had been irritated, shoring up their conviction that the presence of this foundry contradicted their vision of the space they occupied on a residential basis. The letters now explicitly mentioned the “unhealthy noise, odours and smoke,” the “deafening rumbles,” and the “unbearable din” coming from the foundry. Significantly, the file contains one thirty-signature petition with a third of the names crossed off and the

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note “outside the radius” written beside them, evidence that its author had sought support from other residents who might have feared they would be next to suffer. Between the initial reservations, grounded in a desire to preserve a certain quality of life, and this second set of letters – some written by the same individuals, others writing for the first time – the protests intensified considerably, indicating that the bodily experiences of which these residents complained played a direct role in shaping their relationship to the changing environment. Ironically, the foundry manufactured bathtubs, faucets, sinks, and water closets, among other modern hygienic products that residents of this neighbourhood undoubtedly used on a daily basis in the name of evolving norms of personal cleanliness. The cases of this copper foundry, and of a meat-processing plant in Montreal, were representative of the deep-seated concerns over the changing nature of urban space, particularly among the wealthier classes. All around, the air was thick with the physical consequences of the industrial economy that made their confidence in growth and progress possible. As this air drifted into their nostrils, and as noises vibrated against their eardrums, the significance of this new environment took on its full implications. Even parks, constructed in a bid to temper urban development by restoring to the landscape elements of nature that symbolized tradition and civilization, seemed threatened, as bemoaned a Montreal resident who protested against the erection of a sawmill near Richmond Square, which was “highly appreciated by a large number of citizens who seek the quiet shade, and refreshing coolness afforded by its trees and fountains.”32 Indeed, municipal authorities were forced to mediate between economic priorities and a desire for cleaner, healthier cities. In Brussels, where major sanitization and urban renewal projects had been under way for the better part of the nineteenth century, municipal authorities attempted to reconcile these priorities by allowing proposed industries to open, but under very strict conditions destined to limit the impact on the neighbouring habitat.33 In cases where permissions were denied, the authorities justified their decision by pointing to the innumerable “sacrifices” the city had made to offer a healthier environment. Surely this would not be negated in the name of greater profits: Considering that we cannot reasonably tolerate the settling in of permanent sources of miasmatic and putrid infection … in the midst of a considerable population, while the City of Brussels has made so many sacrifices in the interest of public salubrity; that it has established, at great expense, water distribution, cleaned up the course of the Senne, transformed

Encounters with Industrial Space  91 popular neighbourhoods and dispensed pure air and light to the greatest extent, and that, if the private interests of its residents are worthy of consideration, it must nevertheless yield to the interest of public health.34

The refusal is a severe, almost paternalistic, reprimand, repeated in several rejected cases, implying that city officials used this bureaucratic process as an opportunity to reinforce their conception of urbanism as well as to justify heavy investments, and demonstrating the constant tensions between the ambitions of private enterprise and the responsibilities of public institutions in both the physical and ideological construction of urban space. In other cases, municipal officials simply discredited such protests on the grounds that neighbours were overstating their sensitivity. Sent out to look into grievances expressed about a Montreal tannery, sanitary inspectors found no reason to acquiesce to the petitioners’ demands that the firm be forced to limit the odours it emitted. Having visited the entire premises, the inspectors noted that the smell was “not pleasant, but not as harmful” as in other leatherworks.35 This judgment is, of course, open to interpretation. On a basic level, it indicates that, even two decades after bacteriological science had demonstrated the invisibility and imperceptibility of pathologies, public authorities continued to rely on individual sensory experiences based on informal observations in assessing the impact of industrial pollution. Did the inspectors happen to come by on a day when production was slow? Were the owners of the tannery aware that an inspection was in the works, prompting them to clean up beforehand? Were city officials minimizing residents’ complaints in order to protect business interests, or were the tannery’s neighbours exaggerating their claims?36 In any case, what we learn from these comments is the emphasis placed on physical experiences in the construction of spatial meaning. The frequency with which citizens and bureaucrats referred to these sensorial stimuli demonstrates the extent to which their bodies participated in their perception of the city and reveals the diverse, often contradictory, meanings they attributed to the spatial transformations under way around them. Stepping In To and From Not only did increasing industrialization change the landscapes beheld by the eye and the air ingested by the nose, it also brought new

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rhythms to urban life that modified the way bodies moved through the city. Crowds of workers walking to and from work at fixed hours of the day filled the streets, contributing to the atmosphere of perpetual movement that characterized these cities. In his examination of a Montreal working-class district, Herbert Ames tested the hypothesis that a high proportion of individuals employed in the area’s industrial establishments came from other neighbourhoods. “The main avenues leading north, east, and south were watched for several evenings at about six o’clock,” he explains. On each of the major thoroughfares observed, the number of people going each way were counted; it was found that for every person who entered Griffintown at that time of day, three to four people left, in a “constant stream pour[ing] outward.”37 Ames’s scientific objective was to quantify the movement of commuters to Montreal’s main industrial district in order to reflect upon strategies for facilitating workers’ accessibility to their place of employment. But even through this prosaic language, as we picture his research assistants posted at busy intersections frantically counting the passers-by, we can imagine the sight of these crowds, the mass of people moving in the same direction, their feet hitting the pavement, their voices buzzing together. Others described this movement of people with more imagery and constructed this mundane, daily event as a key signifier of the bodily movement that fed the atmosphere of modernity. Typically, representations of these crowds were tinged with sadness at the fate of the workers and the conditions in which they were employed. One Montreal writer focused especially on the troubling image of children going to work in factories: “Have you seen them, on cold and foggy winter mornings, an hour before sunrise, these bands of young children, boys and girls, going, pale-faced and serious, to take up their customary tasks?”38 In Brussels, author Louis Dumont-Wilden emphasized the sensorial qualities of workers’ walk home at the end of the day. “Suddenly the bell that ends the day’s labour rings its monotonous toll into the dusk. And from all the back alleys that open into the great thoroughfare, flow bands of workers.” In this description, the sound of factory bells are reminiscent of death knells, ejecting the tired workers into the streets. Dumont-Wilden continues: “Through the fog and in the darkness, the streetlamps flicker and reflect – magical illumination – in the stagnant puddles of rain, but none muses on the charms of the urban landscape, or even on the charms of the home where one finds his kin.” In this critique of industry, the urban context is both magical and deadly. If its

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3.3  Usines Pipe. The inside of a Brussels workshop at the turn of the century. Archives of the City of Brussels, Collection Iconographique C7030.

scenery can charm the eyes of the casual observer, its factories condemn workers’ bodies, blinding them to the fleeting beauties of their environment, sending them “all, on the same mechanical and rhythmical pace, toward their slumber, so that they might resume the next day their life of misery.”39 These descriptions of workers’ commutes focus explicitly on the atmosphere of the streets around the factories – an atmosphere that is cold, foggy, and dark, despite the streetlights. The atmosphere is made even heavier by the regular and dejected movement of workers’ bodies, young and old, exhausted by gruelling work and lack of rest. The groups of labourers filling the streets before and after work were the visible embodiment of what went on behind the closed doors of the industrial establishments, these “caverns of anaemia and exhaustion,” to cite the author Franz Mahutte. “They erect, like blind beacons of misery,” he continues, “the annealed chimneys from which beats down the corrosive smoke. From the inside come hollow noises, of grumbling machines, of friction from conveyor belts giving rhythm to the

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pulsations of labour.” But these are the words, like so many others we have heard thus far, of an observer standing outside, feeling the smoke and noise pouring out, able only to speculate on what is happening inside: “One imagines that hundreds of beings toil and die in there.”40 Having looked at them from the exterior, let us now step inside these temples of industrial production and listen to what those who experienced them first-hand had to say about the atmosphere and spatial meanings they generated. Workers’ Voices To begin, who better to consult about both the material and intangible atmosphere of urban factories and workshops than workers themselves? Records offering first-hand working-class perspectives on the city and the body at the turn of the twentieth century are sparse. Factory life, however, is one issue about which we can glean at least some thoughts of industrial labourers. To be sure, these commentaries are those of a minute handful among the thousands who laboured in these industries. To the extent that workers might have shared class-based spatial stories, are these few voices representative of them? On the question of the physical experiences of factory work and of the sensorial nuisances and corporeal risks that workers confronted regularly, the accounts we have, though limited to a few sources, are rather consistent in both Montreal and Brussels. These sources show workers’ sensibilities to their working environment as well as their principal demands for improving it. They also show how the various pressures placed on workers’ bodies by industrial activity during this period were central to their broader attitudes about the atmosphere and meaning of industrial spaces. One detailed account of working-class life during this period comes from Neel Doff. Born into a destitute family in Holland, Doff experienced a youth of hardship and misery as she followed her parents in their attempts to find work and survive in various places between Amsterdam and Brussels. The first in a trilogy of autobiographical novels, Jours de famine et de détresse (Days of Hunger and Distress) recounts these experiences through the eyes of the seventeen-year-old protagonist, Keetje Oldema. Because Keetje’s father spoke only Dutch he was unable to find steady work in Brussels, leaving his daughter to support the family by taking a job at a local hat-making factory. As she describes her first impressions upon entering the workshop, Keetje emphasizes

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the hazy atmosphere of the room and the frenetic physical efforts of the women she sees in front of her: They took me to a large workshop filled with steam, where women, almost all young, slaved away, sleeves rolled up, in front of long vats filled with hot water, to which had been added vitriol, so I was told. They stopped for a moment to stare at me; then, their heads bent forward, their arms down, work resumed, feverishly. Entering the room, I found the silvery mist, where these young naked arms and these heads of hair of all colours exerted themselves with great busyness, quite beautiful; but when I had to breathe these emanations, this nearly subconscious impression of beauty soon dissipated.

Here we see the centrality of Keetje’s sensory experiences in her initial encounter with the workshop. Her sense of sight is engaged first: she marvels at the silver cloud of vapour that envelops the room; the corporeal nature of the spectacle is heightened by the entanglement of bare arms and shocks of hair. But only as her other senses intervene, as she smells and breathes in the foul air, does the enchanting impression of beauty subside into an unpleasant reality. After this initial confrontation with the physical atmosphere of the workshop, Keetje quickly becomes aware of the psychologically tense atmosphere in the shop. The woman charged with training her is curt and unpleasant because the time spent teaching the young apprentice slows her own pace of production, for which she is paid by the piece. Keetje is put to work right away. As she goes from observing the activity in the workshop to participating in it, her physical experiences mediate the process by which she familiarizes herself with her environment. Her work consists of repeatedly dipping long woollen bonnets into the chemical solution, and then rolling them up and rubbing them on a nearby surface until they shrink enough to be moulded into felt hats. “We’d sweat abominably at this task,” explains Keetje, “and, in this frozen winter, nearly everyone was coughing. The water was very hot, the acid corrosive: my fingernails softened within a few hours, and broke, causing a big roll of flesh to protrude from the tip of each finger.” By lunchtime, her hands are so swollen and in so much pain that she cannot hold her sandwich. The sweat, the coughing, and the damaged hands are thus the primary referents for the young worker as she engages with this new environment of economic production. But to make the connection between

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the physical experiences and mental understandings of space even more elaborate, Doff does more than simply associate Keetje’s work with bodily suffering. The author also exposes the animosity that reigns among the workers and their difficult relationship with those above them in the hierarchy. Keetje is mistreated by her colleagues and ridiculed for her physical appearance by the shop’s manager. “At the office they’re talking about a new one who must be a rare bird,” the manager exclaims one morning, demanding to see Keetje. When the other employees point her out to their superior, he laughs, “That? Surely not!” “Ha! ha! They have taste, these gentlemen! But she’s just a grasshopper: take a look at those arms!!” Insulted, the young woman becomes keenly aware of her body, noting that her thin arms and long hands had frequently been the object of mockery from others. “I was almost crying of shame,” she continues, “especially since the joy of all those women, old and young, was real.”41 From the wondrous initial visual impression of the factory, to the stomach-wrenching smell of the acid, to the physical pain of the work, to the emotional pain from the psychological abuse she receives about her appearance, Keeteje’s senses and body formulate her understanding of the industrial working environment as a space of suffering, tension, bitterness, and humiliation. Doff’s novel has the merit of fitting these aspects of the story neatly together in dramatic literary form. Close examination of the more formal, non-literary sources in which workers collectively describe their experiences with industrial work divulges a similar dynamic in which physical experiences are central to understandings of the factory space. For both Brussels and Montreal we have first-person accounts of these experiences from workers who testified before nation-wide investigations into the nature of industrial work in Belgium and Canada. Taking place only a few months apart in 1886, these inquiries offer a wide-ranging view of attitudes to industrial work on the part of both employers and workers. The Commission du travail, which took both written and oral testimonies in several Belgian localities, was set up by the national government as a response to the working-class riots in Walloon industrial centres earlier that year. The Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital held eleven days of public hearings in the principal manufacturing centres of central and eastern Canada at a time when the frenetic rate of production and growth brought tensions between industrialists and their employees to a head. Though more forceful legislation would not be passed until later in the twentieth

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century, these commissions coincided with the first timid steps towards the legislation of such workplace issues as safety, health and hygiene, and child labour.42 In both countries, governments feared the social unrest bubbling beneath this ever-increasing industrial productivity and deployed similar attempts to understand the nature of the relationship between employers and the labour force. These investigations were different in their methodology and results, and are not comparable on a strictly empirical basis. For instance, the number of testimonials for Montreal is much higher than those concerning Brussels.43 Moreover, historians have pointed to structural biases in both investigations. Were the workers’ voices representative, especially in Belgium where people refused to testify for fear of reprisals and where the commission lacked the power to subpoena witnesses? While testimony was given by individuals from a diversity of class backgrounds and both linguistic groups present in the two cities, the voices heard were primarily those of men. Finally, although a concern for political balance on these commissions seems to have informed both governments, these exercises were largely associated with strong conservative tendencies and, as such, were widely discredited by the left in both countries.44 Despite these differences and lacunae, however, these parallel investigations offer a rare glimpse into the tense, corporeally constructed atmosphere within industrial establishments themselves. Immediately evident in the workers’ comments is the climate of mistrust and hostility that reigned between them and their employers. While owners and managers described the rapport as cordial and respectful, workers responded that any politeness was superficial. “The worker is forced to make a good impression, since the bosses have all the power,” pointed out a Molenbeek mechanic. “Such and such a worker displeases them? Without any reason or pity for his family, they fire him, giving incapacity as an excuse, after ten or fifteen years of work.”45 Montreal workers echoed these sentiments, with accounts of beatings and physical intimidation giving corporeal form to this strained atmosphere. “There is no bond of sympathy existing between the capitalist of the large mill and his employés [sic],” notes one Royal Commission report, comparing the constables some factories hired to enforce discipline to “Oriental despot[s].”46 The most frequently cited sources of tension between management and labourers concerned salary and working hours. Faced with pressing financial obligations, concerns over the odours and sounds of the factories seemed less urgent

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to workers than to the residents of luxurious neighbourhoods. When asked about the water closets at the foundry in which he worked, for instance, a Montreal moulder replied that although there was sometimes an “awful smell,” he was often too busy working to notice such details.47 Yet, as the workers’ testimonies show, much as in Keetje’s confrontation with the workshop environment, there was a strong connection between disagreeable physical experiences and these broader attitudes of mistrust and confrontation. Indeed, while some factory “operatives” may have been too occupied to notice the foul smells surrounding them, others complained bitterly about the physical discomforts of their workplaces. “Imagine a vast hangar covered by a glass roof where one bakes in summer and freezes in winter, and where water leaks in through one of many cracks,” described a Brussels typographer of his workshop, exemplifying the sentiments of many workers in the two cities. Another layer of embodied meaning can be read in the expression of repulsion at the smells coming from the workers’ deficient sanitary installations. Owen Duffy of Montreal even mentioned that he was occasionally forced to stay home because of the unbearable smell of the water closets situated next to his work station.48 Many workers defined their workspace in terms of physical dangers, deploring the lack of security measures for machinery, materials, and chemicals, as well as the risk of fires. Also at issue was the nature of the tasks they performed and the debilitating effects on their bodies. They breathed in chemicals in small, unventilated workshops, climbed insecure scaffolds, and lost limbs to the machines they used. “I first learned my trade in an attic, then in a basement, which, nonetheless, belong to a very rich boss,” noted a shoemaker from Brussels, adding that it was there that he “lost a great deal of my eyesight.”49 In one gruesome tale, a Montreal carpenter reported having his entire arm ripped away by a machine on which he was changing the timing belt, a job he was ordered to do even though he was not qualified. Did the company he worked for pay any compensation or medical fee, he was asked. “Not at all,” he answered, “I was even upbraided for the scrap of cotton on which I had rested after the accident, and which was stained with my blood.”50 Many employers denied responsibility for such matters, insisting that their establishments were irreproachable in terms of hygiene and security. Confronted with the testimonials put forth by the workers, the employers placed the responsibility squarely on their shoulders, attributing accidents or deteriorating health to the

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workers’ lack of attention or propensity to drink on the job. A Brussels ice maker claimed that “the only real danger lay in the tendency of some workers who, rather than working constantly in the ice-house, would cool off, either by nursing their many binges through clandestine naps in one of the galleries, or by trying to kill time sitting on the ice blocks rather than working.” In making this accusation, the employer tapped into the recurring theme of workers’ supposed propensity for alcoholism, seen in this period as a cause of social degeneration.51 Factory Inspections Another point of comparison in the responses to the pressures of rapid industrialization lies in the establishment of routine inspections in manufacturing establishments. In Quebec, these were mandated by the 1885 Manufactory Act, while in Belgium they stemmed from the creation of a ministry for work and industry in 1895. The inspectors’ reports for the Montreal and Brussels areas confirm the dangerous and unhealthy conditions denounced by labourers. Year after year, these first-hand witnesses of industrialization condemned the excessive smoke, noise, and dust to which workers were exposed, the lack of adequate ventilation, and the absence of appropriate sanitary installations. These observations were rooted in emerging preoccupations with industrial hygiene, during a period in which the dangers of economic space were increasingly seen as superseding the threats associated with the city in general. From the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War, notes Corbin, hygienists became increasingly interested in the working environment – its ventilation, lighting, and heating – and conceptualized the factory in relation to its impact on the bodies of those inside.52 Year in and year out, these inspectors began their reports by lauding what they perceived as major and constant improvements in matters pertaining to safety and hygiene and expressed their faith in the capacity of modern technology to ensure the health of all who toiled in industry. “The need for well-being, even of luxury, which has developed in contemporary society, has manifested itself in the domain of industry,” proclaimed Émile Van de Weyer, a factory inspector in Brussels.53 Noting that steam boilers had once been manufactured by hand in sheds “constantly filled with unbearable smoke … the workman chilled in winter and sweltering in summer,” the Montreal inspector Louis Guyon rejoiced that the invention of the riveting machine, compressed air, and electric lightning had improved not just the productivity of this

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industry but also the material conditions and “comfort” in which workers operated.54 But behind this “cheerful and hopeful feeling,”55 the inspectors’ reports also betrayed a sense of uneasiness with the corporeal realities they witnessed on their visits to manufacturing establishments. If they frequently resorted to bureaucratically dry and repetitive language, they sometimes expressed more vivid indignation. When the inspectors denounced the “glaring neglect” in certain establishments, described them as “ugly, dingy, dirty,” and accused their owners of being “without heart or intellect,” they told their own spatial stories premised on sensorial encounters. In some cases, their concerns had to do with the inadequate safety measures in certain factories. If the generalized spread of modern mechanization facilitated workers’ tasks, it also exposed them to greater physical risk.56 While these risks were sometimes attributed to “inattention to duty and giddiness on the part of the operators,”57 the inspectors nonetheless recognized a broader problem with bodily safety. Elevator shafts were sometimes left wide open, fire measures were often non-existent, and hydraulic motors, turbines, and other machinery were frequently positioned in out-ofreach, obscure, damp, and slippery corners, making maintenance and repair work awkward and dangerous. Indeed, the Brussels inspector Pol De Bruycker gave a distinctly corporeal dimension to his annual reports, recounting in grisly detail the violent burnings, mutilations, and deaths, sometimes of young children, he had investigated.58 Relatively simple and inexpensive solutions like protective rails around machinery or closed elevator shafts could easily prevent accidents and save lives, argued Guyon. But the real problem underlying the physical relationship to the factory environment was not so outwardly visible. “In the vitiated air of the manufactory, where the worker is forced to spend half his life, there exists a danger that is far greater because it is constant,” noted the inspector, for whom the true menace lay in the air entering workers’ lungs, harming their bodies, and ruining their youth.59 From this perspective, the culprits of industrialization were the acids used in the manufacture of matches, paper, or even explosives and the various types of dust ingested on a daily b ­ asis – not detectable by sight yet so highly pernicious to workers’ bodies. The inspectors also regularly decried the overall hygienic conditions of certain establishments, particularly in older workshops that operated from converted basements and dwellings, where ceilings were low, widows were small, lighting was artificial, and the evacuation of

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“vitiated air” and “gas and vapours” was too slow.60 In some cases, the filth and disorder that prevailed in many workshops appeared even more harmful to workers’ health than the actual tasks they performed or substances they handled. Accumulations of trash, unclean lavatories, puddles of gear grease on the floor, and closed windows preventing air circulation all contributed to what the doctor described as a dangerous accumulation of germs. Attempts at cleanliness even seemed to worsen the situation. “Sweeping stirs up the germs, the unhealthy dust, and carries them to the respiratory organs. Done during working hours, it constitutes a veritable heresy against sanitary science,” professed the Montreal doctor C.I. Samson, emphasizing his faith in the hygienic principles of his times.61 This poor sanitation, the inspectors added, did not correspond with modern management techniques that sought to maximize the worker’s physical output for greater productivity and efficiency. New installations were “clean, warm, well lighted and ventilated,” noted the Montreal inspector James Mitchell, because “dirty surroundings, excessive heat or cold, poor light and bad air induce physical discomforts, which tend to the production of an inferior quality of work, as well as a decreased quantity.”62 While noting that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, basement workshops had almost disappeared from the district for which she was responsible, Louisa King observed that “this is due less to a humane feeling on the part of the employers than to the fact that artificial light injured the sight of the work-people, thereby causing the work and consequently the employers’ profit to suffer.”63 Was it up to the workers to keep their work areas clean, or were the employers responsible for providing them with adequate facilities? The inspectors did not always agree on the answer to this question, but they always discussed it in terms of the interaction between bodies and space. What is particularly revealing, however, is the tone with which hygienic problems were reported, a tone that betrayed the inspectors’ own disgust at what they saw and smelled. Take, for instance, Samson’s recounting of the sanitary installations he witnessed in certain factories, a theme frequently commented upon by the inspectors. Leaving no doubt as to the “repugnance” they “inspired,” he describes how “lacking a seat, the visitor climbs on the rim, crouches, and the parquet almost inevitably receives a certain quantity of urine that seeps into the interjoist or that is supposed to be absorbed by a layer of sawdust that is renewed from time to time.” Acknowledging the nature of the conditions they faced, Samson is also critical of workers for not improving

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workplace hygiene. In Brussels, De Bruycker noted that he frequently received complaints from workers themselves about the state of factory washrooms. Arguing that these were sometimes exaggerated, he agreed that “beside some installations that corresponded to the exigencies of modern progress, were found others that left too much to be desired.” These detailed descriptions of toilets, and more significantly of the way they were used, are more than anecdotal. Taken as part of a broader discourse of inspection characterizing industrial space and the workers who occupied it, they indicate how the very agents of selfconfidently rational, state-supported modern order continued to rely heavily on what their own bodies told them, transposing their physical experiences with such spaces into the ideas that they formulated about it.64 Representing the Worker’s Body Industrial work was, by its nature, physical work; and the tenets of industrial hygiene concerned not just the spaces of production, but also the bodies of those who produced. Preoccupations about the atmosphere inside and around the factories, and the physical experiences they generated, thus extended to the body itself. Recurring images of the strong, powerful, and muscular bodies of valiant workers or, more frequently, of the suffering and deteriorated bodies of overworked labourers, reveal the terms in which doctors, hygienists, inspectors, reformers, and authors conceptualized the effects of industrialization. As Corbin reminds us, the contrasting images elites produced of workers’ bodies must be treated with caution, as they are the product of observations based on specific convictions and expectations through which workers’ behaviour and their place in society were defined.65 But these representations also allow us to discern the processes that shaped these constructions and to account for the relative fear or admiration they inspired. An Industrial Metaphor The worker’s body was frequently put forth as a metaphor for industrialization itself, and represented as a machine, a tool for production. Like the machines that required large shipments of coal and vast hydraulic resources to operate, so too the working body needed fuel. Like the machines whose output sullied the air of the city, so too did the

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working body pollute its own environment. Like the machines that required upkeep and maintenance, so too was the working body susceptible to overheating and malfunctioning. As historian Anson Rabinbach argues, this analogy enthused scientists and social reformers of the late nineteenth century, who saw in this equation of the body and machine a “new scientific and cultural framework” that would lead to greater productivity. Harnessing this energy, exploiting this “human motor” more efficiently, also held the promise of objective and neutral solutions to labour-related economic and political conflicts. A new “science of work” led researchers to believe they could “resolve the ‘worker question’ through science” by investigating, studying, measuring, and photographing the body’s movements, its rhythms and labour capacities. Maximizing the efficiency of the working body, went the reasoning, would nullify the perceived advantage in productivity of overly long shifts and convince workers of the validity of employers’ claims by replacing moral exhortations to work with “experiment and reasoned argument.” Like the city itself, the worker’s body in this period was conceptualized in rationalized terms, as an object that could be shaped and moulded according to imperatives of progress and prosperity.66 In 1910, the Solvay Institute of Brussels published a detailed study of the food consumption of 1,065 Belgian workers, examining and representing their bodies in rigorously empirical terms. The authors developed their ideas about the body in tandem with ideas about the industrial establishments that transformed the landscape. Whether sleeping or labouring, argued Auguste Slosse, the body was always at work in some way, and his description of the body’s pulsations and secretions are reminiscent of contemporary descriptions of industrial machines with their motors running and fan belts spinning, producing energy and generating waste: “Each beat of the heart releases a known amount of blood into the arteries, the digestive glands secrete their gastric juices and continue the transformation of nutrients … breathing brings vivifying oxygen to the blood and rids it of the carbonic acid generated by internal oxidation.” Similar to the intensification of industry that fuelled modern life, heightening the speed of change, the movement of people and ideas, the human body also quickened its activity with industrialization: “The organism’s functional activities increase, respiration becomes more active, the pulse accelerates, the intensity of chemical reactions grows.” And, just like the machines that moved industry forward, the “human machine” needs energy for its “internal combustions.”67 Indeed, the measure of the appropriate types and

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quantities of food required to maximize the human body’s productive potential drew heavily on contemporary references to industrialization. Pushing this metaphor to its limits, a Brussels industrial journal published a table comparing the relative horsepower costs of a variety of “agents of motive force.” It was calculated that for one man, “producing an average effort of seven kilograms on a crank of 0.35 metres in diameter, working for eight consecutive hours at a speed of 30 revolutions per minute to earn 3.5 francs, the cost per horsepower would be 4.25 francs.” Compared to a horse or an ox at around 1 frank per horsepower, or especially to a steam engine, fixed motor, windmill, hydraulic wheel or turbine at a few cents each, man was a costly machine indeed, but, in the eyes of some industrialists, a machine nonetheless, whose cost and efficiency could be measured by cold, rational calculations.68 Little wonder that at the Commission du travail hearings in Brussels one angered witness declared that “the labourer who enters a large factory is no longer a man. He is a number charged with producing dividends, and by dint of being in constant contact with a machine, becomes a machine himself, but a machine that quickly goes haywire.”69 Much as the machines used in factories polluted cities with the smoke, dust, smells, and sounds they emitted, the body at work also vitiated the air around it, further poisoning the atmosphere. In Le livre du travailleur (figure 3.4), a guide for workers about health and safety in the factory, the hygienist Lucy Schmidt noted that, even at rest, through breathing alone, the body’s emanations were harmful. With the added effects of smoking, of poor dental and corporal hygiene, of artificial lightning, of coal heating, of the various dust particles in factories, workers found themselves carrying out their physically strenuous activities in a toxic cloud formed in large part by their own bodies and bodily practices. In this economic context dictated by an impulse for sustained industrial production, these ambient threats to the body were heightened by the body’s own inability to keep up with modernity’s rapid pace. Indeed, Schmidt and other hygienists pointed to overwork, or surmenage, an excess of intense physical effort, as a major problem that faced not just individual workers, but entire industries that relied on their capacity to maintain a rhythm of production.70 The human machine, like the mechanical one, was prone to breaking down when overtaxed; as a result, by the turn of the century, notes Rabinbach, fatigue had replaced idleness as the main challenge to productivity in the minds of the bourgeoisie. Like other forms of energy, human energy was seen as a valuable resource, one that had to be managed and conserved to avoid waste and inefficiency. This framework intensified

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3.4  Illustration by the Belgian artist Constantin Meunier in Lucy Schmidt’s Le livre du travailleur on the subject of industrial hygiene (1913). Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

hygienists’ reliance on vivid descriptions of the body and the effects of the factory upon it. As a result, industrial work was typically represented in terms of the painful muscle spasms, the accident-inducing fatigue, or the life­threatening infectious diseases to which workers were exposed. Those

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who defended workers’ interests before production-driven industrialists used modern scientific discourse and drew on bodily representations to point out that there were physical limits to the amount of time a person could work; thus regular days of rest and restricted hours were also in the employer’s best interests, as workers would be more productive.71 As the doctor, socialist activist, and former labourer César de Paepe testified at the Commission du travail hearings in Brussels, the nature of any type of work could be summed up in the most basic scientific terms: all work, whether physical or cerebral, “is movement, an expenditure of energy; that is, an expenditure of calories and electricity, that are produced by the oxidation of food.” Here again, the machine–body equation is invoked. But in this definition, in his focus on movement, electricity, and consumption of energy, Paepe substitutes the individual body for the very atmosphere of modernity that defined the period. He continues by describing the workings of lactic acid, again representing industrial activity in terms of fatigue, “which soon becomes pain, and gives way to involuntary spasms, to cramps and to exhaustion of the nerves and muscles.” A further threat inherent in industrial work was the necessity for the body to remain in the same position for long periods of time. In many occupations, notes the doctor, “the body is constantly bent forward, doubled over, which restricts the stomach, the liver and especially the respiratory organs,” all of which precipitated the onset of various ailments specific to individual trades.72 Research in the period also exposed a host of unsuspected physical afflictions associated with the intensification of industrial work. Schmidt discusses how workers exposed to the sensory stimuli of the factory risked having their senses dulled, or even destroyed. Insufficient lighting, for example, forced people to bring their eyes too close to their work, resulting in myopia and blindness, while overly bright lights fatigued and weakened the eyes. Flickering light, from gas lamps or candles, caused painful stress on the retina, while light that released too much heat caused the eyes to dry up, leading to irritation, redness, and headaches, making work impossible. Alternatively, workers who manufactured boilers, machines, and other metal products in foundries were often prone to hearing loss. “Indeed,” she explains, “the aural nerves receive, from the liquids of the inner ear that conduct sound, repeated and overly resonant shocks, that are quick to exhaust the nerves, and before long dull their sensitivity,” resulting in untreatable deafness.73 Finally, a direct bodily consequence of this surmenage was the risk to the weakened body of contracting diseases, caused either by the poisonous gases and dust produced by the manufacturing process or by the

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3.5  Ouvrier peintre. Photograph of a painter suffering from years of exposure to lead, published in a 1912 edition of the Belgian socialist journal Abonnement Germinal. Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

poor hygienic practices that favoured the transmission of tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, or smallpox. The province of Quebec’s 1910 study on tuberculosis blamed the “dusty and smoky atmosphere” and the “exhausting work” in factories for the high mortality rates resulting from the spread of this disease, which, noted Schmidt, was also depriving

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Belgium of its “living force.”74 Moreover, according to one Quebec doctor and professor of hygiene’s analysis of manufacturing establishments, Montreal was especially fertile territory for pulmonary diseases. In the city’s factories and workshops, he stressed, workers “live in the perpetual respiration of air vitiated by all sorts of deleterious vapours, loaded with the most harmful types of dust, and alternately subjected to all variations of heat, cold or humidity.” All of these, he added, were factors that the medical community recognized as direct causes of respiratory and other lung-related ailments.75 Publishing an overview of work-related diseases in the Belgian socialist journal Abonnement Germinal, the doctor F. Frère used particularly graphic bodily references to give additional impact to his appeals for improved conditions. Detailed descriptions of the transformations of workers’ bodies as they contracted these diseases, in combination with explicit references to the coughing, choking, indigestion, vomiting, cramping, and paralysis that caused such “atrocious suffering,” used the tormented body of the worker as a means to make a broader political statement about the nature of industrialization. Take the worker suffering from saturnism, or lead poisoning: “He is pallid, faded, sometimes of a greyish complexion. Furrows and wrinkles appear as if they had been traced with a lead pencil, while the rest of the skin is earthy, greyish, and seems dirty. The discolouration of the mucous membranes adds its touch to the leaden tint of the face.” This desolate appearance is reinforced by a constant feeling of weariness, fatigue and breathlessness, repeated palpitations, and indigestion. Further visual emphasis is provided by accompanying photographs of crippled workers, whose careers and life expectancy have been cut short by this debilitating disease.76 Vivid representations like these not only highlight the bodily underpinnings of industrial work, but also inform broader critiques of the dangers of modern industrialism. Women Workers Factory inspectors and hygienists expressed a particular concern for the bodies of working women, whose presence and visibility in industry increased considerably through the nineteenth century.77 As we saw in Neel Doff’s account, women were often subjected to violence and mistreatment within the walls of industrial establishments, and in both Brussels and Montreal pleas were made for particular attention to this issue.78 In a long list of demands presented to the Commission

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du travail, a delegate of the Molenbeek workers’ league called for inquiry into factories and workshops that employed women and children “to know how these beings are treated, and the precautions that are taken to protect them from the dangers of machines, with which they are in daily contact.”79 Though the recommendation was not taken up in Belgium, such investigations were carried out in Quebec as of 1896, when, after successful lobbying by the Montreal Local Council of Women, female inspectors were hired to report on industrial establishments that employed women.80 After this date, the tone of the reports changed noticeably as gender-related issues concerning industrial work became more prominent. “The textile and other industries where children, girls and women are employed have our especial care as there is much greater cause for vigilance and close supervision there than in places where only men are employed,” ensured factory inspector James Mitchell, underscoring his thoughts on women’s particular vulnerability in the industrial labour force.81 In commentaries like these, the uneasiness was caused by the proximity in which women and men worked. The notion that members of the two sexes should physically exert themselves while positioned side by side struck many observers as indecent, and their remarks are coloured by moral undertones that determined their view of appropriate interaction between men and women. The lack of separate sanitary facilities for each sex in many factories was also considered particularly problematic. Indeed, ten years after women began inspecting Montreal’s industrial establishments, Louise Provencher noted that progress was being made to ensure women’s well-being in the workshops, but wondered “does not the moral side of her nature also need to be watched and safeguarded?” For the “inspectresses,” as they were called, the conversations that “working girls” could be heard having in the workshops, even the “illustrated catalogues and advertisements of at least doubtful taste” to which their eyes were daily exposed, were enough to make one blush. While many workshops placed male and female employees in separate rooms, Provencher recommended that this practice be made mandatory, that women workers be supervised only by other women, and that all conversation be banned during working hours. Furthermore, she repeatedly suggested that the very rhythm of the workday be modified to better accommodate women workers by allowing women to arrive later in order to avoid walking to work among the crowds of men who descended into the dark streets in the early morning hours.82

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While the inspectors expressed reservations about the propriety of women’s factory work and fought to establish what they considered appropriate conditions, others were opposed to the very idea of women working. Conservative commentators in both Belgium and Quebec tapped into prevailing notions that women’s social role was in the home, emphasizing in spatial and bodily terms their vision of the factory as inappropriate for women. “What! A woman in the workshop?” exclaimed the Belgian priest and educator Victor Van Tricht. Then, responding to his own disbelief, “Yes! We live in times that make us witness this lamentable spectacle!” According to his understanding of femininity, women’s presence in industry exposed them to both a physical and social environment that debased and sexualized them, and robbed them of their very “nature”: She will thus go off, far from her husband, far from her child; she, a woman, will cross the tumultuous threshold of the textile mill. Suffocated first by this atmosphere where sneers that make her red in the face fly about, trembling with fright in the middle of these workmen whose stares and smiles sear her like a hot iron, ah! she suffers in her soul and in her honour. But let time do its bidding, let the first blushes of her insulted modesty dissipate, let the first jolts to her menaced chastity settle, and she will get used to this world and this atmosphere. To the men’s remarks, she will have answers that will make them laugh; in response to their looks and their advances, her eyes, her gestures and her demeanour will flash an insolent shamelessness that will chill us with horror.

