IV

L'espace possède ses valeurs propres. . . . Cette quête des correspondances. . . propose au savant le terrain le plus neuf.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Space possesses its own values . . . . This search for connections . . . offers the scholar the newest of territories.

The vision of a unified, rational city projects the new beginnings that are, in one sense, what revolution is supposed to produce. But if the past can be condemned, it cannot be so easily eradicated from everyday life. Like most of the institutions that touched daily life in the city, Paris streets negotiated past and present as they continued to act out the Revolution. However many projects aimed at transforming the urban text into an ideological whole, the city resisted. Paris, like French society as a whole, was almost equally consumed by the past and the future. A very different revolution was needed to create a capital city truly emblematic of the new country, a revolution that could face resolutely forward. Washington D.C. was what Paris could never be, a city that figured the republic. It is precisely the differences between these two capitals that tell us why, if Washington is the city of the republic, Paris is the city of revolution.

The rational city came closest to realization in the new, planned cities. Only previously unsettled terrain could offer the unencumbered space necessary for Descartes' engineer to sketch out an urban ideal. While the French talked endlessly about rationalizing cities, it was the Americans who effectively built most of those planned cities. America offered up for settlement an entire continent, which had, comparatively speaking, few vestiges of the past to encumber the present. These cities of the New World obeyed a different aesthetic from that of the archetypical European city, with its layers of settlement; its dirty, crowded central section; its crooked, winding streets; and its multiple-dwelling, and often multistory, housing stock. The aesthetic of containment that enclosed the European city between a center and fortifications around the periphery was quite foreign to the aesthetic of expansion that presided over the American town.

To put this aesthetic into operation, American cities relied on the grid of right-angled streets, recommended by the ease with which lots could be surveyed, built up, and sold. Like the heavenly city described in such luxuriant detail in Revelation 21:16, which many city fathers certainly had in mind, the archetypical American city "lieth foursquare." So strong was the presumption of suitability that the grid was imposed even where the irregular terrain did not especially lend itself to such geometric severity (most strikingly in San Francisco). Expansion was written in this text from the beginning. Barring natural obstacles, American cities had only to follow the logic of the grid and push forth in every direction. The vocation of the city, the grid announced, was commerce and communication, not magnification of the great. To be sure, the American town was a landscape of power, but the power relations inscribed by the grid were more diffuse, less striking than those in cities designed around dramatic vistas and imposing central squares.

Street names played their part in this aesthetic, and they too heeded the logic of the grid. American cities owed their characteristic combination of numbers and greenery to William Penn's plan for Philadelphia in 1682, which rejected names of prominent personages for streets as unworthy of a Quaker creation. In the city itself, High Street (now Market Street) and Broad Street, which figured on the original plan, were augmented by numbered streets going in one direction and by cross streets named for, in Penn's words, "things that Spontaneously grow in the Country." The names from the country tied the city to the surrounding area. The numbers too served double duty, First Street, for example, recalling First Day, the Quaker Sunday.

The abbé Grégoire, concerned with devising logical systems of nomenclature, was greatly impressed with the way that Philadelphia Quakers had "imprinted their dignified character even on their streets." Quaker disapproval of glorification and distrust of patronymics resonated broadly in the new world. To be sure, American streets carry the names of individuals. But if American streets honor, they seldom glorify. As de Tocqueville recognized, the democratic impulse levels rather than raises, and Americans manifestly have felt uncomfortable with the hierarchy so salient in Paris street names replete with full names and titles.^[19]

Moreover, the American Revolution entertained a very different relationship with the past than did its French counterpart. There was

no urgency to eradicate vestiges of the past. The nominatory conservatism characteristic of the American Revolution is worlds apart from the symbolic radicalism of the French Revolution. No one paid much attention to the radical revisions suggested from time to time, and the royal titles mostly remained in place. Responding in 1794 to a correspondent who urged eradication of prerevolutionary street names, the editor of a New York newspaper sensibly, and prudently, maintained that all streets and their names belonged in the historical record. Popular sentiment evidently concurred with Thomas Jefferson, who revealed a keen sense of a sacred geography that one tampers with at one's peril: "I am not sure that we ought to change all our names. And during the regal government, sometimes, indeed, they were given through adulation; but often also as the reward of the merit of the times, sometimes for service rendered the colony. Perhaps, too, a name when given, should be deemed a sacred property."^[20]

The striking exception to the usual course of American urban planning was, and is, of course, Washington, D.C. With its name taken from the "father of the country," the capital city recalled the paradigmatic patronymic origins of the city, precisely the connections that William Penn had so emphatically rejected for the City of Brotherly Love. Washington himself was very much involved in the planning of the city that would bear his name (which he always referred to as the "Federal City"). He chose the site, and he chose the planner for the capital that was to exemplify the new nation and the very structure of the new government. The plan that Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant submitted to President Washington in June 1791 started with the Philadelphia grid but superimposed broad avenues like the ChampsElysées in Paris, as well as diagonals and multiple focal points reminiscent of those in Christopher Wren's plan for rebuilding London.

