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Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration: Domesticating the Halles in Second-Empire Paris Author(s): Victoria E. Thompson Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 87-109 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/286800 . Accessed: 29/09/2013 10:23

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Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration: Domesticating the Halles in Second-Empire Paris

Victoria E. Thompson

During the Second Empire, Emperor Napoleon III and prefect of the Seine Haussmann attempted to create a more splendid, more hygienic, and more secure Paris. In the 1850s and 1860s, old neighborhoods were demolished and replaced by broad thoroughfares, luxury housing, parks and open squares, and new centers for leisure and commerce.1 In his 1874 study of Parisian social life, customs, and institutions, writer and journalist Maxime DuCamp reflected on the changes in the capital during these years. According to DuCamp, one of the most dramatic transformations had been the renovation of the central food market, the halles:

The change [in the halles] has been profound and so radical that nothing has been left of ... the past. The pillars, those famous pil- lars of the Halles of which so much has heretofore been said, have disappeared; the criss-cross passages, dirty, unhealthy, by which one arrived with difficulty on the square, have given way to large pas- sageways, airy and commodious; those cabarets which, at midnight,

Victoria E. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Xavier University in Ohio. She is the author of "Creating Boundaries: Homosexuality and the Changing Social Order in France, 1830-1870," in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan (New York, 1996), and is currently working on a manuscript entitled "Modernity and the Marketplace: Women's Work and the Public Sphere in Nineteenth-Century Paris."

The author thanks Lynn Hunt for an incisive reading of an early draft of this article; Gillian Ahlgren, John Fairfield, Marie Giblin, Deborah Hamilton, and Carol Winkelmann for their com- ments; and the anonymous readers for French Historical Studies, whose remarks were immensely helpful. Research for the article was made possible by a French Government Chateaubriand Fel- lowship and a Xavier University Summer Research Stipend.

1 On the renovation of Paris during the Second Empire, see David Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995); Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 1852-1870: L'Urbanisme parisien d l'heure d'Haussman[n] (Paris and Lille, 1976); Howard Saalman, Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York, 1971); David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, N.J., 1958). For a long-range perspective, see Andre Morizet, Du Vieux Paris au Paris moderne: Haussmann et ses pridicesseurs (Paris, 1932). For a comparative view, see Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, Conn., 1986).

French Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter 1997) Copyright ? 1997 by the Society for French Historical Studies

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88 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

opened their doors to the entire vagabond population of the big city. . . have been uprooted and moved outside the limits of Paris; in modifying this area, in stripping it, it has been moralized.2

The halles had long been considered in need of renovation.3 In 1811, Napoleon had expressed his desire to build a larger and more im- pressive central market. Continued population growth during the first half of the century, the popular insurrections of the early 1830s, and the first bout of cholera in 1832 lent urgency to the project of renova- tion. By the early 1830s, the market was identified as both a center of popular revolt and a breeding ground for disease. By 1840 the project was a top priority. According to a member of the municipal council, "The halles quarter, .. . unhealthy, badly built and crowded, is of a re- pulsive appearance.... No other point of Paris requires improvement with such urgency, under the triple goal of improving public health, beautification, and public security." 4

In 1842 the municipal council established the commission des halles to study the question of renovation. Whereas Napoleon had envisioned the halles as the "People's Louvre," some members of the commission expressed concern over the continued presence of the popular classes in the center of the capital, arguing that maintaining the halles in its tra- ditional location would encourage the movement of luxury commerce to the fashionable and growing western part of the city, leaving the center of Paris to the poor.5 Others argued that moving the market to the outskirts of the capital would cause undue hardship for the work- ing men and women who depended on the halles for their provisions. After much deliberation, the prefect of the Seine, in conjunction with the commission des halles and the prefect of police, decided to leave the market in the center of Paris, but to make it more orderly, hygienic, and safe, changes that would render the market less offensive to bour- geois sensibilities. This solution would, it was hoped, address the prob- lem of the halles without offending traditional interests and practices.

2 Maxime DuCamp, Paris, ses organes, sesfonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitie du XIXe siele (Paris, 1874), 2:153; all translations are mine.

3 On the renovation of the halles, see Bertrand Lemoine, Les Halles de Paris: L'Histoire d'un lieu, les peripeties d'une reconstruction, la succession des projets, I'architecture d'un monument, I'enjeu d'une "cite" (Paris, 1980); Pierre Lavendan, La Question du dtplacement de Paris et du transfert des Halles au Conseil Municipal sous la Monarchie dejuillet (Paris, 1969); Jeanne Hugueney, "Les Halles centrales de Paris au XIXe siecle," La Vie urbaine: Urbanisme-Habitation: Amenagement du territoire 2 (Apr.- June 1968): 81-130.

4 Archives de la Prefecture de Police (hereafter APP), DA 379, Lanquetin, "Question du d& placement de Paris," Prefecture de la Seine, Commission de Halles, Documents a etudier, no. 4 (Apr. 1840), 13.

5 APP, DA 379, Commission des halles, Documents a etudier, no. 3 (July 1842); no. 4 (Apr. 1840); no. 6 (Mar. 1841).

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 89

Expropriation of property around the old market began in 1848 and construction of the definitive new market commenced in 1854.6 With six pavilions completed by 1867, the halles designed by Baltard became the prototype for covered markets throughout France.7 In Paris, in 1863, the market for used clothing and household goods, the Temple, was renovated along the lines of the halles and much resembled it in appearance.8

According to historian Philip Nord, renovation in the center of the city put the capital into the hands of the bourgeoisie: "The heart of the old city became commercialized, shed much of its working-class population, and underwent a definite embourgeoisement." 9 The deci- sion to maintain the halles in the center of Paris has been considered by some historians incongruous with the overall goal of renovation, since the market was closely identified with the people. Under the Old Regime, the dames de la halle, a contingent of female merchants, had acted as the representatives of the people of Paris to the monarch and the aristocracy.10 Identification of the market as a site of urban rebel- lion in the 1830s cast the "popular" nature of the market in a more negative light. Retaining the traditional location of the halles has thus been seen as paradoxically preserving, as DavidJordan has argued, "an enclave of the old popular culture in the very heart of the new city."11

However, renovating the halles was more than a matter of estab- lishing new structures and facilities for a market whose character would remain the same. Contemporaries believed that one of the primary benefits of renovation would be the moralization of merchants, as a new physical environment would, it was thought, encourage adherence to a new moral code. Donald J. Olsen has argued that the renovated European capitals of the nineteenth century were "deliberate artistic creations intended not merely to give pleasure, but to contain ideas, in- culcate values, and serve as tangible expressions of systems of thought and morality." 12 Olsen maintains that it was only in the "ornamental and

6 The first pavilion, built in 1851, was immediately demolished after critics complained that it looked like a fortress designed to control the people. Baltard, the original architect, came up with new plans inspired by the gare de l'Est and with the help of Haussmann had them approved by the emperor in 1853. Hugueney, "Les Halles centrales," 111-22.

