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From body and home to nation and world: the varying scales of transnational urbanism in Montreal and Brussels at the turn of the twentieth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

NICOLAS KENNY
NICOLAS KENNY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada
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Abstract

The vast transformations that shaped western cities at the turn of the twentieth century were the product of global processes and interactions. Drawing on the cases of Montreal and Brussels, this article argues that underlying these broad dynamics were questions and preoccupations pertaining to more localized and personal scales of the body and the home. Concentrating on the discourses that circulated in these distinct, yet analogous cities, the article shifts the focus of the transnational approach from specific contacts between individuals and places, to the wider web on which circulated the ideas and initiatives that reshaped people's living environment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 36 , Special Issue 2: Transnational Urbanism in the Americas , August 2009 , pp. 223 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Archives de Montréal (hereafter AM), VM45, Fonds du comité de santé (hereafter CS), S1. Letter from the Board of Health to the Finance Committee, dated 12 Aug. 1889.

2 See, in particular, the work of Saunier, Pierre-Yves, ‘La toile municipale aux XIXe–XXe siècles: un panorama transnational vu d'Europe’, Revue d'histoire urbaine, 34 (2006), 163–76Google Scholar; Saunier, Pierre-Yves, ‘Transatlantic connections and circulations in the 20th century: the urban variable’, Informationen zur modernen Stadgeschichte, 1 (2007), 11–24Google Scholar.

3 AM, VM21, CS, S2. Letter from J. George Adami on behalf of the Montreal League for the Prevention of Tuberculois to the city council, dated 11 Apr. 1905.

4 Laberge's battle, it should be noted, was waged within an ongoing war between the two departments. In a time when municipal sanitation departments were increasingly organized in the growing cities of industrialized countries, Montreal's health officials frequently found themselves pleading the validity of their cause to the city's budgeters. Thus, when, 10 years later, Laberge attended the 27th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Minneapolis, he was forced to dip into the budgets for the public baths and milk inspection service to cover the costs. AM, VM45, CS, S1. Health board departmental note, dated Oct. 1899. On Montreal's municipal health service, and Laberge's career in particular, see Gaumer, Benoît, Desrosiers, Georges and Keel, Othmar, Histoire du Service de santé de la ville de Montréal (Sainte-Foy, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 AM. A.B. LaRocque, ‘Rapport annuel de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1882’, 23.

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11 For a comprehensive examination of these projects, see Thierry Demey, Bruxelles, chronique d'une capitale en chantier, vol. I: Du voûtement de la Senne à la jonction Nord-Midi (Brussels, 1990). On the Parisian influence on urban development in Brussels, see Van Loo, Anne, ‘L'Haussmannisation de Bruxelles, 1865–1880’, Revue de l'Art, 106 (1994), 39–49Google Scholar.

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16 Travel diary of Charles Buls, 1903. Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles, Fonds Buls, Box 95. On the former mayor's conception of urbanism, see Buls, Charles, Esthétique des villes (Brussels, 1893)Google Scholar. On culturalist approaches to urban planning, see Choay, Françoise, L'urbanisme. Utopies et réalités (Paris, 1965), 21–30Google Scholar.

17 ‘Were we American, we would have no scruples; with a few strokes of a pencil, we would trace a series of perfectly rectilinear streets, intersecting at right angles on perfectly level ground.’ Buls, Esthétique des villes, 8.

18 For a Better Montreal: Report of the First Convention of the City Improvement League (Montreal, 1910), 4.

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22 See, for example, Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corbin, Alain, ‘Du Limousin aux cultures sensibles’, in Rioux, Jean-Pierre and Sirinelli, Jean-François (eds.), Pour une histoire culturelle (Paris, 1997)Google Scholar; Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Jephcott, Edmond (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar; Breton, David Le, Anthropologie du corps et modernité (Paris, 2005)Google Scholar; Synott, Anthony, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (London, 1993)Google Scholar.

23 In Montreal and its immediate suburbs, the population increased from 170,000 to 530,000 between censuses in 1881 and 1911. Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération. In the same period, Brussels’ population swelled from 437,000 to 757,000. Daelmans, Frank, ‘La démographie au XIXe et XXe siècle’, in Smolar-Meynart, Arlette and Stengers, Jean (eds.), La région de Bruxelles: des villages d'autrefois à la ville d'aujourd'hui (Brussels, 1989), 212–13Google Scholar.