The originality of the plan struck everyone, one commentator going so far as to praise the "genius" that had made an "inconceivable improvement upon all other cities in the world." The same observer accorded particular praise for the avoidance of the "insipid sameness" that made Philadelphia so dull.^[21] The vistas, the broad avenues, and the monumental public buildings inscribed the plan of Washington within the tradition of Saint Peter's Square or Versailles. But, instead of pope or prince, this city of the New World glorified a republic.

Contemporaries readily grasped the symbolic significance of the planned city. "Un citoyen des États-Unis," writing in French in 1795, elaborated a striking semiotic interpretation of the new federal city. L'Enfant, noted this author, had made visible the relations between city and country and those between the three branches of the government. Placing the Capitol on a hill with several broad avenues radiating outward made it unquestionably the center of the city, much as this city was to be the center of the new country. As former President (and then Chief Justice) William Howard Taft noted in 1915, L'Enfant's capital city was the very image of the federal Constitution adopted in 1788, infinitely adaptable to "the greatest emergencies and the most radical crises that could possibly confront a nation."^[22]

In this projection of nation, nomenclature played its part. The plan impressed the regularity of the grid upon topography even more forcefully than in Philadelphia by dividing the city into quarters and placing letters on north-south streets in addition to the numbers for east-west streets. To counter the monotony of the numbered grid, the diagonal avenues that cut through plazas or converged on a central point like the Capitol and the president's house bore the names of the then fifteen states. The location of these avenues followed their geographical location in the country, north to south (which was also the order in which delegates from the several states signed the Constitution in 1787). The three longest avenues, which traversed the entire city from east to west, represented three of the largest states, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Jefferson's own Virginia.

The layout of the streets may or may not have been Thomas Jefferson's idea, but like the plan of the city as a whole, it gave emblematic expression to the republican ideal that he and the Founding Fathers sought to establish in the new United States. Whatever the origins, the streets of Washington constituted a dazzling symbolic ploy to reconcile the states of the Union to the federal city that figured as it sustained their union. The nomenclature wove the states into the very fabric of the city just as the Constitution merged the states into the federation. It was this city in the New World, not Paris, that executed Henri IV's conception of the Place de France almost two centuries after the fact. The city and its grid, like the Constitution, resolved what remained unresolved in Paris and in France. They settled the nature of the relationship of the part, the province or state, to the whole, the nation. Toponymy and topography joined in a grand

national scheme of unity. Surely, the abbé Teisserenc and the abbé Grégoire would have been pleased.

The uncontested brilliance of Washington lay in the exceptional coherence of a design that, like the Constitution itself, was exceptionally suited to future needs, symbolic as well as urban. L'Enfant conceived the space in terms not of enclosure but of organic expansion. To the rationality that the eighteenth century so ardently desired and the ideological coherence that French republicans struggled to effect, L'Enfant joined a distinctively American preoccupation with growth. The Federal City, he reported to President Washington, would "soon grow of itself, and spread as the branches of a tree." Like all city plans and like the original Utopia, L'Enfant's plan for Washington was itself a utopic, that is, a place that came into existence not simply through a text but as a text in the strictest construction of the term. As such, it is emblematic of all texts, an edenic vision of a world to which words and works give form and substance.

In no way could the new, planned city of Washington serve as a model for the many-layered urban palimpsest of Paris, with its legacies from so many regimes, its vestiges of so many events and so many populations. L'Enfant's plan proclaimed Washington's vocation as capital of the Republic. In contrast, every map of Paris pronounced it as much more than the capital of France. The singularity of Paris as a city of revolution resides in its torturous relationship to the past, to the many pasts of the city and of the nation. The existing society and the existing city had to be made over in the image of the revolution, and yet could not be. The past was too conspicuous to be elided and too conflictual to be assimilated.

The modernity commonly ascribed to nineteenth-century Paris is rooted in this sense of movement, the perpetually unfinished, always provisional nature of the present and the imminence of change. Paris, not Washington, figured the age of revolutions. The battles on and over Paris streets strike a vivid contrast with L'Enfant's peaceful vision of organic growth for the American capital. By inscribing conflict onto the urban text itself, the Revolution of 1789 set the stage for the revolutionary Paris of the nineteenth century. The sense that change was at once inevitable and unpredictable translated into a veritable obsession with revolution, with fixing change, with arresting movement into order to make sense of the city and of the revolution by which it had come to be defined.