Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital, 2015

The Canadian Business History Association might want to consider giving free memberships to winners of the CHA’s Wallace K Ferguson prize, because business history is doing so well there. Business histories, broadly understood, of slavery in Sierra Leone and taxation in Russia have been recent winners, along with Alexia Yates’ history of Selling Paris. Here is the new history of capitalism at its best: not so much displacing other modes of history as enriching them, in ways that complicate our understanding of intention and agency. It’s very pleasing to see Canadians taking such a prominent part in this scholarship.

Take Paris. It always embodied both “civilization” and its rowdy democratic challenges. Entrepreneurs always seemed a little abject in comparison to kings, aristocrats, and revolutionaries. Yates rejects the stereotype and shows, with resounding success, what it meant to “see like a speculator.” Yates makes the link to James Scott’s work explicit in a chapter on speculators, but every chapter is a deep dive into a different economic identity. Together they show how different stakeholders projected their interests upon the multifarious and motley marketplace of Parisian property.

The story begins with the Third Republic, following the Franco-Prussian War and civil war that left the city in ruins but also relaunched Parisian self-government for the first time since the Revolution. A democratizing ethos rejected the oppressive, bourgeois monumentalism of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, and turned inward, with a renewed emphasis on, and revitalization of, domestic space—albeit an internal space made newly legible and visible by salesmanship. City officials struggled to pursue a public interest amidst the pressures for growth and opportunities for corruption, while avoiding booms and busts or runaway inflation. They got booms, busts, inflation, and corruption just the same. Billions of francs worth of property changed hands and house prices rose sixfold over the century.

The narrative arc is commercialization. Landed property, associated with patrician values, as a counterweight to capitalism—was gradually incorporated into the market, as just another commodity. The emergence of sociétés anonymes, commercial corporations to coordinate proprietors’ actions, expedited that process. Proprietors could band together, street by street, to get urban amenities, and then apply to obtain the status of public thoroughfare for their (unregulated) private roadways. Investor societies also seemed to offer modest wage-earners and white-collar workers the opportunity to buy housing shares, either as an avenue to or counterweight against the impossibility of buying property. For only a tiny fraction of Parisians were owner occupiers. Almost everyone was a tenant—some living in stunningly palatial apartments and some in tiny garrets a few feet above them. Almost everyone was, therefore, largely at the mercy of a whole congeries of unscrupulous entrepreneurs: developers and speculators, estate agents and landlords, lawyers and notaries. Women seemed to be especially vulnerable: in one play of 1882, Les Corbeaux, summarized by Yates, women could only protect themselves against the fraudsters by marrying one of their number.