7 Lemoine, Les Halles de Paris, 190. 8 Philippe Perrot, "Splendeur et declin du marche du Temple," L'Histoire 33 (Apr. 1981): 15. 9 Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, NJ., 1986), 100. 10 On the merchants of the halles during the Old Regime see Rene S. Marion, "Les Dames

de la Halle: Women and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Paris," Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 17 (1990): 140-48; Jehanne d'Orliac, Les Dames de la Halle, 1181-1939 (Paris, 1946).

lijordan, Transforming Paris, 363. See also Bernard Marchand, Paris: Histoire dune ville, XJXe-X~e sicle (Paris, 1993), 99.

12 Olsen, The City as a Work of Art, 4.

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superfluous" that the moral and ideological importance of renovation revealed itself, yet the renovation of the halles demonstrates that even the most utilitarian structures were expected to reflect and reinforce certain values.13 The architecture and layout of the new market aimed to transform what had been perceived as a disorderly and confused space into one in which clarity and order reigned.14 The renovated market buildings were fully covered, enclosed, and clearly demarcated from surrounding streets and residences. Within the market, stalls were also clearly demarcated and separated one from another. Thus reno- vated, the halles would be no less an anomaly in the bourgeois capital than the extra servant quarters included in the new luxury apartment buildings of northwestern Paris."5

In addition to transforming the structure of the market, authori- ties also sought to transform the behavior of the merchants within it. If, as one planner stated, the market was "to the city what the kitchen is to a bourgeois house," then the challenge facing authorities was to make the merchants, like domestic servants, compliant and dependent aux- iliaries of the bourgeois home.16 This was done largely through regu- lations concerning the functioning of the market. As with the physical renovation of the halles, ideological concerns shaped the regulatory project as well. In particular, widely held assumptions regarding the sex of the merchants played a pivotal role in influencing decisions made concerning the organization of the renovated market.

Despite the fact that there were male merchants in the halles, largely, although not exclusively, in fresh meats and baked goods, as well as male workers (the burlyforts de la hallewho carried heavy loads of merchandise), the halles was identified by contemporaries as a female space. Cadastral records indicate that the majority of merchants in the halles were women, but this identification of the market as "female" was also due to the influence of traditional depictions of popular com- merce as primarily a female domain. Thus in popular literature from this time, the most frequent and colorful types used to represent popu- lar commerce (including not only the halles, but the Temple market for used clothing and street merchants as well) were female. The bold and opinionated fishwife, the alluring young flower-seller, the mischie-

13 Ibid., 5. 14 On the spatial reorganization of the halles and the control of merchants see Victoria

Thompson, "Gender, Class, and the Marketplace: Women's Work and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Paris, 1825-1870," Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993, chap. 3.

15 Jordan, Transforming Paris, 357. 16 APP, DA 378, M. Senard, "Halles centrales a 6lever a Paris. Reponse a deux memoires

publiees par les Interesses au projet de 1845 par M. Senard. Suivi d'une lettre de M. Belanger, Ingenieur a M. Hector HOREAU, Architecte, sur la Question du Nivellement," Dec. 1850, 23.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 91

vous merchant of fruits and vegetables, the shrewd merchant of used women's clothing-these were the stereotypes that peopled popular literature and popular consciousness. Moreover, the halles, because of the political importance of the dames de la halle under the Old Regime, was identified as a site of female power. The perception that the mar- ket was peopled by opinionated, meddling, and troublesome women was continually reinforced during renovation, as it was overwhelmingly the female merchants who made their complaints and requests known to the police and departmental authorities, and even to the emperor himself.17

Imagining the market as "female" provided a framework for think- ing about renovation, as it made the choices for renovators seem clear: uncontrolled, the market was the harbinger of death and disorder, the fearful side of female nature; controlled, the market could serve as a site of virtue and harmony, the laudable side of female nature. Cre- ating a female space that could function as a site of virtue, decorum, and order meant, in the mid-nineteenth century, creating a female space that was regulated by the norms of "domesticity." 18 In nineteenth- century France, as elsewhere in the West, domesticity served as an optic through which to view social and political organization. Yet the mostly female merchants of Paris seemed to contradict the domestic ideal in two important ways: their family relationships were not organized along the lines of the nuclear family unit, and they, not their husbands or fathers, often functioned as the sole economic support for their families. Authorities did not explicitly set out to impose the norms of domesticity upon the mostly female merchant population. However, their belief that the tenets of domesticity were necessary to order and stability influenced the choices they made in regulating the new mar- ket. The result was a conflict between merchant practices and police and departmental regulations, a conflict that on the surface appeared to concern the organization of the market, but that also touched on a larger debate over the role of women in public.19 Archival sources from

l7Jurisdiction over the halles was shared by the Paris police and the Department of the Seine. The prefect of police, the prefect of the Seine, and the emperor were the three persons most directly involved in the renovation and regulation of the market.

18 On domestic ideology in France see Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bour- geoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981); Barbara Corrado Pope, "The Influence of Rousseau's Ideology of Domesticity," in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York, 1987): 136-45; Jean- Paul Aron, ed., Miserable et glorieuse: La Femme au XIXe sicle (Paris, 1980); Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet, L'Histoire des meres du Moyen Age d nosjours (Paris, 1977).

19 On women and the public sphere in France see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), especially chap. 4; Suzanne Desan, "Constitutional Ama- zons: Jacobin Women's Clubs in the French Revolution," in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary

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police and departmental authorities provide information about these conflicts, while depictions of female merchants in popular literature help situate them within a broader cultural context.

Work and Family in the Halles

During the July Monarchy, the halles expanded to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population. The extension of the market into sur- rounding areas alarmed observers, who saw it as a sign of the great confusion that they believed characterized market life. In his 1842 re- port on the state of public health in the (former) fourth arrondisse- ment, public hygienist Henri Bayard decried the lack of differentiation between public and private life in the area around the halles, complain- ing that "all the houses in this neighborhood are so many permanent markets."20 In the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, the perceived need to impose order on the market became more pressing. Accord- ing to another observer, writing in 1850, "everything is overflowing from all directions.... The public thoroughfare, streets, alleys, pas- sages between houses, windows, doors, everything is invaded." 21 Such confusion not only posed obstacles to the smooth flow of traffic in the area but also made surveillance of the market and its population ex- tremely difficult. The eventual design of the new market responded to repeated demands for the imposition of clear boundaries in the neigh- borhood of the halles by separating the market from the surrounding area through the use of enclosed buildings and wide thoroughfares.