Tricht offers a familiar critique, but his characteristically evocative style and his drawing on the material and corporeal dimensions of industry show the level of subjectivity on which opposition to women’s right to paid employment was formulated. The physicality of the factory space, the tumult, the suffocating air, the burning iron all represent fears about the unhealthy moral atmosphere that was believed to corrupt women through the transformation of gendered interaction. Can such a woman still be a mother, he wonders.83 Though their perspectives on the merit of female labour varied, commentators frequently defined these moral considerations in terms of corporeal preoccupations, ranging, as in the examples above, from immediate issues of personal risk and security to more socially grounded questions of appropriate bodily deportment. Hygienists, for their part,

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brought up the issue of the body much more directly. For instance, women were considered to be at greater risk of suffering from the effects of overwork because they were seen as physically weaker than men.84 The Montreal-area hygienist F.A. Baillairgé, who focused on both the moral and the bodily factors, argued that legislation should prevent women from working in industries that presented more serious health hazards. Citing the case of Belgium as an example to avoid, Baillairgé referred to women’s factory work as an “antisocial crime.” “And I would ask whether a young woman, bent forward all day, for months, over a sewing machine, will not contract some form of infirmity,” he demanded, his vivid bodily imagery adding emphasis.85 César de Paepe, too, was clearly uncomfortable with the increasing presence of women in Brussels’s industries. Cautious to avoid any overt moral judgment, Paepe relied on an alarmist description of the consequences of industrial work on women’s bodies, to evoke much broader menaces to society. The “weaker sex,” he argued, was best kept away from industrial establishments, which were too harsh for “the feminine organism, for not only do children suffer directly from their mothers’ illnesses, but also this painful work, beyond the strength of women, results in the curvature of their spinal cords, and the contraction of their pelvis … and strikes future generations even before they are born.”86 It was but a small step, the reasoning went, from individual back problems to the jeopardized health of an entire generation. As these discourses demonstrate, questions about women’s bodies had a distinct place in broader corporeal representations of industrialized society. Evolving ideas about women and their place in the workforce were part of this debate, and there was certainly no unanimity among women themselves. If the middle-class female factory inspectors sought to conciliate social norms with women’s determination to join the industrial workforce, other women positioned themselves more firmly on either side of the debate. Relying on her research in industrial hygiene, Lucy Schmidt objected in no uncertain terms to the presence of women in industrial establishments. “Woman,” she argued, along the same lines as Paepe, “loses her strength and her health to industry; and thus, she harms not only herself, as a human being: the very soul of the race, the seed of workers’ life is affected by the work of women in industries that require them to strain themselves, or to spend time in insalubrious atmospheres.” For Schmidt, the judgment was unequivocal: women who exposed themselves to the poisons of industry risked degeneration and death, if

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not a miserable existence, “worth than death itself!”87 While Schmidt’s point of view was premised more on corporeal concerns than on political or moral convictions, feminists of the period refuted the argument that the physical risk of industrial work was greater for women than for men, seeing this as little more than a perpetuation of existing inequalities. The Montreal Local Council of Women and its president, Julia Drummond, for instance, had lobbied actively for the appointment of women inspectors before 1896, denouncing the fact that women were placed in the same category as children when it came to regulating the length of workdays. Men and women, they argued, should be seen as equals in the industrial workforce, and the benefits of legislation enforcing shorter hours and adequate conditions “should be secured for all.” Given that women were actively seeking equal educational and professional opportunities and fighting for equal pay for equal work, it seemed inappropriate to them to request special privileges for industrial work in particular, privileges that in any case served to justify existing salary disparities.88 Imagining the Worker The imprint of industry on the urban fabric in Montreal and Brussels was so prevalent that reflections on the corporeal nature of this process were by no means limited to its direct participants or to scientifically educated experts in the field. These questions also preoccupied those who commented on the city in more impressionistic, literary terms. Through these representations emerge tensions between images of the bruised and battled labourer, whose suffering was the embodiment of anti-modern critiques of industrial development, and of the powerful, muscular worker, whose strength and courage gave corporeal form to a cherished optimism in industrial expansion, prosperity, and social advancement. Examining the transformations wrought by the steel business in Pittsburgh during this period, historian Edward Slavishak has shown how urban elites constructed images of workers’ bodies that corresponded to their own ideals of industrial productivity, masculinity, and racial homogeneity. The turn-of-the-century worker, he argues, “was represented by others – artists, journalists, social reformers, employers – for public consumption; through these representations his role as a worker became merely acting, his body standing in for his subjectivity.”89 Central to this process, however, were the subjectivities and corporeal experiences of those doing the representing. In defining

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the corporeal otherness of the worker, these commentators relied on their own felt experiences. Beneath the purported objectivity of the calculating eye lay the powerful impressions created by the conditions in which these observations were made. Through middle-class accounts of workers’ bodies emerge hints of the individual authors’ own haptic encounters with the unique atmosphere of industrial spaces, their bewilderment at the sights and sounds of machinery operating at breakneck speeds as well as the clouds of dust and gas and the intense heat that envelop their own bodies. “I do not tire of contemplating the poor who have been working below my window for the last few days,” comments Laurent, the protagonist of Belgian author Georges Eekhoud’s 1904 novel, L’autre vue. Though Laurent is the son of a wealthy bourgeois family, the young man refuses the social and hetero-normative distinctions to which he is expected to adhere, and as the novel progresses, he actively, if rather condescendingly, observes and seeks out the company of workers. As he studies the small group of construction workers, he notices the sounds of their labour and the fluid movement of their bodies. “I like the music of their paving-beetles (demoiselles), their timbre is dear to me,” he observes as the sounds of the city being modernized reach his ears. Watching their postures and movements, “crouched or standing, at work or at rest, they seduce me with their plastic and candid awkwardness.” Laurent’s enthralment extends even to their facial features: “the blue of their childlike eyes, the coral of their succulent lips so deliciously enhancing their tanned faces!”90 In the daily hubbub of urbanization, the scene may appear unremarkable: a group of workers simply go about their daily business. But it is precisely the representation of the bustling city and workers in movement that sets the stage for the author to introduce the character’s difficult position, his problematic attraction to individuals too different in social status, too similar in sex. The sensorial, not to say sensuous, language with which Eekhoud portrays these public symbols of urban modernity serve to underscore the intimate and interior nature of Laurent’s contemplation. A promotional pamphlet on Montreal, released to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and to celebrate Montreal’s metropolitan expansion and its place in the British empire, used equally evocative descriptions of workers’ bodies in reference to the city’s industrial capacity. In contrast to Eekhoud’s more private voice, the tone here is celebratory and triumphant, almost exuberant. Though Montreal’s recent history is portrayed as one of “commercial and financial

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matters,” of “peaceful if unromantic development which builds a state of mighty ends,” the author nevertheless wants to add a warmer, more human touch to the story. “Nay, commerce is not unromantic,” he insists, using the atmosphere of the factory and the bodies of workers inside to support his assertion that it is only “constant life within [industry’s] bounds” that has “but dulled the mind to it.” The dilettante who peers in at the rolling mills’ doors, where titans, halfnude, swing the white hot bars from infernal fires, and others shape them like children playing with putty; who passes through the sugar refineries, where, percolating through enormous filters, or boiling to grain in huge vacuum kettles, the sweet produce of the cane is prepared for market; who visits the electric engines of the Street Railway or the Royal Electric, where at headlong speed the spinning wheels furnish the energy which moves half the town by day and lights it by night; who penetrates to the mysterious precincts of the gas works, where, in their round houses the vast receivers rise and fall like balloons: such a man will see the romance not seen by others.91

The contrast with the description of industrial work in the Commission testimonials is remarkable. Here the workers are a breed of supermen who handle their tools as children play with toys, their brute strength and virility emphasized by their near nakedness. They do not suffer from their work, but thrive on the hellish atmosphere and fiery heat. The imagery is vivid, highlighting the physical experience of the spectacle of industrialization in a glorification of the economic elite’s achievements and of their pride in their city. But against these celebratory spatial stories of titans and massive engines, others saw the state of factories and workers’ bodies in a worrisome light. Here the workshop atmosphere is degenerative and harmful, while workers’ bodies are weakened, damaged, and suffering. In the well-known observation of urban mores, Montreal by Gaslight, this atmosphere is used to “expose” the city’s “sin, shame and sorrow” in an attempt to “stir up citizens to seek a remedy for each particular evil.” The “hideous noises” and smoke, the “weary toil” in the factories, workshops, mills, and foundries debase workers, exposing them to the worst “social, mental, moral and physical” conditions, writes the anonymous author, making explicit references to the Royal Commission and taking readers on a tour of the city’s cotton mills, boot and shoe establishments, and its notorious cigar factories. The

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author brings us in, “up two flights of narrow stairs,” onto a work floor drowned in “the sound of machinery and the hum of voices.” Continuing, the author wants to make readers feel the atmosphere for themselves: “Here, in stifling air foul with odours of tobacco, machine-oil, perspiration, and a thousand other evil-smelling substances, are seated the slaves of the leaf.” Men, women, and children – no one is spared the long hours for meagre pay. “There are no toilet appliances, no fire escapes, no facilities for ventilation: there is nothing but work and a brutal foreman to enforce it.”92 This approach was used with much effect by Victor Van Tricht, who frequently denounced the complacency and indifference of the bourgeoisie in the face of the social and economic injustices faced by the working class. In one of his many published “chats,” Tricht discusses the factory atmosphere and the worker’s body by playing on modernity’s perpetual tension between the rational and the personal. He begins by noting that the most basic chemistry text would teach readers about the fundamental procedures involved in the smelting of metal and steel, the different proportions of carbon retained, the various byproducts created, and the variety of applicable methods. The eyes of the observer will see the dazzling display of “billows of oxygen in the air, seething in the liquid iron, burning its carbon, and rushing toward the sky in clouds of carbonic acid. And the steel pouring into the ingotmoulds, its spurts of fire bubbling with sparks.” But, he regrets, the same eyes will look no further and remain oblivious to the reality that lies behind this scientific rationality. The visual spectacle it offers hides something that is invisible to the disinterested observer but is deeply felt, physically and emotionally, by those who exert themselves within. These eyes will not see the worker, his chest and arms bare, expending his sweat, drop by drop, onto the floor that drinks it and the steel that burns it. They will not see his taut muscles, his feverish nerves, also pouring out streams of this strength, this human energy, without which all this pretty mechanics would only be a blind force, breaking and crushing everything, and breaking and crushing itself, the way a ship in distress, without a compass, breaks, splits, and crumbles against the rock on which it is lost, and with a sinister crack, sinks … And in these men, blackened with coal, whose flowing sweat marbles their burning skin, they will not see the heart … This worker, who in the jaws of his pincers bites a burning ingot, do you think he is thinking of

116  The Feel of the City steel? No! He is thinking of his wife, sleeping there, afar, in his little white house, next to a cradle, and in the smoke and in the flame this vision dances before his eyes: it is she who gives strength to his muscles, courage to his heart, joy to his life. It is for them that he works, it is them that he supports, and it is comforting to remind himself of it, in a whisper, when the work is hard and the flesh is weary. All of this, it is not the eyes that see, but the soul!93

As in the Jubilee piece above, the worker’s body is exposed to the bystander gazing at the scene, his arms powerful and strong, his movements intense and rhythmic, the conditions in which he works extreme. But there end the similarities, and we could argue that Tricht would have considered the Montreal author as precisely the type of person he reproached for not bothering to look more carefully at what was happening in the foundry, who marvelled only at the scintillating surface, missing the tension in the workers’ muscles, their agitated nerves. If the Montrealer saw in the worker’s brawny movements a testament to the romantic side of industry, Tricht made the link between body and interiority much more explicit and intimate. Though the worker’s heart is hidden, it is what pushes him forward. The love of his wife, suitably minding the baby at home, gives him strength, hope, and motivation. The real meaning of his movements has nothing to do with the science and production visible to the eye; it is recognizable only by the soul. Are these workers valorous heroes of a coming age or downtrodden vassals of an oppressive regime? While these interpretations are diametrically opposed in their intentions, they tell the vivid and contrasting perspectives of middle-class observations of the worker’s body. A bourgeois author contesting social norms, a crusading moral reformer, an influential business association, and a priest imbued with a particular spirit of social betterment all wrote in terms of specific expectations and assumptions about industrialization and workers. Whichever side they were on, their visions of the body were fundamentally representative of the interior, emotional responses elicited by the rapid industrialization of turn-of-the-century society. In contemplating the tensions between the vast, outward processes initiated by capitalist enterprise and the subjective sentiments they evoked, these authors situated their discourse in the body and in its movements in space, a body through which these processes were lived, a body simultaneously defined by them.

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Conclusion “When the Roman Empire was at its highest, all the industries of the country, in fact all the labour of the country, was performed by men who had been taken prisoners in battle and converted into slaves and whose lives and comfort were considered matters of little consequence,” said Thomas Duffy, Commissioner of Public Works, to the delegates of the 1899 Convention of the National Association of Factory Inspectors held in Quebec’s legislature. “To-day, however, both in England and America,” he continued, “our workingmen are regarded as our strength and the very foundation of the nation’s greatness.”94 Celebrating the accomplishments of modern industrialization on both sides of the Atlantic and the social evolution that accompanied it, Duffy expressed pride in the physical conditions in which workers contributed to this growth. As this chapter has demonstrated, the growing intensity of industrial activity at the turn of the twentieth century, and the distinct environment it produced, made the body and senses particularly relevant in urban dwellers’ relationship to the modern city, whether this was in terms of individuals’ own corporeal experiences with industrialization or through representations of the bodies of the workers whose labour was the force behind these transformations. Even these representations, we have seen, were in themselves the product not only of visual observation, but also of the direct tactile and sensorial experiences of the industrial milieu. For those who, like Duffy, felt a great sense of confidence in modern developments, the factories and workshops that sprouted on the landscapes of cities like Montreal and Brussels were visual symbols of prosperity, which, in their size, layout, and aesthetic appeal created an atmosphere that bespoke order, productivity, sophistication, and progress. The workers inside were seen as strong, muscular titans, who deftly wielded massive tools in rhythmic motions that symbolized the steady pace of forward movement. In contrast, for those whose homes were situated nearby, who laboured at the service of industrialists, or whose professional activities brought them into close contact with the realities of these factories, the corporeal referents they used evoked distinct fears about the direction in which modernity was taking them. As archival records in both cities demonstrate, many urban residents took exception to the smells, sounds, dust, and smoke which the encroachment of industry brought to the places where they lived – nuisances that affected their physical comfort and health but also threatened them with financial loss as a result of the devaluation of their property.

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As for the countless men and women whose livelihoods depended on industrial work, their relationship to industrial spaces was one of constant physical exertion within the confines of damp conditions, where muscle cramps, respiratory problems, accidents, disease, and violence were commonplace. Their testimonies poignantly illustrate how this physical stress contributed to the climate of tension, mistrust, and suspicion that characterized their rapport with their employers and that reigned on many factory floors in these two cities. Finally, the doctors and hygienists whose work kept them abreast of the latest developments in the expanding field of modern medical research relied on the vivid imagery of overtaxed bodies to drive home the urgency of their message in favour of more balanced, safer, and more hygienic working conditions. Industrialization and urbanization, the very foundations of Montreal and Brussels’s claim to metropolitan status, were also understood to be the causes of the diseases, death, and decay that plagued urban life. In this regard, the encounters of North American and European urban dwellers with industrial spaces were indeed comparable. Whereas geographical and historical differences explained variations in attitudes to the growth of industry, experiences with its concrete realities converged. The scale of industrial buildings was larger in Montreal, and authorities oversaw industrial expansion in different ways, performing prior investigations in Brussels while relying on more summary and incidental observations in Montreal. But the transnational character of these developments transpired in the way workers, hygienists, bureaucrats, government-appointed commissioners and inspectors, and other bourgeois commentators and writers in each city responded to these stimuli. In both places, the link between the global process of industrialization and subjective attitudes about it centred on the body. From pride and confidence in the possibilities of this development, to worry and exasperation at its consequences, these interior emotions and preoccupations that shaped the daily existence of urban dwellers relied on corporeal tropes for their full expression. It was the persistence of this connection that framed representations of the body itself as a metaphor for industrialization: machines of great productivity, but subject to deterioration and overuse. At the end of the day, these weary bodies needed rest. Modern science proved that the body depended on it, noted Jules Félix, a Belgian doctor and ardent supporter of the “three eight” model of daily living. Insufficient sleep “prolongs the corrupted postures of the body, brings

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about the deformation of essential organs,” he deplored.95 As we continue our explorations of the spaces that comprised these modern cities, let us follow these tired workers away from their workshops and back to their homes. We will see that private living spaces were also highly contested terrains in the modern city. Here too, physical and sensorial experiences, as well as conceptions of others’ bodies, played an active part in the construction of ideas, preoccupations, and deeply engrained fears about the physical and moral dangers of working-class homes.

Chapter Four

Home for a Rest

In the self-assured spirit of the turn of the twentieth century, commentators in both Montreal and Brussels sought to liken the streets of their cities to the great Parisian boulevards, which were seen as the epitome of modern urban development.1 But if the breadth and dimension of new thoroughfares could nourish this boastfulness, there also lurked in these cities another streetscape, considerably more troubling for many residents of all social backgrounds. Winding, narrow backstreets were cast as material evidence that modern planning’s grasp on the urban environment remained tenuous. Industrial cities of the day attracted large concentrations of working-class families, who, by the very nature of their employment, lacked the financial means to live up to the urban ideals engraved on luxurious boulevards. Instead, most were condemned to live in the dark and narrow alleys, courtyards, and tenements that seemed to many the very opposite of what the grandiose avenues represented to the city. Continuing the exploration of the urban labyrinths that complicated the modern drive for clean, orderly, and efficient cities, this chapter considers perceptions and atmospheres in and around the homes of workers. We will visit some of the dingy blind alleys that housed the poorest residents of Montreal and Brussels, those who toiled long hours in the factories and workshops, those who worked at sweating industries right in their homes, or who earned their livelihood directly in the street, where they picked rags, sold goods, or simply did what they could to scrape by. To the extent possible, we will listen to what the poor themselves had to say, but owing to the availability of sources, we will primarily follow a range of social reformers, hygienists, statemandated inspectors, and other commentators as they expectantly

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made their way through these streets and into these homes. Accustomed to higher standards of personal comfort, these observers of urban life were, in many cases, bewildered by what they saw and felt. We will then accompany them back to the reassuring luxury of their meeting rooms and salons, where, in discussing their experiences, they constructed a vision of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods that was interlaced with understandings of their own physical and moral selves. In so doing, middle-class observers participated in a transnational circulation of ideas premised on evolving standards of decency, privacy, morality, and gender to inscribe social identities and relations upon the landscape of the modern city. Developing understandings of hygiene and scientific rationality shaped spatial narratives of the home in the period, forging a new interconnection between house and body as contemporaries drew parallels between the physical integrity of buildings and the health of their occupants. This vision was bolstered by the increasingly rigid distinction between spaces and activities considered public, and those understood to be of a private nature, a process of delineation that was ongoing and frequently tested by the bourgeoisie in their contacts with workingclass families. The bourgeoisie’s moral imperatives, framed in direct reference to the spatial and bodily physicality of these living environments, were shaped not only by the way these reformers saw the homes and the bodies of the poor, but, significantly, by what their own bodies told them about the experience of these spaces. Workers’ Housing and Scientific Rationality House and Body In her study of British middle-class housing in the late nineteenth century, architectural historian Annmarie Adams notes that Victorians perceived of their houses as extensions of their bodies and, inversely, that they saw the “body as a reduction of the house.” By the last decades of the century, it was widely believed “that a house could cause sickness or that domestic architecture itself was sick because it was connected to the body and the house.”2 Though the problem of unsanitary housing was not a new one, the intensification of urbanization added a sense of urgency to the discussion, as municipal officials, reformers, and hygienists worriedly noted the unprecedented levels of density in certain working-class districts. Workers themselves, speaking at labour

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commission inquiries, expressed dissatisfaction with the state of housing. Noting the financial strains caused by high rents, workers especially denounced the negative effects of their homes on their bodies, the lack of sanitary installations, the diminutive size of living quarters, insufficient ventilation, and the malodorous atmosphere in which their daily lives were steeped. An anonymous stair builder in Montreal explained that, reacting to a visit from a health inspector, his landlord had replaced a rudimentary wooden conduit that led directly to the sewer main with nothing more than a faulty pipe that disintegrated immediately when it was later removed. The ground below, he related, was saturated with refuse, generating an unbearable odour, and the worker expressed his conviction that the illness that struck his wife and four children, one of whom died of diphtheria, was caused directly by the poor state of the house and its cellar.3 For reformers and hygienists of the period, the question of housing was indeed a fundamental concern. In his three chapters on the topic in The City below the Hill, Herbert Ames acknowledged that while Montreal workers were not necessarily as poorly housed as those in New York or Chicago, the situation nonetheless called for urgent action as few workers disposed of what were considered minimal housing requirements, “where the front door is used by but one family, where the house faces upon a through street, where water-closet accommodation is provided, and where there are as many rooms allotted to a family as there are persons composing it.”4 As a charitably minded businessman, Ames had himself invested in a model residential establishment for working families, and he exhorted others who had the means to do the same, convinced that a properly managed project of the sort could be not only philanthropic but profitable as well. Ames also called for legislation allowing the city council to intervene and demolish unsuitable structures, particularly rear tenements. As the archives of Montreal’s health committee show, matters pertaining to unsanitary dwellings and, in particular, to insufficient sewage infrastructure, were frequently brought to the attention of municipal officials by dissatisfied residents. Keeping a close watch on the state of its homes, the city deployed inspectors mandated to systematically visit and gather data on houses: their positioning facing the street or on the back of the property, the number of inhabitants, the number of rooms, the condition of the sewer conduits, the presence of a sink and whether it was equipped with a siphon, and the general state of the building and its plumbing.5 Undertaken in the name of public health,

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these inspections also reveal the municipal bureaucracy’s determinations to apply sanitation measures that drew on the latest research in disease and urban planning. Thus, in the beginning of our period, the city doctor Alphonse LaRocque lamented the fact that the benefits of good hygiene were not yet widely known among the city’s population. Hygiene, LaRocque continued, had to be taught like a religion upon which society’s salvation depended, his comments reflecting the heavy class and gender consciousness that marked the nineteenth-century hygienist movement. If the “enlightened portion” of the city’s population supported sanitary reforms, he noted, “the obstacles came from the lower classes who unhappily are ignorant of the benefits of hygiene.”6 Because hygiene was closely associated with the home, Larocque also emphasized the special importance of transmitting to women the hygienic knowledge through which they would raise healthy and vigorous children. For Montreal hygienists in particular, the matter was further complicated by the diverse national origins of the city’s working class. Larocque perceived the rural migrants that populated poor neighbourhoods as ignorant of the most basic rules of hygiene, while others attributed the worst faults to the cultural traits of the city’s increasingly cosmopolitan residents. According to another hygienist, “no one can deny but that the unsanitary condition of things among Asiatics is due to mental proclivity. This is true also of Spaniards, Portuguese, and their descendants in South America.” When members of such communities rented homes built by an American or an Englishman, he added, they quickly destroyed the sanitary installations and poured “streams of filth” out of their windows and into the courtyard, where it would dry in the sun.7 As these allusions to class, gender, and ethnicity indicate, hygienic discourse in this period typified social belonging and distinctions, signifiers of identity that played a prevalent role in shaping the corporeal and spatial stories through which the home environment was understood. Air and Light During the 1880s and 1890s, knowledge about bacteriology and contagion theories gave a new impetus to this growing army of disciples of the hygienist cause. Hygienists contributed prolifically to this discourse by publishing studies that exposed urban sanitary failings as well as more accessible instruction manuals designed to show urban dwellers how to improve their bodily practices and make them more amenable

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to modern hygiene standards. As they dissected workers’ houses room by room, these newly professionalized specialists consistently framed their observations in reference to the body and the dangers to which it was exposed. The air one normally breathed like a “blessed breeze” was “hot, loaded with dust and humidity for the manufactory worker who, dripping with sweat, suffocating, so dearly needs it to avoid dying!” noted Séverin Lachapelle, doctor, professor of hygiene, and future member of parliament. But the worker’s home offered no solace: “The great factory bell is there to call him every morning at the break of day, and the demands of capital only return his freedom once nighttime envelopes the earth.”8 Despite the development of zoning practices intended to create spatial delineations between industry, residence, and commerce, workers frequently had little choice but to live close to the factories, where they continued to breathe the polluted air day after day. The exigencies of the system in which they worked determined where they could live, adding to the physical toll on their bodies. As for the houses themselves, they were denounced as being small, unventilated, and dark. For the Montreal hygienist Édouard Gouin, these factors represented the “triple defect of our workers’ housing,” and he pointed directly at the forces of modern industrialization to explain the lamentable state of workers’ homes. It was, he argued, “the modern transformations of industry, mechanization, the concentration of capital, the creation of large corporations, the development of transportation” that had forced so many people to live in such limited space, deprived of air and light.9 Calls for better air circulation and abundant light formed the mantra of hygienists around the world. Bodies forced to spend long periods in dark and stagnant air were condemned to perish slowly and painfully. Others also decried a tendency for many homes to be overly damp and built on contaminated land. In Montreal, commented the secretary of Quebec’s Board of Health, housing construction struggled to keep up with urban growth, and too little time was spent thinking about the orientation according to which residential buildings were erected, worsening the problems of ventilation. Buildings were considered to be too high for the width of the streets, which were reduced in appearance to narrow alleys. Apartments often faced dark inner courtyards, rooms were designed with no windows, and large, once well-kept homes were subdivided into small, crowded flats, all of which diminished the amount of air and light available. These conditions simply prepared the body for disease, lamented the hygienist. “It is known, indeed, that

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the air introduced into the lung at each inspiration goes to purify the blood, and that this purification is necessary to maintain the vitality of the body.” But if the lungs were filled with polluted air, impure blood would flow through the body, and its organs would be unable to perform their functions normally, causing fatigue, lack of attention, headaches, loss of appetite, nausea, insomnia, dyspepsia, and anaemia.10 The urban layout, the home environment, and the functioning of the body were thus inextricably linked. The house itself, meant to relieve and revitalize the worker’s body after endless hours of dangerous industrial work, more often than not exposed it to weakness, disease, and death. The same matters pertaining to overcrowding, lack of air and light, humidity, absence of water closets, and overall dilapidation were denounced in Brussels as being fundamentally contradictory to the ideal regenerative qualities a house was supposed to have, indicating the extent to which specialists in the two cities borrowed from the global circulation of hygienic knowledge in this period.11 Brussels hygienist Marie Du Caju, for instance, addressed this connection explicitly, arguing that a home could be healthy only if it were dry, clean, ventilated, and well lit. Accordingly, she recommended that people avoid living close to factories, without, however, addressing the lack of options many workers had in this regard. But, irrespective of where one happened to live, the rules of hygiene remained of the same importance. “Cleanliness,” she insisted, “is a luxury affordable to all; it is especially the luxury of the poor … a benevolent fairy embellishing all that she touches.” Even the most insalubrious home could be improved as long as its tenants remained committed to cleanliness.12 In the vicious cycle of poor hygiene, the body itself was often presented as its own worst enemy. Du Caju exposed in rigorous detail how the simple act of breathing posed a potentially lethal threat to the home environment. This automatism, she explained, reduced the amount of oxygen in a room, replacing it with dangerous carbonic acid that altered the air, resulting in nefarious consequences to the health of its inhabitants. When the same air circulated in and out of human lungs too many times, it became unclean, “laden with miasmas, or animal matter abandoned by the blood into the lungs,” producing a revolting smell, symptomatic of the lurking dangers. “Man’s breath,” she concluded, “is lethal to man.”13 Of course, the sanitation movement had swept through Brussels in the mid-nineteenth century, demolishing vast sections of central workingclass neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, the city’s poor were increasingly

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concentrated in the remaining blind alleys, prompting one public servant to denounce the fact that “the hygienic measures that chased them from their unhealthy slums have followed them to their new residences.”14 Outbreaks of infectious diseases were frequent in these alleys, and they were considered a menace to public health across the city. Municipal officials attempted to impose strict measures, with obligations to declare any outbreaks of disease and decontaminate the houses in which patients were located. Particularly run-down alleys were demolished by the city, but the cost of such action was too high for it to become a widespread practice, not to mention that this approach created major relocation issues. “In this matter,” stated one councillor, “we must not act at random: we must follow an overall plan, and have a well-defined course of action.”15 If creating a modern home environment required careful application of rational knowledge about hygiene, construction techniques, and bodily practices, the same logic could be applied to the building of the wider city. Before we analyse the atmosphere of these back streets and blind alleys in more detail, it is important to note that, in Belgium, the question of working-class housing was regulated by the law of 9 August 1889, inspired by the findings of the national labour commission. The centrepiece of this legislation was the creation of local boards known as “patronage committees for workers’ housing and provident societies.” Consisting of five to eighteen members named by the national and provincial governments, these committees were responsible for investigating the housing situation within their jurisdictions, overseeing the construction of houses specifically for members of the working class, and supporting credit and savings institutions that would help workers set aside funds for the purchase of their homes.16 Initiated by the Catholic majority in parliament, the primary objective of this law, notes historian Annick Stélandre, was to encourage individual home ownership for workers.17 Reducing the role of the state, the thinking went, would ensure greater social order and improved hygienic conditions as workers would hold a personal stake in their material surroundings. If workers had the possibility of owning their comfortable and hygienic accommodations instead of renting a cramped and unhealthy slum, it was hoped, “the sentiment of individual property that affirms itself … abates fallacious ideas of community (collectivité).”18 However, the more lasting significance of this law lies in the impulse it gave to the broader debate about the housing question. In the Belgian capital, the patronage committees were very

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active, commissioning two important investigations into living conditions, meeting on a regular basis to discuss housing matters, and publishing annual reports. The body of sources available on the subject is thus more extensive than in Montreal, but as we join investigators in their sometimes impromptu visits of working-class homes, we will see that beneath the positivist veneer lay intensely corporeal and emotional considerations that highlight the body’s role in the construction of spatial understandings of the so-called private sphere. The Relative Privacy of the Home Shocking! From the second half of the nineteenth century, the distinction between public and private spaces, as well as the bodily practices performed in each, became increasingly differentiated in bourgeois society, and these distinctions were anchored in the very design of houses, which now featured parlours and bedrooms that afforded privacy even within the family.19 Yet within this cultural context, the bourgeoisie developed, indeed craved, an intimate familiarity with the homes of workers, and middle-class inspections of workers’ homes were common. Aside from the formal patronage committees, the members of which took very seriously their obligations to report on the hygienic state of houses in their district, a range of people, including journalists reporting on what they considered to be the lamentable state of different neighbourhoods, politicians interested in redressing their city’s image, members of philanthropic organizations on their missions to succour society’s less fortunate, as well as public health officials, all found reasons to make their way into working-class residential areas. The sheer number of people gaping at the homes of workers made for rather heavy traffic in these narrow alleys. This rush of “slum investigation,” notes historian Daniel Bender, was a prevalent form of urban “tourism” in the nineteenth century. Casting their moralizing gaze on the urban poor, reformers saw themselves as explorers on an “urban safari,” the working-class districts they entered a “foreign world” within the confines of the city.20 Though the sights to behold were the bodies and homes of the indigent, it was the visitor’s own sensorial experiences that gave the journey its shivering exoticism. Mixing “good intentions and blinkered prejudice,”21 the reformers’ objective was to gather as much information as possible about the state

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of workers’ homes in order to identify and bring about the most efficient and rational means to improve their living conditions, and by extension the health of the entire city. The two major investigations carried out by the Brussels patronage committee, the first in 1890, the second in the period 1903–9, sought legitimacy in modern scientific research methods. These reformers traded in a booming economy of information about the city, producing the “marketable commodity” of “modern, classificatory instruments” that, as historians point out, reveal as much about the masculine, heterosexual, middle-class, and white outlook of those who produced them as they do about the actual spaces and people they categorized.22 In the first, led by reformers Charles Lagasse and Charles De Quéker, the authors set out to systematically map the city, creating a visual portrait of working-class homes drawn according to a range of statistics on the number of houses, their inhabitants, their rent, the types of ventilation systems, the number of available toilets, the quality of the water supply, the presence of courtyards and staircases, and the proximity of establishments selling alcohol. As Janet Polasky argues, these rationalist reformers, bent on elevating urban labourers to the rank of “citizens,” seemed convinced that housing “problems could be fixed by accumulating facts.”23 The investigators were dismayed by what their observations had revealed, and they did not hesitate to express these feelings. Consequently, when a new investigation was initiated by the architect Émile Hellemans in 1903, the watchword was given to ensure a greater emotional distance from the object of inquiry. “Thus,” commented the author, “we have, as much as possible, set aside from the gathered observations the inevitable error known by science as the personal equation (équation personnelle).”24 But despite this clearly stated ambition of giving up personal biases in favour of positivist quantification, sources on housing are rife with redolent language. While microbiology legitimated sanitary concerns, hygienists also sought to capitalize on these scientific foundations to amplify the reach of their message, and to scandalize and shock authorities and citizens into action. Indeed, members of the Belgian labour commission lamented that “we have as yet been rather unsuccessful in rousing public opinion.” While the primary stated intention was to arrive at “truly scientific” statistics concerning workers’ housing, the underlying objective was to send an emotional shockwave to the population in order to jolt a sense of “passion” about the issue and encourage people “animated by philanthropic sentiments” to invest themselves in the cause.25

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Corporeal references were central to this strategy, as in Hellemans’s emphasis on the disgust provoked by latrines in certain homes. “Furthermore (would that I be pardoned for mentioning this vulgar detail, but one of capital importance), it is no longer possible to tolerate that one single latrine be used by more than seventy-two (72) people!”26 In appearance a simple denunciation of inadequate sanitary facilities, this quotation is revealing, not least because it immediately follows the author’s expressed faith in the importance of detached scientific inquiry. Feeling the need to apologize for the vulgarity of what he is about to say, the architect is nonetheless willing to upset middle-class sensibilities by making an explicit allusion to a part of the living environment, and the bodily functions associated with it, that his contemporaries would have found distasteful to discuss, at a time when bodily practices, particularly those associated with the toilet, were increasingly moved from the openness of the outdoors to the seclusion of the home.27 At one level, Hellemans’s uses of italics, his repetition of the number 72, and the exclamation point punctuating the sentence may appear as mere grammatical details. Yet they also underscore his sense of exasperation and disgust. For all of the scientific objectivity he confidently displayed, it is clear how the “personal equation” coloured his observations. Paying a Visit Analysing the construction of the notion of “slum,” Alan Mayne criticizes historians for being “gullible” in their acceptance of “disingenuous pledges given by bourgeois observers” and in taking at face value linguistically determined definitions of the urban poor and their neighbourhoods.28 Indeed, we must exercise caution in accounting for these class biases and avoid accepting these descriptions of working-class homes as empirical observations of a fixed reality. Yet this sensorial and emotional language was central to bourgeois spatial narratives. Though factually contrived, their choice of words nonetheless buttressed particular truth claims. In a period when understandings of individual privacy were sharpened, when bodily practices were increasingly relegated to specially designed spaces hidden from the gaze of others, what does the bourgeoisie’s fascination with the intimacy of workers reveal? Analysing the way bodily tropes and corporeal experiences mediated the relationship with residential space helps us to answer this question as we follow reformers directly into the homes they visited.

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If hygienists were prone to exaggerate their observations for the good of their cause, the language they used was also revealing of their own interiority. Bodily experiences conditioned subjective feelings of surprise, shock, and shame, while reformers’ repeated transgression of the public–private divide suggests that this distinction remained under cultural construction. The frequently recurring tension between the self-assured objectivity in which reformers framed their inspections and the profound personal effect these appear to have had on them are indicative of how their own bodies, their own corporeal confrontations with modernity, their own standards of revulsion, and their own fears informed the interior perceptions with which their relationship, both to the urban poor and to the spaces they occupied, was shaped. Investigators, hygienists, doctors, architects, philanthropists, politicians, or bureaucrats – all members of the middle or upper classes – crossed the threshold of the homes of the poor with a sense of anticipation, shoulders slightly hunched, ears cocked, eyes squinting, and breath held. As their sight adjusted to the dimness, which, they reported, prevailed in these settings, they were startled and disturbed by what they saw and felt. Their physical senses were struck first, as their bodies came into contact with what was for them an unpleasant environment. In the Brussels section of a national study on workers’ housing produced by the Conseil supérieur d’hygiène publique, for example, the doctor M. Janssens, a hygienist and civil servant, discussed the fate of one “poor house,” its corridors, walls, and staircases covered in a “revolting layer of filth.” To reinforce this feeling of disgust, Janssens continued by listing all the elements of disrepair that affected the physical atmosphere of the house: damaged sewer pipes, broken sterfputs,29 clogged-up latrines, an out-of-order water pump, leaky faucets, and shattered cobblestones in a courtyard littered with filth. Overcrowding, ignorance, envy, and “popular mores” were, he reasoned, the real causes of all these “acts of vandalism and savagery.”30 Municipal investigators at the service of the Board of Health in Montreal made similar descriptions, denouncing the “offensive exhalations” of “the most primitive pits,” dug directly into the ground, reinforced with a few wooden planks susceptible to rotting away, and leaving a “deposit of fecal matter on the floors … from two to three inches thick.”31 Noting that entire working families, even two, were sometimes housed in a single room, one doctor concluded that in Montreal, “there are houses in which a breeder would not put his livestock.”32 The Montreal hygienist Elzéar Pelletier even compared some of the homes

4.1  Les foyers et l’enfant. Working-class rear tenement housing in early twentieth-century Montreal. From Le bien-être des enfants, a pamphlet promoting better living conditions published in 1912 by the newspaper La Patrie. Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

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he visited to medieval prisons, where “when one wished, without violent death, to get rid of a dangerous rival, he had him shut up in an obscure dungeon, where he soon ceased to be dangerous; if he came out of it, he was a mere shadow of himself.”33 Faulty plumbing caused smells and messes that bothered these inspectors and contributed to conditioning their attitudes. Qualifying these spaces as primitive and savage, moreover, cast them and their inhabitants as hindrances to the progress and civilization promised by modernity. With the creation of public patronage committees in Belgium, independent philanthropic organizations were also formed. Though not under the aegis of the state, groups like the Association pour l’amélioration du logement ouvrier (Association for the Improvement of Workers’ Housing), nonetheless benefited from royal patronage and the support of influential personalities, drawing its membership and funding from the city’s political, professional, and aristocratic corps. Modelled after the patronage committees, the organization was divided into smaller groups, each responsible for keeping a close watch on the hygienic conditions of housing in different sections of the city and for sponsoring building initiatives. Coming from the upper echelons of society, many members had no particular qualifications in housing issues, though it can be said they made up for it with a deep personal zeal.34 Focusing on the scandalous scenes they witnessed added impact to the accounts through which they hoped to stress the direness of the situation, but also betrayed the subjective dimension of their undertaking. Their prolific reports provide telling illustrations of the extent to which entering workers’ homes was felt as a poignant physical experience by the reformers themselves. One Dr Legros, a member of the Brussels patronage committee, related a recent walk down the rue du Canon and into the impasse of the same name. “I could not do otherwise but enter,” he claimed, suggesting that it was a sense of imperious duty that exercised this powerful attraction. Continuing his story, Legros emphasized his sensorial reaction to the alley, the bodies of both the observer and the observed once again forming the centrepiece of the narrative. “To describe to you the stench, the manure of this dump, would be impossible,” he gasped. The root of the problem lay not in a lack of modern conveniences, he suggested, but rather in their misuse and insufficient upkeep: “Facing the entrance, a water pump, the drainage of which is obstructed, half flooding the courtyard and spreading a nauseating odour; garbage

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bins overflowing with refuse, dirty clothes hanging from the windows, add to this half-dressed women and children and you can imagine the spectacle of this agglomeration in the middle of the city of Brussels.”35 Legros’s spatial understanding in this case was shaped, at one level, by his sensorial encounter with these odious odours, but his personal narrative found its full resonance in his confrontation with the exposed bodies of the local women and children, whose demeanour contradicted his established views of the dignified environment a modern capital should portray. Stories of this sort were told year after year at the gatherings of these patronage committees and philanthropic associations. As they milled about the luxurious assembly rooms of city hall or downtown mansions in the company of other dignitaries, ministers, members of the nobility, and dames patronesses, these reform-minded philanthropists gave a lot of thought to the material conditions of their less fortunate compatriots, evoking these spaces in bodily terms. In one self-­congratulatory tale, for instance, members reported on how they had assisted a poor but deserving family in leaving their insalubrious downtown tenement for “a pretty maisonette in Laeken … with a garden where they can tend vegetables.” The contrasting descriptions of the two residences reveal the emphasis placed on the physical atmosphere and its corporeal consequences in creating the spatial narrative. In their first home, the family of two parents and eight children had been confined to two minuscule rooms, one of which doubled as a workshop for the father, a cigar maker. “The atmosphere, further vitiated by the emanations of drying tobacco leaves, was barely breathable.” In their new suburban home, the family had escaped the narrowness of both their old apartment and the density of the central city. They now enjoyed five rooms and breathed fresh and vivifying country air, and their bodies were the better for it. The formerly ill father recovered quickly, while the children displayed “colours never seen in them before.” And all of this for the same rent as they had paid downtown.36 Hygiene and Morality Hygienists frequently denounced what they considered to be inappropriate or even dangerous practices that, in some cases, had a direct effect on the environment in which workers lived. The sanitary engineer F.P. Mackelcan, for instance, appealed to his readers’ olfactory imagination

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in listing a litany of malodorous “domestic habits” that added to the hygienic “evils” afflicting so many houses: The nursing of children is so conducted that no corner is free from odours from year’s end to year’s end, and these special odours are frequently complicated with those of cabbage water and other cookery, sometimes with dirty clothes left in soap-suds, or a pickle tub already tainted, or a gallery spout fetid from top to bottom, or an ill-used closet, or dirty sink and cupboard beneath, or a pot of broth turned sour, or mouldy things in a pantry, or a full spittoon, or, worse, still, the floor itself a spittoon, or a bucket of old fat that is intended for soap-making, with, as a standard institution, a scuttle to store refuse of all kinds intended for the scavenger.

