III

Nous aurons toujours un Voltaire, et nous n'aurons plus jamais de Théatins.
Marquis de Villette, 1791

We shall always have a Voltaire, and we shall never again have Théatin monks.

The most immediately striking aspect of revolutionary nominatory revision, which was also the Revolution's nominatory legacy to succeeding generations, was the intense politicization of everyday life. Children were given first names taken from the revolutionary calendar (Floréal), revolutionary virtues (Liberté), heroes (Franklin, Voltaire, Ami du Peuple, Brutus), or a combination (Brutus-sans-culottemarche-en-avant). Among the over forty models of revolutionary playing cards, one set had Voltaire as the king of diamonds and Rousseau as king of clubs; Justice, Temperance, Prudence, and Force took the place of the queens of hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. One "rev-

olutionized" chess game replaced the king with a tyrant, the queen with an adjutant, and castles with cannons; checkmate resulted from a "blockade." Over three thousand communes (out of forty thousand) brought their names into line with revolutionary order—Villedieu became La Carmagnole, after the popular revolutionary song, and Saint-Denis became Franciade. Revolutionary conviction transferred to language and invested discourse with a veritable mystical power. In this process of politicizing, the everyday street names played their part. From instruments of symbolic social control, street names became one more weapon in the intense battle for ideological allegiance waged over the nineteenth century. Well before 1789, Mercier complained that street names did not instruct inhabitants as they ought to.^[13]

The Revolution provided that opportunity. The original reforms were born of enthusiasm and a passionate will to inculcate the Revolution by example. In 179 , the marquis de Villette, in whose house Voltaire had died in 1778, solicited formal approval for his own alteration of the street name on his house from Théatins (after the religious order located nearby) to Voltaire. "We shall always have a Voltaire, and we shall never again have Théatin monks," went his impeccably revolutionary reasoning. Moreover, the marquis urged the "good patriots" of the rue des Plâtrières (Plasterers' Street) to honor their titular republican deity: "It is important for sensitive hearts and ardent souls crossing this street to know that Rousseau used to live there on the fourth floor, and it scarcely matters that plaster used to be made there." Villette's enthusiasm fired others. Royalty and saints were swept away by authentic republican saints (Montmartre to Montmarat, Hôtel Dieu to Mirabeau-le-Patriote, Sainte-Anne to Helvétius) and republican virtues (Princesse to Justice, Richelieu to La Loi). If there was an association between site and name, as with the streets honoring Voltaire and Rousseau, the attachment invariably translated ideological considerations. It was perhaps inevitable that republican habitués of the Café Procope reportedly submitted names of royalist writers for all the sewers!^[14]

However well intentioned, piecemeal alterations violated every notion of system. They could never satisfy a regime that sought, as the abbé Grégoire put it in his later report to the Assemblée Nationale, to deal with "every abuse" and to "republicanize everything." Moreover, driven by the passions, enthusiasms, and manias of the moment,

these changes ran the risk of being made incorrectly in a climate of such volatility. Mirabeau-le-Patriote was an appropriate substitution for Hôtel-Dieu in 1791; a mere two years later, the disclosure of Mirabeau's counterrevolutionary activities made it a dreadful embarrassment. Mirabeau quickly lost his street (along with his place in the Panthéon). La Fayette posed similar problems. Neither he nor Mirabeau, Grégoire noted, had withstood "the purifying vote of posterity."^[15]

The chaos and uncertainty introduced by myriad namings and renamings brought dissatisfaction all around, prompting several motions for total nominatory reform. There exists no more striking emblem of revolutionary utopian impulses than these amazing proposals for extensive reform of street nomenclature. As nomenclature could reform topography, it could rewrite history. The entire city would be renamed and, hence, recreated. One Citoyen Avril despaired of the "barbaric or ridiculous or patronymic" names of Paris streets. Worse still, these names were "insignificant" and left the whole with no "motive." So anarchic had the renaming become that Avril urged the suspension of all naming until a comprehensive plan had been adopted. His own scheme combined great men whose memory would "perpetuate the revolution" with a variant of the abbé Teisserenc's geographical toponymy. The next year Citoyen Chamouleau went even further in his proposal to rename every street in the whole country. Each street was to bear the name of a virtue: Notre-Dame would become the Place de l'Humanité républicaine, surrounded by the rues de la Générosité et de la Sensibilité; la Halle would become the Place de la Frugalité républicaine, and so forth. "Thus the people will ever have virtue on their lips," the idealistic orator intoned before the Assemblée Nationale, "and soon morality in their hearts."^[16]

The Comité de l'Instruction Publique responded to these instances with a charge to the abbé Grégoire to consider the problem, and it adopted his report in January 1794. After a review of the history of street naming from Peking to Philadelphia, Grégoire made several recommendations. He agreed that patriotism required new names. However, he insisted that "calm reason" establish not a name here and a name there but a "combined system of republican nomenclature." First, Grégoire emphasized, names should be short, comprehensible, euphonic, and appropriate; and second, they should be morally correct: "Each name ought to be the vehicle of a thought,

or, rather, of a sentiment that reminds citizens of their virtues and their duties." System got citizens to the proper place and got them there properly, that is, with a lesson in mind. "Is it not natural to go from the Place de la Révolution to the rue de la Constitution and on to the rue du Bonheur?"