Within the renovated market as well, every aspect of market life, from standards for weights and measures to the status of paid assistants, was clarified, controlled, and categorized. Authorities were particularly troubled by merchant networks that seemed to blur the boundary be- tween work and family. For merchants, however, extended family net- works that were strongly integrated into their work environment were important as economic support systems, social networks, and sources of political legitimacy and solidarity.22

France, ed. Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., and Elizabeth A. Williams (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992): 11-35; Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).

20 Henri Bayard, "Memoire sur la topographic medicale du IVe arrondissement et de la ville de Paris," Annales d'hygine publique et de medicine lMgale 28 (July 1842): 262.

21 APP, DA 379, Senard, "Halles Centrales de Paris. De l'etat actuel des Halles; Des divers Plans proposes, et specialement du Projet Horeau; De la convenance et de lajustice du concours demande a l'Etat" (1850), 4.

22 On these networks in the eighteenth century see Marion, "Les Dames de la Halle." On women's networks in general in France see the recent forum, "Women, Social Relations, and Urban Life," with contributions by Roderick Phillips, Georg'ann Cattelona, Leslie Page Moch, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Elinor Accampo, French Historical Studies 18 (1993): 1-64.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 93

Merchants combined work and family in a variety of ways. Re- quests for places in the market reveal that it was common for members of the same family to work together. Stands were sometimes run by a husband and wife, and in many cases they would later be passed on to their children.23 A market stall, often the sole means of support for an entire family, seems to have been considered part of a family's "patri- mony," and attempts were made to keep this valuable resource within the family when the official stall holder died. Requests by children or spouses for the stall of a deceased mother or wife were therefore com- mon, even when those requesting the stall had not previously worked in the market.24

For merchants, the right of a family member to the place held by a relative seems to have been not only accepted, but actively protected. For example, in 1864, a young flower merchant of the halles died, leaving behind two small children. Usually in such cases the stall of the deceased would be made available to the other merchants by order of seniority. However, at the request of the young woman's mother, who also seems to have been a merchant, the other merchants agreed to allow the grandmother to manage the stall until her seven-year-old granddaughter would be old enough to run it herself.25 In acting in such a manner, they put the maintenance of a family of the market above their own individual interests.

Merchants cooperated to protect family ties within the market and did not limit their definition of family to blood relations. The relationship between a merchant and her hired assistant could, after many years, be considered a "family" tie as well. Thus, for example, the seventy-six-year-old Widow Herbin requested that her place in pavil- ion seven be given to her assistant of twelve years, Madame Barbiere. The Widow Herbin stressed that her assistant had also been a surro- gate daughter to her and that the two women lived together along with Madame Barbiere's three children, whom they both worked to support.26 The Widow Herbin no doubt feared that upon her death Madame Barbiere and her children would be left without any income.

The practice of merchants living with their assistants seems to have been relatively common, not only among the merchants of the halles, but in general among female merchants in Paris. In an 1841 police re- port concerning the merchants who held stalls selling toiletries and

23 Archives de Paris et du Departement de la Seine (hereafter APDS), D 1 P4 529, Registres de cadastre, 1862, Halles centrales, pavilion 7.

24 APDS, V 2 F2, article 3, Marchands au petit-tas, questions de place. 25 Ibid., 1864. 26 Ibid., 26 Oct. 1868.

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other items in the arcades of the Palais Royal, the police discovered that several of the merchants lived with their assistants.27 This may have been part of an apprenticeship arrangement, by which the merchant offered her assistant room and board. It is also possible, however, that this was part of a more general tendency of merchants who worked together to live together as well. Of the female merchants at the Palais Royal under investigation, three lived on the nearby rue Jeamisson, while another three lived not only on the same street, but in the same building, at 145 rue Saint-Honore.28 Cadastral records for the halles show that the majority of merchants also lived close to the market and tended to congregate in certain streets. For example, among fish mer- chants alone, twelve lived on the rue Rambuteau in 1876; furthermore, four lived in the same building, at number 22, while another lived across the street.29

Biological and surrogate family ties often overlapped, reinforcing one another and structuring merchant networks. Biological relation- ships between merchants could strengthen bonds between employers and employees and could encourage the perception that all merchants, related or not, were part of a "family." Thus the Widow Herbin, men- tioned above, emphasized her "familial" relationship with Madame Barbiere by telling authorities that the latter's mother had been a mer- chant in the halles for forty years.30 Madame Barbiere was thus "family" for the Widow Herbin, not only because the two women lived and worked together but also because she was the daughter of another long-established merchant. For the Widow Herbin, Madame Barbiere's family relationships were not limited to herself and her mother, but extended to the market itself. She was, as the Widow Herbin stated, truly a "child of the halles." 31

The merchants of Paris therefore experienced such a strong inte- gration of their public and private lives that work and family often seemed indistinguishable. Family relations, both biological and surro- gate, structured the market space and the lives of merchants. These dense networks of aid, support, and companionship, in which ties of neighborhood, profession, and family reinforced one another, belong to a long tradition of popular practices in Paris and were considered necessary by the merchants for the efficient and equitable function-

27 APP, DA 222, Service des moeurs: Prostitution, "Rapport de la delegation envoye pour ar- reter les marchands," 5 Aug. 1841.

28 Ibid., "Rapport du police municipal, service dispensaire," 5 Aug. 1841. 29 APDS, DI P4 529, Registres de cadastre, 1876, Halles centrales, pavilion 9. 30 APDS, V2 F4, article 3, 26 Oct. 1868. 31 Ibid.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 95

ing of the market. Yet for authorities and middle-class observers, such networks of extended family and community solidarity in the heart of the newly renovated, central marketplace of the city appeared an anomaly to both the liberal principle of freedom of commerce and the bourgeois ideal of the nuclear, male-dominated family. Administrative authorities and casual observers were faced with two choices: redefine merchants as individual competitors in a market open to all comers, without preference based on family ties, or refashion the nature of family ties within the market to make them adhere to the model of the nuclear, rather than the extended, family. Assumptions concerning the sex of the merchants favored the adoption of the second option. In the reorganized market, regulations favored the nuclear family over the extended family and placed merchants, presumed to be female, clearly under the dominance, not of a husband or father, but of the state.