Mundane bodily practices were thus shown to have unsuspected consequences, resulting in “ill-cared for” children and large numbers of “humpbacks and cripples and blind, besides those that annually succumb.”37 But the author’s discussion of these practices exceeds purely health-related considerations. His tone is accusatory, hinting at a deeper element of subjectivity at work in these considerations of the home. As Mayne argues, these “representations of the abominations supposedly given free reign beyond the slumland threshold” served to define and reinforce the “broad moral commonwealth of bourgeois community.”38 Indeed, these titillating experiences shocked not only the bourgeoisie’s bodily senses, but their sense of morality as well, and a consideration of the narratives which defined these spaces must indeed account for the interaction between the moral and physical dimensions of their interiority. Mens sana in corpore sano To varying degrees, virtually all of the written sources addressing the question of housing in Montreal and Brussels contain explicit references to the connection between good hygiene and sound moral standards, reflecting a “moralization of cleanliness” discourse that was prominent in the West during this period.39 The health of the body and of the soul were thus intrinsically intertwined. “The immoral soul,” wrote the Montreal hygienist F.A. Baillairgé, “kills the body by upsetting it, and by breaking the unity of harmony that makes man’s strength.”40 For Du Caju, corporal dirtiness, a sign of baseness and uncouthness, constituted the most degrading and contemptible form of negligence. “More inseparable from our person than the dirtiness of clothes,” she

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suggested, bringing the exterior, physical problem to an interior, moral level, “it is in a way closer to our soul, at the same time marking us with a visible stigmatization.”41 In the context of modern liberalization that emphasized the notion of the individual’s responsibility to act in a way that ensured the health of the wider society,42 those who combined a sound body and soul became productive individuals, while those who neglected these constituent parts of their existence simply impoverished society by consuming an undue share of its resources: “The arms of the one are the wands of fairies that uncover the treasures of the earth: the other is an abyss in which disappear the products of the earth.”43 The oft-repeated Latin phrase mens sana in corpore sano became the slogan of turn-of-the century hygienists, some of whom professed an almost evangelical faith in these precepts. The anonymous author of a muckraking examination of poverty in Montreal evoked the “pale faces, sunken eyes, and wasted cheeks” of the city’s poorly housed workers in an attempt to jar his readers into awareness. “In a Christian city, is this right?” he asked, harmonizing the calls of science and religion.44 On this note, it hardly seems fortuitous that hygienists labelled their studies “catechisms,” or that reformers rejoiced at the “miracles” they believed they worked, comparing themselves to colonial missionaries praised for giving time, knowledge, and even their lives to bring civilization to “savage tribes.”45 Their rallying cries could even be likened to the words of an evangelist rousing his disciples into recruiting more followers: “Let each of us bring a new member, and let this new member in turn bring a new one, and before long we will form a formidable army, the army of good marching forward to improve defective housing, and blessed by the wretched it will have saved.”46 Some hygienists in the period continued to draw on traditional understandings of the interdependency of body and soul, arguing that a person’s physical attributes were telltale symbols of their inner personality. One’s physical “constitution,” was seen as an indicator of “temperament.” A nervous disposition, for instance, was revealed by a thin, spindly body, while strong bones and powerful muscles were the signs of a sanguine personality.47 More broadly, though, new scientific knowledge gave hygienists cause for optimism. They came to believe that, by following the laws of hygiene, individuals could shape their environment in ways that limited the spread of disease, explains historian Stanley Schultz. This feeling of agency could thus be directed at the moral and social problems in cities. “Those who believed that nature could overcome nurture revelled in the courses of action open to them.” In the same way that reformers drew on Ebenezer Howard’s garden

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city ideal to argue that the physical environment could be modified to counter diseases, so too could non-physical problems be attacked. “Human action,” adds Schultz, “could alter the face of the city and reshape the moral health of the urban populace.”48 Thus if some of the blame for the housing situation could be placed on entrepreneurs – who, in their search for profit, built hastily and shoddily – the unhygienic behaviour of these houses’ occupants was an equally significant target of the reformers’ cause. Though unsanitary privy pits were constructed by unscrupulous landlords, it was the fact that they were “frequently dirtied by clumsy or negligent visitors” that truly made them problematic.49 This moral dimension was central to the reform-minded bourgeoisie’s understandings of workers’ homes and bodies. Unable to take on the economic realities behind these housing troubles, hygienists sought to mould and influence the personal choices and actions of workers. Poverty was certainly no excuse for neglecting hygiene, they insisted. Quite the contrary, added Du Caju, “if dirty poverty is repulsive and ignoble, clean poverty, that respects itself in its appearance, is moving and inspires respect.” Scientific conceptions of hygiene as a collection of strategies to increase bodily resistance against disease were also intrinsically brought to the interior level of values and emotions and seen as a way to inculcate a love of order, respect for one’s self and others, even “the desire to be counted among people of good company.”50 As a corollary of this principle, the urban poor whose living conditions failed to elevate them to heights of what modernity was said to offer, lost, in the eyes of middle-class reformers, their very humanity. Indeed, residents of these dwellings, where there reigned an “almost animal misery,” were reduced “naturally, to animal morals.” Stripped of dignity and a sense of moral responsibility, the resident of such homes was “hardly above the animal whose only concern is its daily feed.”51 In a 1904 patronage committee report, Hellemans, commenting on the state of the impasse de la Baleine, known to be particularly unhygienic, focused specifically on the body of a particular woman whose face “is atrociously ravaged by a lupus and who every year nevertheless gives her breast to a child.” His gruesome description zeroes in explicitly on these facial features: “The lips have disappeared, an ear is eaten away, the noses replaced by a deep hole, flakes continuously peeling off the face fall profusely on the clothing.”52 Grotesquely overstated, Hellemans’s description is overtly corporeal, emphasizing the woman’s facial deformations and questioning her continued wet­nursing of children. At the same time, it reveals the author’s anxieties

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about the physical and moral dangers of this environment at the heart of the modern city. As Anson Rabinbach shows, nineteenth-century thinkers tended to “equate the psychological with the physical and to locate the body as the site where social deformations and dislocations can be most readily observed.”53 Through Hellemans’s language and imagery, this woman is reduced to a subhuman state, made into a monster who not only typifies the threats associated with the impact of modernity on urban space, but also symbolizes, in a profoundly corporeal way, the bourgeoisie’s deepest fears about what these filthy alleys, these dark sores on the city landscape, could represent. Immorality and Vice A clean, tidy, and self-owned home where body and soul could thrive were thus seen as keys to social betterment, to wholesome family life free of immorality and vice. Indeed, it was around the equally corporeal notion of vice that the interdependence of morality and hygiene was most ardently defended. If hygienists and other reformers decried the material conditions in which so many working families lived, it was but a small step to equate the inadequacy of the accommodations with that of its occupants. Describing a residential blind alley in M ­ olenbeek, for instance, the local housing association noted that the typical resident performed only menial tasks, was drunken and lazy, while his wife was “untidy and a poor housekeeper,” their children raised in “vice and idleness.” Throughout these reports, the urban poor are said to have a “natural penchant” for dirtiness, clutter, and disorder; they are described as being “completely unconscious” of their situation and living in a generalized state of “torpor” and “indifference.”54 Stereotypes about indolent workers were thus bound up in the perception that their homes were deficient, unsanitary, and ultimately perilous for body and soul. Attention to the specific body-related vices that reformers most frequently denounced reveals the centrality of residential space in the construction of bourgeois visions of morality. The question of alcohol consumption, deplored by the Molenbeek committee, is a case in point. Workers were frequently accused by housing reformers, as well as by their employers, of indulging too frequently in the pleasures of drink, squandering their already meagre salaries instead of investing their earnings in better lodgings for their families. The unsanitary atmosphere of their homes was directly invoked, for, as one specialist

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explained, these dwellings “do not offer the slightest charm to the worker and naturally push him to find entertainment in cabarets, thus enabling alcoholism and its deadly consequences.”55 If a disagreeable home environment favoured alcoholic tendencies, noted the hygienists, this environment was in turned worsened by the family-related problems caused by alcoholism. And at the heart of the problem stood the worker’s body, devastated by the effects of alcohol on the system, effects compounded by the fact that the drinks workers could afford to purchase were generally of poor quality and sometimes of counterfeit composition. The housing reformers’ most gripping concerns regarding the notion of morality in the body–home connection revolved around the thorny issue labelled promiscuity. The very first article of the Association for the Improvement of Workers’ Housing program, in fact, defined the organization as a social undertaking created to improve working-class housing “and above all to fight against promiscuity.”56 From a purely hygienic perspective, the concentration of so many individuals in these narrow dwellings augured nothing but problems. As Albert Soenens, judge and president of the patronage committee for the west of Brussels, explained, “the clutter and the promiscuity so widely noted in the houses of popular neighbourhoods engender the most dreadful physical evils; they etiolate childhood, diminish vital resistance, and bring about the debilitation that exposes the defenceless man to the dangers of disease.” These physical calamities, however, were only the first step towards the development of a host of serious moral problems afflicting society, inevitably leading to the “degeneration of the species” in the form of the proliferation of alcoholism and criminality, increased dependency on public assistance, as well as the inevitable spread of epidemic diseases propagated well beyond the homes in which they originated.57 The shared sanitary accommodations in these homes were especially reviled as “evil,” an affront to “the most elementary rule of hygiene and morality.”58 But if reformers’ sense of morality was offended by digestive bodily practices, they were even more perplexed by the delicate questions of sexual promiscuity. Whereas shared sanitary installations were qualified as “unhealthy” on a number of levels, the inevitable promiscuity of sleeping quarters was considered downright “disastrous.”59 As ­Édouard Gouin lamented, it was in such types of housing that, sooner or later, “modesty is lost, evil is learned, detestable faults are committed.”60 The lack of personal space available to each member of the

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household meant that individuals of both sexes and various ages would find themselves sharing the same beds, if, as the reformers sighed, “the straw mattress, often infected with vermin, and thrown down at night in the middle of the room” could even be called a bed.61 Indeed, given the large numbers of people forced to spend each night in such small rooms, the “sorting” of members of the household according to age, sex, and family relations was very much a “hopeless task” in many working-class homes.62 Such nighttime proximity, they feared, would facilitate sexual relations, particularly between young people, contributing to the overall atmosphere of immorality, which, as we have seen, their sensibilities readily detected in the homes of workers and the ­urban poor.63 Because those who found themselves subjected to these conditions were often members of the same family, what reformers feared were the possibilities for incestuous relations created by these spatial arrangements, and the reformers’ discomfort is perceptible in their discussion of the matter. As we saw above, Gouin’s reference to incest was rather veiled. Without using the word, he simply suggests that “the community of bedrooms” was responsible for the loss of innocence he deplored. While many of his Montreal colleagues were also reluctant to openly discuss such a delicate question, references to it in the Brussels sources are more frequent, but not always less oblique. Writing in response to a question on the influence of housing accommodations on workers’ morality and the effects of this promiscuity in the labour commission’s investigation, one anonymous participant simply let his or her distress speak for itself, cryptically writing, “my pen refuses to detail what goes on in these wretched homes. I might give details another time.”64 Whether the person worked up the nerve to follow up on this vague promise is unknown, but many others, also refusing to name the evil and drawing only on their assumptions, simply let readers put two and two together, such as the authors of one patronage committee report who condemned the “sad consequences” of this promiscuity, which was becoming “alas more and more frequent: here, a family comprised of nine people: parents, sons and daughters, many of whom are adults, sleep in the same room; there a mother sharing her bed with her sixteen-year-old son.”65 For some housing specialists, however, the question of incest was a fundamental one and, as a symptom of the broader urban downfall that coloured so many spatial stories, needed to be confronted. Both major investigations conducted in Brussels during this period referred

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to a problem that brought bodily considerations to a most acute level of awareness in the broader narratives about these neighbourhoods. Hellemans, for example, had little difficulty in letting the “personal equation” intervene in his condemnation of the “intense” and “deplorable” promiscuity and incest his inquiry had uncovered, referring to the “despicable exchanges existing between brother and sister, father and ­ agasse daughter, and even mother and son!”66 Fifteen years earlier, L and De Quéker had been just as shocked by such revelations. More than half of the families the investigators had visited, many of which consisted of more than five people, lived in one-room dwellings. No need to be a strict moralist, they declared, to understand the possible consequences of such a state of affairs. Begging forgiveness for revealing certain “somewhat naturalist details,” they proceeded to illustrate the sources of their concern by recounting the story of one family of ten, sharing a single if relatively spacious room, and made up of a seventy-year-old patriarch and his wife, three children from his first marriage, two daughters and a son from his second marriage, as well as his current wife’s two daughters from a previous marriage. There was only one bed in the room, shared by the parents. The eight children, aged between seventeen and twentynine, slept on what the authors referred to as “an enormous straw mat” which they tossed into a corner during the day. What resulted from this situation appalled the investigators: three of the four young women, they discovered, were pregnant. The two youngest ones, they added, did not betray the slightest hint of shame in designating their stepbrother Jef as “the author of a situation no longer possible for them to hide.” When they confronted Jef, he initially denied his responsibility, before admitting to it in the same way one confesses to pulling some sort of practical joke, and then raising the issue of the third sister’s pregnancy, pointing the finger at another one of the brothers. “All this was said with a cynicism so … natural,” commented the authors of the report, “that one has to have heard the conversation to believe it.” The investigators also recounted their efforts to obtain explanations from the father, but, they explained, this “hardened drunk” did not seem to understand what they were getting at and abruptly ended the conversation, telling them that “no one had the right to meddle in his business, or that of his daughters.” The story ends with the revelation that the investigators sought the assistance of a dame patronnesse, who gave the family money for a larger flat. No sooner did the father have the money in hand than he and his wife left for her hometown of Charleroi, leaving the children on their own in the capital.67

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What these accounts say about the veritable frequency of acts of incest in either city is impossible to ascertain. Though the issue was frequently denounced, Lagasse and De Quéker admitted that they did not know whether many such cases existed, and “for the honour of our workers” they wished to believe not. Only their empirical statistics about the number of people per room in these neighbourhoods allowed them to doubt that such stories were not exceptional. Moreover, no one much cared to comment on the possibility of such sexual improprieties existing in the homes of the bourgeoisie itself, the bedrooms of which no inspectors were mandated to examine. However, these accounts bring bodily and moral conceptions, elements of the reformers’ interiority, to the heart of their understanding of these unique spaces, created from the push of modern industrialization. Reformers focused distinctly on the workers’ physical surroundings, their bodies, and their morality, imputing their perceived moral proclivities to their spatial environment. They condemned this suspected sexual behaviour, but they also demonized the actors, attacking their physical and moral state. Lagasse and De Quéker portrayed the young women as flighty and unaware, showed the young man as a careless buffoon, their (step)father as an irresponsible toper, and their apartment as a flea-ridden den of iniquity. Stories like these reveal the patterns according to which the modern city and its inhabitants came to be defined in bodily terms, terms through which space was given meaning according to such categories of opposition as bourgeois and worker, salubrious and insalubrious, moral and immoral. Social Relations and the Home When Bourgeois and Worker Meet Their keen interest in the housing question thus brought middle-class reformers into direct contact with workers, contributing to the shaping of the class relations that structured their spatial narratives. To be sure, many commentators favoured the development of distinct working- and middle- or upper-class neighbourhoods. As we saw in chapter 2, certain members of more privileged social groups advocated the construction of transport infrastructures that would allow workers to live in the surrounding suburbs, freeing the centre of dense workingclass districts that were seen as threats to the physical and moral health of the wider city. In the countryside, explained Montreal hygienist A.A. Foucher, houses were detached, allowing them to be inundated

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with light and fresh air. For his part, De Quéker favoured a horizontal development of the city that would counteract the perceived negative effects of its skyward momentum. Besides, he noted, living farther away from the centre would provide workers with the opportunity for a daily, healthy walk to and from work.68 Others, however, noted that if individual homes were preferable, they did not believe that urban multi-family apartment buildings necessarily had to be insalubrious. Properly applied, the laws of hygiene could bring physical improvements and moral uplift to virtually any home.69 Furthermore, proponents of this view, especially in Brussels where the more limited amount of land on which to build made this particular form of promiscuity almost obligatory, claimed that the solution to the moral shortcomings of the working class was to continue to make room for them in the city’s prosperous neighbourhoods. These reformers remained convinced that the good example set by the bourgeoisie would inevitably rub off on the workers, who, through direct contact with “more polished people,” would lose “something of their frequent roughness,” and abandon “this false idea that the working population constitutes a class on its own, clearly distinct from the bourgeois classes.”70 Recognizing the challenge posed by the constantly increasing property values in central Brussels, the president of the Association for the Improvement of Workers’ Housing insisted that creating contact between the members of different classes was a salutary objective and that the “‘shoulder to shoulder’ of community life” and “neighbourly relations between the protector and the protected” had to be encouraged.71 In light of the simultaneous construction of luxurious bourgeois neighbourhoods that reinforced the social differentiation of residential space, it seems fair to suggest that this line of argument, condescending in its assumptions, was more rhetorical than sincere. Residents of working-class neighbourhoods, however, did not necessarily adhere to reformers’ spatial understandings, nor did they always appreciate these frequent disruptions of the intimacy of their dwellings, and varying levels of resistance can be detected in the sources. To be sure, municipal officials and philanthropic reformers were aware that their presence in workers’ homes could be interpreted as an intrusion. This is evident, for instance, in the outline of the rules to be followed by Montreal sanitary inspectors in which officials were reminded that, in diligently applying hygiene by-laws, they were to remain respectful and polite towards the residents of the homes they inspected.72 At the beginning of the 1890 investigation in Brussels, the police officers

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responsible for collecting the data on behalf of the principal investigators were cautioned, in no uncertain terms, that despite the zeal expected of them, their efforts must not be “vexatious” for the workers. Surveys had to be carried out with a good deal of tact, the instructions continued, suggesting that it was better to leave certain questions unanswered than to “arrive at findings and measurements against the will of the inhabitants.”73 Despite these precautions, reformers sometimes, and unsurprisingly, received a cool reception when entering the homes of workers. In Brussels, housing philanthropists, boastful of their work, were reluctant to report negative experiences. Yet their frequent references to the workers’ resistance to their message bespeak the tensions they may have faced when visiting these alleys and penetrating these homes.74 Repeated recommendations to attempt to befriend the workers also suggest that bourgeois reformers were not always welcomed with open arms. Wherefore the need for “a few signs of interest, a few favours,” or a “word of encouragement” and a “comment on one’s concern for the children of the poor,” if not to overcome or placate existing feelings of hostility?75 The reformers’ need to develop and discuss such strategies indicates that the implementation of hygienic norms, and the attempts to reconfigure urban space according to notions of progress and social improvement, were also the result of confrontation and the expression of competing claims to these spaces. In supporting their cause, housing reformers readily affirmed that workers appreciated the efforts directed at them, but while we have little evidence of what workers were indeed thinking, certain sources do reveal an element of resentment. On the recommendation that they would be better off leaving the city centre of Montreal or Brussels, for instance, it is not difficult to surmise from their unwillingness to acquiesce that many in the working class disagreed with this assessment. And if they did move, nothing guaranteed their situation would be enhanced. Each day, the city seemed to be improving itself, noted one contributor to the Montreal weekly, L’ouvrier. Where tumbledown hovels once stood, elegant and sumptuous stone houses were going up. In the midst of all this progress, however, “the worker, pack on his back, emigrates to distant neighbourhoods, and looks in the suburbs for affordable rents that he cannot find in the centre” continuing to live in ramshackle homes that offered little respite against the cold Montreal winters.76 Moving farther afield, some also noted, would only overburden workers, who were already physically drained. Required

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to wake up earlier and arrive home later, they would have less time to rest and would be forced to take long, tiring walks in both directions. As for trains and tramways, the additional cost their use implied would negate the savings engendered by the lower rents in the suburbs. Furthermore, the ideal of home ownership for workers seemed unattainable, almost preposterous in light of their economic standing. Remarked one labourer, the very thought of such a possibility evoked only “bitter irony.”77 What was really needed, several noted, was more state-subsidized housing built specifically for the city’s workers. Domestic Gender Relations Gender considerations also nourished the spatial dynamic of workingclass neighbourhoods in the modern city. Many of the hygienists and leaders of the housing reform movement, most of whom were men, maintained that working-class women had a particularly crucial role to play in the great societal stakes of decent housing. It is no coincidence, for example, that in his corporeal allegory of all that was sick in working-class housing, cited above, Hellemans chose to embody his understanding of social ills in a female form. Women, it was understood, could make or break the working-class home. In a fundraising letter sent out by the Brussels patronage committee, the president and secretary summarized this point of view quite succinctly, writing, “It has been said and repeated with reason that it is the woman who builds the home and who demolishes it. Can we not further affirm that it is the woman who elevates the worker, through her spirit of order, her thrift, her saving, her cleanliness and the attractiveness she gives the home, or who prematurely ruins the labourer’s future, through her moral incapacity and her negligence as wife or as mother?”78 Because they were mandated to produce and maintain a salubrious environment and pleasant atmosphere in the home, women were seen by housing reformers as bearing a particular responsibility for the social and moral order of the wider city. Note, for instance, the expressly gendered language used by the Montreal hygienist Joseph Desroches in discussing hygiene as the “sister” of morality, the “legitimate daughter” of common sense and experience. Along with this feminized conception of hygiene itself, much of the popular literature on the subject was geared specifically to female homemakers. As the keepers of hygiene in the home, it was particularly important that women be properly educated and kept informed about both what was expected of them and how they were to carry out their responsibilities. The hygienist and

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4.2  Family Life. John Henry Walker, nineteenth century. The woman who follows modern hygienic principles has a healthy and blissful family life. The family below, in a one-room, unkempt home, lives in darkness and despair, the children suffering and the mother at wit’s end. McCord Museum M9350.50.2.263.

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cleric Baillairgé explicitly tied the question into the church’s teachings on women’s role in the stability of the family and the nation, noting that if mothers had “in hygienic science one hundredth of what they have in love and caring, there are many of our brothers and sisters now sleeping in the cemetery who would today be among the living, and who would be giving strength to the French-Canadian family.”79 Housing reformers believed that the best-kept homes belonged to women who had previously worked as servants and who had learned the values of order, cleanliness, and thrift while in the service of upper-class employers. As for women who had only known the workshop, the reformers judged their housekeeping skills unsatisfactory. Self-help manuals, newspapers, and almanacs of the day were brimful of recommendations, tips, and admonitions counselling women to act as the foot soldiers in the battle for the spread of hygienic homes and behaviour, stressing their importance in “advancing the cause.”80 Suggestions were given to guide women in thorough and frequent housecleaning, while various reminders of bodily cleanliness encouraged regular bathing and gave advice on how to care for sometimes neglected body parts such as hair, nails, or teeth. These matters, noted the Brussels publication L’hygiène illustrée, were primordial because they were at the very core of daily existence. After all, “it is in treating with a bit of care and a bit more method these thousands of nothings of which life is made, that it is possible to make it more pleasant, soft, and practical.”81 A key element of this discourse, moreover, one that highlights the way ideas about hygiene and the body entered into people’s intimacy, was the emphasis on familial relationships between women and their children and husbands. Providing children with a clean home, and showing them how to care for their bodies, were societal responsibilities that befell all mothers, who were charged with ensuring that “our children will grow into strong men, useful to the homeland.” Furthermore, children brought up with hygienic principles would gain in social rank, because care for one’s physical person demonstrated a propensity for personal improvement in all aspects of life.82 As for their relationship with their husbands, women were expected to keep a tidy and comfortable home so that, after a long day at the factory, men would prefer staying in with their families to whiling away the hours in the streets or at the local cabaret. Women, according to this logic, were held directly responsible for the behaviour of men. In failing to provide their working husbands with pleasant homes, women had

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4.3  Dishonoured. Illustration by the Belgian artist A. Struys depicting familial discord in the working-class home. From the catalogue for the Exposition historique de l’art belge in 1880. Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

only themselves to blame for their husbands’ repeated absences, or for the laziness, debauchery, and drunkenness that afflicted so many working families. This happened, accused one Belgian women’s publication, “quite simply because you are unable to hold them back, because your home is not well kept, because your appearance is sometimes dreadful, because your mood is morose, finally, in a word, because you are not ‘good housekeepers.’”83 In their contacts with working-class women, housing reformers played on these conceptions of gender in a variety of ways. It was not without pride, for instance, that the representative of the Association for the Improvement of Workers’ Housing for the suburb of Forest recounted how his members had been able to play on what they understood to be women’s jealous tendencies in order to obtain better results. When speaking to women in their district, the members would compare the house they were visiting with the neighbouring one, hinting

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that it was better cared for and more orderly. “Accompanying this comparison with the remark that a cleaner and more stylish home would retain the father, the husband, we had the satisfaction of noting absolutely remarkable changes.”84 Patronage committees spared no efforts to reinforce this gendered understanding of the home. Every year, the Brussels section organized its Order and Cleanliness contests, designed to reward women who contributed most to sanitation efforts in the realm of the city for which they were considered responsible: the home. According to the rules, the competition was open to married, widowed, and “abandoned” women who registered before the deadline. Women with criminal records, who ran liquor outlets, gave false information about themselves, or were generally of “questionable morality” were excluded outright, creating a category of individuals who were formally marginalized and deprived of the opportunity to participate in this official channel for improving the urban environment. The home was evaluated by means of a points system in which participants were graded according to the number of persons comprising the household, the family’s financial situation, children’s attendance at school, the type of employment held by the head of the family, whether the family had savings and insurance, the cleanliness of the home, the quality of the bedding and furniture, as well as the overall impression of the judges. Those with the most upstanding homes won savings accounts and received certificates. To ensure that participants supplied their full efforts, evaluations were not scheduled, but held randomly and without notice. In addition to motivating the participants to keep their homes clean at all times so as to be prepared for an unexpected visit, this strategy also afforded the patronage committee with a further reason to enter working-class homes. To emphasize the message of these competitions, the committee annually organized a lavish, but “solemn,” awards gala held in the grandiose gothic room of the city hall, attended not just by the participants but also by a range of dignitaries, including members of the committee, city councillors, government ministers, and the committee’s honorary president, Prince Albert, along with his wife, Princess Élisabeth, future King and Queen of Belgium. Speeches were given, flowers decorated the scene, and patriotic songs were played by the royal court’s music ensemble. The organizers consciously produced this atmosphere with the intention of impressing upon the women an aura of refinement and respectability, attitudes they were intended to bring back to their

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own housekeeping chores. Charles Lagasse, president of the committee, thanked the prince for his royal presence by noting that “more than one laureate, falling asleep last night, had, thanks to you, happy dreams, musing that, as in a fairy tale she would be welcomed into a good palace by good princes.”85 Emotions ran high at such gatherings, and, according to those who transcribed the proceedings, the speeches were frequently interrupted by “long and lively applause,” even, surprisingly enough, when the women were told by the city’s mayor that so many of the homes in their neighbourhood continued to be a stain on the capital’s image, and that they would be better off relocating to the surrounding suburbs.86 Beneath the pomp and circumstance, the speeches served to buttress the gendered reading of working-class residential space. The prince, politicians, and philanthropists used the tribune to project their vision of the ideal home and, above all, the specific role they expected of women in fostering this environment. Year after year, women were told that it was up to them to ensure the social and moral uplift of their class, and that innate virtue and motherly judgment were the best tools they had to accomplish this mission. Indeed, asked one minister, what would working families become without women’s “domestic virtues” through which, with humility and simplicity, they kept their children safe from the dangers of the street and their husbands away from the seduction of the cabaret? Hardly conscious of the “grave problem of the social question that preoccupied so many thinkers,” they simply tackled the challenges of modernity in their own, daily ways, the minister told them, in the process revealing his vision of working-class women’s naivety as they diligently worked for a better society, unaware of the deeper problems that troubled masculine minds.87 These events served to diffuse more overt political messages as well. Lagasse, for instance, never failed to remind the audience of the great leaps of progress such initiatives were bringing to workers’ homes in particular, and to the urban environment in general, seizing the opportunity to remind the working-class women gathered before him that such progress was the result of sustained efforts from all social classes under a regime of peace, labour, and love for the nation. These accomplishments, he insisted, in a veiled attack on the Belgian Workers’ Party, had nothing to do with “those who wish to revolutionize the face of the world, human nature even, through violent upheavals or even laws.”88 What a blessing to society that private interest pursued such laudable social aims, stated the prince on another occasion, proud that those

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responsible for industrial and commercial activity – “the body of the nation” – were doing so much to heal its soul.89 In keeping with the economic impetus of modernity, understandings of gender also shaped the construction of hygiene as a consumable product, one that could be marketed directly at women. Indeed, popular turn-of-the-century periodicals contain innumerable advertisements drawing explicitly on the ideas about hygiene being presented in adjacent columns of print, themselves frequently inundated with product placement strategies. Geared to middle- and upper-class women with the means to purchase such products, these representations provide an additional angle from which to consider the way in which private acts of personal hygiene, particularly as they related to women’s bodies, were discussed in public settings. The common thread linking these advertisements was the notion that women had a weaker physical disposition than men and needed to compensate by purchasing these restorative products. “Since the beginning of time, women have always faced their share of suffering,” sympathized one textual advert in the Montreal paper Le Canada. Maintaining an aura of mystery around the female body, the ad notes that “secret troubles” have always undermined women’s physical well-being. Always, that is, until the hope brought about by “Ferrozone,” a pill that promised to give the body new vitality and energy, bringing an end to the headaches, nervousness, and irritability that plagued women’s lives.90 Advertisements like this one played on understandings of the connection between the physical and the interior self by promising bodily strength and verve as well as an overall sense of happiness to those who consumed these pills or tonics. However, they also showed how the hygienists’ crusading language was rooted in broader societal understandings of gender. Beyond merely extolling the values of various soaps, shampoos, brooms, and brushes, these ads often pitched such products as necessary to the fulfilment of the spousal and maternal roles expected of women. “Men avoid pale and weak women. They hesitate before marrying them,” cautioned an ad for “Dr Coderre’s Red Pills.” Only young women with rosy cheeks and shiny eyes, sure signs of vigorous health, found model husbands who cared for them and their children.91 Once women were settled into their home and family life, however, the stress on their bodies would only increase, they were warned. “There is washing day, ironing day, the sewing days, etc., each of these days brings its lot of work. There are moments of anxiety and exhaustion,” cautioned another such ad, showing a woman hard at work with a glass

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4.4  Idealized femininity. Cover of Bruxelles féminin, 1 November 1902. Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

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4.5  Le Canada – l’expansion de Montréal. Montreal’s “supremacy and development” are incarnated in the figure of a woman superimposed on the urban landscape in this 1905 image by the illustrator Édouard J. Massicotte. Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

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of “Saint-Lehon Wine” nearby, a vivifying liquid from France that gave new energy to the body and mind, an “ideal tonic” that allowed women to both soothe their bodies and perform the household tasks expected of them.92 O. Chapard, a Brussels doctor, wrote a regular column entitled “The Doctoresse’s Chat” in Bruxelles féminin, a glossy magazine geared to a wealthy readership. While the health issues Chapard’s bourgeois readers faced seemed to result more from their “sedentary way of life,” the challenges of modern life were no less numerous, and the doctor’s columns were peppered with advice on hair and skin care, obesity and constipation, along with the names of the most recommendable products and remedies. Corporeal, gendered, and class-based representations of the home thus spread well beyond the scientific tracts and meetings of hygienists and housing reformers. With the emergence of a consumer-driven economy, urban women, around whom so much of the body–home discourse was centred, were also potential consumers of products that promised, in the hectic context of the modern city, to alleviate some of the physical and mental strains caused by the transformations of this distinct environment. Conclusion In Marius Renard’s Notre pain quotidien, the protagonists, Madeleine and François, whom we first met in chapter 2, settle into a cozy apartment in the industrial suburb of Anderlecht, just west of Brussels. Faced with the precariousness of working-class life and far from her natural social and family networks, Madeleine works hard to keep her home well decorated and impeccably clean. When her husband is jailed for his involvement in a workers’ uprising and Madeleine finds herself pregnant and alone, she takes solace in preparing the home for the baby’s arrival.93 Renard, a socialist politician whose work consistently expressed hope for the improvement of conditions for the working class, used the image of Madeleine’s home and her determination to keep it comfortable as evidence that limited means did not condemn the urban poor to a miserable existence. Read in conjunction with the reports of the more conservative-minded housing reformers, Renard’s description of this working-class home seems almost defiant, as if his objective were to counter the more prevalent images of workers’ housing as sordid spaces of disease and vice. Nevertheless, in presenting Madeleine’s home in this manner, Renard showed his characters living up to a modern, hygienic ideal of urban residential space promoted by hygienists, politicians, bureaucrats,

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philanthropists, and other housing reformers. Not only did Madeleine and her housekeeping skills conform to familiar gender norms of the woman as defender of working-class moral integrity, but the physical aspect of the apartment itself corresponded with prevailing standards of salubriousness, typified by abundant light and adequate ventilation. In the context of turn-of-the-twentieth-century industrialization and urbanization, the city’s housing stock constituted a central element of the landscape. With a vast proportion of the urban population made up of workers, the material problems facing these homes took a significant place in contemporary discourse, and these homes were seen as a threat not just to their working-class occupants but to the entire city as well. Just as the houses themselves gave texture and colour to the fabric of the modern city, the discourses examined in this chapter gave them meaning as constituent elements of urban space grounded in ideas associated with modernity and the body. On the surface, the problem of unsanitary housing was a technical and scientific one that involved the body directly. Indeed, the most obvious fear associated with damp, poorly ventilated houses equipped with decrepit pipes, drains, and latrines was the spread of disease. From a hygienic point of view, the home, which was supposed to provide rest for the tired body of the worker, seemed to be more of a corporeal danger than a reviving haven. In the wake of emerging discoveries in the fields of bacteriology, hygiene, and medicine, housing reformers felt confident that modern science held the key to solving these problems. To this end, the merits of personal hygiene and diligent cleanliness in the home were preached to all who would listen. Detailed investigations were undertaken and surveyors took to the streets to map, measure, and monitor the relative state of salubriousness in working-class neighbourhoods. However, beneath this objective and rational approach to ostensibly scientific problems lay subjective and interior preoccupations, connecting housing troubles to middle-class perceptions not only of class and gender, but also of deeper fears regarding disorder, vice, and immorality. If modern hygiene meant providing an environment in which the body could stay healthy and strong, it also required that special care be given to one’s mental faculties and moral posture. Indeed, the physical sensations reformers experienced when entering working-class residential spaces were reported and discussed in heavily loaded and profoundly emotional terms. Though historians have argued that this alarmist tone was a consciously deployed tactic to win adherents to a cause, dismissing this passionate language as mere hyperbole would

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fail to account for these reformers’ own interiority. Their confrontation with the physically deformed bodies of the urban poor, the darkness and disorder in which they sometimes lived, and the scenes of drunkenness and incest they occasionally witnessed shocked their sense of morality and values. The framework of civility in which the bourgeoisie of the period situated its social norms was the product of gradually diminishing thresholds of repugnance. Bodily practices were increasingly considered distasteful and were relegated to the home, understood as a private sphere. However, these distinctions were not fixed or immovable. ­Middle-class reformers were fascinated, and drawn into, the intimacy of workers’ homes. By physically experiencing the atmosphere and contemplating the bedrooms and outhouses in which workers carried out their most intimate bodily practices, the bourgeoisie pushed at these increasingly restrictive conventions, even as they professed to uphold them. They tested the bounds of their own feelings of shame and decency, casting judgment on their fellow urban dwellers and affirming their own sense of identity in the process. Municipal authorities, hygienists, and reformers on both sides of the Atlantic assessed the question of housing in similar ways, drew on a common scientific literature, and travelled to the same international congresses. The comparative view of workers’ housing discussed in this chapter demonstrates the extent to which discourse about the city and the body, constructed initially through highly localized personal experiences with the material spaces people encountered, gained broader significance through dialogues and encounters that far surpassed the immediate environment, demonstrating how individual bodies and private spaces were integrated into the transnational flows through which the urban culture of the turn of the century was reformulated. As we entered the labyrinths of these neighbourhoods, I suggested that the frequently cited notion that a typical day was ideally divided into three eight-hour segments reflected the way residents of industrial cities interacted with urban space. Having visited their factories and homes, on now to the streets, where much of people’s time away from house and work was spent, and whose spatial significance was shaped in far more public sensorial experiences and bodily practices.

Chapter Five

Street Scenes

In the autumn months of 1914, as war raged in Europe, the Montreal women’s magazine Le foyer published the travel diary of an unnamed “friend” who had spent a few weeks in Belgium and Germany seven years earlier. The magazine’s intention was to provide its readers with additional perspective on some of the places they were hearing so much about in the news. The visitor had stayed three days in Brussels, apparently spending much of his time in Sainte-Gudule Cathedral, and expressed a rather positive overall impression of the city. To him, nothing in Brussels was more beautiful than its crowded boulevards as they lit up with activity in the evenings. He offered a truly sensory account of his movements through these lively spaces: Without discontinuity, along its sidewalks, a line of shops, boutiques, kiosks, and cafés. Window displays are filled with everything that is most shiny, most sparkling, most dazzling, everything that draws the eye of the passer-by, stops him for a moment, and suggests that he enter. And all of this is lit up by gas and electricity, inside and outside, with such extravagance that it is no longer nighttime, but daytime, the full sun of noon. To this feast for the eyes are added the comings and goings of a compact crowd, the splendour of their apparel, the sounds of tramways, of carriages, of automobiles of omnibuses; it is an intoxication for almost all the senses.

