Housing Crisis in Historical Perspective: Business Practice and Built Space in Fin-de-siècle Paris

From 1878 to 1882, Paris's building industry experienced a spectacular boom. Construction levels surpassed those of the most flourishing moments of the Second Empire, and after a sudden slump coinciding with a market crash in 1882, would not be reached again until the years immediately preceding the Great War. Contemporary commentary was unanimous that this failure was overwhelmingly one of business practice, not of the fundamentals of the Parisian land market. A financial network that one observer described as analogous to the efficiency and ruthless inhumanity of the Chicago meatpacking factory had enabled entrepreneurs to engage in unprecedented levels of speculation, producing a new class of market intermediaries that indelibly transformed property relationships in the capital. This paper will use the activities of one particularly prolific speculative developer from this period, Paul Fouquiau, as a case study through which to explore the intersection of business culture and built space in the construction of the modern metropolis, and to pose questions as to the national specificities of this process. This paper will use tax records, construction permit dossiers, sales contracts, and architectural plans from national and local archives to reconstruct Fouquiau's development ventures, illustrating the application of new business forms – specifically the limited-liability joint stock company – to the urban landscape. Fouquiau's several development firms were among some 250 such companies that operated across the capital between 1870 and 1900, rewriting the city's spaces largely without the direction or collaboration of public authorities. This focus on production will be complemented with a contextualization of his marketing journal within the exploding property marketing press of the time, serving to locate his distribution practices within an emerging commercialized housing marketplace that increasingly constituted housing-seekers as consumers, property-ownership as a service, and housing itself as an exchangeable good.