Instituting the Nuclear Family

The growing popularity in mid-nineteenth-century France of the ide- ology of domesticity, with its emphasis on a separation of work and home, rendered women workers suspect in the eyes of the middle class. According to Arlette Farge and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Far from the domus, the woman worker deserts in fact the familial space that she rules, and that, above all, rules her.... This domestic absence had to be controlled."32 The fear that female merchants were a source of disorder because they combined work and family life and carried out both in public view permeates early nineteenth-century depictions of market women. The construction of fully enclosed pavilions resolved, to a certain extent, the problem of female "publicity." At the same time, new regulations sought to create a boundary between work and family believed to be missing in the halles. In particular, authorities in- creased the importance of the mother-daughter relationship among merchants, while reducing the status of assistants to paid employees of the market. New regulations thus tended to target both surrogate and extended family relationships, while preserving those family relation- ships that fit the model of the nuclear family. Authorities charged with regulating the market and journalists writing for a primarily middle- class audience used stereotypes of female disorder, referring both to the "feudal" power of women under the Old Regime and to the eco- nomic power of the prostitute under the new, to justify and explain these changes in market regulations.

32 Arlette Farge and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Introduction," Madame ou mademoiselle? Itineraires de la solitudefiminine, XVIIIe-XXe sicle (Paris, 1984), 12.

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In 1868, prefect of the Seine Haussmann issued a decree forbid- ding extended family members from inheriting a relative's stall.33 This reversal of an 1829 police ordinance stipulated that henceforth only daughters could be named as successors.34 The pro-government news- paper, the Moniteur universel, justified the regulation by denouncing the extended family networks that structured the market as holdovers from the Old Regime. The traditional method of choosing successors, according to the Moniteur, operated on the basis of privilege and re- sulted in an "infeudation of places .. . for the profit of certain families, to the exclusion of all others, with rights of transmission from woman to woman, not only in the direct line, . . . but also in collateral lines." 35 Such language doubly condemned the organization of the market as archaic: with access based on extended family relationships and deter- mined by women, the market stood in direct opposition to the merit- based and male-dominated social hierarchy put in place after 1789. The Moniteur thus depicted the 1868 regulation as an agent of progress and modernization: "For these sorts of fiefs, the municipal adminis- tration has substituted simple inheritance rights, transmittable from mother to daughter, by order of primogeniture." 36

By preserving the daughter's right to succession, the administra- tion stopped short of creating a market compatible with the principles of a merit-based, free-market society. The Moniteur itself recognized the apparent paradox of the incomplete modernization of market relation- ships and was astonished by liberal critics of the administration who decried it "not for having been timid in its reform, but for not having upheld the old usages in all of their enormity."37 The unwillingness of both critics and supporters of the regime to eliminate completely family relationships in determining succession attests to the force of cultural assumptions concerning women's roles. In the mid-nineteenth century, women could not, it seems, be considered as individuals com- peting in a free-market, merit-based society. Extended family networks, targeted as archaic remnants of the Old Regime, were thus replaced by the bourgeois nuclear family. Indeed, according to the Moniteur, re- inforcing nuclear family ties was one of the primary goals of the 1868

33 APP, DA 380, Decree issued by prefect of the Seine, 2 July 1868. In 1868 the concession of places in the market was transferred from police to departmental authorities. While the two sectors of administration did come into conflict over some aspects of market life, on topics dis- cussed in this article -limiting succession to daughters, the place of assistants, and the behavior of merchants-there does not seem to have been any disagreement.

34 Police ordinance, 11 June 1829. 35 Moniteur universel, 17 Nov. 1868. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.

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regulation. It argued that the regulation actually restored the right of daughters to succeed their mothers, a right that it claimed had been lost under the earlier decree.38 The importance of the nuclear family was further strengthened by the new rules concerning hired assistants.

Merchants considered their assistants not simply as hired help, but as apprentices. As such, they were part of the "household," or family, of the merchant, and therefore were believed to possess the right to succession, as the request of the Widow Herbin revealed. By working with the older, more experienced woman, the younger woman learned a trade that could support her and her eventual family. In a petition from stall holders of the Temple market to the prefect of police pro- testing an earlier (and unsuccessful) attempt to regulate the use of assistants, merchants described this system in unambiguous terms: "In our commerce, either to help us sell, or to act as guardians . . . over merchandise continually exposed for sale in a market that is not closed, we employ young people for wages, who are fed by us, ... who will be- come later on Marchandes themselves, [and] who will sell one day for themselves in the Market." 39

The use of hired assistants was part of a practice of mutual aid that governed market relationships. Merchants of the Temple market expressed this sentiment most eloquently in 1843, in response to at- tempts by market inspectors to forbid merchants from watching over one another's stalls, when they argued that they had "all and at every instant need for each other in their commerce." 40 This ethic of mutual aid permitted merchants to leave their stalls to run errands, make purchases, attend to other duties, or simply take a break during the workday. Assistants allowed merchants some freedom and flexibility; in exchange, they learned a trade.

The 1868 decree targeted these practices by stipulating that mer- chants would no longer be able to use hired assistants in their stalls as substitutes. Merchants could still hire assistants, but these assistants were no longer permitted to run the stall in the absence of the mer- chant; only immediate family members (a spouse or child) would be allowed to serve as substitutes and then only for a limited time. Ac- cording to opposition journalist J.-A. Barral, this ruling was part of an effort by the city to increase its revenues by forbidding ill or elderly

38 Ibid. In fact, the 1829 ordinance limited succession to only the daughter or the niece of the merchant. The wording of this article and the tendency of merchants to request the right to succession based on a much wider group of family relationships, as demonstrated above, seem to suggest that in practice more distant relatives were also granted the right to succession.

39 APP, DA 723, petition of stall holders at Temple to prefect of police, 12 Mar. 1842. 40 APP, DA 723, petition of chiffon merchants to prefect of police, 7 Apr. 1843.