The traveller’s account effectively renders the charged atmosphere of the modern urban boulevard, highlighting its commercial, consumerdriven character. The writer dwells, importantly, on its dazzling lights, the movement of the dense crowd, the sparkling accoutrements of the

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walkers, the noise and energy of the heavy traffic, all of which inebriated the senses. So much so, that, although he appreciated the spectacle, the visitor noted that stress and fatigue quickly set in, followed by a longing for a different set of sensory experiences: “Quickly, one returns to the tranquil neighbourhood where passers-by are rare, where on the paving stones the rumble of cars is more resonant in the silence, where from the bosom of the darkness, can be seen God’s stars shining in the sky,” he concludes, hinting at his own unease with the physical and mental intensity of the modern boulevard, with what Simmel called the intensification of nervous life.1 Having examined the corporeal relationship to space largely in terms of the specific dynamics of industrialization, we will now accompany residents of Montreal and Brussels beyond the factory and home and into the streets, where they strolled, drove, shopped, relaxed, or worked, and where “the rich rub shoulders with the poor, vice brushes against virtue.” To the Belgian poet Théodore Hannon, the street had its own personality, character, and moods. “It laughs, sings, babbles, gossips, rests … It rejoices, mourns, celebrates.”2 The purpose of this chapter is to scrutinize the specific spatial dynamic of streets in order to explore how this personality was constructed. How did individual sensory experiences and intimate bodily practices condition urban dwellers’ relationship to the public sphere of the city, the open spaces where modernity was showcased and exteriorized? Urban streets were undergoing significant transformations through the emergence of a new planning discourse during this period. The significance of these material changes lay in the tension between the disappointments city dwellers felt at the sometimes painfully slow process of modernization, and the broader cultural and national aspirations urban elites sought to inscribe upon the boulevards. Like the factories and homes, this new organization of public space was discussed and understood through corporeal practices and sensorial experiences with the lively atmosphere of modern boulevards and the vivacious gatherings of many people. But if the streets delighted, so too did they threaten, and people’s fears of the bodily and moral risks they associated with automobiles, nighttime violence, and street festivities lay just beneath the surface of otherwise enthusiastic narratives. Finally, the modern street highlighted new ways of thinking about the body itself, and we will see how ostensibly ordinary matters like the construction of public toilets or funeral processions reveal some of the diverse and unexpected ways in which people’s corporeal existence shaped their relationship to

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public space. These were themes that recurred frequently in the discourses of municipal councillors, journalists, poets, novelists, and other ordinary citizens who experienced these transformations. They emphasize the duality of the physical and interior self as it relates to the urban environment, and complicate our understanding of the vicissitudes of street life by offering a glimpse of urban dwellers’ intimacy in the public context of the modern city. Chaos and Beauty in the Street To survive the “moving chaos” that defined the boulevards of n ­ ineteenthcentury Paris, Marshall Berman argues that the “modern man must become adept at soubresauts and mouvements brusques, at sudden, abrupt, jagged twists and shifts – and not only with his legs and body, but with his mind and sensibility as well.”3 The boulevards of Brussels and Montreal may not have been as large and animated as those of Paris, but Berman’s conception of this dual body–mind imperative is certainly applicable beyond the City of Lights. In this period of what many saw as unbridled urban expansion, city streets were the focus of a new planning impulse, carried out under the aegis of an increasingly professionalized class of engineers, planners, and architects whose primary objective was to refashion the city according to models that favoured the rapid, efficient, and profitable flow of people and goods. Like other Western cities, Brussels and Montreal undertook massive public works to build the streets, parks, lights, sewers, and other infrastructure that incarnated the ideal of a cleaner and healthier environment. On one level, making urban thoroughfares conform to modernity’s ideals of unimpeded circulation required remodelling the physical space of the streets: increasing their width to allow for more traffic, paving them with smoother materials, and redesigning intersections to minimize accidents. On another level, however, modernizing the streets of the city involved rethinking the ways people moved and behaved on them. As we will see, the meaning of this milieu was constructed through a reformulation of understandings of commercial activity, speed, lighting, even public decency, all of which, far from desensitizing the body, engaged it in vivid ways. Before discussing these questions of behaviour and deportment, this first section will deal specifically with the significance of these material transformations to the urban environment. My intent here is not to discuss specialized planning initiatives in detail,4 but rather to assess how, in a context where the very notion

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of an urban thoroughfare was being reinvented, people’s bodily experiences of this materiality informed their way of experiencing and conceptualizing these spaces. The Failure to Meet Expectations Even as they were promised smooth and open boulevards, urban dwellers frequently expressed their dissatisfaction with the sensory nuisances and physical discomfort caused by streets that often remained dirty and cluttered, exposing a disconnect between the formal discourse through which streets were thought about and the material realities experienced by the body. Between pledges for modernization and the actual accomplishment of these initiatives lay the far less glamorous reality of a landscape in transition, a landscape on which streets were in the process of being paved and waste removal programs in the process of being implemented. If modern sanitary ideals called precisely for the frequent and exhaustive removal of rubbish, then residents felt justified in denouncing “the present disgraceful state of the streets of Montreal,” which they saw as “a source of danger and disease to every member of the community.”5 If tramways symbolized smooth and rapid transportation through the traffic of a busy city like Brussels, then opposition councillors could readily condemn the pools of coal, grease, and oil that formed “veritable lakes … of foul sludge” around the vehicle depot.6 These unpleasant sensorial experiences and perceived threats to health and physical safety regularly reminded urban dwellers that the much-heralded forward march of modernity was sometimes more of a stagger or a stumble. “What a pigsty,” one songwriter satirically wrote of Montreal, intimating that municipal officials were more interested in their “payment” than in the “pavement.” The “stink” he describes is literal as well as symbolic – not only were the streets disgracefully dirty, but through the administration’s cupidity, an odour of corruption seemed to be wafting over them as well.7 Such misgivings were particularly evident when the streets became the scene of clashes between man-made symbols of order and progress and the unpredictability of nature. When a horse and buggy became tangled in broken telegraph cables in the Montreal district of Pointe Saint-Charles, the owner insisted that it was because of the city’s negligence that his horse “took fright, broke my carriage and my harness, and maimed himself.” The municipal administration declined responsibility, insisting that the cables had fallen not because of any

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shortcomings on its part, but because, on that November afternoon, the wind was blowing like a hurricane, toppling over signs, fences, and even chimneys.8 The city thus shifted the blame away from its own incapacity to ensure efficient circulation towards the randomness and unpredictability of nature, forces antithetical to the human rationality upon which the success of the modern project depended. In the same vein, the presence of animals in the street increasingly irritated proponents of efficient thoroughfares. An integral part of the urban scenery until the late nineteenth-century, animals provided food, transportation, raw material for manufactured goods, and fertilizer, but their presence was increasingly seen as a nuisance and as a cause of accidents and disease.9 Hygienic conceptions of urbanism increasingly relegated animals, and the industries associated with them, to the outskirts of the city. A Brussels councillor seized on this issue, which had “moved public opinion.” Herds of farm animals on the city’s most prestigious boulevards, plodding from Luxembourg station in the east to the abattoir in the west, were “a real danger and an inconvenience for the public.”10 In Montreal, the “offensive odours” from the open carts of manure that farmers sometimes drove into the city were also the object of numerous complaints to the city doctor.11 Despite frequently repeated claims of the hygienic superiority of the countryside, the contact between humans and animals in city streets was an uncomfortable reminder of the evolution of norms governing the use of public space. Beauty and Harmony Speed and efficiency, however, were not all that modern boulevards were expected to offer. As urban historian Thomas Hall points out, creating a “distinguished townscape” became a fundamental objective of late nineteenth-century planning, along with circulation and hygiene.12 While city streets were meant to embody the heights of rationality, urban dwellers also looked upon their material layout for a reflection of the more interior feelings of pride and accomplishment that, as we have seen, corresponded with the ideals of modernity. Together with articles exposing the design and measurements of boulevards conceived to expedite the movement of the maximum number of people, the Belgian architecture and planning journal Tekhné also ran pieces calling for a cityscape that was steeped in “Beauty” and “Harmony” and that conciliated “modern needs” with the “artistic aspirations of our race,”

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insisting that the problem of city-building “was at once objective and subjective, that science could and should be blended with art.”13 Whether they emphasized the tactility of physical movement or the subjective impressions garnered by visual observation, these competing, yet intertwined, conceptions stemmed from people’s corporeal and sensorial presence in the streets. Explaining this duality, urban historian Françoise Choay notes that the rationalist and scientific vision of urban planning interacted with a traditionalist, or “culturalist,” approach that favoured sinewy streets, emphasized the heritage and distinctness of older buildings, and drew its inspiration from a nostalgic critique of modern developments and an idealized vision of the city of the past.14 In Brussels, one of the most outspoken proponents of the softer charms of urban design was the mayor Charles Buls. Faced with the proliferation of what to him were “artificial, dry, and mathematic” boulevards, this “delicate soul” called for the conservation of older streets and lanes, as well as for an urban and architectural development that was influenced by continuity with established practices and that accounted for the hidden beauties of disorder.15 We might imagine him agreeing with a French traveller for whom the straight lines and systematic uniformity of Montreal’s new boulevards were disappointing to those who preferred “the capricious arabesques, the romantic whims of older cities.” Something was lost in these spaces, which, he regretted, resembled the “recent streets of London and Brussels.”16 In Montreal itself, the well-known architect Percy Nobbs also criticized the excessive symmetry of modern city planning. “When the elements bear the natural character of crookedness, let us with great care plan crookedly,” he pleaded, arguing that the city’s unique geographical position and varied topography afforded the opportunity to mould a truly distinctive environment.17 On both sides of the Atlantic, the modernist discourse on the evolution of material space was tempered by more subjective questions of artistic appreciation and the notion that urban dwellers’ sensory contact with the environment should evoke cultural identity. Buls expressed this clearly when he wrote of the patriotism that informed his vision of an ideal streetscape, one that embodied a “filial respect for the memory of the past; such that any Belgian entering the ancient crown drawn by the verdant belt of the boulevards would feel his heart flutter as if he were returning to the paternal abode.”18 In Montreal, the writer and conservative politician G.A. Nantel drew on simmering linguistic tensions to make the connection between urban space and conceptions of

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national identity. Every part of the city contributed to the public purse, he noted, and yet certain neighbourhoods had streets that would have shamed “any small medieval city … Why should we redden to the ears when we have to show visitors the Eastern part of the city, inhabited primarily by Franco-Canadiens?”19 Beyond the immediate questions of practicality, these portrayals of the streets of Montreal and Brussels show how these spaces bore fundamental connections to deeply held beliefs about culture and identity, a link made even more evident when the streets’ material reality fell short of these ambitions. The intricate cultural implications of the streetscape, we shall now see, were imagined and reinforced in direct reference to bodily feeling. Boulevard Modernity The Movement of the Crowd On the boulevards and amid the lively crowds, individuals, each in their own ways, performed their soubresauts with varying degrees of agility and goodwill, implicating their bodies and minds in the discourses through which these spaces were made into sites of modernity. A distinguishing feature of these thoroughfares was precisely the high concentration of people massing together, responding to an urban magnetism fed by human curiosity, by “our senses that yearn to be satisfied, for we like to hear pretty things, taste a good pâté, inhale a delicious scent, drink when we are thirsty, take a bath or cool ourselves off when it is hot, eat when we are hungry, rest when we are tired, caress the objects we like.”20 Bodily tropes were central to descriptions and understandings of the boulevard atmosphere, not just in terms of individual haptic and sensorial experiences, but also in the way the shapes, movements, and sounds produced by these colourful crowds came to define the meaning of the street. The author Louis Dumont-Wilden, self-styled flâneur of Brussels, particularly enjoyed the early hours of the evening, a transitory time between the end of the workday and the beginning of the city’s nightlife, when the streets filled with people heading home or for a night on the town. “And the flâneur strolls in the middle of it all,” he wrote, breathing in with curiosity the scent of life and of vice exhaled all around: by clothing, hair, tobacco smoke, shops, the shouts of newspaper vendors,

5.1  Place de la Bourse in Brussels by the painter Fernand Toussaint depicting the bustle of the city’s central boulevards, ca 1900. Archives of the City of Brussels, Collection Iconographique, unindexed.

164  The Feel of the City and the very pavement from which it seems to arise. The smell animates him, stirs him up; at the moment he feels as if he is living all these lives he sees throbbing around him; he feels the crowd’s heart beating, the heart of the city; he sees this pleasures pass by, he inhales it, he soaks it up, he keeps it in reach, but does not touch it.

This passage takes us far from the vision of the modern body–street relationship as one of numbness and desensitization. The author’s corporeal and sensorial experiences, the interaction between material realities and ideas, between what he observes and what he feels in the city street, constitute the very foundations of his spatial story. Dumont-Wilden is particularly attentive to the intuitions aroused by his sense of smell. He is aware of, and takes pleasure in, the aromas of the street, and in particular of the people who animate it, their clothes, their hair, their tobacco. To him, these fragrances make this space literally come alive, and they enliven him with anticipation and excitement as the beating of the crowd’s heart becomes his own. Yet ultimately he resists immersing himself fully, keeping his sense of touch slightly at bay, perhaps to maintain his modern and masculine composure. This intensity and pleasure, he warns, also give way to dreams of wealth and power, threatening to intoxicate the observer with a deceptive sense of invulnerability. Ultimately, this spectacle “cannot prolong itself,” and at the end of this quotidian interlude, the streets, boutiques, cafes, and covered passages gradually empty themselves: a tobacconist dozes off in his shop, a dog wanders by, thin columns of smoke drift from a few dying cigars, and as the flâneur puts his hand to his pocket, he notes the emptiness of his wallet. At that moment, “all the troubles, all the suffering, burning or light, that this crowd has carried along beneath the splendour of the setting, clings to his memory, pinches his heart, and he goes home broken, exhausted and sad, musing upon some banal task awaiting him the next day.”21 From ecstatic thrills and exhilaration, to deception and melancholy, Dumont-Wilden shows how the street, as experienced in all of its sensorial materiality, could open up the entire gamut of emotions, how the bodily interactions through which space acquired meaning for urban dwellers were bound to the inner self. Indeed, the heterogeneous crowds that populated the streets of Montreal and Brussels were, in the popular imagination, the protagonists

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of these spatial stories. The streets of Brussels, noted the author and journalist Franz Mahutte, were animated by a colourful panoply of “clerks and workers” making the most of their few hours away from work, “stylish people” out for a laugh, “rowdy students and shy students,” local shopkeepers, tipsy military men, even “good country folk dumbfounded by the unsuspected things they see and hear.”22 For the Montreal authors Bray and Lesperance, the city’s ethnic mix defined the character of its streets. Walking along, they met “unmistakable descendants of the ancient Iroquois Indians,” and at another turn they came across “a company who, by their dress and talk, take us back to the peasant classes of older France; while crowding everywhere are ladies and gentlemen of the most approved modern type, according to the fashions of London, Paris and New York.”23 Beyond their simple presence in the street, it was also people’s outward appearance, dress, and talk that gave texture to these encounters and incarnated the distinctions between past and present, tradition and newness, that characterized the tensions of modernity. Reinforcing the sensory quality of the street, the modern urban experience was also indexed to the distinctive soundscape of these crowds. Street vendors hawking their wares, for instance, gave this modern tableau a touch of local colour. In the illustration shown in figure 5.2, the silhouettes reveal an assortment of bodily forms and movements, inviting the reader to imagine a cacophony of repetitive calls, cried out in the distinctive Bruxellois dialect: “Klie-ierkoop! Klierkoop,” hollered the clothes vendor. “Crevettes et crabes: Gernaud en Krabbe!” replied the woman pushing a cart of seafood. The Montreal author Arsène Bessette drew on the encounter of a young, rural French Canadian with the multicultural and permissive atmosphere of Saint-Laurent Boulevard to depict this distinctive environment. As the protagonist discovers his new city, he hears the Jewish tailors calling out, “Vant a suit gentleman?… Big sale here, to-day!” and feels a shiver as “a tall brunette, swaying her hips, looked him up and down from head to toe, and whispered to him as she passed by: Come Deary, I love you!” It was this blend of visual, auditory, and tactile experiences – these words, spoken in English, the intensity of movement, of women brushing past him, of businessmen hurrying along, and others strolling more leisurely, cigar on the lips and cane under the arm – that brought the startled youth into the fold of Montreal’s metropolitan bustle.24

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5.2  Bruxelles cri-de-rue, E. Drot. Archives of the City of Brussels, Collection Iconographique, H400.

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Local (Specifi)cities These idioms and accents indicate how the globalizing trend of urbanization melded with local culture in each city. As if to affirm the resilience of their identities in the rushing flow of transnational currents, commentators in both cities frequently emphasized these specificities, further highlighting the bodily experiences through which people developed feelings of belonging and attachment to their city. In Montreal, for instance, snowy winters were described in terms of enjoyment and uplift. It was “the health-giving properties of the climate” that gave the city “its principal charm,” suggested the local photographer and guidebook author N.M. Hinshelwood. Winter, he noted, with the “dear tinkle of the sleigh-bells” and, above all, “the sight of the pure white mantle of snow,” always seemed to arrive like an old friend after a long absence. To him, snowfalls transformed urban space. Houses “seem to snuggle cosily down” and “appear lower because their roofs, lintels, steps and sills are capped with adornments of the ground’s new colour.” As the “little fleeces” fell, they also changed the observer’s sense of distance, giving the impression that the trees and sky “blended into a new intimacy.” This virtual spatial reconfiguration was accompanied by a more emotional shift as well. As the “enchantment” of the snowfall settled in, and the immensity of the modern world seemed to diminish, people felt enlivened by a spectacle that made them visibly “more cheery.” Spirits lifted, cheeks became rosy, laughter rang out, and the sight of children skipping along with their sleds and the “enhanced brightness of their eyes” added to this feeling of gladness. Even cabbies and policemen could not bring themselves to scold the little boys pelting snowballs at them.25 As the urban environment was modified, even by an ephemeral snowfall, so too did people’s moods and appreciation of the city change, if only for a moment. In Hinshelwood’s eyes, the phenomenon that best exemplified the sensorial pleasures through which he developed his attachment to Montreal was a natural one, an event which human beings had no role in shaping, one whose occurrence they could only await and enjoy when it happened. In the modern industrial metropolis, it sometimes took a dose of nature’s goodwill for people’s spatial stories to take a truly happy turn. For the Brussels novelist Eugène Demolder, among others, it was the city’s famed beer-serving establishments that best typified the joyful charms of the streets and incarnated “the city’s soul.” Using an exaggerated feminine bodily metaphor he portrays this “holy city of beer,”

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5.3  Children and snow bank for Mr W. Birks, Montreal, 1896, Wm. Notman and Son. McCord Museum II-115058.

this “Eden of pint-drinkers” as “laughing, covered with grape vines, her waist plump and throat greedy, and her breast joyfully blooming.” To Demolder, the “religion of fermented hops” defined the sights, smells, and sounds of the streets. Describing the city’s numerous breweries, he notes the way they “exhaled the steam from bubbling vats, and spread a barley-scented fog through the streets, lazily crawling along the facades in a heavy haze of inebriation.” The atmosphere was compounded by the lively movement of workers’ bodies and the sounds of their labour: “robust fellows, dressed in brown corduroy, a grey apron on their stomachs, a linen cap on their heads,” using their solid hands to move the overflowing barrels, “pissing their froth out from their joints” onto carriages drawn by great horses, rushing off to the customers “with the noise of rattling iron.”26 Indeed, for many Bruxellois, the sensorial comfort offered by the city’s small pubs represented the last ramparts against the onslaught of modernity, places that had to be

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inscribed in the city’s collective memory before the “pickaxe of demolition workers” made them all disappear.27 Representing Workers in the City Class dynamics, and in particular the possibilities for contact between members of different classes that the boulevard experience afforded, figured prominently in the way the streets was conceived. Belgian writers, for instance, expressed a fascination with the Marolles, a workingclass neighbourhood in the heart of the old city, essentialized by slumming bourgeois of the period as the “depository of the soul of the real Brussels.”28 Georges Eekhoud’s novel L’autre vue typifies this classbased construction of the streets in a way that draws heavily on the bodies of workers. His wealthy young protagonist, Laurent, becomes infatuated with a group of male, working-class youths, through whom he discovers the Marolles. Laurent’s initial contact with them is physical: their knees and elbows touching, their breath tickling the back of his neck and his ears as they talked around a table. Later, “they felt my biceps, slapped my thigh, tested my muscular resistance,” relates Laurent, himself returning these marks of interest. From the outset, this cross-class interaction takes the form of a sort of masculine ritual, a game of seduction in which physical interaction helps overcome the social barriers which demarcate the modern city. Laurent’s description of these workers’ physical attributes shows how, to him, the essence of their interiority resides in their bodies, in their virility, what he calls their beauty. They are corporeal beings above all, providing a stark contrast with the stuffy intellectual world he is fleeing. It is with this frame of mind that he ventures through the city in their company, exploring the neighbourhoods they live in, meeting their friends, taking part in their games and drinking, observing the “voluptuousness” of the movement of their bodies, the “resilience of their muscles.” Physical force, agility, and muscular strength are at the heart of their conversations. Indeed, the relationship between Laurent and the youths climaxes when they bring him to their wrestling gym. Laurent marvels at the force and beauty of their movements in the ring. Then, suddenly, but only half against his will, he is dragged in himself, immediately impressed by the contact with his opponent’s skin and muscles. “I palpate the contours of his muscles, I regale in the feel of those surfaces and curves, supple yet firm,” muses Laurent, comparing the sensation not to “sensual pleasure” but to a transcending religious experience.29 Eekhoud, who faced trial for alluding to homosexuality

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in his writings, thus played on perceptions of workers’ brute corporeality in contrast to bourgeois intellectual refinement in order to give the neighbourhood meaning as a site of working-class exoticism and allure. The author Marguerite Baulu offered a similar bodily interpretation of the Marolles through the lens of working-class physicality, but focusing on feminine types. In Modeste automne, we follow a young domestic servant as she settles into the neighbourhood after marrying a local worker. The Marolles, states the author, are populated by two sorts of women. As her name suggests, Modeste belongs to the first group, comprised of the simple, “admirable galley slaves of the factory of daytime work, of maternity and conjugal duty,” whose bodies are worn down by the obligations inherent in making an honest living. Beside them are the “sensual Marolliennes,” whose bodies incarnate their licentious ways. “Drinking, coquettish females, owing money, always seated at some cabaret, keen to plant cheap jewels in their hair, their pathetic tawdriness the cause of filth and hunger in their homes.”30 This contrast is illustrated when Modeste confronts her husband’s mistress, Peau d’Or (Golden Skin), whose very name evokes her body, in a scene charged with violence and intimidation. In the midst of rue Haute, accompanied by the noise of music and dancing in the cabarets, the odours of deep frying, spilled beer, mussels, snails, and unwashed people, the two come face to face. Modeste is frail, meek, and trembling, while Peau d’Or is confident, boorish, and aggressive. The eyes of the other women in the street twinkle as they hope, in vain, that the scene, “following the sound logic of the Marolles,” will end in “blows, pulled hair, and, who knows? maybe a bit of blood.”31 For his part, Marius Renard takes us beyond the Marolles on a more uplifting voyage of self-discovery in the streets of Brussels. Indeed, central to the plot of Notre pain quotidien is the way Madeleine’s mental map of the city expands in synch with her person. As her knowledge of her environment increases, so do her maturity, her self-assurance, and her ability to confront the challenges she faces. Her first steps in the crowded streets are hesitant; she finds herself feeling “indecisive in the stir of the jostling crowd,” among “the cries, the calls, and the rattle of carriages.” But even on this first encounter, she takes interest in “the appearance of things,” in the reflections of the street lamps on the buildings, the clicking sounds of the tramways coasting along their tracks, the dark silhouettes of urban dwellers walking in all directions, the glowing windows of the cabarets, the sounds of horsemen’s calls and whips, the laughter of children playing, the crowds of workers heading home after a day in the factory. Immediately, she feels her

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determination rise, and as “the timorous sensations subsided and calmness returned,” Madeleine resolutely marched towards “la vie,” meaning “life,” but bearing a close, and resoundingly obvious, semblance to “la ville,” “the city.”32 Renard was thus in line with the accepted notion that the urban environment influenced individual behaviour. From this standpoint, ­middle-class commentators logically insisted on the educational potential of the streetscape. In a letter addressed to Tekhné, the French modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, a regular visitor to Brussels, wrote that because houses, public buildings, and monuments were constantly seen by a wide range of people, architects had a responsibility to please and to educate. For “the poor class” who had neither the means nor the time to visit museum exhibitions and attend concerts, he emphasized, “the art of the street is for them the only source of a bit of beauty!”33 The Montreal Catholic newspaper L’ouvrier also addressed workers on this theme, attempting to convince them that they would find personal fulfilment by enjoying the urban atmosphere with their senses. Moralists, noted the paper’s editor in chief under the pseudonym “Papa-Noé,” distinguished between natural and fictitious pleasures, those that had no cost – family life, friendship, conversation, and reading – and those of luxuries and fineries, material possessions one paid for and displayed for all to see. The latter only created insatiable desires, insisted the author. Urban boulevards full of people wearing fancy clothes and elegant jewellery were thus a beautiful spectacle that pleased the senses, one that workers could simply observe and enjoy without themselves acquiring such possessions. “Where one would have to spend in order to be an actor, the worker can save a princely sum by remaining a spectator,” concluded the editor.34 While this can clearly be read as an attempt to disengage workers from modern society, Papa-Noé’s curious logic is nonetheless revealing of the author’s sensibilities in its call for workers to find moral fulfilment not in material possessions, nor even in spiritual contemplation, but in the unique sensory atmosphere of modern streets. These portrayals of working-class experiences in the city thus help unpack connections between class and space, not among workers themselves, but among bourgeois observers of urban mores. The characters we have examined were often pedestrian, in both senses of the term: walking through the streets of the city, and defined according to clichéd characteristics that make them operate primarily on a physical rather than intellectual level. But in describing these characters’ movement, pleasure and suffering, physical vigour and violence, masculinity and femininity, the authors rely on the body and senses to formulate their

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vision of the street. Beyond what they say about middle-class perceptions of workers, it is in their shared reliance on the living and moving body as a primary signifier of experience that the construction of these spatial narratives reveals subjective meanings of modern street life. Threatened Bodies After an exhilarating walk along the outer boulevards of Brussels, Madeleine “for the first time, did not have a restful sleep,” writes Renard.35 If the boulevard atmosphere exalted the senses and contributed directly to the way urban dwellers gained knowledge about and identified with their environment, Madeleine’s troubled doze serves to suggest that this intensity of affect also risked harming the body and, by extension, the soul. After all, just as Hinshelwood’s snowfalls could delight the senses, winter could also freeze the body and threaten one’s survival. See how people exposed to the cold felt their muscles become numb and paralyzed, their blood stagnating, their sensibilities disappearing, deplored a Montreal hygienist, evoking winter’s punishment on the different parts of the body. “In vain, they rub their blue hands together for warmth. Painful numbness from the cold clenches their fingers and their toes; their nose, their ears, their cheeks, if exposed even briefly to the biting outdoor air, turn red and congest.”36 As for the breweries and cabarets that so warmed and charmed Demolder, their presence on the urban landscape was synonymous, in the eyes of many observers, with problems of alcoholism, employee absenteeism, and the breakdown of family life. See how the worker’s soul died away as the pressures of industrial life pushed him to abandon his family and seek the noise, smoke, and acrid odours, the drink and debauchery of the cabaret, lamented the priest Victor Van Tricht. And when this worker returned home, “drunk and swaggering,” his face bore the “hideous” expression of a “satiated brute.” “His wife cries, he swears; she protests, he yells, he strikes, and the child, the poor little child, hidden in a corner, trembling and filled with tears, watches with dread this sort of monster that is his father.”37 Speed Demons The febricity of the boulevards was thus also constructed as a source of corporeal danger, violence, and decadence. And if increasingly dense and rapid circulation was the very symbol of modernity, it also required

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an adaptation on the part of urban dwellers, who were suddenly confronted with the necessity to rethink the way they moved through the streets, particularly in light of the physical and mental reconfigurations imposed by another ground-breaking, speed-inducing modern invention, the automobile. “The streets of Brussels and its suburbs are becoming more dangerous every day for pedestrians, and the sidewalks constitute their only safe haven,” complained a women’s magazine in 1913. Implying that walkers were losing access to a space once considered theirs, this comment indicates how a strict observance of urban planners’ will to enforce a spatial segregation of pedestrians and vehicles had not yet entirely infused people’s ways of navigating modern streets. And yet even the allotted comfort zone was becoming less and less accessible under the impulse of urbanization as the scaffolds of construction sites constantly blocked sidewalks across the city, effectively forcing walkers back into the street.38 At city council, Brussels burgomaster Émile De Mot picked up on this issue and freely harangued automobile drivers, who, he claimed, threatened the lives of the city’s residents by speeding through crowded intersections, “as if public thoroughfares belonged to them exclusively.” He himself had witnessed women and children miraculously avoiding speedsters in place Royale, and he feared that the place de la Bourse would soon become known as “le carrefour des écrasés” – the crossroads of the crushed. To eliminate these dangers, the mayor decreed that drivers would have to slow down to walking speed when circulating in several of the city’s largest intersections. Without going as far as his discretionary powers to regulate matters concerning public security allowed him, he nonetheless let it be known that if the situation did not improve, he could be tempted to take the more radical step of banning cars entirely from certain streets. Objections cited in the press to the effect that automobile drivers were taxpayers like everyone else and that such measures would hamper the growth of a new industry were not about to sway him: “I do not know, gentlemen, of an industry possessing vested rights to run over our fellow citizens,” thundered De Mot, to the approving laughter of the assembly.39 In Montreal as well, the growing presence of cars complicated urban dwellers’ movement through the streets of their city. The intensification of this challenge was highlighted with acuity on an August evening of 1906, when an automobile driven by one Herwald Thomas Atkinson, barrelling eastward down Sainte-Catherine Street, swerved to avoid a stopped streetcar, and ran straight into a man and his son who were

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crossing the street, killing the former and injuring the latter. This first automobile-related fatality recorded in Montreal was reported with graphic details in several newspapers. Beyond the vivid details they give of the tragedy, these accounts tell us much about city dwellers’ inexperience in sharing their streets with these vehicles.40 In La Presse, automobiles were still seen as a novelty. Though it was billed as “the machine that has become the most popular agent of locomotion in Montreal,” the car remained the privilege of a few “sportsmen” attracted by its originality. The papers also carried the testimony presented at the coroner’s investigation into the death of the victim, Antoine Toutant, in which several eyewitnesses commented on the high speed at which the vehicle was moving. Much as De Mot had preferred limiting drivers to an imprecise walking pace, the witnesses, all stunned by the speed of the car, were able to describe its movement only in relation to what was, to them, a more familiar point of reference: the speed of a horse. And there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that no horse could move as fast as Atkinson’s car that evening. These testimonies also reveal individuals’ own corporeal understanding of movement through the streets. Emma Martial, wife and mother of the two victims, testified that when the streetcar stopped, she told her husband that they would have time to cross the street. As they stepped forward, she felt a strong gust of wind behind her before she saw her husband propelled into the air and her son rolling on the ground. To emphasize that the accident was due to the driver’s recklessness as opposed to her and her husband’s negligence, she insisted upon the latter’s corporeal vitality. “My husband was in perfect health, he saw and heard well,” she affirmed, adding that she herself had not heard the approaching automobile, “for I would certainly have been careful of it.” For their part, the driver of the car and his passenger, Herbert Dalgleish, who were arrested after the incident, both insisted that Atkinson was driving responsibly, and that it was Toutant who had misjudged the distance separating him from their vehicle. Affirming that he had swerved away from the crowd descending from the streetcar, Atkinson claimed to have blown his horn to warn the pedestrians of his presence. “The deceased and his son also stepped out in the way of the auto. The son seemed to hold the father back. As I almost passed through he jumped right in front of the auto,” he declared in his effort to exculpate himself. Given the attention brought to the case, the Montreal Automobile Club felt compelled to comment on the debate. Though it issued a

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circular to its members reminding them to scrupulously obey the rules of traffic, the Club was also aware that the incident could tarnish the image of automobiles and hamper the organization’s attempts to gain broader acceptance for cars in the city. Strict permit rules were in place, noted the Club officer interviewed by the Daily Star and whose arguments reveal how tense the relationship between cars and people in the street remained: “One thing, however, is sure, that while automobiles may scare people now, since the public is not accustomed to them, they are really less dangerous than a horse.” A car could be stopped over the distance of only a few feet, while a galloping horse required several yards to be immobilized, he explained, adding that if something frightened the animal, control could easily be lost, while “the automobile depends entirely on the skill and nerve of the driver.” In the face of increasing movement and speed, navigating the modern street required calculated and rational judgment. The unpredictable nature of horses made them inappropriate for the modern street, signifying a shift in attitudes from the Pointe Saint-Charles horse-and-buggy incident noted earlier in the chapter. Twenty-five years earlier, the animal’s presence in the street was entirely natural, while modernity’s inventions – telegraph cables – had been blamed for the horse’s behaviour. Whether Toutant was inattentive or Atkinson reckless, when the dust settled it became increasingly apparent that corporeal movement through street space was changing. The testimonies surrounding this accident show how people’s way of physically gauging distance and movement with their eyes and ears needed to be refined in the wake of this changing spatial dynamic, while the framework through which they judged the speed of oncoming vehicles had to evolve from the familiar movement of horses to the more novel velocity of motorized automobiles. Though Atkinson was ultimately found responsible for Toutant’s death, the accident highlighted the transformations of the modern street, the new ways in which city dwellers negotiated these spaces, and the central role of the body in this reformulation of spatial understandings. Ruffians and Streetlights Further evidence of the perceived threats associated with turn-of-thecentury streets can be found in the frequently stated fears that modern boulevards gave free reign to the more villainous characters that made the city a dangerous place. If the boulevards were to inspire and

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educate through the noble architecture of public buildings and monuments, others streets, strewn with taverns and brothels, also threatened to injure and harm. Municipal administrations frequently received complaints about the rambunctious behaviour of youths whose presence in dimly lit byways was perceived as a menace by local residents such as those of rue Haute, who wrote to the Brussels city council to complain about the “brawls in certain cabarets of the neighbourhood that are frequented by ex-convicts.”41 In most cases, perceptions of these threats reflected the ideas about class and gender that typically shaped understandings of urban space. In a lengthy debate on the question of whether women should be permitted to act as doctors to the poor in Brussels, one member of the board responsible for overseeing the dispensation of public health care dissented, not because of his judgment of women doctors’ competence, but rather because of the dangers he felt they would be exposed to when visiting certain streets and impasses of the city at night. “The indigent class is not always accommodating,” he cautioned, referring to a male doctor who had once returned “in rough shape” from a nocturnal emergency intervention. “Will they behave differently, the indigents, toward a woman doctor?” he wondered. 42 The distinction between daytime and nighttime was indeed fundamental in defining people’s relationship with the streets. In cities such as Montreal and Brussels, where the advancements of modernity had brought extensive gas and, later, electric lighting, residents’ perceptions of their physical security became intertwined with the presence of these beacons.43 In his 1896 farewell speech, Montreal mayor Joseph Octave Villeneuve reminded the assembly that proper lighting in the city’s streets was as important as their cleanliness. “The immunity of our city from burglaries and other offences at night is largely due to our well lighted streets,” he boasted, adding that he had heard numerous foreign visitors praising the city’s lighting system.44 This enthusiasm engendered countless requests from citizens and municipal councillors who hoped to see light fixtures installed in their neighbourhoods and invoked modern expectations for free, secure, and effective circulation through urban thoroughfares. Thus Brussels councillor Alphonse ­Huisman-Van den Nest described the traffic created by over 10,000 vehicles and 50,000 pedestrians who crossed place Sainctelette on a daily basis as justification for his request to have “very intense and abundant lighting” installed in this main point of contact between the city’s centre and its primary industrial districts.45

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Requests like this also echoed the class and gender perceptions noted above. One Montreal shopkeeper, for instance, addressed a letter to the city bringing attention to the “dismal state of the lane” situated near his business, particularly at night. He attributed the situation to “the seeming neglect of your Light-Committee not providing sufficient light to enable any strangers or lady to come up after dark without fear of assault from gangs of ruffians who habitually make it a safe asylum on account of its dark alleys off the lane.” “One good arc light,” he pleaded, would be sufficient to avoid the spate of robberies and assaults that affected the neighbourhood and made his customers complain of the dread they had of this “place of refuge for sneak grocery thieves who got away as no one would venture to follow them.”46 Lighting fixtures, then, were seen as having a transformative effect on public space, rendering it, through the elevation of the sense of sight, seemingly safer and more accessible at night. Beyond such practical considerations, these lights also changed the intangible atmosphere that shaped people’s appreciation of modern cities.47 Marius Renard, for instance, exploited the sensorial impressions caused by the glimmer of streetlights to set the scene for his narratives. Madeleine’s acquaintance with urban space is marked by the illumination of electric lights, particularly in the evening as their beams mixed with the red and pink glow of the setting sun. The poet Émile Verhaeren emphasized the eerie, radiating glow of gas and electric lights to evoke the streets’ more mysterious and sinister qualities. In “Les Promeneuses,” Verhaeren describes a group of women who, “mourning their soul,” silently and mournfully walk the streets in the midst of “a dazzling and chemical atmosphere” produced by the diamond-shaped projections of gas lamps, while waves of electricity made the “colossal” city glow like an ocean.48 The Montreal writer Gaston P. Labat celebrated the advent of electric lighting as an especially notable form of progress. It was what “brings us closest to the sun king, and we should consider ourselves proud and glad that, thanks to it, we can see Montreal gleam and radiate at night beneath its brightly shining fires,” he exclaimed, echoing the widespread enthusiasm with which electric streetlights were received in many cities.49 Not all commentators agreed, however. When a municipal councillor from Brussels asked why the city was not proceeding faster in equipping its central boulevards with the new technology, Charles Buls responded that it would be a mistake to abandon gas too readily and argued that the role of streetlamps was to produce above all a “beautiful effect” and cast a poetic, even melancholy, atmosphere

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over the nocturnal city. Electric lighting, he had observed in his travels, was “sad” and “lacked gaiety.” Instead of concentrating streetlights in a limited number of places, the mayor elaborated, creating a pleasant nocturnal ambiance required “disseminating lights as much as possible” and “multiplying the number of luminous points,” an effect best achieved with gas lighting.50 Buls’s attitude was certainly antithetical to the discourse of modernizing municipal administrations that argued for brightness and safety, but such contrasting perspectives underscore the diversity of subjective responses to which sensorial experiences of the modern environment, particularly at night, gave rise. Revelry and Debauchery Beyond some of the physical risks attributed to modern boulevards, detractors also charged that they threatened the moral foundations of society. From overindulgence in the shops, restaurants, and bars that lined them, to more sordid problems of debauchery, drunkenness, and prostitution, the boulevards represented, for many critics, all of society’s most damaging moral ills. For those who viewed these spaces with condescension, the appeal of consumerism, luxury, and frivolous pleasures found on the boulevards were little more than objects of mockery. Presenting the character of Louise, a young woman ostensibly modelled after Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and who enjoyed walking along the boulevards to seek the attention of men, the Belgian author Abel Torcy chided her misguided romanticism, associating the rhythm of the modern city with the folly of youth. “Poor girl,” he wrote. Having caught a glimpse of the immensity of the city, the tumult of its crowds, the lights on the boulevards, she naively believed that “there, stronger passions beat in the hearts of men, that this more feverish life offered more delectable pleasures.” For his part, Labat ridiculed boulevard shoppers for their lack of discernment and their flighty search for supposed authenticity: “Oh the lovely bibelot!” exclaimed a young female shopper, “It is an antique, is it not?” “No ma’am,” replied the shopkeeper, “it is modern.” “What a pity, it is so pretty,” she regrets. The same note of disdain underpins the humorous verses reproduced in an 1896 Montreal almanac. Written in a rural voice that might have resonated with the flows of migrants arriving into the city from the Quebec countryside, the poem ridicules urbanites’ tendency to think too highly of themselves and to disparage the supposed imbecility of rural folk. You may wear “fine feathers,” laughed the author, but so do “the roosters of our

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village.” You may have pretty mirrors, he continued, but “ugly faces are seen/when you step in front of them.” “Don’t over-est-ist-estimate yourselves so!” went the ditty’s refrain, framing modern boulevards as spaces where vanity, haughtiness, and self-aggrandizement were on permanent display.51 Critics of the perceived moral depravity that reigned on the boulevards could take a much harsher tone as well. The stark lines and dark silhouettes of a caricature published in the Montreal newspaper Le Travail in 1912 suggest the nefarious effects the streets could have on children (see figure 5.4). Two boys stand outside their school, a sign on it informing passers-by of its three o’clock closing time and the caption noting that there are not enough parks in which children can play. And yet Montreal is a big city – what can the boys do? The image below it answers the question by depicting a modern boulevard with a hotel bar, cinema, and poolroom lined up one after another. “The street is for [the child] full of temptations, that very often are his perdition,” reads the caption. In Belgium, the demographer Edmond Nicolaï passed a similar judgment on this boulevard atmosphere, not with images, but with evocative words decrying the promiscuity that stained the moral order of large cities and the “golden debauchery that struts its arrogant and inappropriate luxury.” Streets and theatres were the site of the shameless debasement of an honest and respectable bourgeoisie, a scandal for young girls, and the downfall of future generations. Modernity, he continued, “clenched its victims in its perfidious claws,” making them “slaves to its yoke.”52 Such voices were part of a well-worn chorus, to be sure. However, if we look past the tired moralizing in these comments, their emphasis on atmosphere and materiality reveals the link between discourse and embodied experiences of the street. The episodes that undoubtedly best exemplified these competing images of the boulevards as spaces of pleasure and enjoyment on one hand, and of excess and immorality on the other, were the debates over a fair held on Brussels’s boulevard du Midi every summer. During the 1880s and 1890s, the question of the fair was brought before the municipal council for annual approval. Though permission was granted every year, with one exception,53 the margin of votes was sometimes narrow and the discussions generally heated. To some, the event tarnished the modern city’s image, especially as it was held near the southern train station at which international travellers arrived. The fair, argued its opponents, not only typified moral ills, but also concentrated them in a single, compact, and all too easily

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5.4  Temptations of the street, Le Travail, December 1912.

