The Marxist Restless Analyst

Consciousness and the Urban Experience first appeared in 1985 alongside a companion volume, The Urbanization of Capital. If, three years prior, David’s magisterial Limits to Capital had tried to fill in a few “empty boxes” in Marxian theory, the delicately calibrated pairing of Consciousness and Urbanization, beautifully rendered in hardback by Basil Blackwell, began putting these filled boxes into fluid motion, actively integrating space within the core of Marxian theorizing. The Urbanization of Capital, inspired by Marx’s Capital and Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, oscillated between twin themes of capital accumulation and class struggle; Consciousness and the Urban Experience added subjective and historical texturing to this theory, modelling itself more on the Marx of The Eighteenth Brumaire. Taken together, the two volumes became understated masterpieces of scholarship, propelling both Human Geography and Marxism to new, unprecedented intellectual heights.

While American urbanization, especially the plight of Baltimore, figured heavily in an oeuvre famously punctuated by Social Justice and the City, Paris has never quite left David’s geographical imagination. On and off he’s utilized its historical transformation as a conceptual testing-ground. Yet his isn’t a plague-on-your-house Marxist account: David loves Paris as much as anybody. I remember the delightfully bohemian seventh-floor garret he once owned along rue Séguier, a stone’s throw from the Seine, with a bath tub in the kitchen and stunning views of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. At its little living room desk much of Consciousness was written, and the book embodies David’s thrill of Paris’s modern history and geography, a tale he begins in February 1848, with a bloody revolution, and has culminate in 1919, with the construction of the Sacré-Coeur, a building David always said he hated.

In the intervening years came a coup d’état that kick-started a spectacular speculative rebuilding program, engineered by Prefect of the Seine Georges Haussmann and Emperor Louis Napoleon, a scheme surpassed only in scale and cost a century later by Robert Moses in New York. Thus, David’s story of the production of modern Paris isn’t just a painstaking analysis of a single city from a bygone age; it’s equally a parable of urban history, one that still persists, might always persist, holding for all great cities with monuments and myths. As such, Consciousness and the Urban Experience helps us understand how much of what surrounds us, our buildings and human landscapes, no matter how beautiful, have often been founded on turmoil and violence, on conflict and struggle.

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David wends and wefts through Paris, circa 1850-1870, leading us into the grim devastation of worker neighbourhoods and out onto the new glitzy boulevards erected in their stead. What unfolds is a brilliantly meticulous commentary on “Haussmannization,” the prototypical paradigm of gerrymandering and gentrification. Explored in-depth are its tax and credit system, its labour markets, the condition of women, consumerism and spectacle, the transformation of space-relations, consciousness formation and class struggle. Shifting seamlessly between ground-rent stats, property prices and the number of bricks entering Paris, the art of Delacroix and Manet, the prose and poetry of Zola, Flaubert, and Baudelaire, the politics of Marx and Blanqui, for critics who diss Marxism as vulgar economics this is a formidable counter. Economic, cultural, political and ideological phenomena are woven together without one ever getting reduced to the other. David’s mode of inquiry and method of presentation accords with that other great urbanist, Henri Lefebvre, who concurrently framed his idea of city space around a subtle triad of imagined, symbolic and material realms.

 But the speculative binge of the Second Empire, like all capitalist speculative binges, couldn’t defy the laws of gravity. Debt mountains piled up, over-investment and over-accumulation were rampant, too much money flooded into a real estate market and urban economy already saturated. Titles to fictitious capital remained just that: fictitious, never-to-be realized. When lenders demanded their money back, when workers absolutely couldn’t be exploited anymore, the whole regime came crashing down like the Vendôme Column, the reviled statue celebrating the imperial mantle of Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Bonaparte’s more famous uncle, which a ragged band of Communards would later topple in festive merriment. To compound matters, in a desperate ploy to save face and Empire, the epigone Emperor, whom Marx denounced as a “cretin,” sent France to war against Prussia, with disastrous consequences.

 On the morning of March 18, 1871, all hell broke loose. French soldiers didn’t have the heart to turn on their own, enabling a working-class contingent on the Butte Montmartre to seize a battery of army cannons. A joyous mob of deserters, gaunt workers, and angry women kindled the re-appropriation of Paris. Immediately, General Lecomte, the cannon battalion’s chief officer, was captured, as was General Thomas, remembered and hated for his brutal savagery against "the reds" in the June Days of 1848. Both were lined up and shot against a nearby wall. The conservatives duly had their martyrs. For the next seventy-three days, Paris became a liberated zone of people power; workers’ committees, citizen groups, and neighbourhood associations defined the municipal politics of nation’s capital.

 Some of David’s best prose comes from his “coda” on the Commune, after it was crushed by the National Guard, with a ruling class massacring twenty-thousand Communards, taking no prisoners, purposefully wiping out future generations of socialist rebels. They killed more Frenchmen than they did warring Prussians. David recounts one incident near the end, on May 28th, when a thirty-two-year-old bookbinder, Eugène Varlin, a salt-of-the-earth union man, was arrested and beaten by a reactionary mob. With one eye dangling out of its socket, he was taken to the same spot as Generals Lecomte and Thomas, propped up against the same wall, and shot. It took two bullets to finish him off.

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Now the Left had its martyr, too. Gallia Poenitens. And so began a process of soul-searching, the work of expiation, David says, out of which the phoenix of the Sacré-Coeur would eventually rise. But debate would ensue. Whose past was it here anyway? Who were the real heroes and victims? And whose future could stake a claim to a site where the blood of martyrs—on both the Right and the Left—had flowed? After years of deadlock and acrimony, and with soaring costs and technical difficulties, Abadie’s design finally sprouted on Montmartre’s funeral pyre.  

For years, the Sacré-Coeur was seen as symbol of religious fanaticism, of an intolerant monarchy, as something that reversed the noble principles of 1789. It was backward-looking and loathed by progressives, who had a better idea: why not erect a colossal Statue of Liberty there instead? Why not put the giant statue already being constructed in a Parisian workshop, the one redolent of republican values scheduled for the New World, in front of this God-awful monument? It’s a mind-boggling thought, the sight of Liberty on the Butte Montmartre rather than in New York Harbor, upstaging the Sacré-Coeur. One wonders how many tourists at the Sacré-Coeur know this, how many could dream of what might have been. The view over those radiant Parisian rooftops somehow seems different knowing this fact. “The building,” David concludes, “hides its secrets in sepulchral silence. Only the living, cognizant of this history, who understand the principles of those who struggled for and against the embellishment of that spot, can truly disinter the mysteries that lie entombed there.”

Consciousness and the Urban Experience never endorses any nostalgic search for lost time nor a headlong embrace of absolute modernization. Instead, David prises open the dialectic of modernity, the creative destruction that infused, and goes on infusing, our lives. Historical geography marches on, he says, frequently through its worst side, leaving its trace in the built landscape around us. But amongst the buried rubble, in the shadows of mighty monuments, in what’s left of our public realm, we can find glimmers of light, rays of hope, works of art and literature and people that can instruct and uplift. And David’s lifelong passion, about to enter its nintieth decade, has been that of a restless analyst who continues to inspire with his heart as well as his head.

*“The restless analyst” is Henry James’s “mythological character” from The American Scene (1907), which David borrows in Consciousness and the Urban Experience. “I have long been impressed with that,” he says. “It seems to capture the only kind of intellectual stance possible in the face of a capitalism that reduces all aspects of social, cultural and political life…to the roving calculus of profit.”

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