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98 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

merchants to sublet their stalls. Barral used images of female weakness and dependency to evoke sympathy in his readers: 'And one forgets that it is to women, who because of the fragility of human nature are subject to periodic indispositions . . ., that this barbarous regime [of not allowing substitutes] is applied in the Halles centrales of Paris."'41 Barral raised the powerful specter of female poverty, arguing that for ill or elderly merchants unable to work, the revenue gained through subletting their stalls was often the only income they possessed. The regulation forbidding substitution by paid assistants was clearly de- signed in part to increase the control of the administration over the merchants and to maximize revenues. Yet while critics such as Barral opposed the regulation and the heavy hand of the administration, by defending the supposedly ill or elderly merchants, those more favor- able to the regulatory project focused on the younger assistants as a source of danger. In neither case was the real function of assistants as apprentices and aids recognized.

For authorities, looking at the market through the optic of do- mesticity, the only acceptable relationship between women was that of mother and daughter. At a time when prostitution was still believed to be primarily the domain of women (the male procurer or "pimp" was not yet believed to dominate the business of prostitution), other types of relationships between women were increasingly considered suspect. The relationship between the older merchant and the younger assis- tant therefore appeared dangerously similar to that between procuress and fille publique. This fear appears in written reports beginning in the 1840s and is part of a growing tendency to associate all forms of female commerce with prostitution. Thus, for example, in an 1842 note to the prefect of police, the adjunct Inspector-General of the Temple Market wrote that agents of disorder in the market were "not the merchants themselves ... but rather the salesgirls who are paid according to their greater or lesser degree of prettiness, of . .. shamelessness."42 Fear of prostitution among assistants manifested itself as concern regarding the sales technique of racolage, literally "solicitation." Solicitation con- sisted of merchants calling out to or approaching passersby with flat- tering comments in order to attract customers. Repeated regulations, from the 1840s on, forbade the use of solicitation. The younger and, in the eyes of observers, more seductive assistants employed by mer- chants were those believed most likely to engage in solicitation and therefore most worrisome and in need of policing.

By targeting hired assistants, market authorities struck a blow at

41J.-A. Barral, "Les Halles de Paris," Opinion national, 13 Nov. 1868. 42 APP, DA 723, note to prefect of police, 28 Mar. 1842.

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both the traditional system of apprenticeship and merchant networks. It is likely that the use of hired assistants became less attractive to merchants when they could no longer be used as substitutes and less appealing to assistants once the prospect of eventually possessing a stall in the market was no longer guaranteed. Assistants, like any out- sider to the market, would henceforth be required to apply for per- mission to run a stall. In the meantime, the 1868 regulation required that merchants give market authorities the livret of all hired assistants, transforming these assistants from apprentices and "family" members to employees under direct control of market authorities.

Merchants also underwent a process of redefinition. The mainte- nance of preferential treatment for daughters in the 1868 regulation indicates that the market conceived as a female space was not destined to become an arena governed by the principles of freedom of com- merce and open competition. Privileging the nuclear family, and in particular the relationship between mother and daughter, restructured market relationships so as to make them more compatible with the norms of bourgeois domesticity. The 1868 regulation sought to sever the association of the market with the Old Regime, without, however, applying free-market principles to its assumed female population. The same assumptions resulted in a second aspect of the "renovation" of the merchants of the halles: the denial, on the part of authorities, of the possibility of a female breadwinner. Operating within the context of a culture that increasingly attacked women who successfully sup- ported themselves, market authorities and observers transformed the identity of the merchants of the halles from "female breadwinners" to recipients of charity.

The Challenge of the Female Breadwinner

The overlapping of work and family that characterized market life and troubled authorities was consistently invoked by merchants, who regu- larly justified work-related demands by referring to family obligations. The Femme Las, a toiletries merchant at the Temple market, supported her request for a better situated stall by informing the police that she was the sole support of her family because her husband was "suffering from infirmities and old age."43 Another petitioner, asking for a better place in the halles, wrote of the "heavy obligations that my young and numerous family imposes on me."44

Such requests were motivated by immediate economic need. How-

43 APP, DA 723, Reconstruction du marchg du Temple, Femme Las to the prefect of police, 8Jan. 1859.

44 APDS, V2 F4 article 3, 30 Mar. 1869.

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100 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

ever, the status of family provider also functioned for merchants as a source of individual and collective identity and could be used to justify a wide range of demands. Thus, for example, in an 1858 petition ad- dressed to the prefect of police regarding the new arrangements of the renovated halles, sixty-six merchants of wholesale vegetables reasoned, "if they add that they are all mothers of families and that having sold for many years in the halles they have no other means of existence, perhaps their position will be considered worthy of attracting your attention." 45 Merchants justified requests by invoking their status as family provider even when the request had little immediate relation to the commercial side of market life. In an 1857 letter to the priest of the Saint-Eustache parish, asking him to bless the recently completed pavilion for the sale of seafood, the fish merchants of the halles explained their request by referring to themselves as "mothers of families" and stating, "We have great need that God would want in his paternal Bounty to bless Our work."46 Merchants used their status of family providers to lend au- thority to their voices.

The tactical nature of referring to one's status as family provider occasionally led merchants to misrepresent their actual family situa- tion to add weight to their demands. The Widow Ramon, for example, justified her request to deliver milk to her clients who worked in the Temple market by arguing, "In this way I will increase my meager daily profits by ten or twelve sous, which are sorely needed, as I am a widow with two children and responsible for my mother in her eighty-eighth year."47 Her request was denied when a police inquiry revealed that her two children were grown and married.

In mid-nineteenth-century France, invoking one's family obliga- tions was a standard way of legitimizing requests made to authori- ties, even when those requests were not directly economic in nature. Working-class men, for example, developed a rhetorical strategy in the 1840s by which political and economic demands were justified by referring to their role in the family.48 According to the terms of this argument, often called the "family-wage" or "male-breadwinner" argu- ment, working-class men argued for higher wages, independence in

45 APP, DA 380, petition of vegetable and greenery merchants to prefect of police, Nov. 1858.

46 APP, DA 380, petition of fish merchants to the priest of Saint-Eustache, 1 Dec. 1857. 47 APP, DA 723, letter of the Widow Ramon to the prefect of police. 48 For studies of the construction and use of this argument in nineteenth-century France

that give gender a central place, see Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Louis Devance, "Femme, famille, travail et morale sexuelle dans l'ideologie de 1848," Romantisme 13-14 (1976): 79-103; Michelle Perrot, "L'Eloge a la menagere dans le discours des ouvriers fran~cais au XIXe siecle," Romantisme 13-14 (1976): 105-121.

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the workplace, and the vote, on the basis that they were responsible for a wife and children. Contrasting independence and dependency, pub- lic and private, male and female, the "male-breadwinner" argument, while not completely replicating bourgeois models of domesticity, had resonance with members of the middle class who had made gendered divisions an integral component of bourgeois life.