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accessible place. Vagabonds milled about, workers left their professional and familial responsibilities to go tippling, women and children were exposed to drunkenness and immoral talk, the noise of the crowd and of the attractions disrupted the tranquillity of the neighbourhood, the temporary installations damaged the trees lining the boulevards, and the generally poor standards of hygiene posed serious threats to the city’s public health. The fair’s supporters, on the other hand, argued that such events benefited the city, adding an element of joyfulness, festivity, and cultural specificity to its image. They also vaunted the profits generated by the event, but, above all they insisted that the fair offered workers a much-needed and all too rare opportunity for enjoyment and relaxation. This merry atmosphere, added councillor Goffin, was even a defining element of national identity: “It is in fact a primordial tendency, innate in the Belgian, Flemish and Walloon character, to wish to express, on certain days, the attachment to one’s hometown through public festivities,” he declared, not without provoking the ire of some of his opponents.54 What the debate ultimately revolved around, however, were competing understandings of appropriate bodily deportment in the streets of the modern city. On these hot summer days, the fair stimulated people’s senses in intense and atypical ways. Crowds converged in a narrow space. The smells of mussels, French fries, and beer floated through the air. The sounds of laughter and conversation, of barrel organs and screeching roller coasters resonated in the ears of the revellers. Performers displayed feats of strength or exhibited corporeal abnormalities. The poet Théodore Hannon devoted several verses to what he ironically called the “incense of the fair,” the “fairground fragrance” comprised of all of the grease, sausage, doughnuts, and other smells he found to be utterly revolting.55 More appreciative, Eugène Demolder portrayed the annual summer event in terms of the animation of the boulevard, the dust created by the innumerable footsteps, the lighting “sparkling with bizarre colours,” the “tintinnabulary” sounds of electric machines, and the “din of noisy festivity,” without omitting to describe in detail the various characters, strongmen, fortune tellers, lion tamers, clowns, gymnasts, bearded women, and other “phenomena” that animated the scene.56 The annual fair was but one episode in the life of the boulevards, but the comments it generated from both municipal politicians and social commentators reveal some of the many ways bodily matters shaped spatial perceptions. With its sensorial medley and provocative display of bodies, the fair challenged established middle-class practices and norms

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5.5  Encens de foire. Revellers enjoy the taste of hot frites, depicted by illustrator Amédée Lynen, while the poet Théodore Hannon deplores the mix of fairground odours and noises. Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

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5.6  La kermesse. Illustration by H. Bodart, showing the crowd, animations, activities, and various body types at the annual summer fair in Brussels. Le globe illustré, vol. 43 (1886). Royal Library of Belgium – all rights reserved.

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of respectability, sparking debates over whether this activity on one of the city’s prestigious boulevards was desecrating or reinforcing national character, offering a break from daily life or threatening public decency. Over time, the fair acquired a certain degree of respectability, becoming a recognized feature of summer life in Brussels, and by 1900 the council was voting by a large majority to grant the organizers five-year permits. Where earlier debates had focused on the corporeal and moral threats posed by the fair, its contributions to social betterment were now lauded. Indeed, profits from the event were channelled to charitable organizations that funded an educational vacation house for underprivileged children in one of the “healthiest” parts of the Brabant province, where “no factory or workshop would vitiate the atmosphere.”57 Natural Functions and Public Decency In an age that defined its claims to progress and civility in terms of man’s capacity to rationally overcome the whims and impulses of nature, the inescapable reality that the body, though constructed through layers of social and cultural meaning, was fundamentally an element of that same nature could sometimes be problematic. Modern notions of respectable corporeal deportment occasionally clashed with basic physiological needs. We saw in the preceding chapter how this struggle was illustrated by the question of latrines in workers’ homes. The matter was also brought directly onto the boulevards through recurring debates over the delicate question of public lavatories. At the heart of the issue were the tensions at play between bodily practices and the solidifying norms of decorum in modern cities. The Great Urinal Debate In an amusing passage of his travel memoirs, the Belgian engineer Georges Kaïser recounts how, when strolling through Montreal after a lunch at which he had consumed a considerable amount of water, he suddenly found himself pressed by the call of nature. “Anyone observing me would have seen me quite perplexed, inspecting my surroundings, probing corners with growing anxiety,” he related, before detailing his woes: Suddenly, a policeman! I rush toward him; “Mister policeman, I wish to isolate myself for a moment. Where might I inquire?” “What do you want to do?”

Street Scenes  185 I specified. “Ah, go into a bar,”

answered the policeman, directing him to a nearby public house. Surprised, our visitor quickly ran into the designated establishment, ordered a glass of sherry, and hurried to the back, where he was able to find some relief. Noting that in London he had already been “inconvenienced by the rarity of certain establishments of small public utility,” Kaïser found it rather curious and awkward that in Montreal one had to enter a bar to satisfy such needs. “In sum, only visitors suffer from this state of affairs,” he presumed, noting that local residents seemed perfectly accustomed to this situation.58 Though Kaïser’s anecdote was intended simply to add colour to his account, his frustration at being unable to readily find public toilets nonetheless echoed a persistent problem facing municipal administrations. Indeed, in this period of increasing concern with notions of decency, the issue of how people were to meet some of their most basic needs casts further light on the question of bodily practices in public space and brings together several of the themes that inform the present analysis of spatial meaning, specifically hygiene, morality, security, sensorial experiences, bodily practices, and the image of the modern city.59 Reflecting Kaïser’s comments, elected officials and bureaucrats attending to matters of hygiene frequently decried the dearth of public toilets in their cities. “What can be said of the urinals?” wondered Louis Laberge in his 1885 annual report, the first he penned as city doctor for Montreal. “They don’t exist, or, if there are any, they are so ill-cared for, that we are inclined to think they were created for the purpose of disgusting the people of these most useful conveniences.”60 The topic was also frequently on the agenda of the Brussels council, which, like Montreal, periodically received tenders from private interests wishing to undertake the task of furnishing the cities with these structures. It was during a debate over one such proposal that Brussels councilman Hyppolite Delecosse enumerated several concerns associated with toilets on the urban landscape. The arguments he raised were frequently repeated in both cities and emphasized the connection between public spaces and bodily practices. Not surprisingly, one of Delecosse’s major concerns was sensorial in nature. Rather than invest in suitable “kiosks” disposed in various places, the city had instead chosen to burden the sides of private homes with “poorly fitted urinals that spread foul odours, and are insufficiently dissimulated, insufficiently hidden from view.” Beyond the sorry spectacle they offered, moreover, these run-down corners had also become unseemly “dens

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of immorality” where “men and women of ill repute give themselves to dishonourable encounters, and … give free reign to their revolting passions” while exhorting considerable sums of money from the “honest and peaceful bourgeois” who unsuspectingly ventured into these narrow stalls. For Delecosse, the only solution to these problems was to build and maintain, throughout the city, dozens of urinals that “left nothing to be desired in the way of morality or hygiene” and that were carefully designed to offer enough discretion while preventing shady characters from conducting their unsavoury activities. Not only would this improve the scenery and protect people’s safety, it was also indispensable to the citizenry’s good health. The current lack of urinals often forced their users to wait their turn in line. Himself a doctor, Delecosse noted that he did not need to remind an assembly that included four physicians of the disastrous health risks this could pose, particularly among older people. The lack of urinals in Brussels, he suggested, often forced people to either soil their clothing or break the law by urinating on the street, an unacceptable situation which “exposed people to accidents, some that are quite serious, others that are grotesque and that lend themselves to mockery and ridicule.”61 Newspapers, tenders, and letters to the administration indicate that similar imperatives were at play in Montreal. One individual calling himself Jean D’Acier, for instance, wrote into some of the city’s French-language papers denouncing what he perceived as petty political wrangling over a simple yet urgent matter and accusing Montreal of shamefully “turning a deaf ear” to the citizenry’s “clamour.” Complaints of this sort flowed in on a daily basis, added a Le Monde editorial that questioned when the council would act and described as “inconceivable” the fact that all of Sainte-Hélène Island, a popular Montreal park, had but one toilet for the use of women and children.62 Laberge, who also insisted on the sanitary and moral importance of urinals, agreed that the problem affected the city’s image directly and noted that while other cities grasped the importance of the situation, “only Montreal, the metropolis of Canada,” lagged behind. This negative assessment reflects comments frequently heard in Brussels that the city paled in comparison to Paris and Berlin in the urinal department, and that citizens’ habits gave it “the aspect of a large Teniers painting, where one always sees a character urinating somewhere.”63 But if the lack of public urinals and toilets hampered the city’s image, so too could their presence. Among frequent requests for additional

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urinals, Brussels’s city council also received complaints from people who lived near these facilities. These “charitable establishments,” remarked the alderman De Mot with a hint of irony, “have the particularity that everyone requests them … for their neighbours. They are needed at a distance, for the external use of the petitioners, but not in their immediate environs.”64 Indeed, on the prestigious boulevards of these modern cities, the sight and smell of people satisfying their intimate bodily needs jarred with cultural norms that increasingly confined such practices to the privacy of the home. Montreal addressed this dilemma by building public restrooms that mirrored the ambitions represented by the modern boulevards. Resembling miniature palaces, these edifices were intended to grace the streets with style and elegance, reflecting Montreal’s metropolitan status and impressing visitors to the city. So proposed Alfred Bertin in the plans he submitted to the city for constructing and operating a series of public toilets in some of Montreal’s main squares (see figure 5.7). It is telling that the “odourless cabinets completely separated from one another and supplied with the most advanced devices” with which people were to satisfy their “natural needs” came just sixth on the list of services Bertin proposed to offer in these restrooms. His plan also called for a range of amenities, including an information booth with directories, maps and transportation timetables, newspaper and stationary stands, clocks, calendars, barometers and weathervanes, telephones, and booths containing an assortment of towels, mirrors, brushes, combs, and a “boy shoe polisher.” Tenders for such contracts proposed architectural creations that were to be tastefully ornamented and built of brick, stone, or reinforced concrete. Beyond their barest functionality, these modern pavilions thus promised comfort and refinement. Rather than reduce bodily practices to their most fundamental, unsightly, and malodorous expression that clashed with the desired atmosphere of the modern street, Bertin’s parlours promised to offer sensory experiences and bodily practices that corresponded to the efficiency, hygiene, and comfort that the streets were meant to represent.65 Funding such projects was another matter. As we saw, the question stagnated in council, and it was only in 1913 that the first of these washrooms was opened in place Jacques-Cartier. It was with great pride and in minute detail that the superintendent of municipal buildings announced the installation of this “most modern and luxuriously and comfortably fitted up” of “comfort stations” and hoped that several

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5.7  Luxurious facilities. Proposed design for public toilets submitted to the Montreal health committee in 1906. Archives de la Ville de Montréal (VM21_S2)

more would follow. Not everybody was impressed by this lavishness, however. In a letter to Le Travail signed with the pseudonym Jean Veritas, one Montrealer reminded the administration that the population had asked only for a few modest installations in various parts of the city, the nature of which required no luxury. And yet, he complained, the city was building just one, at an astronomical cost, and in a location that was busy only on Wednesday and Friday market days, leading him to conclude that “on the five other days it will be frequented by the rats!”66 Such disputes highlighted not only differing understandings of the utility of public toilets, but also the way in which bodily practices, including those increasingly deemed intimate, shaped competing spatial understandings, in this case between municipal officials, who saw the streets as symbols of prestige, and a working-class publication interested in accessibility.

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Euphemisms and Puns Debates over the layout and location of public toilets raised tricky gender considerations as well, though somewhat less so in Montreal, where the proposed installations were conceived of with separate sections for men and women. In Brussels, where the question was largely framed in terms of the construction of urinals, gender tensions were more preponderant. Reacting to Delecosse’s exposé cited above, councillor André asked his colleague why, in pleading for the hygienic needs of men, “he has not thought of the ladies,” an injustice in his eyes. Although Delecosse responded that he was favourable to the construction of toilets for women, the little attention paid to the issue throughout the debates indicates that, in the minds of the councillors, it was of secondary importance. Besides, one such euphemistically named “necessity chalet,” located in the grandiose avenue Louise, was hardly ever used, noted councillor Janssen at another meeting, not specifying why this might have been. Whereas it was generally agreed that urinals should be placed on major thoroughfares, Janssen argued that women’s facilities should be established “in relatively secluded places,” framing his spatial understanding of bodily practices in conspicuously gendered terms and giving a distinctly masculine edge to his portrayal of boulevard atmosphere.67 According to alderman Leurs, one urinal, installed in the parc du Cinquantenaire, had to be relocated several times on account of “the ladies” who were “shocked” by this “undignified spectacle.” Indeed, the councillors seemed more concerned with protecting women from the uncomfortable sight of men relieving themselves by building more discreet urinals than with providing them with accommodations they could readily use. A decade earlier, councillor Vandendorpe had expressed his indignation after a broken water main forced people living in the rue de l’Abricotier to fetch their water near a local urinal. “It is profoundly deplorable,” he said, that “the homemakers of the neighbourhood are forced to wait for the men to finish at the john before they can draw the water they need.” Here again, the question of public urinals caused gendered discomfort, this time in terms of how the intimate bodily practices of men in public spaces could run contrary to attitudes about appropriate forms of interaction between men and women in the theatre of the modern street. Finally, the importance that might have been accorded to the question of providing toilets for women was also diminished by the derision with which the issue was invariably greeted

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when raised in council meetings. For instance, when referring to the unused avenue Louise toilet, Janssen coyly stated that “on the matter of necessity chalets for women, the need does not seem to be felt (sentir).” The assembly, comprised of men, burst into laughter at the sensorial double entendre implied in the word sentir, which means both to feel and to smell. Their mockery implies that they did not take the matter entirely seriously.68 This last point, about the councillors’ laughter, bears elaborating. We are fortunate that the scribes taking minutes at the Brussels municipal council not only indicated where the assembly laughed at what was said, but also recorded the degree through the use of such terms as “laughter,” “hilarity,” or “general hilarity,” giving a sense of the atmosphere in the room. When it came to discussions over chalets de nécessité, the topic was always good for some salacious puns and repeated sophomoric laughter, showing that, even in such a venerable and serious elected assembly, the mood could sometimes turn to giddiness. For instance, while discussing the number of urinals the city should install, as well as their location, Burgomaster De Mot promised to comply with his honourable colleagues’ requests, “on the condition,” he added, “that they indicate locations that were most propitious (propices).” This remark was greeted with a “new outburst of hilarity,” suggesting that the orator probably finished his sentence by stretching the second syllable to the last word. On another occasion, the public works alderman, also addressing the question of location, evoked the cost involved before apologizing to his colleague Grimard of the finance section for overstepping his responsibilities. “Oh! I see no inconvenience,” responded the latter, to the council’s “general hilarity,” “all the more since I do not like to stick my nose into those matters.”69 In addition to such joking around, urinal discussions were also opportunities for some friendly teasing. During his long tenure, councillor Émile Hubert, for instance, became notorious for his repeated insistence that the city intensify its investments in such projects, to the point that laughter erupted each time he spoke on the topic, no matter what he was saying. Consider, for example, the following exchange involving Hubert, who by then anticipated the mockery, De Mot, and Burgomaster Adolphe Max upon reaching Item 79 on the agenda, “Urinals – Construction and Maintenance,” on a day when the mood seemed particularly jovial: m. le bourgmestre. M. Hubert has the floor. (General hilarity.) m. hubert. You laugh, gentlemen, and yet I think this is a very serious ­question.

Street Scenes  191 m. de mot. And also very humid. (Renewed laughter.) m. hubert. You think I’ve only a few words to say; well you’re mistaken; I have at least ten minutes’ worth. (Laughter.) m. le bourgmestre. Ten minutes, Monsieur Hubert? That’s incontinence! (Renewed laughter.)70

Such laughter is, of course, challenging to interpret, and probably says more about the atmosphere at the council on a particular day, or about the dynamic of personal relationships at play, than about the politicians’ profound convictions on the matter. Nevertheless, the recurrence of such humour each time the issue was raised made laughter a critical element of the debate over public toilets. If, on one hand, it can indicate that the question was seen as less pressing than others, it also suggests that this particular form of interaction between bodily practices and public space was problematic enough to elicit a touch of unease among the councillors, a feeling they perhaps sought to diminish by laughing it off. Indeed, the question of such intimate bodily practices on the streets of the city was problematic to the extent that it required these decision makers to come up with ways to balance questions of hygiene, morality, security, and the image of their city as a modern capital, with the awkward question of bodily functions, which was deemed to be an inappropriate topic of conversation. In these debates readings of public space, bodily practices, and personal subjectivities intersected. The laughter these discussions generated adds an additional layer to the interior and emotional quality of modern spatial stories. That Brussels’s governing body was located a stone’s throw from one of Belgium’s most famous monuments, the Manneken Pis, a fountain featuring the statue of a peeing boy, apparently did little to relieve this tension. Bodies of the Deceased The human body, in all of its complexity, is ultimately a perishable organism. Death, wrote the Montreal hygienist Joseph Israël Desroches near the end of our period, is “the dissolution of the human compound, it is the separation of the soul from the body, it is the passage of the soul to its eternal destiny.”71 While the spatial stories at the heart of this study have revolved around the living body – in its exaltations and pleasures, in its pain and suffering, at work and at rest – death is also an inevitable aspect of human embodiment. It is thus fitting to close by briefly addressing the ways urban dwellers perceived their streets in reference to bodies of the deceased. As was the case with attitudes

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5.8  A public urinal in Brussels, ca 1900. Archives of the City of Brussels, Collection Iconographique, J2448.

about the body and space, understandings of death were also in transition during this period. As historian Philippe Ariès argues, until the Great War, the death of an individual “still solemnly altered the space and time of a social group that could be extended to include the entire community.” But in urbanized, industrialized, and increasingly

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medicalized societies, a shift was under way. Death and mourning, which had long been public in Western culture, were increasingly relegated to the home and, later, the hospital. Under the hygienic impulse of the late nineteenth century, feelings of repugnance towards the dead body increased, and “a new image of death” emerged: “the ugly and hidden death, hidden because it is ugly and dirty.”72 In this shifting context, the presence of death, an uncontrollable natural occurrence, in the carefully planned and designed streets of the modern city was particularly problematic. Funeral Processions In the nineteenth century, hygienic considerations and fears of contagion had pushed burial grounds outside of city centres. In Brussels, the deceased were laid to rest in cemeteries in outlying suburbs. The main cemeteries of Montreal were the adjacent Catholic and ­Protestant grounds on the summit of Mount Royal, in operation since mid-­century.73 Funerals were thus highly visible and public affairs as mourners took to the streets, slowly accompanying the dearly departed to their final resting place. During the 1870s, Ashton Oxenden, Anglican bishop of Montreal, observed that Canadians were “somewhat demonstrative in their sorrows. The Funeral Cavalcades are of enormous dimensions. It is quite a common thing to see a hearse followed by forty or fifty carriages, and by one or two hundred mourners,” proceeding to the “very picturesque and beautiful cemetery on the north side of the mountain, about three miles from the town.”74 Over the course of the century, notes historian Brian Young, such funerals became less frequent. “Distance and cost discouraged the frail, the poor, the lame, and the boisterous from making the trip; except for the corteges of the prominent, large processions or crowds in the cemetery were also discouraged.” Nonetheless, when such events did occur, at funerals held for military personnel, firemen killed in the line of duty, or other noteworthy personalities, they brought large gatherings of urban dwellers into the streets, their thoughts and attention turned to the dead body being carried before them. The atmosphere created around this particular spatial dynamic, notes Young, raised questions of decorum, particularly with respect to the participation of women in these predominantly masculine ceremonies and of members of the working class deemed to be unruly. More controversial burials, such as those of Joseph Guibord, an anticlerical member of the liberal Institut canadien

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whose burial plot was deconsecrated by the archbishop, or the colourful publican Joe Beef revered for his bawdy establishment and his indefatigable support for society’s neediest, could turn these street-centred events into theatres of religious and class-based conflicts in which public space was invested with competing claims and priorities.75 Aside from becoming exterior manifestations of social or political tensions, funeral processions also had, for obvious reasons, a distinct interior and emotional quality to them, particularly in Brussels, where more anonymous ceremonies remained the norm. There, the municipal administration outlined strict regulations for such processions in order to ensure that they took place in an atmosphere of order, calm, and serenity. The rules, adopted in 1881, stipulated that all processions had to be carried out by the administration itself, which thus gave itself the right to control the way in which corpses were moved through the streets. Processions were to be performed under the supervision of a designated organizer entrusted with the task of making sure that “the convoy never ceases to march with order and decency, that all agents remain in position and observe the silence.” His duties included ensuring that no obstacles impeded the cortège’s movement and mandating one of the pallbearers to stop traffic at intersections until all had passed. Pallbearers themselves had to be closely supervised lest their actions compromise the dignity of the proceedings, and the organizer was charged with seeing that they refrain from smoking or stopping in cabarets, “either near the cemetery, on the convoy’s course, or during the return to the city.”76 This last provision certainly attests to the extent of municipal authorities’ preoccupation with funereal norms of etiquette and solemnity, and to their determination to see them inscribed in residents’ uses of public space on such occasions. Such processions transformed the fast and efficient streets of the modern metropolis, for a few moments at least, into quiet spaces of contemplation and mourning. Émile Verhaeren captured this spatial dynamic in “La Mort,” a haunting poem depicting the movement of death through city streets. “Adorned with black and opulence,” he wrote, amid the sounds of “veiled drums, slow music,” among vast hearses decked with pale lights, “death displays itself, exaggerates.” Relating the sound of the sobs and agony of the grieving marchers, the poet focuses on the emotionally laden atmosphere created by the materiality and ornamentation of death in the street – the decorations, the burial garments, the casket, the church bells. The form of the streets themselves also played a role in this doleful scene. As the procession makes its way from the city to the faubourgs, the elements of the modern

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boulevards, cast here in a sombre light, are not the joyful gathering spaces so frequently described, but the straight path of a sorrowful parade: Draped in black and familiar, Death goes on, along the streets Long and linear. Draped in black, like the night, Old Death, aggressive and rough Goes through the neighbourhoods Of boutiques and trades, In a coach raised With large, exorbitant panels, The colour of wear-and-tear and of olden days.77

As in Montreal, funeral processions in Brussels inscribed class distinctions upon public space. Describing the “long and banal” route from the city to the suburban cemeteries, for instance, Dumont-Wilden remarked on how pitiful and humiliated the mourners of the city’s poor neighbourhoods looked, dressed in their cheap Sunday best, while, across town, funerals and memorials were attended by “an elegant crowd.” The sadness and pity inspired by the sight of an impoverished family’s funeral was further heightened by the death of a child. When Keetje participates in the funeral procession of a young girl from her neighbourhood, Neel Doff’s protagonist feels outraged by the spectacle. “And this cavalcade, through hollow roads, where we sank into the mud, with this casket carried by girls who, to avoid the puddles, tilted it from right to left, struck me as a barbaric and disrespectful thing.” Beyond her sorrow for the deceased child, Keetje’s emotional reaction to the funeral was thus intensified by the movement of the young girls – whose bodies are described as being too frail to accomplish the chore asked of them – through the grim and muddy streets.78 Keetje’s fictional indignation reflected existing controversies. At a Brussels city council meeting in 1903, members expressed similar sentiments when it was brought to the assembly’s attention that the hearse used for the city’s poor often carried the bodies of several children at once, taking a convoluted route from one house to another, and making it impossible for the families to follow. “And yet it is already painful for parents to lose children they have raised to the age of five or six, and it is truly cruel to prevent them, in a way, from following the body,” pleaded councillor Hubert. “Here! Here!” responded his colleagues,

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who later voted to set aside additional funds for the purchase of more hearses in order to alleviate this problem.79 The presence of deceased children in the streets of the modern city, if only momentary, clearly presented sentimental complications which the council acted directly to resolve, showing once more the profound intertwining of preoccupations of a bodily nature and the uses and meanings of urban space. Transporting Corpses If bringing people’s mortal remains into the street provoked intense emotive responses, the practice also affected urban dwellers on a sensorial level and clashed with their understandings of modern hygiene. If cemeteries were spaces where the bodies of loved ones rested, evoking fond memories for those left behind, they represented something entirely different in the eyes of the hygienist, noted the Montrealer J.A. Beaudry, who, concentrating on “the purely physical and material side of things,” saw them simply as fields “on which are buried the corpses of those whom God has condemned to animal decay.” Stripped of its soul, the human body in decomposition became a direct threat to the health of the living, of a modern population, increasingly sensitive, as we have seen, to hygienic considerations.80 For his part, Montreal city doctor Louis Laberge campaigned against the traditional practice of draping the walls and floors of rooms in which corpses laid in state. These drapes, he argued, prevented the flow of air and the penetration of sunlight, and trapped the dust carried in by visitors, making them potential centres of infection. Conscious that he was involving himself in a delicate battle against an old and established custom, Laberge nonetheless insisted that modern hygienic practices prevail and that funeral rituals be modified to comply with the standards that hygienists were attempting to establish within the urban setting.81 It was precisely these modern concerns about the hygienic risks posed by corpses that prompted residents of the municipality of Notre-Damedes-Neiges, bordering the Montreal cemetery of that name, to lodge a complaint against the establishment in 1892, expressing fears that “foul exhalations” emanating from the corpses would seep into the ground, contaminating well water and menacing public health.82 Brussels authorities were confronted with similar issues. But beyond the physical fears of disease provoked by corpses, it was the perception of death and, above all, of the dead body that seemed to trouble certain sensibilities. Responding to a complaint about the “pestilential odour”

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spread by a hospital hearse, addressed by a citizen hoping to see the itinerary modified, the secretary of the hospices council expressed his doubts as to the validity of this claim and wondered whether they did not originate from “persons of whom the sensibilities of the olfactory nerves had perhaps been sharpened by the sight of vehicles they knew to contain some corpses.”83 Back at the municipal council, Émile Hubert also complained about the sight of workmen transporting corpses to the “Dissection Institute” in the early hours of the morning, “making superhuman efforts to climb the boulevards and streets that cross the capital” to “finally arrive, exhausted,” at Leopold Park, where several scientific and educational institutions were situated. Here it was less the dead bodies themselves than the display of the men physically exerting themselves to transport them that shocked both the councillor’s sense of decency and his understanding of the streets of the capital as an inappropriate setting for such a scene. Untrue, responded alderman De Potter, who insisted that such transfers were carried out with the utmost decency and with respect for such spatial considerations. Indeed, it was precisely to avoid drawing attention to the task at hand, to the “painful feeling” that could be associated with the movement of death in the street, that it was undertaken in a simple fashion, and at night so that it might remain “unbeknownst to the public.”84 If the movement, behaviours, and fluids of the living bodies complicated spatial understandings of the period, so too were bodies of the deceased problematic. While funeral processions might briefly reconfigure the otherwise lively boulevard atmosphere, conferring upon it a momentary aura of sorrow and contemplation, death was also an irritant in the modernizing streetscape. Corpses made people nervous. They offended physical senses and were in turn perceived as a risk of further death. In addition, they affronted moral codes of decency and decorum, such that in modern streets built on imperatives of movement and progress, death was most unwelcome. These perceptions, and the rules formulated to codify them, attempted to minimize contact between the bodies of the deceased and the bodies of those who stayed on to make the city come alive to the promises of modernity. Conclusion In his explorations of “Bruxellois mores,” the author Léopold Courouble tells the story of a fierce policeman harassing a group of female street peddlers, choosing among them one victim in particular, a “little

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humpback” called Fintje. Seeing the brute approach, the girl drops her basket of fruit and takes to her heels through the streets. Behind her, the agent, “agile, pressing his sabre against his thigh, leaps over a pile of paving bricks and sand spread out in the street, his gloved hand clamping down on the fugitive’s shoulder.” Quietly, Fintje refuses to answer his aggressive questions, resisting in her own way the powerful embodiment of civic authority. This infuriates the policeman, and as he roars at the girl to follow him to his precinct, the scene draws a crowd of observers who cannot help but scoff at “the ferocious officer and his grotesque prey.” Fintje follows the agent, resigned but stoic. “And nothing was sadder than this silly, deformed creature, her big head sunken into her pointy shoulders, and shivering in the bitter breeze that lifted her frayed shawl and tattered apron.” But the story ends on a happy note when the officer lets up as they walk by a little boy who is crying. Suddenly touched, and in a moment of softness, the agent feels compassion and buys oranges from Fintje, which he gives to the boy, before sending them both on their way.85 The story is useful in illustrating the convergence of street space, bodies, movement, and sentiment in the modern city. The street is represented in many guises: a space of economic activity, a space under construction and renovation – the materials designed to make circulation more fluid ironically strewn about, impeding the policeman’s movement – a space where people gather, where authority is imposed and contested, and where physical strength and weakness are on public display. The contrast between the officer’s swift and agile body and Fintje’s weak and frail shell underscores these tensions. We are made acutely aware of the characters’ physicality, of the bodily terms on which their interaction and their movement in space is premised. But the spatial narrative at hand is made complete as the exterior and material dimension of the body shifts to the interior plane of feeling. The street is here associated with a variety of emotions, ranging from fear and hatred to sympathy and benevolence, all flowing from interaction with its materiality. These spaces were designed, in the spirit of modernity, with the intent to offer smooth, rapid, and efficient movement, although, as we have seen, they sometimes fell short of these objectives. But the streets nonetheless became directly implicated in urban dwellers’ individual and collective sense of self. From the personal musings of those attempting to feel at home in the tumultuous and unpredictable atmosphere of urban modernity, to the grander political narratives that saw in the material layout of the city a reflection of national

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character, the connections between the public culture of the boulevards and the interior preoccupations of its occupants were constructed. As planners discussed the layout of the streets, as politicians reflected upon their deeper cultural significance, as moralists criticized the societal implications of the public forms of interaction they engendered, and as authors contemplated the spectacles offered by their atmosphere, all drew upon the senses and the body to forge and give meaning to their relationship to these spaces. Debates over the form and trajectory of the streets or the orientation of street lighting, but also more mundane questions of everyday life such as carnivals, winter strolls, cabarets, public toilets, and funeral processions, all revealed people’s corporeal connection to their environment, their ways of acquiring knowledge about it, the expectations they formulated, their ways, ultimately, of performing the physical and mental soubresauts required to thrive within it. As we have seen, streets were etched in conflict, shaped according to class, ethnic, and gender distinctions. But they were also the one space that was shared, albeit unequally, by all residents of modern cities like Montreal and Brussels. Local particularities such as topography, historical development, or winter snowfalls in Montreal and summer fairs in Brussels framed the specific mood and atmosphere of each city, offered residents distinct points of reference from which to weave their spatial narratives. But these independent, parallel cases also suggest that men’s and women’s perceptions of themselves and of each other, their moral codes, their understandings of appropriate behaviour, of class and gender distinctions fundamentally materialized in modern urban streets and boulevards, irrespective of locality. Indeed, it was through an awareness of both their own bodies and those with whom they shared these spaces that residents of these modern cities turned their streets, otherwise static and lifeless entities, into the lively public stage on which they revealed their interior joys and sorrows, their personal struggles and aspirations.

Conclusion

Keeping in Touch

On 20 August 1914, the burgomaster of Brussels, Adolphe Max, accompanied by two aldermen, and the municipal secretary who carried a makeshift white flag, marched to the edge of the city to negotiate the terms of occupation with the German forces poised to enter the capital. Proud and defiant, Max sought to prevent their inevitable entrance from turning into a humiliating spectacle and assured the enemy that he fully intended to maintain his post and look after the interests of his constituents.1 Though he was hailed as a courageous and patriotic leader, Max’s stance led to his arrest, and a month later he was deported for the remainder of the conflict. His fate was, in a sense, representative of his city’s, as war and military invasion replaced the exuberance and optimism of the fin de siècle with a feeling of resignation and austerity. Montreal, for its part, was spared the ordeal of occupation, but there too, war changed the prevailing mood. The year 1914, noted the city’s harbour commissioners, would be remembered for “the general feeling of uncertainty and extreme business conservatism, due to the financial depression that prevailed during the early months of the season, but particularly by the outbreak of hostilities in the Old World and the gigantic struggle still being waged on the battlefields of Europe.”2 The First World War and the postwar economic crisis it engendered marked the end of what would be remembered as the belle époque. The hope and optimism with which Eric Hobsbawm characterized the era gave way to “seismic upheavals and human cataclysms.”3 By the time the 1920s began to roar, and after four years of hunger, injury, and death in which humanity had witnessed the deadly extremes of modernity, the bodily experiences that had marked turn-of-the-century industrialization and urbanization would no longer seem so unprecedented or transformative.