24 E.E.M. Gouin, ‘Le logement de la famille ouvrière. Ce qu'il doit être, ce qu'il est, comment l'améliorer’, L'école sociale populaire, 9–11 (1912), 18. The word ‘prosperous’ is in quotes in the original, to denote irony.

25 Topalov, Christian, ‘La ville “congestionnée”: acteurs et langage de la réforme urbaine à New York au début du XXe siècle’, Genèses, 1 (1990), 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Joyce, Patrick, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), 65Google Scholar.

27 For the international context, see Sheard, Sally and Power, Helen (eds.), Body and City: Histories of Urban Public Health (Aldershot, 2000), 6Google Scholar; Vigarello, Georges, Histoire des pratiques de santé: le sain et le malsain depuis le moyen âge (Paris, 1999), 217Google Scholar. On Montreal in particular, refer to Michèle Dagenais, Des pouvoirs et des hommes: l'administration municipale de Montréal, 1900–1950 (Montreal, 2000), 21–5; Gaumer, Desrosiers and Keel, Histoire du Service de santé, 62.

28 Association pour l'amélioration du logement ouvrier, Annual Report (1896), 25.

29 AM, VM 47 Fonds de la Commission de l'aqueduc, S4. Letter from Alfred Bertin to Montreal city council, dated 23 Jul. 1890.

30 Émile Hellemans, ‘Rapport sur les bains populaires en Allemagne’, in Comité de Patronage des Habitations Ouvrières et des Institutions de Prévoyance, Rapport sur l'exercice 1897 (Brussels, 1898), 32–43. On the evolution of western norms of cleanliness and bodily deportment, see Elias, The Civilizing Process.

31 AM. Louis Laberge, ‘Rapport annuel de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1885’, 99.

32 Bulletin communal de Bruxelles (27 Dec. 1901), 973.

33 See, for example, Adams, Annmarie, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women 1870–1900 (Montreal, 1996)Google Scholar; Daunton, M.J. (ed.), Housing the Workers, 1850–1914: A Comparative Perspective (Leicester, 1990)Google Scholar; Mayne, The Imagined Slum; Harold Platt, ‘From hygeia to the garden city: bodies, houses and the rediscovery of the slum in Manchester, 1875–1910’, Journal of Urban History, 33 (2007), 756–62.

34 Ames, Herbert Brown, The City Below the Hill. A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal, Canada (Toronto, 1972), 40Google Scholar.

35 On the links between health and home, see Adams, Architecture in the Family Way. On the medical discourse shaping understandings of the home environment in this period, see also Platt, ‘From hygeia to the garden city’.

36 Elzéar Pelletier, ‘Unsanitary dwellings’, in For a Better Montreal, 43.

37 These were sparked, in particular, by the discoveries of Robert Koch in the 1870s and 1880s. See Goubert, Jean-Pierre, La conquête de l'eau: l'avènement de la santé à l'âge industriel (Paris, 1986), 50Google Scholar. When it came to ensuring the health of a house, ‘ce qu'on ne voit pas est plus essentiel que ce qui est exposé à la vue’, warned hygiene professor, and Brussels water-service engineer, Félix and E. Putzeijs. Putzeijs, Félix and Putzeijs, E., Hygiène appliquée. Les installations sanitaires des habitations privées et collectives (Brussels, 1904), 10Google Scholar.

38 Dagenais, Michèle and Durand, Caroline, ‘Cleansing, draining and sanitizing the city: conceptions and uses of water in the Montreal region’, Canadian Historical Review, 87 (2006), 650Google Scholar.