Female merchants, unable to reproduce the same gendered divi- sions in their rhetoric or their lives, found themselves in a situation in which their status as breadwinners was discounted, not only as im- possible, but as a direct cause of disorder and immorality. The strict separation between work and family in bourgeois life and ideology was meant to create a private space protected from the self-interest and competition that was believed to characterize the public world, "a place," according to Joan Scott, "of complete human fulfillment, in opposition to the alienation of capitalist society." 49 The "female" world of the family was thus meant to ensure that virtues such as selflessness and love could be preserved in a free-market society. Since economic power was identified with masculinity, a woman's place in the family denied her the possibility of earning a living. What Catherine Hall has argued for England was true for France as well: a man's "manliness was based on his ability to provide for his dependents; the femininity of his wife and daughters rested on their capacity to be dependent."50 The ideology of domesticity held, therefore, that a woman could not suc- cessfully support a family on her own. Admitting the contrary would confuse lines between public and private, between male and female, and thereby threaten both order and virtue.

Concern regarding women who were economically independent appeared in popular literature with growing frequency beginning in the 1840s and constituted a prominent theme of such literature during the Second Empire. This concern was often expressed by conflating economic independence with prostitution. For example, one of the most common female stereotypes of the time, the lorette, was a cour- tesan who used her income from prostitution to support herself and her family. In one description, a lorette employed her entire family by tying them to her commerce: her father was also her doorman, her aunt worked as an usher in a theater she attended regularly, her sis- ter was her maid, and her cousin was her domestic.51 In addition to

49 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 108. 50 Catherine Hall, "The Sweet Delights of Home," in From the Fires of Revolution to the Great

War, ed. Michelle Perrot, vol. 4 of A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 74.

51 [Taxile Delord, Arnould Fremy, and Edmond Texier], Paris-Lorette (Paris, 1854), 19.

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102 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

presenting an image of confused boundaries between work and family, such depictions of prostitutes as primary wage earners subverted the model of the male-dominated family, in this case by the absence of a male breadwinner. The relationship between the prostitute and her male lover (not her client) was commonly characterized as operating according to a reversal of gender roles, since he lived off her wages. According to Alexandre Dumas, for example, the male "souteneur [sup- porter]," as he was called by police, really merited the title of "homme entretenu [kept man] ." 52 The economic power of the prostitute, insofar as it made possible a reversal of what was believed to be the correct power relationship between the sexes, came to symbolize, by the late 1840s, her immorality and lack of respect for the social hierarchy.

During the 1850s, popular literature increasingly cited the eco- nomic independence of female merchants as a source of danger. In the 1854 Paris anecdote, for example, Alexandre Privat dAnglemont, jour- nalist for Le Siecle, argued that families of merchants and other female "breadwinners were organized along a reversal of middle-class gen- dered lines: "Most men married to merchants or to steady workers do nothing, or almost nothing. They barely help their wives in their tasks; they spend their days in the bar."53 While this statement was clearly meant as an indictment of men of the popular classes, challenging their claims to responsibility and respectability, d'Anglemont also targeted, through ridicule, the pretensions of women who claimed to be the sole supporters of their families. For this attack he chose, significantly, a merchant of the halles, "Mother Brichard," who, at forty-five, was "fat, round, short, a sort of laboring cow, a workhorse. She is active, turbu- lent, always moving; she comes, goes, cries, denies, speaks, sings, works, all at once." 54 Remarking that his readers might be "astonished that a woman alone could earn a living," d'Anglemont clearly, by his descrip- tion of "Mother Brichard," indicated that a truly "feminine" woman could not earn a living, at least not honestly.55 The subtext of this pas- sage was reinforced by d'Anglemont's decision to end with a descrip- tion of prostitution around the halles. This time, he located disorder not in working-class men who shirked their rightful responsibilities, but in the women who did not fit the norms of bourgeois sensibility:

The honest worker on his way to work greets her [the prostitute] with jokes when passing by. The men are ashamed of these remarks;

52 Alexandre Dumas, Filles, lorettes et courtesans (Paris, 1843), 36. 53 Alexandre Privat dAnglemont, Paris anecdote: Les Industries inconnues, la childebert, les

oiseaux de nuit, la vile des chi#onniers (Paris, 1854), 16. 54 Ibid., 25. 55 Ibid.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 103

they are vaguely horrified by what they have done. But the women, on the contrary, seem proud of their abjection; they face scorn with head held high, and return joke for joke. The instinct for morality is completely destroyed in them. Of all beings in creation, woman is always the worst when she isn't the best.56

Presenting female merchants as the sole support of families which in- cluded lazy or violent men thus reinforced links between female com- merce and prostitution and served to discredit as immoral and unnatu- ral the status of the female breadwinner.

Such characterizations reflect a growing tendency during the Sec- ond Empire to consider work and family incompatible for women. Another means by which popular literature revealed its discomfort with the propensity of women -especially merchant women, who were per- haps most visible to bourgeois observers -to combine work and family life was to question the authenticity of motherhood among female merchants. Authors played on longstanding fears that fraudulent com- mercial practices were widespread in the capital to imply that female merchants posed as mothers to increase their business. In an 1854 bro- chure on the "petits metiers" of Paris, for example, the merchant of toy windmills was described as "dragging with her the child, rented or bor- rowed, who is supposed to elicit the charity of passersby." 57 Any woman of the popular classes active in public spaces of the city and claiming to be a mother became suspect. In her 1868 work, Les Femmes a Paris et en province, the countess Dash warned readers against any woman in the streets of Paris who appeared to be a loving mother; she will almost always, the countess stated, reveal her successful farce with mocking laughter and insults directed toward the gullible "bourgeois."58

Discrediting the female breadwinner image as false or immoral was part of an attempt to reconcile bourgeois beliefs, shaped by the ideology of domesticity, with what middle-class observers actually saw in the streets of Paris. Denying that those who earned money through commerce carried out in public were truly mothers was one way of doing this. Another approach was to redefine the work that women of the popular classes did in public as mendicity. Edmond Texier in his 1867 article for Paris-Guide wrote of "trades that are no more than varieties of mendicity covered over with a mask of industry [such as] [t]he merchant of bouquets at a sou, who has two children in her arms and who pursues the passer-by with her strangled cry: 'No bread in the

56 Ibid., 213. 57 Paris-Gagne-Petit (Paris, 1854), 30. 58 La Comtesse Dash, Les Femmes d Paris et a province (Paris, 1868), 92.