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Since then, throughout the twentieth century and into the present, observers of urban life have documented what they have seen as the steady and troubling progression towards the “dead” space of contemporary cities, overrun by freeways, shopping malls, and suburban monster houses.4 While this trend is most closely associated with post–Second World War planning, scholars have traced the roots of this mentality of disconnect to the nineteenth century’s growing concern for sanitation, freedom from nuisances, unhindered circulation, and spatial functionality. Against the backdrop of industrial and urban growth that intensified in the early 1880s and climaxed in 1914, I have sought to problematize this narrative, examining the way developments of a global scope left a distinct imprint on urban dwellers’ relationship to their milieu. Two processes intersected to make cities the sites of a charged atmosphere of modernity. First, constantly expanding urban environments were becoming fundamental to the daily lives of ever-growing numbers of people, particularly in Western industrializing societies where populations were concentrated more in mid-sized cities than in the megalopolises that have typically garnered the most attention. At the same time, the breadth and impact of these transformations were increasingly understood through the prism of corporeal movement and sensation. Concentrating on the centrality of sensorial experiences and bodily practices in people’s day-to-day interaction with the city reveals a different understanding of urban modernity. Despite efforts across Western societies to desensitize cities, the intensity of feeling repeatedly expressed in the sources indicates that, during this high point of modernity, urban dwellers were truly in touch with their environment. Montreal and Brussels, two cities similar in size, loci of regional influence yet peripheral to the core network of metropolitan centres, were precisely the types of places in which these realities converged. Separated by an ocean, products of distinct cultural and political traditions, both cities faced in their own ways the transformations generated by the growth of industry, and with relatively little direct back and forth between them. But on this ocean rippled the waves of modernity. As cities like these strove to assert their metropolitan stature, they participated in weaving a transnational web of exchanges and communication. The economic patterns of industrialization as well as the techniques, strategies, and ideologies of municipal governance and social reform that contributed to the reshaping of cities at the turn of the twentieth century were very much the product of this constant back

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and forth between cities and across borders.5 Pondering the similarities and specificities of Brussels and Montreal offers insight into the ways the large-scale developments that shaped modernity in many parts of the world took root at once in distinct local settings as well as in the bodies and interiorities of the people whose lives bore witness to these spirited times. The feel of the city, the corporeal experience of its homes, streets and factories, in many ways reflected events and processes that were playing out on a planetary scale. Entwining the outwardly transnational with the inwardly subjective helps to situate these preoccupations specifically on the complex and contested tapestry of modernity. One of my primary objectives has been to analyse how the rapid and tumultuous changes that marked the period transformed urban dwellers’ ways of relating to one another and to their environment. A widely employed but multifarious term, the idea of modernity is useful for capturing not only the range of social and cultural changes taking place, but also the equally significant climate of uncertainty and excitement in which people lived. It is the very openness of the concept that allows us to grasp the overall atmosphere of the period, what Raymond Williams called the “structure of feeling,”6 as well as the many ways in which people interacted with it. This is why I have sought to account for different meanings of modernity and the tensions and interactions among them. In particular, it is out of the collision between modernity as a rationalist project intent on managing change and streamlining urban society, and modernity as a more intuitive and subjective way of experiencing and embracing these changes that the cultural significance of turn-of-the-century urban life emerges. Urban dwellers contemplated, celebrated, and criticized their changing habitat as colossal factories darkened the landscape, as crowds of migrants swelled the ranks of central and peripheral neighbourhoods, as workers piled into narrow homes, and as boulevards buzzed with traffic and movement. Rationalist world views seeking to impose order and efficiency on the city clashed with deep-seated anxieties about the pace and extent of urban transformations. Following these incongruities leads to a basic paradox. On one hand, the modern project has been understood as an attempt to impose order on the messiness and cacophony of rapid urban growth, to divide the city into functionalist zones connected by rapid flows of circulation, and to minimize contact between people, particularly of differing class backgrounds. This implied a dulling of both space and the body. Decreasing tolerance for the

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sensory stimuli of the city motivated attempts to sanitize the environment and, under new hygienic imperatives, to free the body from the sight of slums, the smell of smoke, and the sound of machinery, and to minimize contact with other, potentially disease-bearing, bodies. Yet as we have seen in our explorations of the streets, homes, and industries of Montreal and Brussels, the body continuously pushed back, making modernity very much about resistance to these rationalist constraints. Residents of these two cities experienced the dense crowds, the plumes of smoke, the howling machinery, the grandiose vistas, and the pleasures of the night through their bodies, and it was in reference to these sensory and bodily encounters that they constructed their relationship to this environment. By placing the physical realities of urban industrial life at the heart of this investigation – asking what city people saw and heard, what they smelled and touched – this book has sought to participate in the ongoing conversation about modernity. While the body is the most fundamental point of interaction between humans and their physical world, corporeal behaviour, and the messages it communicates, is largely defined by society and culture, changing according to time and place. Fin-de-siècle cities, which attempted to harness the pressures of industrialization even as they thrived upon them, provide a rich context in which to historicize the body and its relationship to space. Bodily practices and sensorial experiences were not only born out of the material consequences of modernity, but deeply implicated in the formulation of perceptions about the city, and indeed about the body itself. In this way did body and city make one another. Physical experiences shaped what people loved or hated about the city and by extension how they built it, arranged it, and gave it meaning; at the same time, the materiality of the home, street, and factory influenced bodily comportment, delineating the movements and gestures considered appropriate or not, defining certain sights, sounds, and feelings as acceptable while rejecting others. Thought of as a living organism, dependent on nourishment and good circulation, the city was likened to the human body. The moral and physical health of one was understood to depend on the other, further accentuating in people’s minds the link between their urban and corporeal existences. This consciousness of the body lay at the heart of evolving cultural standards and understandings of work, health and hygiene, rest, deportment, privacy, and decency. Ideas about the body, its representation as a metaphor for industry, as a beacon of societal advancement or degeneration, as a site of moral uplift or

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debasement, in turn depended on the spatial environment in which it resided: the smoky workshops and lively boulevards, the prestigious city centres contrasting with agitated and intoxicating industrial neighbourhoods. The materiality of the modern city and the interiority of its residents were inextricably linked, and the body served as a vessel with which this incessant movement between the physical and the mental was navigated. This connection between the body and the spaces it occupied becomes all the more apparent when the senses are examined in relation to one another. City life must be understood in terms of the interplay between a panoply of visual, aural, olfactory, and haptic encounters that stimulated, sometimes overwhelmed, urban dwellers on a daily basis. The present study adds to the work of historians who have probed the meaning bound up in individual senses, distinguishing the senses from one another in order to highlight the intricacies of how culture made each of them operate, and unpacking the hierarchies according to which philosophers and ordinary people alike have come to classify them. As we build on this knowledge, it is necessary also to put them back together again as constituent elements of complex bodily experiences. If the senses individually have distinct characteristics and symbolisms, they also function simultaneously, each complementing and responding to the others. A fine meal stimulates our sense of taste, but our enjoyment of it depends also on the smells coming from the kitchen, the sight of the food and wine whetting our appetite, the sounds of the cutlery clattering through the conversation of good friends and family. Leave out the other senses, and the “food will not taste the same.”7 Similarly, the representations of urban space we have considered arose from the constant interplay of feelings provoked by many senses at once. Beholding Montreal’s panorama was an act of looking that was also shaped by the sounds of the harbour, the smell of the breeze through the trees, the touch of the concrete belvedere. A busy boulevard in Brussels required adroit movement if one was to successfully navigate the profusion of sights, sounds, and smells coming from the crowd, the traffic, the cafes, and the twinkling lights. Modern urban dwellers of all backgrounds strove to make sense of this effervescent yet troubling world. Attempts by municipal administrations, medical professionals, and a chorus of concerned commentators to bring order and to lessen the perceived stress on the body was certainly part of this process. But despite the best attempts to rationally compartmentalize bodily practices and reduce bodily awareness,

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escaping the fundamental connection between the body and city life proved to be impossible. The discourse of rationality was itself premised on bodily experience, even if attempts to decrease the prevalence of sensory stimuli never seemed to proceed quickly enough. The severest critics of the noise and the crowds, of the drainpipe effluents and smokestack emissions, of the drink and the sex, still relied on their bodies to orient themselves in these sometimes confusing spaces they strove to understand. Their disgust with the city and its inhabitants was a corporeal experience in and of itself. When they denounced the stench of faulty latrines or shuddered at the boisterous displays of inebriated fair-goers, pleaded for smoother roads or quieter neighbourhoods, they appealed to and participated in formulating a rationalist discourse that was predicated on the very bodily experiences it sought to eliminate. And so, while scholars of urban life have tended to accentuate modernity’s desensitizing influence, the highly corporeal language spoken by Montrealers and Bruxellois suggests instead that the particular conditions of urban modernity heightened, rather than diminished, people’s awareness of their bodies and their habitat. The spread of industry, the proliferation of workers’ homes, and the construction of new thoroughfares solicited the eyes, ears, nose, and skin in increasingly acute ways, shaping judgments of the city and of those who lived within it. This suggests a need to reconsider the reading of modernity as corporeal disconnect, a reading which has a tendency to substitute the proclaimed and oft-repeated ideal for the actual historical outcome. Efforts by municipal and state authorities to bring “formal order” and “visual regimentation” to cities have most often met with failure, rejected by a civil society that longs for “spatial irregularities that foster cosiness, gathering places for informal recreation, and neighbourhood feeling.”8 Not only did the rationalist modern project remain largely unfinished, it was itself much less dissociated from the body than what the historiography has suggested. Our understanding of modernity, suggests art historian T.J. Clark, has been obscured by an “essential myth” that city life came to mean the breakdown of old barriers, a mix of classes, and a celebration of the ambiguous and the marginal, even as increasingly rigid social divisions were inscribed in space by boulevards and exclusive, elite residential areas.9 It is with the intention of occupying the rich analytical space opened by the tension between these poles that I have set the efforts to desensitize the urban environment and neutralize the urban body against the vivid experiences through which urban dwellers resisted these divisions, sometimes in spite of themselves.

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Scholarly treatment of the rise of rationality at the expense of bodily engagement with the city is typically vast in geographical and temporal scope. Turn-of-the-century Montreal and Brussels, though, offer ideal theatres in which to consider the many layers of this modern paradox: on the immediate, affective scale of the body in which these tensions played out on a daily basis, on the scale of the urban setting in reference to which competing discourses of modernity were constructed, and, through comparative observations, on the broader transnational scale on which these ideas were distilled and adapted. In this period of urban growth and nascent planning theories, cities were increasingly thought of in their entirety, as wholes made up of constituent parts, distinct neighbourhoods upon whose efficient functioning urban society in general depended. Panoramic representations of Montreal and Brussels gave visual form to the ideals of order and progress through which urban elites sought to define the environment. Sweeping images of the city allowed viewers to gloss over the smokestacks and tenements that clashed with contemporary standards of urban aestheticism, and offered pristine scenes of a harmoniously functioning whole. The feats of modern human ingenuity were framed by a pleasing natural decor, with distant sights and sounds of industrial activity reinforcing the image of prosperity without jarring the senses. In their capacity to place the observer in corporeal harmony with a seemingly orderly environment, panoramic tropes were frequent in the discourse of elites who were eager to celebrate the accomplishments of industrial society while at the same time concealing the more unpleasant sources of this success. Just as the longue durée story of modernity as steady rationalization is nuanced by a more micro-scale analysis of specific places over a shorter period, so too was the image presented by the broad strokes of panoramas altered when the more closely focused and corporeally engaged experiences of the city were invoked. Condemnation of the perceived negative effects of industrialization and urbanization came from urban reformers or nostalgic authors who concentrated precisely on some of the more problematic parts of this broader whole. Descending into industrial neighbourhoods, critics presented a more noisome and noisy sensorial portrait. The bodily relationship to space changed once the broad views symbolizing order and authority were no longer visible, replaced in people’s sensorial perceptions by the chaotic din of factories and machines, and the stench of accumulating trash and sewage. As panoramas bled into labyrinths, the notion that the supposedly more rational sense of sight prevailed in experiences of the modern city was

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contested by the charms, and especially the irritants, of the other senses. When sight was superseded by smell, hearing, and touch, industrial modernity and its spatial environment were most often presented not as the paragon of human achievement, but as the tentacles of a beast encroaching upon the countryside, physically oppressing its residents, and sapping the city of its creative forces. Approaching modernity through the prism of city dwellers’ daily physical interaction with the specific spaces in which they lived and worked, played and consumed, reflected and mourned, underscores this continued importance of corporeal experiences in a time when the senses are thought to have been dulled. This was readily apparent in the factories and workshops whose output fuelled industrial and urban expansion. In their very structure, in their massive proportions, and in the decorative ornamentation of their architecture, these buildings gave visual form to the ambitions and aspirations of a liberal bourgeoisie seeking to affirm its hegemony. The fumes, noise, and dust produced by factories heralded their productivity, but also shaped a bitter rapport between the city and its residents, who were concerned for their health, property values, and overall quality of life. Inside these establishments, workers denounced the bodily nuisances and threats they associated with smoke, temperature variations, and insufficient sanitary and security measures – the physical atmosphere incarnating the climate of mistrust and hostility that reigned between them and their employers. The body itself served as a powerful rhetorical tool, and commentators tapped into this climate of constant sensation to heighten the impact of their messages. Proponents of industrial growth conveyed images of powerful and brawny workers whose bodies were cast as physical evidence of the progress and prosperity of industrial society. Scientists observed the working body from an empirical mindset, calculating the cost of maintaining these most intricate of machines at maximized rates of productivity. For their part, hygienists, labour leaders, and sympathetic authors used poignant images of the bodies of sickly and crippled labourers in order to denounce these conditions, or invoked the bodies of female workers to decry the erosion of societal norms and to call for a reformulation of the relationship between men and women. Living quarters intended for bodily rest and rejuvenation gave rise to similar concerns. House and body were seen as extensions of each other, and it was feared that the sickly state of many working-class homes

208  The Feel of the City

would threaten the physical health of their inhabitants. Reformers and hygienists placed a high degree of confidence in the redeeming qualities of modern sanitary principles, portraying housing as an issue that could be resolved through rational, technological means. But in a time when Western culture increasingly separated public space from private, relegating intimate bodily practices to the home, where they would be supposedly cut off from public view, the dwellings of workers attracted considerable attention from the bourgeoisie. Under various inspective guises, hygienists and reformers in both cities made frequent trips to the blind alleys and narrow lanes that housed the poorest residents, repeatedly noting that the lack of air, ventilation, sunlight, and adequate plumbing that characterized many homes made them sources of physical danger rather than of bodily restoration. While the colourful and suggestive language they used to describe these abodes and their occupants were meant to spark public authorities into action, it also showed how reformers’ own moral standards, class biases, and expectations of women’s submissiveness were rooted in sensory experiences. Bourgeois sensibilities were shocked by the smell of shared toilets, the dampness of crowded bedrooms, and the presumed sexual promiscuity that reigned in the homes of industry’s workforce. The material and structural shortcomings of the house, and by extension the threat to the health of those inside, they saw as evidence of moral shortcomings that threatened the social order. Between these spaces of industrial work and of rest lay the recently traced boulevards, vast thoroughfares whose breadth offered the promise of speedy and efficient circulation and bolstered aspirations to prestigious metropolitan status. Planned and constructed to display modern standards of beauty and urban aestheticism, these streets required pedestrians to acquire new forms of mental and physical agility with which to negotiate the intensity of crowds and traffic. By no means did these developments take root overnight, and residents expressed their impatience at the slowness with which their municipal administrations transformed the ideas of modern planning into material reality. At stake were their corporeal experiences of the street, their movements encumbered by detritus that lay about or by paving that remained unfinished, frustrating reminders of the gap between hopeful expectations and concrete actions. Much of the magnetism of modern cities lay in the sensory delights they offered in their boulevard culture of consumption and leisure. The street exalted the body in the sights, sounds, smells, and tactility of the

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crowds gathering in shops and pubs or enjoying winter snowfalls and summer amusement fairs. While the relationship to these spaces was often cast in terms of pleasure and exhilaration, perceived bodily and moral dangers always lurked nearby. The moralists who framed urban sites of consumption as synonymous with societal perdition used a corporeal language of physical deterioration, alcoholism, violence, and sexuality to emphasize their critique. Bourgeois efforts to shape the landscape also collided with the inescapable reality that the body nonetheless remained an element of nature. Debates over the location of public toilets or the route of funeral processions, for instance, reminded city dwellers that the natural functions and cycles of their embodied existence did not always adhere to the calculated rationality of urban development, frequently resulting in an uncomfortable disconnect between the inevitability of people’s bodies and the sanitized ideal of a modern and efficient streetscape. Montreal and Brussels were sites where new ideas about the city and the body took root and interacted in the everyday, in the tangible consistency and intangible atmosphere of the modern urban environment. With its deeper historical roots, Brussels clearly experienced the transformations of modernity as a more severe rupture with the past. In Montreal, the awe-inspiring panoramic representations glorifying these developments expressed an exuberant optimism that contrasted sharply with the melancholic sentiments provoked by industrialization and urbanization in Brussels. Portraits of Montreal framed in open vistas stretching as far as the eye could see make the gloomy allusions to the labyrinthine and tentacular sprawl of Brussels all the more striking. Whereas urban expansion in Brussels necessitated the interlacing of new strata of factories and homes into older strands of the urban fabric, Montreal’s more expansive hinterland allowed for a vast outward movement and provided the space necessary for much larger, more imposing industrial installations. At first glance, the presence of industry in Brussels might in fact seem more subdued than it was. An analysis of people’s sensorial relationship to its factories and workshops could seem injudicious were it not for the questions raised by the more visible existence of manufacturing in Montreal. Conversely, a familiarity with the diverse poetic and lyrical works that tap so directly into subjective engagements with Brussels inspire, for the researcher, attempts to tease out these nuances for Montreal, where they are generally ensconced in less obvious places such as ephemerally published periodicals or novels not ostensibly about the urban experience.

210  The Feel of the City

But the search for specific comparative illuminations should not eclipse the remarkable parallels in the ways the residents of two geographically distant and historically dissimilar cities shared in a common experience of modernity. While their size, regional influence, and rapid industrialization make Montreal and Brussels appropriate candidates for comparison, little connected them directly, aside from occasional encounters. Yet in both of these cities, modernity exercised very similar pressures on the population. We can note varying degrees of optimism or nostalgia in one place or another, greater confidence in the possibilities of industrial expansion here, or deeper concerns for lost traditions there, but in both cities the process of corporeal engagement with the changing environment, and the discourses that ensued from these contacts and practices, operated in analogous ways. This is pointed evidence of the transnational scope of modernity’s imprint. Municipal officials, urban planners, hygienists, authors, and artists spoke to the specific priorities, concerns, and realities of their immediate milieux. But their form, purpose, and underlying preoccupations had much in common and were shaped by the widespread circulation of ideas about space and the body in this time of facilitated travel and communications. Planning, building, and, more generally, relating to the city environment may have been eminently local matters, but the similarities in these discourses show the extent to which residents of modern cities shared common references, anxieties, and aspirations. Montrealers and Bruxellois may not have directly known one another to a significant extent, but clearly they both participated in the broader transnational conversations that gave shape to this globalized age. As they entered the frenzied factories, negotiated the busy boulevards, and retreated to humid homes, residents of Western industrial cities committed the basic bodily gestures of daily life. But these experiences were shared with others around the globe, suggesting that not only were Montreal and Brussels representative of broader trends, but also that the ideas flowing through these transnational currents were shaped and defined to a large degree by the fundamental corporeality of individuals – wherever such experiences occurred. Industrialization and urbanization are often thought about empirically as structural elements of societal evolution. Emphasizing cultural aspects of these realities, and paying attention to their place in urban dwellers’ subjective relationship with modern urban and industrial realities, sheds light on their inner preoccupations, moral judgments, expectations of class and gender norms, and on their own interiority.

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Indeed, for all the sophisticated economic models and planning theories, the state-of-the art technologies, and avant-garde aesthetics that defined modernity, urban dwellers, like all human beings, experienced the world around them through their sight and their hearing, their smell and their touch. Exploring streets as sites of tension between private bodily practices and standards of public deportment, viewing the home as the terrain on which evolving understandings of health and hygiene fused with ideas about the human soul, presenting the factory as places where bodies were constructed as forceful agents of progress or the debilitated victims of unbridled expansion, exposes bodily experience as a primary form of knowledge of the modern city. With turn-ofthe-twentieth-century Montreal and Brussels in mind, we might rethink more recent developments as well. We might even qualify the extent to which the smooth and rapid circulation of our day has in fact “detached” bodies from space, causing individuals to lose their “sense of sharing a fate”10 and ultimately becoming more self-centred “and less concerned with others in society.”11 Against the image of an increasingly sanitized body alienated from an increasingly rationalized city, the spatial stories of people whose bodies were profoundly engaged in giving meaning to modern cities allow us to imagine a more hopeful story of human interaction, of the forging of a “common ground.”12 Without forgetting that these relationships have very often been about conflict, suffering, and violence, these deeply embodied experiences remind us of the possibility of seeing the city also as a space of touch and contact, of reciprocity and community.

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Notes

Introduction: The Body Urban 1 F.P. Mackelcan, Our Health and Our Diseases, Condition of Montreal in a sanitary point of view we must reform or continue to suffer: addressed to physicians, to families, to property owners, to architects, to aldermen (Montreal: Lovell, 1879), 28. L’Expansion de Montréal (Greater Montreal): sa suprématie et son développement: finance, commerce, éducation, industrie, navigation, trafic extérieur (Montreal: Le Canada, 1906), 6. 2 A recent collaborative study examines a number of parallel issues in Brussels and Montreal: Serge Jaumain and Paul-André Linteau, eds., Vivre en ville: Bruxelles et Montréal au XIXe et XXe siècles (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), 43. With some exceptions, most of the essays focus on just one of the two cities. The present book builds on this broken ground by formulating arguments in light of research conducted on both cities at once. 3 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 4, 6. 4 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 23. 5 Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity,” in Joel Krieger, ed., The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 592–4. 6 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 113. For another line of attack, see Anthony Woodiwiss, “Against ‘Modernity’: A Dissident Rant,” Economy and Society 26, no. 1 (1997): 2. For a critical analysis of scholarly uses of the idea of modernity, see chapter 5, “Modernity,” of Simon Gunn, History and Cultural Theory (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), as well as a special issue on “Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity,’ in American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (June 2011).

214  Notes to pages 7–8 7 As historians Konstantin Dierks and Sarah Knott observe, the many critiques levelled at modernity do not imply that “the movement of history across certain thresholds of development is not meaningful as a guide to understanding the varied, differential, and contradictory, if not paradoxical, outcomes that define our world – whether we call it modern or not.” Konstantin Dierks and Sarah Knott, “Introduction: AHR Roundtable, “Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity,’” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 637. In the pages of this special issue, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty adds that if “most contemporary historians want to distance themselves” from the “value judgements” associated with modernity, the term is useful in understanding the “ideology and imagination” of a period. “To be ‘modern,’” he adds, “is to judge one’s experience of time and space and thus create new possibilities for oneself.” See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Muddle of Modernity,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 663, 74. 8 James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone Press, 1999), xi, 27. 9 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26. For an in-depth analysis of turn-of-the-century urban modernity in another Canadian setting, see Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late-Victorian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 10 Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Jean-Pierre Goubert, La conquête de l’eau: l’avènement de la santé à l’âge industriel (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1986); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993); Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman, L’hygiène dans la République: la santé publique en France ou l’utopie contrariée (1870–1918) (Paris: A. Fayard, 1996); Christopher Otter, “Cleansing and Clarifying: Technology and Perception in Nineteenth-Century London,” Journal of British Studies 43 (2004); Harold Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Stanley Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: ­ University of California Press, 2001); Christian Topalov, “La ville

Notes to pages 8–10  215 ‘congestionnée’: acteurs et langage de la réforme urbaine à New York au début du XXe siècle,” Genèses 1 (1990). 11 Thomas Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (London: E. and F.N. Spon, 1997), 269. 12 Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 6–7, 29–30. 13 Charles Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” in Oeuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques Crepet (Paris: Louis Conrad, 1922), 49. 14 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 15. For a critique of Berman, see Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 127. 15 References are to Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Kurt Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 409–24. 16 Robert Lewis, Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 5. See also Christian Vandermotten, “La production de l’espace industriel belge (1846–1984),” Cahiers marxistes 13, no. 130 (1985): 14. 17 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 123. Following Certeau, historian Victoria Thompson reminds us that “space is more than a backdrop against which the narrative of history is played out, it is implicated in that narrative as a perceptual and ideological category.” Victoria E. Thompson, “Telling Spatial Stories: Urban Space and Bourgeois Identity in Early 19th-Century Paris,” Journal of Modern History 75, no. 3 (2003): 556. 18 See Isabelle Gournay “Gigantism in Downtown Montreal,” in Isabelle Gournay and France Vanlaethem, eds., Montreal Metropolis, 1880–1930 (Toronto: Stoddart in association with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998), 153–82. 19 Thierry Demey, Bruxelles, chronique d’une capitale en chantier, vol. 1: Du voûtement de la Senne à la jonction Nord-Midi (Brussels: P. Legrain, 1990), 31–44. 20 Richard Dennis, “Historical Geographies of Urbanism,” in Brian Graham and Catherine Nash, eds., Modern Historical Geographies (London: Hasbrow, 2000), 227. Urban historian Timothy Gilfoyle argues that for marginalized groups “certain city neighbourhoods provided unprecedented opportunities to escape traditional controls of family and community,” bringing city streets into processes of identity formation. Timothy Gilfoyle, “White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: The

216  Notes to pages 11–12 New Paradigms of Urban History,” Reviews in American History 26 (1998). On the way urban green spaces took on social meaning as the product of competing visions of their use expressed by municipal authorities and park users, see Michèle Dagenais, Faire et fuir la ville: espaces publics de culture et de loisirs à Montréal et Toronto au 19e et 20e siècles (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006). 21 Dennis, “Historical Geographies of Urbanism,” 240. On recent historiographical trends addressing the materiality of cities, see Chris Otter, “Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History,” in Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, eds., Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (London: Routledge, 2010), 38–59. 22 “The care of the city and care of the body became as one, just as the health of the city and health of the body were one,” writes historian Patrick Joyce in The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), 65. See also Daniel Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilisation in the Age of Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 173; Dennis, Cities in Modernity, 39. Topalov, “La ville ‘congestionnée,’” 90. 23 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1939]), 99–100. Simmel similarly deplored scholarly emphasis on the large and the clearly visible, decrying the focus on states, unions, religion, family, guild, and factory structures at the expense of the more intricate aspects of daily life through which the “real life of society” is constructed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture (London: Sage, 1997), 110. 24 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 74. 25 As historian Bettina Bradbury writes, “some of the new factories were impressive complexes of brick buildings spreading over whole city blocks. They afford visible proof, hard architectural, material evidence that Montreal’s Industrial Revolution was well under way.” Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrialising Montreal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993), 26. 26 Elias, The Civilizing Process, 170–1; Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Immagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 6–7. Constance Classen traces the categorization of sight as the most noble of the senses to Aristotle, noting also that it was especially in the Enlightenment that “the senses became more a subject for scientific and philosophical investigation, rather than for theological and allegorical interpretation.” Constance Classen, World of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993), 3–4.

Notes to pages 12–14  217 On the “hierarchy of sensing,” see also Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5–9. 27 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 25. 28 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 150. 29 David Garrioch, “Sounds of the City: The Soundscape of Early Modern European Towns,” Urban History 30, no. 1 (2003): 6. 30 Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 31 Peter Bailey, “Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise,” Body and Society 2, no. 2 (1996). See also Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 1–2. 32 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Sweet Scent of Decomposition,” in Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner, eds., Forget Baudrillard? (London: Routledge, 1993), 24–5. 33 Platt, Shock Cities, 306; Joel A Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996), 342–5; Georges Vigarello, Le propre et le sale: l’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 218. 34 Joy Parr, “Notes for a More Sensuous History of Twentieth-Century Canada: The Timely, the Tacit and the Material Body,” Canadian Historical Review 82, no. 4 (2001): 742. 35 Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London: Routledge, 1994), 44. 36 Smith, Sensing the Past, 126. 37 Mark Patterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 6–7. Constance Classen applies a similarly broadranging definition to her recent examination of touch in the medieval context: The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). In its focus on the urban landscape, the present study admittedly places little emphasis on taste, though in the contrast between bourgeois banquet halls and working-class taverns this was a sense that also informed urban dwellers’ experiences, both in terms of the taste of new and varied foods and drinks they consumed, and in the social barriers erected around notions of who possessed the discerning refinement to know what constituted good taste. Critical perspectives on taste are examined in Carolyn Korsmeyer, The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing

218  Notes to pages 14–17 Food and Drink (Oxford: Berg, 2005). On taste and the modern city, see Janet Stewart, “A Taste of Vienna: Food as a Signifier of Urban Modernity in Vienna, 1890–1930,” in Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward, eds., The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 179–97. 38 “The modern person is shocked by innumerable things, and innumerable things appear intolerable to their sense which less differentiated, more robust modes of feeling would tolerate without any such reaction,” he continued. Frisby and Featherstone, Simmel on Culture, 118. 39 Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 152–64. 40 John Urry, “City Life and the Senses,” in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds., A Companion to the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 393–5. 41 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 337. 42 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1994), 15–21, 323–66. Taking a Foucauldian tack, historians of liberal governmentality have, for their part, accentuated the efforts by political authorities to rid the city of its sensorial excesses by attempting to shape the conduct of urban dwellers through discourse, rather than by regulating them with a coercive hand. See in particular Engin F. Isin, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds., Governing Cities: Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Advanced Liberalism (North York, ON: York University Urban Studies Programme, 1998); Joyce, The Rule of Freedom; Christopher Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). I examine this theme as it relates to Montreal more fully in “Gouverner pour et par le corps,” in Donald Fyson, Harold Bérubé, and Léon Robichaud, eds., La gouvernance montréalaise depuis quatre siècles: de la ville-frontière à la métropole (Montreal: Éditions MultiMondes, forthcoming). 43 Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 310, 75. 44 Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 777–9, 93. In denying that experience is the beginning point of knowledge and consciousness, Scott is responding to a number of scholars she sees as having set up this framework, including E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978); John Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (1987); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 45 On the “extremes” of Scott’s position, see Michael Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 211–20,

Notes to pages 17–18  219 for whom “Scott’s error is to fix ‘experience’ as the negative ‘other’ of discourse.” On the question of experience and agency, see Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 72–7. For a critical examination of recent endeavours to rehabilitate experience as a useful concept, see Harold Mah, “The Predicament of Experience,” Modern Intellectual History 5, no. 1 (2008). 46 Joyce, Visions of the People, 9. 47 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 14. 48 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Historian Simon Newman, for instance, shows how municipal officials displayed authority through demeaning language and coercive treatment, classifying, restraining, and otherwise violating the bodies of the urban poor. Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). For his part, Edward Slavishak focuses on how civic boosters, journalists, artists, and industrialists in turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh created images of workers’ bodies to promote their own ideological ends. Edward Slavishak, Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 49 Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for WorkingClass History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 4, no. 2 (2007), 26. Canning also explores the tensions and differences between the “discursive body” in the vein of Foucault, and “the search for the ‘material’ body” that, not unproblematically, seeks to conceive of the body in terms of experience and practice. Ultimately, the author favours an approach premised on the notion of embodiment, which is “less fixed and idealised” than the body itself, accounting for “moments of encounter and interpretation, agency and resistance.” Canning, Gender History in Practice, 170–80. 50 Ian Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity (London: Sage, 1999), 60–1. If many scholars have argued that the body is “socially constituted,” affirms Connerton, there is an inherent ambiguity in this notion of constitution, one that speaks to the double sense in which the body acquires social meaning. “That is to say,” he explains, “the body is seen to be socially constituted in the sense that it is constructed as an object of knowledge or discourse; but the body is not seen equally clearly to be socially constituted in the sense that it is culturally shaped in its practices and behaviour.” Connerton, How Societies Remember, 104.

220  Notes to pages 18–27 51 Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 1–2, 10–12. 52 Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 14, 149. See also Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7. 53 Examining the language in official briefs and personal letters submitted to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, historian Joan Sangster notes precisely the importance of remaining attentive to differences in tone and style, showing how women’s letters evoked personal experience on the labour force as meaningful and authoritative evidence. Joan Sangster, “Invoking Experience as Evidence,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 1 (2011). 54 Jay, Songs of Experience, 6–7. 55 Enquête sur les rapports qui existent entre le capital et le travail au Canada, vol. 1: Québec: 1ère partie (Ottawa: A. Senécal, 1889), 99. Jules Destrée, “Le Droit au loisir. Le Repos hebdomadaire,” Abonnement Germinal 1, no. 14 (1905), 1. Initially pleading for a reduction of the workday to nine hours, the eighthour movement became a characteristic feature of labour demands in both North America and Europe during this period. Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Short History (Toronto: Lorimer, 1989), 15–16; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 56 Patricia Seed, “Early Modernity: The History of a Word,” New Centennial Review 2, no. 1 (2002): 13. 1. Comparable Cities 1 References to Larcier’s petition to the city and the council’s deliberations are from Bulletin Communal de Bruxelles (hereafter BCB), January to March 1883, 24, 146–54. 2 This plea to the councillors’ sense of morality was ultimately unheeded, and when it was pointed out that the “housemistress of a boarding house for young ladies” had joined her signature to the list, the room burst out in laughter, presumably seeing a salacious double entendre in the evocation of such an establishment. What matters here, however, is not the council’s reception of the petition so much as the terms on which its author saw fit to present his concerns. 3 As such, it corresponds well with anthropologist Victor Turner’s definition of liminal entities, which are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt

Notes to pages 27–30  221 and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure (London: Routledge, 1969), 95. 4 Archives de Montréal (hereafter AM), VM45, Fonds du Comité de Santé (Health committee, hereafter CS), S1, petition dated 10 March 1894. 5 Thus simple physical distance from a possible source of contagion remained, in the eyes of these inspectors, a safeguard against possible infection, a belief that was nonetheless changing in the period. See Harold Platt, “From Hygeia to the Garden City: Bodies, Houses and the Rediscovery of the Slum in Manchester, 1875–1910,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 5 (2007). Moreover, the inspectors argued, the sanatorium was to be used to house patients suffering from scarlet fever and diphtheria. Unlike other infectious diseases such as smallpox and cholera, these ailments were not considered contagious by “aerial diffusion.” Fears about dangerous germs flying through the air speak further to the close relationship between an understanding of the material atmosphere and the ideas that gave urban space meaning. 6 Michael Peter Smith and Thomas Bender, City and Nation: Rethinking Place and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001), 6. 7 On Brussels’s various incarnations as capital under different political regimes, see Jean Stengers, Bruxelles: croissance d’une capitale (Anvers: Fonds Mercator, 1979). For a comprehensive study of urban renewal projects, refer to Thierry Demey, Bruxelles, chronique d’une capitale en chantier (Brussels: P. Legrain, 1990). For an overview of the city’s evolving layout and urban planning, see Christian Dessouroux, Espaces partagés, espaces disputés: Bruxelles, une capitale et ses habitants (Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles and Ministère de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 2008). 8 Jane Block, Belgium, the Golden Decades, 1880–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 1. 9 Philippe Roberts-Jones et al., Bruxelles, fin de siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 261. 10 Jean Puissant, “Bruxelles et les évènements de mars 1886,” in Marinette Bruwier, ed., 1886, la Wallonie née de la grève? (Liège: Archives du futur, 1990). 11 See Marcel Fournier and Véronique Rodriguez, “An Age Rich in Miracles,” in Isabelle Gournay and France Vanlaethem, eds., Montreal Metropolis, 1880–1930 (Toronto: Stoddart in association with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998). On Montreal’s cultural life during the period, see also Micheline Cambron, ed., La vie culturelle à Montréal vers 1900 (Montreal: Fides, 2005). For a fascinating account of the ways in which

222  Notes to pages 30–4 Montreal’s different linguistic and religious communities developed patterns of demographic behaviour in the industrializing city, see Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton, Peopling the North American City: Montreal, 1840–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). A collection of essays by the Montreal History Group explores the many poles around which gender, class, and ethnic identities collided in shaping the city’s social and cultural life during the period. See Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, eds., Negotiating Identities in 19th- and 20th-Century Montreal (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). For a recent synthesis of Montreal’s history during this period, see part 2 in the first volume of Dany Fougères, ed., Histoire de Montréal et de sa région, 2 vols. (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012). 12 For more on these geographical differences, see Chloé Deligne, Michèle Dagenais, and Claire Poitras, “Gérer l’eau en milieu urbain. Regards croisés sur Bruxelles et Montréal, 1870–1980,” in Serge Jaumain and PaulAndré Linteau, eds., Vivre en ville: Bruxelles et Montréal au XIXe et XXe siècles (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), 171. 13 Eliane Gubin, “L’emploi des langues au XIXe siècle: les débuts du mouvement flamand” in Stengers, Bruxelles: croissance d’une capitale, 238–9; Claire Billen, “Bruxelles au miroir de Montréal,” in Jaumain and Linteau, Vivre en ville, 47–8. 14 Serge Jaumain, Industrialisation et sociétés, 1830–1970: la Belgique (Paris: Ellipses-Marketing, 1998), 46. 15 Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993). 16 Paul-André Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Boréal, 2000). 17 Jaumain, Industrialisation et sociétés, 16. 18 Michel De Beule, Bruxelles, une ville industrielle méconnue (Brussels: La Fonderie, 1994), 16. On Belgium’s “precocious” industrialization, see René Leboutte, Jean Puissant, and Denis Scuto, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle, 1873–1973: Belgique, Luxembourg, Pays-Bas, industrialisation et sociétés (Paris: SEDES, 1998). 19 Robert Lewis, Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 135. 20 On the development of Maisonneuve as one of Montreal’s most important industrial suburbs, see Paul André Linteau, The Promoters’ City: Building the Industrial Town of Maisonneuve, 1883–1918, trans. Robert Chodos (Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1985).

Notes to pages 34–8  223 21 David Hanna, “The Importance of Transportation Infrastructure” in Gournay and Vanlaethem, eds., Montreal Metropolis, 45–56. Another modern communications invention, the telephone, was also reconfiguring understandings of time and distance in Montreal. See Claire Poitras, La cité au bout du fil: le téléphone à Montréal de 1879 à 1930 (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2000). 22 Chloé Deligne, Bruxelles sortie des eaux: les relations entre la ville et ses cours d’eau du moyen âge à nos jours (Brussels: Musée de la ville de Bruxelles, 2005). 23 Michel De Beule, Itinéraire du paysage industriel bruxellois: 30 km de Forest à Evere (Brussels: Société Royale Belge de Géographie – La Fonderie – Commission Française de la Culture, 1989), 7. 24 Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération, 40, 160. 25 These figures are based on the 1880 and 1910 national censuses, cited in Frank Daelmans, “La démographie au XIXe et XXe siècle,” in Arlette Smolar-Meynart and Jean Stengers, eds., La région de Bruxelles: des villages d’autrefois à la ville d’aujourd’hui (Brussels: Crédit communal,1989), 212–13. 26 Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (2003): 39. Kocka defines these aims as heuristic, descriptive, analytical, and paradigmatic. 27 Janet Polasky, Reforming Urban Labor: Routes to the City, Roots in the Country (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 7–11. See also Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 12, as well as Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 9. On comparison through difference, see Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labour: Germany and Britain, 1640–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1, 471. For an illuminating discussion of the possibilities and pitfalls of historical comparison, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (London: Routledge, 2004). 28 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 65. 29 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenthcentury London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Vanessa

224  Notes to pages 38–42 R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-siècle Paris (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1998); David Ward and Olivier Zunz, eds., The Landscape of Modernity: New York City 1900–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 30 Historian Paul Bairoch has calculated that “developed countries” were home to 195 cities in 1900. At the outset of the First World War, only eight had populations exceeding 2 million (Berlin, Chicago, Leningrad, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Vienna). Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, trans. Christopher Braider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 225. As historian Alan Mayne argues, the surge of urbanization in the nineteenth century meant that more people lived in “constellations of urban places” than in “the handful of metropolitan centres with populations over a million inhabitants.” Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), 5–6. 31 Harold Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xii. 32 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 33 Pierre-Yves Saunier, “La toile municipale aux XIXe–XXe siècles: un panorama transnational vu d’Europe,” Revue d’histoire urbaine 34, no. 2 (2006); Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Transatlantic Connections and Circulations in the 20th Century: The Urban Variable,” Informationen zur modernen Stadgeschichte 1 (2007). For studies treating direct links between Belgium and Canada in other contexts, see Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk, Un siècle d’investissements belges au Canada (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1986); Serge Jaumain, ed., Les immigrants préférés: les Belges (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa,1999); Cornelius Jaenen, Promoters, Planters and Pioneers: The Course and Context of Belgian Settlement in Western Canada (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011). 34 Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment” (1916) in Richard Sennett, ed., Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 91–2. 35 James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 8. 2. Image Makers 1 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),

Notes to pages 44–50  225 53–5; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 112; Wyn Kelley, Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the totalizing view of the city from above, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–3. 2 Herbert Brown Ames, The City below the Hill. A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal, Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972 [1897]), 6. 3 Kelley, Melville’s City, 38. 4 On the urban ideals of the turn of the century, see David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Helen Meller, Towns, Plans, and Society in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). As Corbin notes, privileging visual observation authorizes greater distance while avoiding the “repulsion” of contact and proximity. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 5 Montreal, the Metropolis of Canada: The rise, progress and development of its industries, commerce, transportation facilities, resources, banking and real estate values; the men who have made and are making Montreal, with a history of The Gazette from its establishment in 1778 (Montreal: The Gazette, 1907). 6 Émile Bruylant, ed., La Belgique illustrée: ses monuments, ses paysages, ses oeuvres d’art (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe et Cie, successeur Émile Bruylant, 1889). 7 Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association, Annual Report for Year Ending November 1906, 6. McGill University Archives, MG 2079nC9. 8 On the architecture of lookout points, see Philippe Dubé, “La villégiature dans Charlevoix: une traduction séculaire, un patrimoine encore vivant,” Téoros 14, no. 2 (1995): 4. As historian John Stilgoe notes, the “picturesque vantage points” from which urban panoramas were viewed, with their “foliage, rocks and well-dressed men and women,” became in themselves a “significant foreground.” John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 22. 9 A.J. Bray and John Lesperance, “A Glimpse from the Mountain: Montreal,” in George Monro Grant, ed., Artistic Quebec: Described by Pen and Pencil (Toronto: Belden Brothers, 1888), 106. 10 Eleanor Gertrude Farrell, Among the Blue Laurentians: Queenly Montreal, Quaint Quebec, Peerless Ste. Anne de Beaupré (New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons, 1912), 13–14.