39 Du Caju, Marie, Manuel domestique d'alimentation et d'hygiène (Termonde, 1889), 9, 45Google Scholar.

40 One of the most meticulous examinations of the evolution of this distinction is Elias, The Civilizing Process. The following address the public and private divide within a specifically urban context: Viviane Claude, Faire la ville: les métiers de l'urbanisme au XXe siècle (Marseilles, 2006); Goubert, La conquête de l'eau; Pinol, Jean-Luc, Le monde des villes au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar; Platt, ‘From hygeia to the garden city’. On the way it evolved in Montreal, see Dagenais, Michèle, Faire et fuir la ville: espaces publics de culture et de loisirs à Montréal et Toronto au 19e et 20e siècles (Quebec, 2006)Google Scholar. On Brussels, see Billen, Claire and Decroly, Jean-Michel, Petits coins dans la grande ville: les toilettes publiques à Bruxelles du moyen âge à nos jours (Brussels, 2003)Google Scholar.

41 Sennett, Richard, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York, 1990), 26Google Scholar.

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44 Gouin, ‘Le logement de la famille ouvrière’, 18, 32.

45 Elzéar Pelletier, Nos logis insalubres. Our Unhealthy Dwellings (Conseil d'hygiène de la province de Québec, 1910), 16. Without enough fresh air and light, cautioned one doctor, ‘we inevitably see the appearance of a series of morbid symptoms caused by alteration of the blood’. Inadequate hygiene led to higher death rates, preceded in all cases by ‘a chronic degeneration of the organism’. Report by Dr Lantsheere, in Ville de Bruxelles. Comité de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance. ‘Rapport sur l'exercise de 1899’, 23.

46 Vigarello, Georges, Le propre et le sale: l'hygiène du corps depuis le moyen âge (Paris, 1987), 227Google Scholar.

47 Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières, ix–x. Emphasis in the original.

48 ‘Urinating or defecating anywhere but in the home, outside in the streets or public places, is socially proscribed.’ This dynamic, explains Goubert, had a definite sensorial imperative, the priority being ‘épargner la vue et supprimer l'odeur.’ Goubert, La conquête de l'eau, 88–90. Emphasis in the original. The Belgian housing specialist Maurice Falloise noted that buildings with several apartments, as many workers lived in, should be designed such that each household had access to its own balcony on which all water-related facilities were located, thus reducing the possibilities for people to come into contact in the context of henceforth highly private activity. Maurice Falloise, De la construction d'habitations ouvrières (Liège, 1906), 41.

49 AM. Louis Laberge, ‘Rapport de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1885’, 12.

50 AM. Louis Laberge, ‘Rapport de l'état sanitaire de la cité de Montréal pour l'année 1899’, 10.

51 AM, CS, VM 45, 28 Aug. 1882.

52 Province de Québec, Rapport de la Commission Royale de la Tuberculose (Province de Québec, 1910), 78.

53 Pelletier, Nos logis insalubres, 16.

54 Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 2.

55 Vigarello, Le propre et le sale, 207. On the moralizing discourse in Brussels specifically, see Patricia Van Den Eekhout, ‘Brussels’, in Daunton (ed.), Housing the Workers, 67–106, as well as Peter Scholliers, ‘Construire le bon et le mauvais. Les ouvriers à Bruxelles vers 1900’, and Janet Polasky, ‘L'approche moralisante de la question sociale. Le modèle du bon ouvrier’, in Cahiers de la Fonderie, 36 (2007), 12–19 and 25–30.

56 Gouin, ‘Le logement de la famille ouvrière’, 16. Emphasis in the original.

57 Soenens, Albert, Les habitations ouvrières en Belgique (Brussels, 1894), 27Google Scholar.

58 Moere, A. Vander, Habitations ouvrières (Brussels, 1901), 4Google Scholar.

59 Maurice van der Bruggen, in Ville de Bruxelles. Comité officiel de patronage des habitations ouvrières et des institutions de prévoyance. Rapport sur l'exercice 1905 (Brussels, 1906), 178.

60 Gouin, ‘Le logement de la famille ouvrière’, 7. Such references to incest were often veiled and hushed, at other times explicit and direct, but in all cases expressed with a sense of profound discomfort. Commission du travail instituée par arrêté royal du 15 avril 1886, Réponses au questionnaire concernant le travail industriel, vol. I (Brussels, 1887), Hellemans, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières; Charles Lagasse and Charles De Quéker, Enquête sur les habitations ouvrières en 1890 (Brussels, 1890).

61 For more on this theme, see Schultz, Stanley, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 (Philadelphia, 1989), 113Google Scholar.

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