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104 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

house.'"59 In such descriptions, merchant women were portrayed as unable to support themselves, let alone their families, and thus fit the domestic model.

Similar concerns regarding the economic independence of mer- chants influenced regulations in the renovated halles. To create female dependency, authorities redefined the status of merchants, identifying them as recipients of charity under the authority of the police and the city, rather than as independent businesswomen. One way of doing this, as discussed above, was to take control over hired help away from merchants and place it in the hands of market authorities. The 1868 regulation made it clear that merchants could not sublet their stalls or employ substitutes since these stalls were not personal property (and the merchants by extension not independent entrepreneurs), but were rather provisionally granted in order to provide a means of support.

Increasingly, granting a stall came to be considered an act of charity, and the stall holders came to be seen as weak and needy. While requests for stalls in the market based on extended or created family relationships were rejected by authorities after 1868, those who framed their demand in terms of charity were more favorably received. In her 1869 request, a sixty-one-year-old widow emphasized her physical weakness, "affected by weakened vision and neurological pains in the lower part of the body," and her economic dependency, "without re- sources and able to depend only on the help of her twenty-five-year-old daughter."60 Invoking the equation of market activity with charity- "she dares to hope that she will find favor in your eyes and that, always good and charitable, you will deign, Monsieur le Prefet, to grant her this only means of existence" -this widow was convened by market au- thorities and told to make a formal request for a stall in one of the pavilions.6'

Equating commerce with charity was especially common in de- scriptions of those women who worked in the open-air fruit and vege- table market. Adjacent to the newly constructed pavilions of the halles, which served to hide the majority of merchants from public view, was the outdoor market, where merchants sold small quantities of fruits and vegetables. Merchants working in public were especially troubling to observers, and it is among the merchants of the outdoor market, as well as among ambulatory street merchants, that the strongest iden- tification of commerce with charity, mendicity, and female weakness

59 Edmond Texier, "Les Petites Industries," in Paris-Guide: Par les principaux &crivains et artistes de la France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1867), 2:971.

60 APDS, V2 F4, article 3, 7July 1869. 61 Ibid.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 105

was made. According to one inspector, reporting on the open-air mar- ket in 1866, at least half the merchants were inscribed at the bureau de bienfaisance; another inspector wrote, "the [female] merchants who are elderly and without a husband, are very unhappy, many are registered with charity bureaus, many also sleep by the night in furnished rooms [les garnis] ." 62 The use of the word garni in this comment reveals that despite attempts to redefine merchants as recipients of charity, those who worked outside the new pavilions of the halles still appeared to be dangerously close to the world of prostitution.63 Thus while merchants inside the pavilions could be controlled through various measures and, perhaps most important, hidden from view, those in public constituted a special threat. The open-air fruit and vegetable market was thus tar- geted for gradual suppression by an order of the prefect of the Seine issued on 22 November 1867.64

Authorities and observers alike used a double-edged discourse concerning women and money to redefine the status of female mer- chants in the capital. Whether by portraying merchants as weak and dependent recipients of charity or as economically independent pros- titutes, this discourse denied the viability of a virtuous female bread- winner. Women who claimed to support their families through hard work were depicted as either immoral or dishonest. While such con- flicting representations make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine the actual economic situation of the market women of Paris, they do reveal the intense anxiety felt by middle-class observers faced with evidence that women could support themselves and their families by working at a trade. This anxiety influenced the content of regulations concerning the newly renovated market, where every effort was made to render market life compatible with the norms of domestic ideology. In addition to reorganizing merchant networks and encour- aging dependency among merchants, authorities attempted to impose "respectable" behavior inside the pavilions.65 No longer, in markets

62 APDS, V2 F4, article 3, 4 Oct. 1866; 21 Oct. 1866. 63 In the mid-nineteenth century, the world of furnished hotels, or garnis, was identified

as a world of criminals and prostitutes, under frequent police surveillance. 64 APDS, V2 F4, article 3. The administration also wished to eliminate all ambulatory mer-

chants in the capital; however, given the insufficient number of neighborhood markets through- out the city, this was impossible. Police authorities were thus directed to reduce the number of street merchants whenever possible and to grant permissions only to the most needy applicants (APP, DB 257, Embarras de la voie publique [autre que travaux]).

65 Police ordinances were issued with the opening of each new pavilion of the halles and with the opening of new neighborhood markets. In addition, a global ordonnance concerning public markets was issued in 1865. Not all articles were included in each and every ordinance; it is significant in this respect that the most extensive of these ordinances, which served as the basis for the 1865 ordonnance, wa's issued in 1857 on the occasion of the opening of pavilion 7, dedicated to the sale of seafood.

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such as the halles, would fishwives be allowed to cry out to passersby, nor would seductive salesgirls be left to pursue, with double enten- dres, prospective clients. By the terms of the many decrees issued in the 1850s and 1860s, merchants were prohibited from calling clients to their stalls, from announcing the nature and price of merchandise, from calling out to passersby with comments on behavior or appear- ance, and from engaging in "brawls, quarrels, rows, cries, songs or games of any sort."66 Such regulations redefined the market space ac- cording to the norms of bourgeois domestic ideology; rather than a site of popular disorder, the markets of Paris were henceforth to be extensions of the bourgeois home.

Conclusion: Silencing Merchants' Voices

The renovation of the halles reveals the extent to which ideology con- cerning family structure and gender roles affected decisions regarding the reorganization of the market, and, by extension, urban renovation. Ridding the market of merchants who worked in public view, limit- ing succession of stalls to daughters, and encouraging dependency on market authorities all served to create a market compatible with the norms of bourgeois domestic ideology, rather than the principles of freedom of commerce and open competition. The attempted restruc- turing of family life within Paris markets during the Second Empire, a restructuring that entailed a redefinition of the activities and behavior of merchants, as well as a reconfiguration of relationships both among merchants and between merchants and market authorities, was com- patible with the larger goals of urban renovation undertaken during this time: to create a visually pleasing and orderly "bourgeois" city. Im- plicitly linking the structure of the family and the structure of society, and in accordance with the general political trend toward conservatism following the June Days of 1848, renovators attempted to create, in the halles, order out of what they perceived as disorder.67

The "civilizing mission" undertaken by the city in regard to the halles was generally agreed to have been a success.68 For contempo- raries, there was no doubt that renovation had brought about a change

66 APP, DB 371, ordinance concerning the policing of public markets, article 58, 30 Dec. 1865.

67 Two recent studies that examine the connections between debates over family structure and social organization in France are Hunt, TheFamily Romance, and Caroline Ford, "Private Lives and Public Order in Restoration France: The Seduction of Emily Loveday," American Historical Review 99 (Feb. 1994): 21-43.