226  Notes to pages 51–4 11 On the glorifying discourse represented through Montreal’s panorama, see also Rhona Richman Kenneally, “Depictions of Progress: Images of Montreal in Contemporary Guidebooks, 1839–1907,” Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada 23, no. 1 (1998). 12 Julius Chambers, “The Imperial City of the Dominion: Montreal of Yesterday and Today,” in Lorenzo Prince, Julius Chambers, and B. K. Sandwell, Montreal, Old, New: Entertaining, Convincing, Fascinating, A Unique Guide for the Managing Editor (Montreal: International Press Syndicate, 1915), 56. Though Cartier noted the beauty of the panorama, the exclamation attributed to him was undoubtedly the product of these authors’ imaginations. See Jacques Cartier, Voyages en Nouvelle-France, ed. Robert Lahaise and Marie Couturier (Montreal: Hurtubise, 1977), 104–5. On the invention of Cartier as a national hero in Quebec and Canada, and in particular on the “Cartiermania” that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Alan Gordon, The Hero and the Historian: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). 13 Signed Mrs Leprohon, and cited in Montreal Board of Trade, The Board of Trade Illustrated Edition of Montreal: The Splendour of Its Location, the Grandeur of Its Scenery, the Stability of Its Buildings, Its Great Harbour, Its Stately Churches, Its Handsome Homes, Its Magnificent Institutions, Its Great Industries, Fully Illustrated and Described (Montreal: Trade Review Pub. Co., 1909), 4. 14 Montréal, son passé, son présent et son avenir: histoire, commerce, industries depuis 1535 à 1889 (Montreal: Chaput Frères, 1890), 5. 15 John Parratt, ed., Montreal, Pictured and Described (Halifax: Canada Railway News Co., 1889), 39. 16 William Henry Drummond, Montreal in Halftone. A Souvenir: Over One Hundred Illustrations (Plain and Colored) Showing the Great Progress which the City Has Made during the Past Seventy Years: With Historical Description (Montreal: W.J. Clarke, 1901). 17 Montreal, the Metropolis of Canada (1907), 15. 18 No author or precise date is specified in this collection of photographs, simply entitled Montreal, the Metropolis of Canada. A very similar image, dated ca 1890, though evidently taken in the wintertime, appears in the Notman Photographic Archives at the McCord Museum of Canadian industry (VIEW–2396). In it, the industries by the Lachine Canal are visible. 19 Alfred Mabille, Bruxelles (Brussels: Bureau officiel de renseignements gratuits pour étrangers, 1914), 4. Travel guidebooks are a particularly useful source for panoramic representations, as their aim was to present the city

Notes to pages 54–62  227 to visitors in ways that would strike their interest. As Joyce notes, they describe movement within the city, orienting travellers’ itineraries in a way that shapes their perspective on the places they visit. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), 198. On the heuristic value of guidebooks, see also Laurent Tissot, Naissance d’une industrie touristique: les Anglais et la Suisse au XIXe siècle (Lausanne: Payot, 2001), 13–25; Kenneally, “Depictions of Progress,” 7. With particular reference to Brussels, see Serge Jaumain, “L’image de Bruxelles dans les guides touristiques (XIXe–XXe siècles),” in Jo Braeken, Paulo Charruadas, and Eric De Kuyper, eds., Bruxelles, 175 ans d’une capitale (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2005), 155–66. 20 Camille Lemonnier, La Belgique (Brussels: Alfred Castaigne, 1903), 68. 21 Bulletin Communal de Bruxelles, 19 December 1908, 1265. (De Locht). 22 Prince, Chambers, and Sandwell, Montreal, Old, New, 40–1. 23 Franz Mahutte, Bruxelles vivant (Brussels: Bureaux de l’anthologie contemporaine des écrivains français et belges, 1891), 10. 24 Speech published in Tekhné 2 (8 June 1912). 25 Bruylant, ed., La Belgique illustrée, 62–3. 26 Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfreid Imhoff and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 272; Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 27 Louis Dumont-Wilden, Coins de Bruxelles (Brussels: Association des écrivains belges, 1905), 41–5. 28 Marius Renard, Notre pain quotidien (Brussels: Association des ecrivains belges, 1909), 175–8. 29 “Now it’s just the two of us – I’m ready!” shouts the young protagonist toward the city lying at his feet, and whose high society he so desperately wants to join. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994 [1834–5]). 30 Bruno Latour and Émilie Hermant, “Paris ville invisible,” La Décoverte – Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, http://www.bruno–latour.fr/ node/93. 31 Kelley, Melville’s City, 44. 32 Meller, Towns, Plans, and Society, 28. 33 Around Brussels, most suburban municipalities remained politically autonomous, but in Montreal the annexation of twenty-four communities to the central city between 1874 and 1918 meant that industrial districts found themselves administrated by the larger municipality. 34 Charles Buls, Esthétique des villes (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe et Cie, 1893), 22–3.

228  Notes to pages 62–6 35 “Faubourg,” imperfectly translated here as “suburb,” was a medieval term used to refer to settlements that grew outside the fortifications of walled cities, usually in an unregulated fashion, giving them an aura of marginality, suspicion, and even danger. During this period, the term “banlieue,” was also increasingly used, but generally in reference to more independent, and still largely rural, localities, situated at a somewhat greater distance from the central city. For more on this distinction, though in an earlier period, see Sylvie Freney, “Les faubourgs: cette non-banlieue (18e–19e siècles),” Études canadiennes 60 (2006). Though the label “faubourg” applied to the entire ring of municipalities around Brussels, it was most frequently used in reference to the emerging industrial districts. 36 Both during and after his political career, Charles Buls devoted considerable efforts to perfecting his knowledge of urbanism and working to preserve Brussels’s built heritage. He spearheaded campaigns to protect the city’s historic buildings and layout, collaborated closely with renowned specialists on urbanism, and published a well-received treatise on the subject entitled L’esthétique des villes, from which the passage above is quoted. For more on this aspect of his career, see Marcel Smets, Charles Buls: les principes de l’art urbain (Liège: Mardaga, 1995). 37 Émile Leclerq, “Bruxelles” in Bruylant, ed., La Belgique illustrée, 160. 38 Ibid., 219. 39 As Choay notes, other metaphors equated these spaces with cancers or warts. Françoise Choay, L’urbanisme: utopies et réalités (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 13. 40 “Les usines” in Émile Verhaeren, Les villes tentaculaires précédées des campagnes hallucinées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1949), 122. 41 A.B. Larocque, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1883 (Montreal: Louis Perrault, 1884), 3. 42 Testimony of César de Paepe in Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Procès-verbaux des séances d’enquête concernant le travail industriel, 4 vols. (Brussels: A. Lesigne, 1887), 2: 66. 43 On the discourse surrounding the sanitation of urban slums in an international context, see Christopher Otter, “Cleansing and Clarifying: Technology and Perception in Nineteenth-Century London,” Journal of British Studies 43 (2004); Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993). 44 Ames, The City below the Hill, 6. 45 C.A. Dawson [1926], “The City as an Organism (with special reference to Montreal),” in Paul Rutherford, ed., Saving the Canadian City: The First Phase, 1880–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 277–8, 82;

Notes to pages 66–73  229 On Dawson and the Chicago school, see also Anne-Marie Séguin, Paula Negron-Poblette, and Philippe Apparicio, “Pauvreté et richesse dans la région montréalaise depuis l’après-guerre. Un paysage en mouvement,” in Dany Fougères, ed., Histoire de Montréal et de sa region (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012): 2, 1145–6. 46 Edmond Nicolaï, La dépopulation des campagnes et l’accroissement de la population des villes (Brussels: P. Weissenbruch, 1903), 52. Writing in the pages of the Journal d’hygiène populaire, the Montreal doctor Joseph Desroches also conceded the city’s importance for people’s intellectual development, but nonetheless emphasized the notion that the city was a breeding ground for disease, while the countryside, “this temple of nature, protects the happy peasant from the evils that afflict the urbanite, and allows him to grow in the sun, like flowers do.” J.I. Desroches, “Hygiène des villes,” Journal d’hygiène populaire 3, no. 5 (1886): 49. 47 Environs de Bruxelles: guide de l’excursionniste au point de vue historique, descriptif et humoristique (Brussels: Alfred Castaigne, 1890), 25. 48 Alfred Mabille, Les environs de Bruxelles (Brussels: A.-N. Lebègue et Cie, 1888), 10–36. 49 John Fraser, Canadian Pen and Ink Sketches (Montreal: Gazette Printing Co., 1890), 236–41. 50 Mahutte, Bruxelles vivant, 300–1. 51 Ibid., 305. 52 Marius Renard, Le Faubourg (Brussels: J. De Clercq, 1930), 24. 53 Charles De Quéker, “Les Maisons ouvrières à appartements en ville,” in Ville de Bruxelles: comité officiel de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance, Rapport sur l’exercice 1905 (Brussels: Imprimerie des institutions de prévoyance, 1906), 97. 54 On attempts by Belgian authorities to entice workers to live outside of Brussels by subsidizing rail transportation, see Michael Huberman, “Ticket to Trade: Belgian Labour and Globalisation before 1914,” Economic History Review 61, no. 2 (2008); Janet Polasky, Reforming Urban Labour: Routes to the City, Roots in the Country (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 55 Émile De Mot, speech transcribed in “Rapport sur la distribution solennelle des Prix du Concours d’ordre et de propreté entre mères de familles ouvrières 1904,” in Ville de Bruxelles: comité officiel de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance, Rapport sur l’exercice 1905, 137. 56 Adam Shortt, “The Social and Economic Significance of the Movement from the Country to the City,” in Addresses Delivered before the Club (Montreal: Canadian Club of Montreal, 1913).

230  Notes to pages 73–8 57 Patricia Van Den Eeckout, “Brussels,” in M.J. Daunton, ed., Housing the Workers, 1850–1914: A Comparative Perspective (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), 69. 58 First Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the City of Montreal 1910 (Montreal: A.P. Pigeon, 1910), 10. 59 Adrien Leblond de Brumath, Guide de Montréal et de ses environs (Montreal: Granger Frères, 1897), 50. 60 Henri Hymans and Paul Hymans, Bruxelles à travers les âges, vol. 3: Bruxelles moderne (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe et Cie, successeur Émile Bruylant, 1889), 8. 61 Dominic T. Alessio, “Capitalist Realist Art: Industrial Images of Hamilton, Ontario, 1884–1910,” Journal of Urban History 18, no. 4 (1992), 444. With its steep escarpment and numerous industries, Hamilton was fertile ground for panoramic representations of modernity and industrialization. See also Walter G. Peace, “Landscapes of Victorian Hamilton: The Use of Visual Materials in Recreating and Interpreting the Past,” Urban History Review 18, no. 1 (1989). 62 Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 63 Choay, L’urbanisme, 13. 3. Encounters with Industrial Space 1 Travel diary of Charles Buls, 1903. Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles (Archives of the City of Brussels, hereafter AVB), Fonds Buls, box 95. He goes on to note how disagreeable he had found the trip from Ontario. Though he had appreciated the scenery in the Thousand Islands region, he was indifferent to the Lachine Rapids, felt that the trip was too long, and recorded the unpleasant conditions in which he had journeyed, “on a crowded steamer where one had to queue for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” 2 As Homberger notes, social reformers commonly evoked the image of Dante’s descent to hell when characterizing urban slums. Here, Buls is intensifying the critique by applying the metaphor to the entire landscape of Montreal. Eric Homberger, Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 11. See also Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46. On middle-class fears of the industrial city as an “abyss” of poverty, misery, and degeneracy, see Daniel Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

Notes to pages 79–81  231 3 Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2001). For a discussion of these debates in the North American context, see Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996). 4 On smoke-abatement campaigns, and the angry discourses that fuelled them, see Frank Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 5 Édouard Octave Champagne, Annual Report of the Boiler Inspector of the City of Montreal for the Year 1908 (Montreal: Perrault Printing, 1909), 4. And despite Buls’s admonitions of Montreal, Brussels factory inspectors also noted an increase in smoke-related complaints from the public. Émile Van de Weyer in Rapports annuels de l’inspection du travail 7e année (1901), 7. 6 On 12 September, Buls attended a luncheon hosted by the “Officers of the Canadian and the British Life Assurance Companies located in Montreal,” the menu of which he kept in his papers. AVB, Fonds Buls, boxes 46 and 95. 7 Montreal Board of Trade, The Board of Trade Illustrated Edition of Montreal: The splendour of its location, the grandeur of its scenery, the stability of its buildings, its great harbour, its stately churches, its handsome homes, its magnificent institutions, its great industries, fully illustrated and described (Montreal: Trade Review, 1909), 2. 8 John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977), 139–40. 9 Peter Collins, Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture, 2nd ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004); Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: US Industrial Buildings and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Claire Poitras, “Sûreté, salubrité et monolithisme: l’introduction du béton armé à Montréal,” Revue d’histoire urbaine 25, no. 1 (1996). 10 Peter Scholliers, “L’archéologie industrielle: définitions et utilités,” Cahiers de la Fonderie 8 (1990): 62. 11 Adriaan Linters, Industria: Architecture industrielle en Belgique (Brussels: Pierre Mardaga, 1986), 42. See also Michel De Beule, Itinéraire du paysage industriel bruxellois: 30 km de Forest à Evere (Brussels: Société Royale Belge de Géographie – La Fonderie – Commission Française de la Culture, 1989), 11. 12 Cited in Lise Grenier and Hans Wieser-Benedetti, Les châteaux de l’industrie: recherches sur l’architecture de la région lilloise de 1830 à 1930

232  Notes to pages 82–7 (Brussels and Paris: Archives d’architecture moderne et Ministère de l’Environnement et du Cadre de Vie – Direction de l’Architecture, 1979). 13 Ibid., 20–1. René Leboutte, Jean Puissant, and Denis Scuto, Un siècle d’histoire industrielle, 1873–1973: Belgique, Luxembourg, Pays-Bas, industrialisation et sociétés (Paris: SEDES, 1998), 45. 14 Paulo Valente Soares and Guido Vanderhulst, “Le patrimoine industriel en région bruxelloise,” Maisons d’hier et d’aujourd’hui 112 (1996): 39. 15 Ibid., 40–1. On the Palais du vin, see also Cristina Marchi and Nicolas Verschueren, Le Palais du vin et les grands Magasins Merchie-Pède 1898–2007 (Brussels: CIVA, 2006). 16 Archives d’Architecture Moderne, “Inventaire visuel de l’Architecture industrielle à Bruxelles 1-3 B: Molenbeek” (Brussels, 1980), 33–4. 17 On the building and its presence in the surrounding urban fabric, see Douglas Koch, Les quartiers du centre-ville de Montréal 1: Récollets (Montreal: Sauvons Montréal, 1977), as well as Cité Multimédia Montréal et al., Les promenades architecturales de la troisième Biennale de Montréal (Montreal, 2002), CD-ROM. 18 Montreal Illustrated, 1894: Its growth, resources, commerce, manufacturing interests, financial institutions, educational advantages and prospects, a brief history of the city from foundation to the present time (Montreal: Consolidated Illustrating, 1894), 203. See also Guy Mongrain, “Le site initial de la fonderie Darling: un siècle de métalurgie à travers des témoins remarquables” (Montreal: SDM, 2000), 17–19. 19 “Les minarets industriels,” L’émulation (October 1893), 154. While the author is not named, the piece is attributed to the journal L’art moderne. 20 Émile Verhaeren, Les villes tentaculaires précédées des campagnes hallucinées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1949), 83–5. 21 Province of Quebec, Report of the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis (Montreal: The Commission, 1910), 80–2. 22 These laws were a holdover of the Napoleonic regime, which had begun such practices in the period 1810–15. For a detailed examination of their evolution, see Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, “La régulation des nuisances industrielles urbaines (1800–1940),” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 64 (1999). On Brussels, Christine Mahieu, “Bruxelles et ses industries: commodes et incommodes” (Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles/ Secrétariat d’État à l’Aménagement du Territoire de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 1993), 4–5. In Montreal, no formal structure existed for controlling the types of industries that could be established in specific locations, though municipal officials decried this lacuna. E.O. Champagne, Rapport annuel de l’inspecteur des chaudières de la Cité de Montréal pour l’année 1883, 15.

Notes to pages 87–91  233 23 Estelle Baret-Bourgoin, La ville industrielle est ses poisons: les mutations des sensibilités aux nuisances et pollutions industrielles à Grenoble, 1810–1914 (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2005), 353; Christophe Verbruggen, De stank bederft onze eetwaren: de reacties op industriële milieuhinder in het 19de-eeuwse Gent (Gent: Academia Press, 2002), 39; Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Histoire de la pollution industrielle: France, 1789–1914 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2010), 101. 24 AM, Commission des incendies et de l’éclairage (Fire and lighting commission, hereafter CIE), VM 40, S2, D46, 31 July 1885. 25 Archives de l’état à Bruxelles (Anderlecht) (Belgian State Archives, hereafter AEB), series D #337.24, 1888. 26 AM, Commission d’hygiène et de statistiques (Hygiene and Statistics Commission, hereafter CHS), VM 21, S2, 2 April 1906. 27 AEB, series D #235.6, 1890. 28 AM, CIE, VM 40, S2, D40, ca 1880. 29 Christophe Verbruggen, “Nineteenth-Century Reactions to Industrial Pollution in Ghent, the Manchester of the Continent: The Case of the Chemical Industry,” in Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, eds., Le démon moderne: La pollution dans les sociétés urbaines et industrielles d’Europe (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2002), 390. Massard-Guilbaud, Histoire de la pollution industrielle, 83–98. As Massard-Guilbaud notes, the late-twentieth-century expression “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, denoting people’s opposition to the proximity of polluting establishments in residential areas, aptly characterizes the attitude of the late nineteenth century. 30 AM, CHS, VM 21, S2, 1905. 31 AEB, series O #149, 1901. 32 AM, CIE, VM 40, S2, D54, April 1895. Reformers and planners in Montreal and Brussels shared, along with their colleagues in most Western cities during the period, a keen interest in the possibility of parks as remedies to urban problems. See Claire Billen, “Du projet urbanistique idéal aux réalités de terrain: le cas exemplaire du parc de Saint-GillesForest dans l’agglomération bruxelloise,” and Michèle Dagenais, “Saisir les dynamiques d’un espace urbain: le parc La Fontaine, ses usages et ses publics,” in Serge Jaumain and Paul-André Linteau, eds., Vivre en ville: Bruxelles et Montréal au XIXe et XXe siècles (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), 203–16, 217–35. 33 Mahieu, “Bruxelles et ses industries,” 35–6. 34 AEB, série D #235.1, ca 1880. 35 AM, CHS, VM 21, S2, 28 June 1906.

234  Notes to pages 91–7 36 Indeed, bogus complaints against industries were not unheard of, and officials in both cities denounced them in their reports, suggesting the importance of taking such testimonials with a grain of salt. 37 Herbert Brown Ames, The City below the Hill. A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal, Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972 [1897]), 21. 38 N. Legendre, “Les enfants dans les usines,” in Journal d’hygiène populaire 1, no. 21 (15 March 1885), 151. 39 Louis Dumont-Wilden, Coins de Bruxelles (Brussels: Association des écrivains belges, 1905), 30–1. 40 Franz Mahutte, Bruxelles vivant (Brussels: Bureaux de l’anthologie contemporaine des écrivains français et belges, 1891), 305. 41 Neel Doff, Jours de famine et de détresse (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1911), 213–19. Later in the story, Keetje’s bodily relationship to her work takes a dramatic turn when she pursues prostitution as a means to survive and to ensure her younger siblings are fed. For a critical perspective on Doff’s novels that situates the author, her books, their storylines, and characters in their historical contexts, see Madeleine Frédéric’s “Lecture” in Neel Doff, Keetje (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1987), 251–85. 42 For a comparison of the Belgian and Canadian commissions and their value as historical sources, see Eliane Gubin, “Les enquêtes sur le travail en Belgique et au Canada,” in Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk et al., La question sociale en Belgique et au Canada, XIXe–XXe siècles (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1988), 93–107. 43 Nearly half of the 649 witnesses in Quebec were from Montreal. Fernand Harvey, Révolution industrielle et travailleurs: une enquête sur les rapports entre le capital et le travail au Québec à la fin du 19e siècle (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1978), 83. For Brussels, we have the thoughts of only a handful of individuals. Kurgan-van Hentenryk et al., La question sociale en Belgique et au Canada, 98–9. 44 Harvey, Révolution industrielle et travailleurs, 63. Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, “102 Muffled Voices: Canada’s Industrial Women in the 1880s,” Acadiensis 3, no. 1 (1977). Jean Puissant, “Bruxelles et les événements de 1886,” in Marinette Bruwier, ed., 1886, la Wallonie née de la grève? (Liège: Archives du futur, 1990), 131. 45 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Réponses au questionnaire concernant le travail industriel, 4 vols. (Brussels: Société belge de librairie, 1887), 1: 389. 46 Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada (Ottawa: A. Senecal, 1889), 88.

Notes to pages 98–101  235 47 Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada, Evidence, Quebec Part I (Ottawa: A. Senecal, 1889), 457. 48 Ibid., 460. 49 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Procèsverbaux des séances d’enquête concernant le travail industriel, 4 vols. (Brussels: A. Lesigne, 1887), 2: 7. 50 Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada, Evidence, Quebec Part I, 246. 51 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Réponses au questionnaire concernant le travail industriel, 121–2. Allusions to workers’ supposed excessive consumption of alcohol were frequent in the depositions. Asked whether his employees practised a religion, a hat maker retorted simply, “Yes, the religion of schnick.” “Schnick” was a slang word used in nineteenth-century Brussels to designate alcohol. Ibid., 1010. 52 Alain Corbin, “Douleurs, souffrances et misère du corps,” in Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello, eds., Histoire du corps, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 2: 254. On the gendered and racialized language of factory inspectors, which linked weakened bodies and harsh working environments, see also Daniel Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: AntiSweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 53 Émile Van de Weyer in Rapports annuels de l’inspection du travail 6e année (1900), 3e and 8e année (1902), 6. 54 “Report of Louis Guyon,” in Province of Quebec, Sessional Papers #7 39, no. 1 (1906), 181. 55 “Report of James Mitchell” in Province of Quebec, Sessional Papers #7 35, no. 1 (1902), 147. 56 Pol de Bruycker in Rapports annuels de l’inspection du travail 15e année (1909), 28–9. 57 “Report of James Mitchell,” in Province of Quebec, Sessional Papers #7 39, no. 1 (1906), 188. 58 See De Bruycker’s reports spanning the years 1905 to 1913. 59 “Rapport de Louis Guyon,” in Province of Quebec, Documents de la Session, 27, no. 1 (1893), 226. 60 Van Overstraeten in Rapports annuels de l’inspection du travail 1er année (1895), 71. 61 “Rapport du Dr C.I. Samson,” in Province of Quebec, Documents de la Session, 27, no. 1 (1893), 252. 62 “Report of James Mitchell,” in Province of Quebec, Sessional Papers #7 36, no. 1 (1903), 203. The Brussels inspector Émile Van de Weyer observed

236  Notes to pages 101–6 that improvements to sanitary conditions improved workers’ productivity. Rapports annuels de l’inspection du travail 8e année (1902), 7. 63 “Report of Louisa King,” in Province of Quebec, Sessional Papers #7 35, no. 1 (1902), 171. 64 “Rapport du Dr C.I. Samson,” in Province of Quebec, Documents de la Session 27, no. 1 (1893), 253–4. Rapports annuels de l’inspection du travail 12e année (1906), 23. 65 Alain Corbin, “Douleurs, souffrances et misère du corps” in Corbin, Courtine, and Vigarello, eds., Histoire du corps, 2: 251 66 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1–8, 208–9. On the link between body and workplace, see also Ava Baron and Eileen Boris, “‘The Body’ as a Useful Category for Working-Class History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 4, no. 2 (2007): 35–42; Georges Vigarello, Histoire des pratiques de santé: le sain et le malsain depuis le Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 230. 67 A. Slosse and E. Waxweiler, Enquête sur l’alimentation de 1065 ouvriers belges, Recherches sur le travail humain dans l’industrie (Brussels: Misch et Thron, 1910), 26. 68 “Vapeur et muscle,” L’écho minier et industriel 3 (December 1911), 322. As Rabinbach argues, measuring and calculating bodily expenditure in rational ways was a fundamental objective of the modern science of work’s objective to do away with poorly organized and inefficient work: “Breaking sharply with earlier doctrines of moral and political economy, the new science focussed on the body of the worker. Predicated on the metaphor of the human motor and buoyed by a utopian image of the body without fatigue, the search for the precise laws of muscles, nerves, and the efficient expenditure of energy centred on the physiology of labour.” Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 10. 69 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Procèsverbaux des séances d’enquête concernant le travail industriel, 45. 70 Lucy Schmidt, Le livre du travailleur: hygiène industrielle (Frameries: Dufrane-Friart, 1913), 7–9, 15–16. 71 Though Corbin cautions against the “excessive” focus on pain in such representations, Rabinbach demonstrates how the ideal of a “body without fatigue” was shared by proponents of the science of work and workers alike. Alain Corbin, “Douleurs, souffrances et misère du corps,” 251, Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 1–8, 208–9. The reduction of work hours was the object of sociological and economic research during this period in Belgium, and both liberal and socialist specialists agreed that such changes

Notes to pages 106–8  237 would result in gains for workers and employers alike. The Liège-area chemical manufacturer L.-G. Fromont observed the effects of reducing his employees’ workday from ten to eight hours over a twelve-year period. In his study, published by the liberal Solvay Institute, he pointed to a distinct increase in productivity and improvements in workers’ health. Fromont also denoted changes in moral terms, pointing to a decrease in alcohol consumption by workers and a greater spirit of order and discipline among them. L.-G. Fromont, Une expérience industrielle de réduction de la journée de travail (Brussels: Misch et Thron, 1906). The professor and socialist politician Émile Vinck published an essay on the question of the eighthour day in an international context, insisting that shortened hours led to increased productivity as well as to corporeal and spiritual improvements for workers. Émile Vinck, La réduction des heures de travail et la journée de huit heures (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1904). 72 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Procèsverbaux des séances d’enquête concernant le travail industriel, 64–5. During this period, hygienists considered industrial work to be highly problematic in terms of the physical deformations it caused; it was seen as the embodiment of a degenerating society, giving rise to an alarmist discourse and to a specific hygienic pedagogy of posture within schools. See Georges Vigarello, Le corps redressé: histoire d’un pouvoir pédagogique (Paris: J.P. Delarge, 1978), 186–91. 73 Schmidt, Le livre du travailleur, 19–20. 74 Province of Quebec, Report of the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis, 17; Schmidt, Le livre du travailleur, 21. 75 Michel Delphis Brochu, Mémoire sur la nécessité d’une inspection hygiénique médicale des ateliers et des manufactures (Quebec: Imprimerie de J. Dussault, 1889), 5–6. 76 F. Frère, “Les maladies professionnelles,” Abonnement Germinal 8 (1912): 5–13. 77 By 1911, women represented 22 per cent of the workforce in Montreal, 40 per cent of whom were employed in the industrial sector. Marie Lavigne and Jennifer Stoddart, “Ouvrières et travailleuses montréalaises, 1900– 1940,” in Marie Lavigne and Yolande Pinard, eds., Travailleuses et féministes: Les femmes dans la société québecoise (Montreal: Boréal, 1983), 100–1. In Brussels, figures for 1910 show women made up 43 per cent of the active population, one-third of whom worked in industries. Eliane Gubin, “La grande ville, un lieu féminin. L’exemple de Bruxelles avant 1914,” in Eliane Gubin and Jean-Pierre Nandrin, La ville et les femmes en Belgique: histoire et sociologie (Brussels: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1993), 88–9.

238  Notes to pages 108–12 78 Historians have chronicled the abuses and exploitation to which working women were subjected in this period: long hours, low pay, sweating system, and dangerous working conditions, among others. On Montreal, see especially Micheline Dumont et al., L’histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles, 2nd ed. (Montreal: Le Jour, 1992); Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993); Lavigne and Pinard, eds., Travailleuses et féministes; Julie Podmore, “St. Lawrence Boulevard as Third City: Place, Gender, and Difference along Montreal’s ‘Main’” (PhD thesis, McGill University, 1999). On Brussels, see volume 4 of Sextant on work (1995), and volume 7 of Les Cahiers de la Fonderie, on female labour (1989). Despite these conditions, Gubin sees the increasing participation of women in industrial work as a source of emancipation in this period that gave them a more public forum of affirmation than did domestic work. Eliane Gubin, “La grande ville,” 94. 79 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Procèsverbaux des séances d’enquête concernant le travail industriel, 17. 80 Elizabeth Kirkland, “Mothering Citizens: Elite Women in Montreal, 1890–1914” (PhD thesis, McGill University, 2011), 169–70. 81 “Report of James Mitchell,” in Province of Quebec, Sessional Papers #7 35, no. 1 (1902), 147. 82 “Report of L.D. Provencher,” in Province of Quebec, Sessional Papers #7 39, no. 1 (1906), 192; 32, no. 1 (1898), 83; 33, no. 1 (1900), 68. 83 Victor Van Tricht, L’enfant du pauvre: causerie (Namur: P. Godenne, 1895), 39–40. 84 Province of Quebec, Report of the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis, 57. 85 F.A. Baillairgé, La nature, la race, la santé dans leurs rapports avec la productivité du travail: applications à la province de Québec (Joliette: by the author, 1890), 59–63. 86 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Procèsverbaux des séances d’enquête concernant le travail industriel, 63. 87 Schmidt, Le livre du travailleur, 15. 88 Local Council of Women of Montreal, Montreal Local Council of Women: 21st anniversary, 1893–1915 (Montreal: Witness, 1915), 16. The same reasoning was voiced in Brussels, where it was noted that legislation was needed for all workers and that limiting government intervention to women weakened their cause, excluding them from certain jobs and responsibilities and confining them to the bottom of the pay scale. See Rutgers-Hoitsema, “La législation et le travail de la femme,” in Marie Popelin, ed., Actes du Congrès féministe international de Bruxelles, 1912. (Brussels: Charles Bulens, 1912), 55–61.

Notes to pages 112–22  239 89 Edward Slavishak, Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 15. 90 Georges Eekhoud, L’autre vue (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1904), 15–16. 91 The Metropolitan Jubilee Souvenir (Montreal: W. Wallach, 1897), 7. 92 Montreal by Gaslight, (Montreal?: s.n., 1889), 24–32. 93 Victor Van Tricht, À l’usine: causerie (Namur: P. Godenne, 1889), 8–11. Van Tricht is not referring specifically to a Brussels foundry. Nevertheless, I cite his work as he was intellectually active in Brussels and therefore contributed directly to the discourse about the effects of industrialization in that city. 94 “Speech of the Honourable Thomas Duffy, Commissioner of Public Works,” Sessional Papers #7 33, no. 1 (1900), 44. 95 Jules Félix, “La journée des trois huit,” Abonnement Germinal 10, no.1 (1913): 10. 4. Home for a Rest 1 The Montreal Daily Star, for instance, avoided making an improbable direct comparison to Paris, but nonetheless spoke of Montreal’s development in reference to Napoleon III. See Souvenir Number of The Montreal Daily Star: Reviewing the Various Financial and Commercial Interests Represented in the City of Montreal (Montreal: Henning and Camp, 1890). Urban planner G.A. Nantel went to great lengths to describe how Paris was a model for Montreal to emulate: G.A. Nantel, La métropole de demain: avenir de Montréal (Montreal: Typ. Adjutor Menard, 1910). Brussels was frequently referred to as a “little Paris” by locals and visitors alike: Bruxelles et ses environs, 8th ed. (Paris: Guides Conty, 1908); Guide de Bruxelles et de ses environs: Souvenir du Grand Hôtel (Brussels, s.d.). This comparison annoyed mayor Charles Buls, who insisted that the distinct personality of the city and its people lay in its ability to differentiate itself from the neighbouring metropolis. Charles Buls, Esthétique des villes (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe, 1893), 24. 2 Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women 1870–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 3, 29. 3 Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labor in Canada, Evidence, Quebec Part I (Ottawa: A. Senecal, 1889), 643; Enquête sur les rapports qui existent entre le capital et le travail au Canada, vol. 1: Québec: 1ère partie (Ottawa: A. Senécal, 1889), 719. The negative effects of housing on health were also denounced at the Brussels hearings. Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Réponses au questionnaire

240  Notes to pages 122–5 concernant le travail industriel (Brussels: Société belge de librairie, 1887), 1: 582. 4 Herbert Brown Ames, The City below the Hill: A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal, Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972 [1897]), 40. 5 Louis Laberge, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1887 (Montreal: Perrault Printing Co., 1888). 6 A.B. LaRocque, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1882, (Montreal: Louis Perrault and Co., 1883), 21–2. 7 F.P. Mackelcan, Our Health and Our Diseases, Condition of Montreal in a sanitary point of view we must reform or continue to suffer: addressed to physicians, to families, to property owners, to architects, to aldermen (Montreal: Lovell, 1879), 32. When the author made these comments at the beginning of our period, he considered this to be a rather limited problem. By the end of this period of sustained immigration, Montreal hygienists had developed a deep suspicion of ethnic minorities. Commenting on immigrant groups in the city, “especially the exotics” whose homes seemed to have been “transported, as if by magic, beyond the seas,” one hygienist lamented that “it suffices to walk through their neighbourhoods once and set foot in their houses to glimpse the point to which insalubrity, clutter, and dirtiness dominate.” E.E.M. Gouin, “Le logement de la famille ouvrière: ce qu’il doit être, ce qu’il est, comment l’améliorer,” L’école sociale populaire, nos. 9–11 (1912), 28. 8 Séverin Lachapelle, La santé pour tous, ou Notions élémentaires de physiologie et d’hygiène à l’usage des familles (Montreal: Compagnie d’imprimerie canadienne, 1880), 219. 9 Gouin, “Le logement de la famille ouvrière,” 18, 32. 10 Elzéar Pelletier, Nos logis insalubres. Our Unhealthy Dwellings (Conseil d’hygiène de la province de Québec, 1910), 16. Experts in Brussels engaged in a similar discourse, warning against the “morbid manifestations caused by altered blood” when fresh air and light were lacking. Report by Dr Lantsheere, in Ville de Bruxelles, Comité de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance, Rapport sur l’exercise de 1899 (hereafter Comité de patronage annual report), 23. 11 On these transnational connections, see Nicolas Kenny, “From Body and Home to Nation and World: The Varying Scales of Transnational Urbanism in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the twentieth century,” Urban History 36, no. 2 (2009). 12 Marie Du Caju, Manuel domestique d’alimentation et d’hygiène (Termonde: Ant. Du Caju-Beeckman, Imprimeur-librairie, 1889), 41, 45.

Notes to pages 125–8  241 13 Ibid., 42–3. 14 Ministère de l’intérieur et de l’instruction publique – Conseil supérieur d’hygiène publique, Habitations ouvrières (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1888), 106. 15 BCB, 5 October 1885, 502. 16 F. Hankar, A. Van Billoen, and A. Ven Melle, Les habitations ouvrières en Belgique (Brussels: Exposition internationale de Milan en 1906/A. Lesigne, 1906), 2. 17 Annick Stélandre, “Épargne et propriété. La loi du 9 août 1889 sur les habitations ouvrières,” Cahiers de la Fonderie 6 (1989): 22. Stélandre points out that although 60,000 housing units were built in the twenty-five years following the creation of these committees, this benefited only a small proportion of industrial workers, a certain “elite” whose salary allowed them to devote a significant part of their budget to the purchase of a home over twenty or twenty-five years. 18 Association pour l’amélioration des logements ouvriers, Rapport annuel 1894 (Association for the improvement of workers’ housing, hereafter AALO), 32. 19 One of the most meticulous examinations of the evolution of this distinction is Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1939]). On domestic architecture, see Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 26. 20 Daniel Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 133–47. On the sexualized nature of nineteenth-century slumming, see Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 21 Koven, Slumming, 3. 22 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 52, 69; Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 320, 325. 23 Charles Lagasse and Charles De Quéker, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1890 (Brussels: Ville de Bruxelles, 1890), 5–6; Janet L. Polasky, Reforming Urban Labor: Routes to the City, Roots in the Country (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 26. 24 Émile Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1903, 1904 et 1905: rapport présenté au Comité de Patronage de la Ville de Bruxelles (Brussels: Imprimerie des Institutions de Prévoyance, 1905), viii.