Lessons compelled system. Reasonable street names would instruct more effectively than a salmagundi of names with no necessary connection to one another and less connection to the whole. System alone enabled the mind to connect the parts and the whole. The whole would then present an ensemble such that the first name led directly to the other. Grégoire was by no means dogmatic. He advocated system, not a particular system, and exhorted each commune to choose the system best adapted to its particular situation. Every commune in France was "invited" to put these recommendations into practice, and a fair number did. If relatively few streets were involved in these changes—no more than 6 percent according to one estimate—these alterations included a large number of the major thoroughfares. The sense of disruption was considerable if not extensive.

All of these plans for nominatory reform testify to the pedagogical thrust so conspicuous in revolutionary enterprises. The elaborate revolutionary fêtes staged in Paris and in the provinces similarly sought to mold consciousness. The indefatigable Grégoire also wrote an immensely influential report on the French language, which insisted on an idiom common to all citizens as a vehicle of patriotic sentiment and state power. Every one of Grégoire's reforms responded to the twin demands of a modernizing state, ideological control and administrative efficiency. Street-name reform would dot the urban landscape with "emblems capable of exercising the mind, acting on the heart, and bolstering patriotism," and it would do much more, Grégoire hastened to add, by facilitating business and travel, postal service, police surveillance, and tax collection. To this end, he advocated placing signposts at entry points into cities and numbering each house on a street (street numbering did not occur until 1805). These various acts only seem to be unrelated. In fact, they all aim at tightening republican unity. That rationality was in a sense the prime republican virtue made opposition to the rationalization of the city tantamount to protesting the republic. Irrationality was counterrevolutionary. There could be no objections to the numbering of houses as there had been in the ancien régime by aristocrats who, as

Mercier tells it in his article on street signs ("Les Écriteaux des rues"), disdained the "vulgar numbers" that would lend "an air of equality" to their streets.

The highly self-conscious manipulation of symbols made manifest the ambitions to move beyond reform to creation. Symbols entered practical politics, and they did so marshalled under the banner of reason. The Revolutionary calendar gave new names to months divided into equal units of thirty days, themselves divided not into semaines of seven days but into décades of ten days, with names derived logically from the numbers (primidi, duodi, etc.) rather than the gods of another era. The day was divided into ten units, some new clocks showing both the twelve and the ten hour divisions. Money was put on the decimal system and "nationalized" (the franc taking the place of the pound); weights and measures were standardized. The passion for system went hand in hand with the obsession with symbols. To be effective, the Revolution required both.

Thus, to the royal concern for creating a city in the image of the monarchy, the eighteenth century joined its own brand of didacticism. The abbé Teisserenc's model brought the user into the picture not as the source of significance, in this case, street names, but as the recipient of a superior wisdom. Grégoire modified the expression of this sentiment to suit revolutionary times, but the key attitude did not change. "The people is everything, everything is to be done for the people." Details exhibit the "paternal solicitude of the government toward citizens and philanthropy toward foreigners." Iconography was one of these details of representation. The users—the people actually in the streets—were to have no interpretive latitude in reading the authoritative text, which was to direct their lives as well as their footsteps. More than ever in these toponymical utopics, the Revolution imagined the city as a sacred geography. More visibly than ever, the city reproduced by the Revolution projected a landscape of power.

Street names and other symbols, Grégoire reminded the Assemblée Nationale, provided the revolution with the means to do what no regime had ever done—institute reason and popular sovereignty, each as a term of the other. Grégoire urged legislators to seize the unprecedented opportunity, to establish a system of republican nomenclature. "No model for such an enterprise exists in the history of any people."^[17] If the layout of the streets could not be

rationalized—that would await Haussmann more than a half century later, and then rationalization would be partial—nomenclature might yet proclaim the revolution. If it could not be the heavenly Jerusalem, Paris might nevertheless approximate the heavenly city of the Enlightenment. A comprehensive system of names might then just possibly realize what Descartes thought impossible a century and a half before; it could build the city anew.^[18]

These attempts to suppress the multivocality of the city were bound to fail, and they did. Descartes was enshrined in the Panthéon, but his ideal city, as far as Paris was concerned, belonged to the realm of the ideal. The inherent heteroglossia of the urban text won out, as Pujoulx's postrevolutionary lamentations confirm. Urban renewal at midcentury notwithstanding, nineteenth-century politics dissipated dreams of a rational city. From revolutionary nominatory practices subsequent regimes took the lesson of overt politicization, not that of system. Streets became weather vanes in the political winds. As successive governments strove to repudiate the past and legitimate the present, the honorific system of nomenclature became as unstable as the medieval one that it had replaced. Mirabeau's displacement from the Panthéon was only the first of many dislocations. (Surely, it was meet and fitting that the abbé Grégoire be accorded the ultimate honor of interment in the Panthéon during a ceremony in December 1989 marking the end of the bicentennial of the French Revolution.)

The new city envisioned by the revolution was not to be. It was not, properly speaking, a dream so much as a utopia, or the discourse that Louis Marin has labeled "utopic." This discourse, or narrative, designates a place that exists in, through, and as a text. The more coherent the text, the more integrated the system and the weaker the correlation between toponymy and topography, that is, between the "inside" and the "outside" of the text. Beyond the obliteration of particular names, revolutionary schemes rejected the very idea of connection between site and sign. Despite the stress laid by Grégoire and others on the practicality of these nominatory systems, these schemes impress the modern reader by their abstraction. The text obscures rather than illuminates topography, the name hides the place. The requirements of the system, and of the text, override the desires of the users, the readers, whose room for maneuver is more and more narrowly circumscribed. Blueprints for an ideal society, these comprehensive plans for rationalization gave no heed to urban practices

and disregarded entirely the strife to which these practices invariably lead.