68 Hector Horeau, Assainissment, embellissements de Paris: Ediliti urbaine mise d la portge de tout le monde (Paris, 1868), 44.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 107

in the character and population of the neighborhood, giving it a much more "bourgeois" tone. Louis Lazare, editor of the Revue municipale, wrote in 1858 that the opening of the newly renovated pavilions of the halles had been accompanied by a shift in the neighborhood's popula- tion, from primarily working-class to "commercial and well-off." 69 And even critics of the empire, such as Emile Zola, identified the market as a "bourgeois" rather than a popular space; in his 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris, the market was meant to symbolize not popular insurrection and disease, but "the fattening of the bourgeois who humbled himself before the coup d'etat and who amply profited." 70

The "embourgeoisement" of the halles was also reflected in de- scriptions of female merchants. Paul de Musset noted in his 1856 article on "Parisiens et Parisiennes" what he considered to be an improve- ment in the behavior of the merchant: "one can remark . .. a notable improvement in her language. She no longer speaks the fishwife's cate- chism, and dirty words no longer leave her mouth on all occasions.97' The agents of this change, he continued, were the mothers of Paris, and bourgeois mothers in particular: "Among the young, courageous mothers who run to do their errands while their children sleep, there is more than one woman who is educated, well brought-up, musical, the childhood friend of a marquise. It is she who has civilized the marchande de la halle."72 Complaints that the market was already too small-that merchandise and merchants had begun once again to block circulation by occupying the surrounding streets -began to reappear during the early Third Republic and continued until the market was finally moved outside the city in 1969. The image of the merchants held by contem- poraries, however, seems to have been definitively altered. Observers seem to have unanimously agreed that in renovating the market, "the dames de la halle themselves have been transformed into calm retailers, serious shopkeepers."73

Yet how accurate was this perception? Did merchants passively ac- cept changes in their commerce? Did they mold themselves to the new models of femininity that were being held out to them? The evidence suggests that they did not. Proudly identifying themselves as "Les Dames Marchandes de la halle," they petitioned the prefect of police,

69 Revue municipale et gazette reunies 267 (10 Aug. 1858): 309. 70 Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS n.a.f. 10338, Emile Zola, "Note Preparatoires. Le

Ventre de Paris," 58. 71 Paul de Musset, "Parisiens et parisiennes," in Alexandre Dumas, et al., Paris et les pari-

siens au XIXe sikle: Moeurs, arts et monuments (Paris, 1856), 440. 72 Ibid., 440-41. 73 "Une visite aux halles centrales," Magasin pittoresque, 30 (Jan. 1862), 27.

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108 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

the prefect of the Seine, and the emperor himself regarding changes in "their" market.74 Adapting a traditional role to new circumstances, delegations of female merchants repeatedly marched to the Tuileries and presented the emperor with their complaints and suggestions re- garding the renovation of the market.75 And although they framed their demands in formulations of the utmost respect, merchants clearly be- lieved that they were the experts when it came to the organization of market life: "We pray your Majesty to excuse the liberty we have taken in submitting to him our ideas, convinced that his sound and honest judgment will say that in this matter, we are the competent judges." 76

By their persistence and certainty in their own expertise, mer- chants did affect the renovation of the halles, but only by delaying, through their repeated protests, its completion.77 Petitions submitted by merchants were filed by police, yet largely ignored. While merchants believed they had a right to give their opinion concerning various aspects of renovation, authorities increasingly found such actions as- tonishing and incomprehensible.78 This growing lack of understanding between merchants and authorities reveals the extent to which the pro- cess of "domesticating" the merchants of the halles occurred primarily in the minds of authorities and observers, for whom the renovated mar- ket appeared more compatible with the norms of bourgeois ideology.

However, although the domestic ideal does not seem to have been embraced by female merchants or imposed upon them with complete success, changes wrought in the organization of the market had a nega- tive effect on their lives and commerce. Whereas the pre-renovation market had been drafty, open to all types of weather, dirtier, and per- haps less comfortable, it had also been a lively center for gossip and games, a site of commerce, but also of family and friendship. Renova- tion could not completely destroy that aspect of the market, but, in bringing about changes that would weaken merchant networks and en- courage greater dependency on market authorities, it could diminish both the communal solidarity and independence vis-a-vis authorities that were integral components of merchant identity. And although the administration framed its argument for regulatory changes in terms of

74 APP, DA 380, petition of greenery merchants to the prefect of police, n.d. 75 APP, DA 380, report of general inspector of the market to the prefect of police, 24 Nov.

1853; petition of 14 May 1856; reclamation of the marchandes of potatoes concerning the places in the halles, 15 May 1856; report of inspector of Marchg des Innocents, 13 Mar. 1857; petition of Marchandes des Innocents, 9 Jan. 1858.

76 APP, DA 380, petition of poultry merchants, 14 May 1856. 77 Du Camp, Paris, ses organes, sesfonctions et sa vie, 2:152. 78 APP, DA 380, report of the general inspector of markets to the prefect of police, 24 Nov.

1853; note of director of provisioning, 9 Mar. 1857.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 109

tradition versus modernization, the characterization of the merchant population as female justified the interventionist stance taken by au- thorities in regulating market life, a stance which otherwise seemed to violate the principle of freedom of commerce. In this sense, the reorga- nization of the halles may have provided a precedent for intervention in other areas that were not specifically identified as female.79

At the same time as their influence and independence diminished within the market, merchants also lost their traditional role as spokes- women for the "people," a role henceforth assumed by working-class men.80 The frustration of merchants faced with this situation can be heard in their numerous petitions, as they insisted, "that which you have done for our good, can not cause our ruin; we can not be un- happy in our Louvre."8' Such complaints, however, hearkening back to an earlier era when the opinions of the dames de la halle merited at- tention, fell, during the Second Empire, on deaf ears.

79 For example, many of the articles of the 1865 ordonnance were later applied to an obvi- ously masculine space, the livestock market of La Villette, which was also built on the model of the halles. See the ordinance concerning the policing of La Villette, 12 Oct. 1867. David Pinkney notes the architectural similarity, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 79.

80 D'Orliac, Les Dames de la Halle, 163-64. 81 APP, DA 380, copy of petition taken to the Tuileries by female merchants of the MarchU

des Innocents, 9Jan. 1858.

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