242  Notes to pages 128–134 25 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Comptes rendus des séances plénières, mémoires, rapports, lettres, etc., envisageant la question ouvrière dans son ensemble (Brussels: Société belge de librairie, 1888), 4: 167. 26 Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières, ix–x. Emphasis in the original. 27 Jean-Pierre Goubert, La conquête de l’eau: l’avènement de la santé à l’âge industriel (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1986), 88–90. The Belgian housing specialist Maurice Falloise, for instance, noted that buildings with several apartments, as many workers lived in, should be designed so that each household had access to its own balcony on which all water-related facilities were located, thus reducing the possibilities for people to come into contact in the context of henceforth highly private activity. Maurice Falloise, De la construction d’habitations ouvrières (Liège: La Meuse, 1906), 41. 28 Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), 2. 29 A draining well leading to the underground sewage pipes. The term comes from the typical Bruxellois dialect and combines the Flemish words sterf and put, meaning death and hole. The term is highly evocative, and its use subtly added to the grimness described. In Montreal, the English term, “slop trunk,” sometimes found in the sources, also offers startling imagery. 30 Ministère de l’intérieur et de l’instruction publique – Conseil supérieur d’hygiène publique, Habitations ouvrières, 107. 31 Louis Laberge, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1885, 12, and 1889, 10; AM, CS, VM 45, 28 August 1882. 32 Province of Quebec, Report of the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis (Montreal: The Commission, 1910), 77. 33 Pelletier, Nos logis insalubres, 16. 34 “It seems to me that our initiative, properly understood, is one of the most useful, the most fruitful that can be encouraged in these troubled times in which we live. It is, to my eyes, the social undertaking par excellence, the reform of all reforms, and it comes just in time!” affirmed the Association’s president at a general assembly. AALO (1895), 9. 35 Ville de Bruxelles, Comité de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance, Rapport sur l’exercise de 1904 (hereafter Comité de patronage Annual Report), 12. 36 AALO (1896), 21–2. 37 Mackelcan, Our Health and Our Diseases, 30. 38 Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 151.

Notes to pages 134–7  243 39 Georges Vigarello, Le propre et le sale: l’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 207. On the moralizing discourse in Brussels specifically, see Patricia Van Den Eekhout, “Brussels,” in M.J. Daunton, ed., Housing the Workers, 1850–1914: A Comparative Perspective (Leicester: Leicester University Press,1990), 67–106, as well as chapter 1 of Polasky, Reforming Urban Labor. 40 F.A. Baillairgé, La nature, la race, la santé dans leurs rapports avec la productivité du travail: applications à la province de Québec (Joliette: by the author, 1890), 45. 41 Du Caju, Manuel domestique d’alimentation et d’hygiène, 9. 42 Olivier Faure, “Le regard des médecins,” in Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello, eds., Histoire du corps (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 2: 40. 43 Baillairgé, La nature, la race, la santé, 46–7. 44 Montreal by Gaslight, (Montreal?: s.n., 1889), 19. 45 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1898), 10. 46 AALO (1902), 24. On the “quasi-biblical tones” of urban reformers in this period, see Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 151. On the close link between housing reform and Catholic notions of duty to the poor, see Polasky, Reforming Urban Labor, 159. 47 L’Hygiéniste 1, no. 2 (July 1894): 34–40. See also Joseph Israël Desroches, Traité élémentaire d’hygiène privée, 2nd ed. (Montreal: W.F. Daniel, 1890), 24. The study of “nasography” even purported to read people’s personality from the shape of their nose. L’hygiène illustrée 2, nos. 3–4 (March–April 1911): 14. See also Almanach du peuple (1900), 30. Most of history’s “great men” had large noses, affirmed the writers, citing as examples Hippocrates, Luther, Michelangelo, Mazarin, and Corneille, among others. 48 Stanley Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 113. 49 Félix Putzeijs and E. Putzeijs, Hygiène appliquée: les installations sanitaires des habitations privées et collectives (Brussels: Ramlot frères et soeurs, 1904), 209. 50 Du Caju, Manuel domestique d’alimentation et d’hygiène, 9. 51 Léonce de Castillon and Fernand Bansart, La question des habitations à bon marché et des logements à bon marché en Belgique et à l’étranger: étude du projet de loi belge instiuant une société nationale des habitations à bon marché (Brussels: Établissements généraux d’imprimerie, 1914), 16. Gouin, “Le logement de la famille ouvrière,” 9. 52 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1904), 10. 53 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 21.

244  Notes to pages 137–43 54 AALO (1896), 30; AALO (1901), 19, 24; Forest Comité Officiel de Patronage des Habitations Ouvrières et des Institutions de Prévoyance de SaintGilles (Anderlecht, Saint-Gilles et Uccle), Ier Rapport Annuel. Travaux du Comité en 1901 (Brussels: A.R. De Ghilage, 1902), 81. 55 A. Vander Moere, Habitations ouvrières (Brussels: Jules de Meester, 1901), 4. 56 AALO (1895), 3. 57 Albert Soenens, Les habitations ouvrières en Belgique (Brussels: Veuve Ferdinand Larcier, 1894), 27. 58 Ames, The City below the Hill, 45. (“Water Closet” Ames was so personally troubled by the situation that he even posted on his office wall a map with coloured representations of where the “privy abomination” was at its worst.); AALO (1896), 31. 59 AALO (1895), 22. Émile Vandervelde, L’exode rural et le retour aux champs (Paris: Féliz Alcan, 1910), 239. 60 Gouin, “Le logement de la famille ouvrière,” 7. 61 Lagasse and De Quéker, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1890, 9. 62 Jerram, Streetlife, 321. 63 Indeed, new conceptions of time and the decline of traditional delineations between night and day during this period gave rise to a vision of the night as a time of danger, subversions, and charged sexuality. See Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfreid Imhoff and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 23, 178. 64 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Réponses au questionnaire concernant le travail industriel, 1039. 65 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1912), 102. 66 Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières, 19. 67 Lagasse and De Quéker, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1890, 8. 68 A.A. Foucher, “La lumière considérée dans ses rapports avec l’hygiène,” Journal d’hygiène populaire 4, no. 2 (1887): 29; Comité de patronage Annual Report (1907), 34, and (1904), 97. 69 Falloise, De la construction d’habitations ouvrières, 41. 70 AALO (1896), 16. 71 Ibid., 7. 72 Louis Laberge, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1885 (Montreal: Perrault Printing Co., 1886), 16. 73 Lagasse and De Quéker, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1890, 4. 74 In 1897, to cite but one instance, the Bas-Ixelles section reported that “the committee complains of the resistance it encounters when it seeks to remove a family from some unhealthy dwelling.” AALO (1897), 27.

Notes to pages 143–59  245 75 AALO (1896), 22, and (1895), 19. 76 L’ouvrier, 19 January 1884, 2. 77 Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Réponses au questionnaire concernant le travail industriel, 582. 78 AVB, Fonds maisons ouvrières, Archives du comité de patronage des habitations à bon marché et des institutions de prévoyance de Bruxelles, box 10, letter dated 23 April 1892. 79 Baillairgé, La nature, la race, la santé, 48. 80 Journal d’hygiène populaire 1, no. 1 (May 1884): 2. 81 L’hygiène illustrée 1, no. 1 (October 1910): 11. 82 Ibid.; Lucy Schmidt, Le livre des mères, 7th ed. (Gand: Société coopérative “Volksdrukkerij,” 1912), 36–7. 83 Comité de Rédaction du Conseiller des Ménagères, Almanach illustré des ménagères (Brussels: Conseiller des Ménagères, 1895), 12. 84 AALO (1895), 19. 85 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1901), 10–11. 86 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1904), 137. 87 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1905), 178. 88 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1901), 13. 89 Comité de patronage Annual Report (1904), 133. 90 Le Canada 1, no. 285 (9 March 1904), 7. 91 L’Almanach de Montréal (1899), 11. 92 Le Canada 1, no. 257 (5 February 1904): 1. 93 Marius Renard, Notre pain quotidien (Brussels: Association des ecrivains belges, 1909), 145–6, 252–3. 5. Street Scenes 1 “À travers la Belgique,” Le Foyer: Bulletin mensuel des intérêts féminins 12, no. 4 (October 1914): 69; Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Kurt Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 410. 2 Théodore Hannon, “La rue,” in Alexandre Braun, Maurice Benoidt, and Franz Mahutte, eds., Notre pays (Brussels: Librairie national d’art et d’histoire, 1909, 1919), 1: 359–65. 3 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 159. 4 For discussions on the history of urban planning in these two cities, see Annick Germain and Damaris Rose, Montréal: The Quest for a Metropolis (Chichester: Wiley, 2000); Jean-Claude Marsan, Montreal in Evolution:

246  Notes to pages 159–61 Historical Analysis of the Development of Montreal’s Architecture and Urban Environment (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981); Claire Billen, Jean-Marie Duvosquel, and Charley Case, Bruxelles (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 2000); Christian Dessouroux, Espaces partagés, espaces disputés. Bruxelles, une capitale et ses habitants (Brussels: Université Libre de Bruxelles and Ministère de la Région de Bruxelles-Capitale, 2008). 5 Petition from the Montreal Local Council of Women to the city’s health committee, AM, CS VM 45 S1 SS2 SSS1, letter dated 22 April 1899. Montreal’s city doctor even called for a specific law forbidding individuals from disposing of fruit and vegetable peelings on the street: “It will be noticed that in summertime the larger quantities of fruit sold and eaten upon the streets has led to numberless complaints on the part of people who have either sustained injury [or] come near doing so by slipping upon the peelings of fruit, especially banana skins.” Banana peel jokes notwithstanding, this was no laughing matter. AM, CS, VM 45 S1 SS2 SSS1, undated letter from Laberge to Health Board in box containing items from 1897 to 1898. 6 BCB, 11 December 1893, 641–2. (Richald). 7 J.H. Malo, La romance de Montréal sur l’air: Gai lonlon joli rosier du joli mois de mai (Montreal: J.H. Malo, 1909). Favouritism and corruption indeed coloured municipal politics in Montreal during this period. See Michèle Dagenais, Des pouvoirs et des hommes: l’administration municipale de Montréal, 1900–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 10, 13–14. 8 AM, CIE, VM 40, S2, D40, letter from Léandre Fauteux dated 12 November 1880, followed by undated inspector’s report. 9 Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Bettina Bradbury, “Pigs, Cows and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival among Montreal Families, 1861–81,” Labour/Le Travail 14 (Autumn 1984). 10 BCB, 28 November 1881, 789 (Allard). 11 Louis Laberge, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1886 (Montreal: Perrault Printing Co., 1887), 44. 12 Thomas Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (London: E. and F.N. Spon, 1997), 285. 13 E. Creplet, “Voies publiques. Élargissement des carrefours pour les besoins de la circulation,” Tekhné 8 (18 May 1911): 91–3; “Le tracé des villes,” Tekhné 2 (6 April 1911): 17. 14 Françoise Choay, L’urbanisme: utopies et réalités (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 16–25. 15 Charles Buls, Esthétique des villes (Brussels: Bruylant-Christophe et Cie, 1893), 7–9.

Notes to pages 161–70  247 16 Xavier Marmier, Lettres sur l’Amérique: Canada, États-Unis, Havane, Rio de la Plata (Paris: Plon, 1881), 90. 17 Percy Nobbs, “City Planning as Applied to Montreal,” in For a Better Montreal: Report of the First Convention of the City Improvement League (Montreal, 1910), 46. 18 For Buls, perfectly rectilinear streets were suitable for unscrupulous Americans, while Brussels preferred to highlight its Flemish and Walloon heritage. Buls, Esthétique des villes, 8, 41. 19 G.A. Nantel, La métropole de demain: avenir de Montréal (Montreal: Typ. Adjutor Menard, 1910), 152. 20 J.J.S Jacquemin, Des habitations ouvrières dans les villes: résolution de cette question ou moyen de faire des “millionaires” par le multiplicateur de capitaux et de maisons d’habitation, Exposition universelle et internationale de Liège 1905 (Liège: Librairie Nierstrasz, 1906), 35. 21 Louis Dumont-Wilden, Coins de Bruxelles (Brussels: Association des écrivains belges, 1905), 10–11. 22 Franz Mahutte, Bruxelles vivant (Brussels: Bureaux de l’anthologie contemporaine des écrivains français et belges, 1891), 7. 23 A.J. Bray and John Lesperance, “A Glimpse from the Mountain: Montreal,” in George Monro Grant, ed., Artistic Quebec: Described by Pen and Pencil (Toronto: Belden Brothers, 1888), 106. 24 Arsène Bessette, Le débutant (Bibliothèque Québécoise, 2001 [1914]), 79. 25 N.M. Hinshelwood, Montreal and Vicinity: Being a history of the old town, a pictorial record of the modern city, its sports and pastimes, and an illustrated description of many charming summer resorts around (Montreal: Desbarats, 1903), 87-88. On the annual celebration of winter during this period, see Sylvie Dufresne, “Le carnaval d’hiver de Montréal, 1883–1889,” Revue d’histoire urbaine 11, no. 3 (1983). 26 Foreword by Eugène Demolder, in Amédée Lynen, Bruxelles en douze lithographies (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1896), 1–2. 27 See A. Laurent, Bruxelles, ses estaminets et ses bières (Brussels: Bibliothèque de la brasserie, 1883), 5–6. 28 Pierre Van den Dugen “De la gaîté frondeuse à la nostalgie: aux origines d’un Bruxelles qui bruxelles (XIXe–XXe siècles),” in Serge Jaumain and Paul-André Linteau, eds., Vivre en ville. Bruxelles et Montréal au XIXe et XXe siècles (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), 342–4. 29 Georges Eekhoud, L’autre vue (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1904), 62, 98, 103. 30 Marguerite Baulu, Modeste Automne (Paris: A. Leclerc, 1911), 178–9. 31 Ibid., 194.

248  Notes to pages 171–6 32 Marius Renard, Notre pain quotidien (Brussels: Association des écrivains belges, 1909), 25–32. In Arsène Bessette’s Montreal novel, the character Paul experiences the same gradual rise in confidence as he acclimatizes to the city’s sensorial intensity: “The young man, at first dazed by this continuous coming and going, accompanied by the annoying sound of the tramways, mixed into the regular rat-a-tat of the horses trotting on the asphalt, soon regained his sangfroid, and enjoyed this spectacle that was new for him.” Bessette, Le débutant, 79. 33 Tekhné 26 (21 September 1911). 34 Papa-Noé, “Les plaisirs à bon marché,” L’ouvrier 1, no. 8 (19 January 1884). 35 Renard, Notre pain quotidien, 93. 36 Dr J.R., “Les Frileux,” Le Montréal 1, no. 2 (15 October 1899): 14. 37 Victor Van Tricht, L’enfant du pauvre: causerie, 5th ed. (Namur: P. Godenne, 1895), 39. 38 Almanach de la jeune fille et de la femme, 1913. In the second half of the nineteenth century the sidewalk increasingly became understood as a “marker of modernity.” The sidewalk was designed to improve the fluidity of circulation and eventually became “an object of urban governance.” That pedestrians felt displaced from these distinct spaces attests both to the unfinished nature of this project, and to the conflicts over what geographer Nicholas Blomley identifies as the mix of public and private uses of the sidewalk. Nicholas K. Blomley, Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow (London: Routledge, 2011), 56–59. 39 BCB, 13 July 1903, 5. 40 My discussion of this incident is based on the following references: “Les premières victimes de l’auto meurtrier,” La Presse, 13 August 1906, 12; “Chauffeur of Automobile Held Responsible for Death of Antoine Toutant,” Montreal Daily Star, 13 August 1906, 6; “Killed by an Auto,” The Gazette, 13 August 1906, 5: on the testimony gathered at the coroner’s inquest on the same day: “Cour des sessions de la paix, coronners, plumitif,” no. 450, 1904–7, BAnQ – centre d’archives de Montréal. See also Stuart Nulman, Beyond the Mountain: True Tales about Montreal (Kirkland, QC: Callawind, 2002), 52–3. 41 BCB, 23 June 1890. 42 Centre public d’aide social, Fonds affaires générales (Belgian public social assistance centre, hereafter CPAS), file #174, report dated 30 December 1897. 43 On the effects of street lighting on the modern city, see in particular Mark J. Bouman, “Luxury and Control: The Urbanity of Sreet Lighting in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” Journal of Urban History 14, no. 1 (1987); Lynda

Notes to pages 176–7  249 Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930, trans. Pierre Gottfreid Imhoff and Dafydd Rees Roberts (London: Reaktion, 1998). On the varied uses and experiences of the nineteenth-century American night, the gender, class, and age distinctions these entailed, and the concerns expressed by reformers and moralists, see Peter C Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 44 AM, “Valedictory of the Hon. J.O. Villeneuve ex-mayor. Delivered on the 10th of February 1896,” 7. 45 BCB, 7 November 1910, 1490. Historian Joachim Schlör points out that at the turn of the century, “more and more, ‘nocturnal insecurity’ is equated with the absence of light, and the erection of street lamps in dangerous places is seen as an appropriate measure to restore security. So the light brings out the growing contradictions within the city; the brighter it shines in the centres, the more starkly do the outlines of the darker regions stand out.” Schlör, Nights in the Big City, 65. 46 AM, CIE, VM40, S2, D57, letter dated 10 April 1899. In addition to ensuring the security of customers, electric lighting also took on an important commercial function in the late nineteenth century. Seen as a fundamental aspect of the design of department stores, lights served to promote objects on display and attract passers-by. See Serge Jaumain, “Vitrines, architecture et distribution. Quelques aspects de la modernisation des grands magasins bruxellois pendant l’entre-deux-guerres,” in Jaumain and Linteau, eds., Vivre en ville, 293–6. 47 As Baldwin argues, although the electrification of streetlights attracted ever greater numbers of people to the streets past sundown, the nocturnal street remained a male-dominated space, “suffused with sexuality,” in which codes of behaviour and morality were very different than during the day. For many middle-class observers, the putative safety of electric lighting was counterbalanced by the sense that “nocturnal street culture still stood in opposition to the values of respectability and domesticity.” Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night, 175–8. 48 Émile Verhaeren, Les villes tentaculaires précédées des campagnes hallucinées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1949), 113–14.

250  Notes to pages 177–85 49 Gaston P. Labat, Almanach municipal de Montréal (Montreal: Imprimerie Guertin, 1906), 17. On reactions to electric light in this period, see Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, 73–6. Nead, Victorian Babylon. 50 BCB, 12 December 1894, 664–5. Aside from the atmosphere created by gas or electric lights, even the shape of the actual fixtures stimulated debates on the aesthetic merits of Brussels’s public lighting initiatives. One councillor, expressing his satisfaction at the light produced by new fixtures installed on the Boulevard du Hainaut, also felt compelled to denounce their “detestable” appearance. From a revolutionary perspective, he joked, the council could congratulate itself on the effect these lampposts produced, as they would be “excellent lanterns from which to hang future aristocrats.” BCB, 29 April 1907, 846. 51 Abel Torcy, À l’ombre des saules (Brussels: Oscar Lamberty, 1908), 39. Labat, Almanach municipal de Montréal, 65. “Eh! ne vous zeste, ziste, zeste, / Eh ne vous estimez pas tant!” Almanach comique, 12th ed. (Montreal: Pharmacie Bernard, 1896), 37. 52 Edmond Nicolaï, La dépopulation des campagnes et l’accroissement de la population des villes (Brussels: P. Weissenbruch, 1903), 56. 53 The exception occurred in 1884, when the proposal for the fair was voted down by eleven votes to nine. The following year, when the issue again came up for discussion, councillor Richald, one of the event’s primary supporters at the municipal administration, noted that the result of the 1884 decision had simply been to move the fair a few metres away from the Brussels city limits, across the street to the Saint-Gilles side of the boulevard. “We thus experienced all of the inconveniences of the fair without reaping any of its benefits,” he drily pointed out. BCB, 27 April 1885, 361. 54 BCB, 25 January 1897, 25–6. 55 Théodore Hannon, Au pays de Manneken-Pis (Brussels: Henry Kistemaeckers, 1883), 123–6. 56 Eugène Demolder, “Champ de foire,” in Amédée Lynen, 14 motifs de Kermesses (Brussels: Ch. Vos, 1889), 1–7. See also Franz Mahutte’s colourful discussion of the fair in Mahutte, Bruxelles vivant, 53–63. 57 BCB, 31 October 1898, 681. 58 Georges Kaïser, Au Canada (Brussels: Société belge de librairie, 1897), 80–2. 59 For an overview of the history of public toilets in Brussels, see Claire Billen and Jean-Michel Decroly, Petits coins dans la grande ville: les toilettes publiques à Bruxelles du moyen âge à nos jours (Brussels: Musée de la Ville de Bruxelles, 2003). On toilets and culture more broadly, see Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner, eds., Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).

Notes to pages 185–90  251 60 Louis Laberge, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1885, 99. Over a decade after Kaïser’s passage through Montreal, Laberge confirmed that the situation the traveller had experienced was not exceptional and argued that the construction of additional public toilets would undoubtedly further the cause of temperance in the city. “It is well known,” he affirmed, “that men are compelled to patronize restaurants and saloons in order to have a chance to relieve themselves.” Laberge, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1910, 9–10. Even in Brussels, where public toilets were more accessible, those living in residential areas away from the centre reported encountering similar problems. Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Procès-verbaux des séances d’enquête concernant le travail industriel, 4 vols. (Brussels: A. Lesigne, 1887), 2: 28. 61 BCB, 11 April 1881, 479–82. 62 Jean D’Acier in La Minerve, 13 April, 1894, and in La Presse, 5 May 1894. “Les chalets de nécessité: Va-t-on enfin les construire,” Le Monde, 14 April 1894. 63 BCB, 3 February 1879, 76 (Durant); Louis Laberge, Report of the Sanitary State of the City of Montreal for the Year 1885 (Montreal: Perrault Printing Co., 1886), 99 64 BCB, 5 August 1895, 6. 65 AM, CHS, VM 21, S2, letter from Alfred Bertin to Hygiene committee, undated, 1905; AM, Commission de l’aqueduc (Aqueduct commission, hereafter CA), VM 47, S4, D7, documents in file dated between July 1890 and May 1894. The squares Bertin had in mind were Chaboillez, Victoria, Place d’Armes, Dalhousie, Viger, Saint-Louis, Dominion, Richmond, and Beaver Hall. 66 R. Drouin, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Municipal Buildings for the Year 1912, 8–9. “Lettre ouverte aux Commissaires de la cité de Montréal par un ouvrier,” in Le Travail, 28 December 1912. 67 BCB, 10 December 1882, 947–8. Montreal’s hygiene committee also reported less use of public toilets by women, noting that in the first months of activity in the luxurious new establishment, 55,401 men had visited between August and December of 1913, while only 14,359 women had done the same. S. Boucher, Report of the Municipal Department of Hygiene and Statistics of Montreal for the Year 1913 (Montreal: Perrault Printing Co., 1886), 13. 68 BCB, 27 December 1901, 973–4; BCB 2 February, 1891, 45; BCB, 10 December 1882, 947. 69 BCB, 27 December 1901, 973; BCB, 16 December 1911, 1483.

252  Notes to pages 191–8 70 BCB, 8 December 1913, 1336. 71 Joseph Israël Desroches, Mort apparente et mort réelle, ou De l’assistance corporelle et spirituelle des moribonds: rapport présenté au XXIe Congrès eucharistique international de Montréal (Montreal: L.J.A. Derome, 1911), 12. 72 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 559, 69. 73 “The question was once raised whether the Mountain should go to Mohammed, or Mohammed should go to the Mountain – but it was not in Montreal. Here everybody goes to the Mountain – if not alive, then afterward,” mused the American author Henry P. Phelps in Montreal for Tourists (New York: Delaware and Hudson, 1904). For more on the history of these mountaintop graveyards, see Pierre-Richard Bisson, Mario Brodeur, and Daniel Drouin, Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Montreal: Henri Rivard, 2004); Brian J. Young, Respectable Burial: Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 74 Ashton Oxenden, The History of My Life, an Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 177. “There is however, something very sad and unsatisfactory about the ceremony,” he nonetheless added, “for, owing to the severe cold in winter, there is usually no service in the open air, as in England; and, for the impenetrable state of the ground, no actual internment can take place.” My thanks to Sean Mills for pointing out this source. 75 Young, Respectable Burial, 71. 76 “Règlement sur les inhumations et les transports funèbres” BCB, 3 May 1880, 507. 77 Verhaeren, Les villes tentaculaires, 148–9. 78 Dumont-Wilden, Coins de Bruxelles, 49; Neel Doff, Keetje (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1987), 29. 79 BCB, 19 December 1903, 1651, and 13 June 1904, 894. 80 J.A. Beaudry, “À propos des cimetières,” Journal d’hygiène populaire 7, no. 3 (July 1890): 75. 81 AM, CHS, VM 21 S2, “Report from Louis Laberge to Hygiene and Statistics Committee,” in box dated 1905–6. 82 Bisson, Brodeur, and Drouin, Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, 93. 83 CPAS, Fonds affaires générales, file #42, letter from Wehenke, secretary of the Conseil général des hospices to G. Washer, director, 13 August 1880. 84 BCB, 13 June 1904, 898–900. Hubert was most likely referring to the Anatomy Institute. 85 Léopold Courouble, “Croquis de mœurs bruxelloises,” in Braun, Benoidt, and Mahutte, eds., Notre pays, 2: 401–2.

Notes to pages 200–11  253 Conclusion: Keeping in Touch 1 L’indépendance belge, 28 August 1914, 1. 2 W.G. Ross, Farquhar Robertson, and A.E. Labelle, Annual Report of the Harbour Commissionners of Montreal (Montreal, 1914), 5. 3 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Abacus, 1994), 329. 4 On the deadening of public urban space, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 5 C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Suzanne Berger, Notre première mondialisation: leçons d’un échec oublié (Paris: Seuil, 2003); Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914; Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); PierreYves Saunier, “Transatlantic Connections and Circulations in the 20th Century: The Urban Variable,” Informationen zur modernen Stadgeschichte 1 (2007). 6 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001 [1961]), 64–6. 7 Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6. 8 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 58. 9 T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 9. 10 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1994), 323. 11 Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1991), 4. 12 Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010).

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abonnement Germinal, 107, 108 Aboriginal peoples: representations of, 51–2, 165 AJJA Tobacco, 82 Albert, Prince, 148 alcohol consumption, 98–9, 137–8, 172, 181, 235n51, 236n71 Allée-Verte, 69 Ames, Herbert, 44, 65–6, 92, 122, 244n58 Anderlecht, 36, 60, 153 animals: in city, 159–60, 175; people compared to, 104, 136 Antwerp, 36, 54 Association for the Improvement of Workers’ Housing (Association pour l’amélioration du logement ouvrier), 132, 138, 147–8, 242n34 automobiles, 173–5 Baillairgé, F.A., 111, 134, 145–6 Balzac, Honoré de, 61, 227n29 Baudelaire, Charles, 8 Baulu, Marguerite: Modeste automne, 170 Beef, Joe, 194

Belgian Workers’ Party, 149 Berlin, 9, 186 Berman, Marshall, 9, 14, 158 Bertin, Alfred, 187, 188, 251n65 Bessette, Arsène, 165, 248n32 Bodeghem-Saint-Martin, 67 body, 5–6, 11–16, 18–19, 202–4; analogy to city, 11, 74, 103, 203; bodily practices, 11–12, 16, 21, 127, 129, 134, 155, 184, 203; death of, 191–3; and health, 134–5; and housing, 121–2, 124–6, 130, 133, 154–5; and industry, 84–6, 118; natural functions of, 184; representations of, 112–16, 169–70, 207; and streets, 157, 162, 172, 181, 198–9; of women, 110–12; of workers, 65, 70, 80, 84–5, 102–8, 237n72. See also experience; senses Bois de la Cambre, 37 Bourse, Place de la, 163, 173 breweries, 26, 167–9, 172 Brunfaut, Jules, 56, 57 Brussels: housing (working-class), 135–7; industrialization, 32–37, 82, 90–1, 93; origins of, 4; panorama,

296 Index 46–8, 54–61, 74; population, 36; social geography, 27–28, turn-ofthe-century developments, 29–32, 31, 47 Bruxelles féminin, 151, 153 Buls, Charles: on Montreal, 78–9, 230nn1–2; on streetlights, 77–8; on suburbs, 62–3; on urban planning, 161, 228n36, 239n1, 247n18 cannibalism, 70 Cartier, Jacques, 51, 226n12 cemeteries, 193, 196, 252n73 Certeau, Michel de, 10, 58 Chadwick, Edwin, 65 Chambers, Julius, 51 Champagne, Édouard Octave, 79 Charleroi, 33, 36 Chicago, 38, 122 Chicago school, 66 children: funerals for, 195–6; at play, 167, 168; and streets, 25–7, 179, 180; as workers, 92, 100, 109 cholera, 221n5 Cinquantenaire, parc du, 189 Commission du travail (Belgium), 65, 96–9, 106, 108–9, 139 128, 234n43, 239n3 commodo et incommodo inquiries, 87–9, 232n22 comparison: methodology, 20, 24–25, 37–41; of Montreal and Brussels, 4–6, 28–41, 77, 82, 86–7, 118, 155, 206, 209–10 Conseil supérieur d’hygiène publique, 130 countryside, 54, 67–70, 72, 142 Courouble, Léopold, 198–9 courthouse (Brussels), 24, 49, 50, 54, 58–9

Dante, 78, 230n2 Darling Brothers Foundry, 82 Dawson, Carl, 66 De Mot, Émile, 72, 173, 174, 190–1 De Quécker, Charles, 128, 140–1, 142 Delecosse, Hyppolite, 185–6, 189 Demolder, Eugène, 167–9, 172, 181 Desroches, Joseph Israël, 144, 191, 229n46 disease: and city, 13, 229n46; fear of, 8, 27–8 221n5; and industry, 106–8 Doff, Neel, 94, 108, 195; Jours de famine et de détresse, 94–6, 98, 234n41 Drummond, Julia, 112 Drummond, William Henry, 51 Du Caju, Marie, 125, 134–5, 136 Dumont-Wilden, Louis, 57–9, 92–3, 162–4, 195 Eekhoud, Georges: L’Autre vue, 113, 169–70 eight-hour movement, 21, 118, 220n55, 236n71 Elias, Norbert, 11, 13 Élisabeth, Princess, 148 Établissements Delhaize, 82 experience, 6, 16–19. See also senses factories: architecture, 81–4; conditions, 98–102; hygiene, 99–102, 104–8, 111; inspections, 99–102, 109–10, 112, 117; nuisances caused by, 84–8, 90, 207, 233n29, 234n36; tensions in, 97–8; work in, 102–8, 236n68 fair, Brussels summer, 179, 181–4, 182, 183, 250n53 Farrell, Eleanor, 49–51 feeling, 14–16, 23 First World War, 22, 200

Index 297 Forest, 36, 147 Foucault, Michel, 18, 218n42, 219n49 Fraser, John, 68–9 French Canadians, 146, 161, 165 funeral processions, 193–6

hygiene, 15; and death, 193, 196–7; marketing, 150–3; and morality, 121, 133–41, 144; science of, 99, 123–4, 135–6. See also under factories; housing

Gouin, Édouard, 124, 138–9, 240n7 governmentality, 218n42 Grand’Place, 34 Griffintown, 82, 92 Guibord, Joseph, 193–4

incest: middle-class fear of, 139–41 industrialization: complaints against, 86–91; and pollution, 69–70; and urban landscape, 43–6, 52–6, 58–74, 80–2, 84–5, 91–2. See also factories intersensoriality, 14

H.R. Ives & Co., 83 Hannon, Théodore, 157, 181 haptic. See touch Haute, rue, 170, 176 Hellemans, Émile, 128–9, 136–7, 140, 144 Hinshelwood, N.M., 167, 172 Horta, Victor, 29 hospitals, 27–8 housing (working-class): Belgian legislation, 126, 241n17; conditions, 124–6, 130–3; cultural stereotypes, 123, 240n7; hygiene, 123–6, 130–7, 145, 146–8, 154–5, 207–8; inspections, 122–3, 127–33, 142–3, 148; Order and Cleanliness contests, 148–50; ownership, 126, 144; patronage committees, 126–7, 132 (see also Association for the Improvement of Workers’ Housing); philanthropy, 122, 132–3; privacy, 121, 127, 155; promiscuity, 138–41; toilets, 129–130, 136, 138, 242n27 Howard, Ebenezer, 65, 135–6 Hubert, Émile, 190–1, 195, 197, 252n84 humour, in council proceedings, 190–1

Jacques-Cartier, place, 187–8 Kaïser, Georges, 53–4, 184–5 Labat, Gaston P., 177, 178–9 Laberge, Louis, 185, 186, 196, 251n60 labyrinth, city represented as, 43, 61–2, 75–7, 120, 206–7 Lachapelle, Séverin, 124 Lachine Canal, 34, 53, 65, 69 Laeken, 63, 133 Lagasse, Charles, 128, 140–1, 149 Larcier, Ferdinand, 24–28, 220n2 Larocque, Alphonse, 64–5, 123 Le Canada, 150, 152 Le Foyer, 156–7 Le Travail, 179, 180, 187–8 Leblond de Brumath, Adrien, 73 Leclerq, Émile, 56–7, 63–4 Lemmonier, Camille, 54–5 L'Émulation, 84 Léopold, quartier, 37, 89 Leopold Park, 197 Léopold II, 29 Liège, 33 light, 60, 156–7. See also streetlights

298 Index London, 38, 185 Louise, avenue, 37, 189 L'Ouvrier, 143, 171 Luxembourg station, 89, 160 Lynen, Amédée, 182 Mabille, Alfred, 54, 58, 67–9 Mackelcan, F.P., 133–4 Mahutte, Franz, 56, 57, 69–71, 93–4, 165 Mallet-Stevens, Robert, 171 Manchester, 38 Manneken Pis, 191 Marolles, 49, 169–70 Max, Adolphe, 190–1, 200 Meunier, Constantin, 105 miasma theory, 13, 88 Midi, boulevard du, 179 Minimes, rue des, 24–8, 40, 50 modernity: and body/senses, 5–6, 9–16, 23, 43, 75, 203, 207; critiques of, 56–8, 76, 168–9, 179; historiography, 6–9, 22, 205; and urban change, 4–5, 26–8, 38, 41, 85–6, 132, 202 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, 36, 60, 67, 82, 137 Montreal: housing (working-class), 122–5; industrialization, 32–7, 45, 82, 83, 85; origins of, 4; panorama, 44–6, 52–3, 56; population, 36; turn-of-the-century developments, 30–2, 35 Montreal Automobile Club, 174–5 Montreal Board of Health (health committee), 122–3, 130 Montreal Board of Trade, 80 Montreal by Gaslight, 114–5, 135 Montreal harbour, 34, 45–6, 79 Montreal Local Council of Women, 109, 112

Montreal Parks and Playground ­Association, 48–9 Montreal Seminary, 87 Mount Royal, 37, 46, 52–3, 73, 77, 79; cemetery, 193–4; look-out, 48–9 municipal administration, 37, 86–7, 246n7 Nantel, G.A., 161–2, 239n1 nasography, 243n47 nature: and city, 49–52, 160, 167; and suburbs, 66–70 New York City, 4, 38, 122 Nicolaï, Edmond, 66, 179 nighttime, 58, 60, 68, 156–7, 162–4, 176–8, 244n63 Nobbs, Percy, 161 noise. See sound orientalism: chimneys as minarets, 84; foremen as despots, 97 overwork, 104–6, 236n71 Oxenden, Ashton, 187, 252n74 Paepe, César de, 65, 106, 111 Palais de Justice. See courthouse Palais du vin, 82 panorama: genre, 42–3, 52, 61, 74–7, 206. See also under Brussels; Montreal Paris, 4, 38, 39, 158, 186; Montreal and Brussels compared to, 239n1 Park, Robert, 40 parks, 90, 233n32 Pelletier, Elzéar, 130–2 Pointe Saint-Charles, 69, 159 pollution, 69–70, 91. See also smoke prostitution, 26–7, 234n41 Provencher, Louise, 109

Index 299 Renard, Marius, 59, 70–1; Notre pain quotidien, 59–61, 153–4, 170–1, 172, 177 Richmond Square, 90 Royal Commission for Monuments (Belgium), 56 Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital (Canada), 96–9, 122 234n43 Royal Electric, 82, 87 Royale, place, 173 Sainctelette, Place, 176 Saint-Garbiel, 69 Saint-Gilles, 36 Saint-Jacques Cathedral, 52 Saint-Laurent Boulevard, 33, 165 Saint-Louis district (Montreal), 27–28, 40 Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End, 34 Sainte-Catherine Street, 173–4 Sainte-Gudule Cathedral, 156 Sainte-Hélène Island, 186 Schmidt, Lucy, 104–8, 111–12 schools, 24–28, 88 Senne, River, 10, 36, 69 senses, 3–4, 6, 12–16, 204–5; and housing, 130, 132–4, 142; and industry, 79–80, 82, 84, 87–91, 95–6, 102, 106, 117; and streets, 156–7, 162, 164–5, 168, 170, 171, 181, 199, 208–9; and urban landscape, 43, 46, 50–2, 54, 57, 59, 61, 71, 74–7. See also sight; smell; sound; taste; touch Shortt, Adam, 73 sight, 12–13, 75 Simmel, Georg, 9, 14–15, 40, 57, 157 Slosse, Auguste, 103 slums: historiography, 127, 129

smallpox, 221n5 smell, 13, 15, 71, 133–4, 160, 181, 182 smoke, 13, 19, 44, 55–6, 63, 78–9, 84, 85, 86, 88, 104, 231n5 Soenens, Albert, 138 Solvay Institute, 103–4, 237n71 sound, 13, 50–1, 68, 70–1, 165, 166 space, 6, 9–11, 201 spatial stories, 10–11, 58 St Lawrence River, 33, 50, 52, 68 streetlights, 92–3, 176–8, 249nn45–7, 250n50 streets: consumerism, 171, 178; planning, 158, 190–1, 208; sidewalks, 189, 248n38; traffic, 159 (see also automobiles); vendors, 165, 166, 246n5. See also under body; children; senses Struys, A., 147 suburbs: annexation, 227n33; in Brussels, 36–37; 61–74; faubourgs, 62–3, 74, 228n35; in Montreal, 33–4, 37, 61, 64–74; and nature, 66–70, and public health, 64–5 surmenage, 104–6, 236n71 taste, 217n37 Tekhné, 160, 171 toilets: in factories, 101–2, 109; in homes, 122, 132–3, 136, 138, 242n27; in streets, 178–91, 188, 192, 251n60, 251n67 Torcy, Abel, 178 touch, 14, 16 Toulouse Street, 89–90 Toussaint, Fernand, 163 transnationalism, 20, 39–40, 155, 201–2, 210 tuberculosis, 107–8

300 Index

Van Tricht, Victor, 110, 115–16, 172 Verhaeren, Émile, 64, 84–5; “Les Promeneuses,” 177; “La Mort,” 194–5 Victoria Bridge, 52, 56 Villeneuve, Joseph Octave, 176

walking, 57–9, 67–70, 92–3, 173 Wallonia: industry in, 34, 82; migration, 59; riots, 96 Windsor Hotel, 54, 79 winter, 167, 168, 172 women: as consumers, 150–3; as doctors, 176; as homemakers, 72, 144–50, 153–4; as workers, 108–112, 237n77, 237n78, 328n88

Walker, John Henry, 145

zoning, 37, 124

urban planning, 61–2, 75, 120, 158, 160–1, 173, 201