Cities of Power. Göran Therborn

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СКАЧАТЬ and Mughal Empires were dynastic names, and so was Choson (today’s Korea). China, Zhongguo, did have a territorial meaning, while also, for instance in Korea, being referred to as a dynasty.¹⁷

      When does a state become a nation-state? The continuities of European state history complicate the task, often necessitating indicating a timespan of variable length. A very important aspect of this continuity was the unique European process whereby princely rule could gradually evolve into a purely symbolic monarchy. Even the French case is not without possible options. Clearly, the revolution from 1789 onwards made France into a nation-state, but the crucial date, or even year, has been debated. For instance, in 1880 when the National Assembly was to decide the Day of the Nation, it had at least eleven alternatives in front of it.¹⁸ The alternatives considered included the one most proper in my eyes, 20 June 1789, when the Third Estate of the Estates-General turned itself into a Constituent National Assembly. The date finally chosen, 14 July 1789 (the storming of the Bastille), was arguably a wise compromise, a moderate way of commemorating the revolutionary people of Paris.

      In Parisian iconography, an embryonic national streak was visible already under the monarchical hegemony of the ancien régime. When major streets started to get official names in the seventeenth century, some were given to non-royal statesmen, like Richelieu, Colbert and Mazarin; later they were given to the provost of the merchants and to city aldermen and, finally, in the 1780s, to famous writers such as Racine and Molière.¹⁹

      One of the first urbanistic conquests of the revolutionary nation was ending the duality between Paris and the royal court city of Versailles. The Estates had been convoked to Versailles, and it was there that the French nation constituted itself as such. It was in buildings around the royal castle of Versailles that the Third Estate turned itself into the National Assembly, in the Hall of Minor Pleasures (Salle des Menus-Plaisirs), and swore the Oath of the Tennis Court (Jeu de Paume) not to part before providing the nation with a constitution. This spatial duality ended abruptly in October 1789, when a very angry procession of Parisian market women and an only slightly less angry march of Parisian National Guards forced the king and the court to return to Paris, to the Tuileries. The National Assembly followed, and installed itself in the Riding House (Salle du Manège) of the same royal palace.

      The revolution unleashed a huge iconoclasm, not quite unprecedented,* similar to that of later Communist revolutions and anti-Communist counter-revolutions. As the revolution did end the ancien régime – after a short counter-revolutionary Restoration of 1815 to 1830 – the pre-revolutionary toponymy and monumentality did not return, unlike in parts of post-Communist Europe, but nor did the revolutionary thrust endure. Place Louis XV became Place de la Révolution, the site of the guillotine and the execution of Louis XVI. In 1795 the Directory gave it its present name, Concorde, briefly interrupted by the Restoration. The Place du Trône became the Place du Trône Renversé (the Square of the Toppled Throne) and then finally settled down as the Place de la Nation. The Place Royale lost the statue of Louis XIII and, after a brief stint dedicated to the ‘Fédérés’ (the army and the National Guard) became the sedate Place des Vosges in honour of the first province to contribute to the military campaign of 1799. The Restoration, of course, restored its monarchist original, but then lost out. Place Louis le Grand became definitively Place Vendôme, and Louis XIV was replaced by the Column of Austerlitz, modelled after Trajan’s column of ancient Rome. The victorious commander of the battle (Napoleon) was taken down from the top during the Restoration, but was restored there afterwards. The Bastille prison was demolished. Instead came the Place de la Bastille, with its July Column topped by the Spirit of Liberty, erected in the 1830s, commemorating the martyrs of the July Revolution.

      Already the national Orléans monarchy coming out of the 1830 revolution tried to bask in Napoleonic glory, completing the Arc de Triomphe with its recording of tri-continental imperial French victories. The battlefields of Napoleonic victories are all over the streets of central Paris: Aboukir, Austerlitz, Eylau, Friedland, Iéna, Pyramides, Ulm, Wagram and so on, commemorated by three republics as well as by the Second Empire. The early victories of the Second Empire and the two world wars then added to the extraordinary war-path character of the streets of central Paris.

      During the mid-nineteenth-century Second Empire and the power and design of the imperial Prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Paris got a largely new spatial layout of long, wide boulevards lined with homogenous architecture and long horizontal lines of wrought-iron balconies, all testifying to a wealthy authoritarian power unrestrained by any parliament or by individualist property rights. This Paris became what Walter Benjamin called the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, and David Harvey the ‘capital of modernity’ and a transcontinental model was seen particularly in Latin America.²⁰

      However, the main enduring capital-city effect of the revolutionary French route to political modernity and a nation-state is this: national Paris has never had the time and/or money to construct monumental buildings of national institutions, although from the very beginning of the Revolutions there were grandiose plans.²¹ The Palais de l’Élysée, the Presidential Palace, is an ordinary aristocratic town palace in a side street of the Rive Droite, once belonging to Madame de Pompadour, the most notorious of royal mistresses. The National Assembly has a nice location by the river, but is no more than a former palace of a minor Bourbon royalty. During the Paris Commune of 1871 it had to move to Versailles, and in 1875 it decided on this principal site of the ancien régime as its permanent location (a permanence reversed after four years). France did not have an official prime minister (then called Président du Conseil) until 1946, but this position existed de facto from 1934, lodged in Palais Matignon, another former aristocratic townhouse, on the Rive Gauche. The last royal palace, the Tuileries, was burnt down during the Paris Commune.²²

      Instead of institutional landmark buildings, Paris has a set of places de ruptures, heavily invested with meaning to this day. The eastern Places de la Bastille, de la République and de la Nation all refer to domestic French history, and they all have a left-of-centre connotation and a similar function of gathering or demonstrating arrival.

      Correspondingly, the French right have their places of assembly and destination to the west, mainly commemorating external wars, from the Jeanne d’Arc statue and Place de la Concorde along the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, or, at the Rive Gauche, les Invalides. To this day, French politics is much better at mass demonstrations and short strikes than at building institutions and organizations.

      When did Britain become a nation-state, a multinational one of (at least) the English, the Scots and the Welsh, and London a national capital? These are questions rarely raised in British historiography, in contrast to questions of national identity and nationalism.²³ Terminus ab quo is the ‘Revolution’ of 1688, which, whatever its unintended modern consequences, was basically a revolution in the pre-modern sense, literally a ‘rolling back’^* to the Tudor times of ‘free-born Englishmen’ and Protestant monarchs. No section of a nation-state, and no party wanting to create a nation-state, can possibly invite a foreign prince to conquer the country and rule the state, like the seven ‘gentlemen and aristocrats’† who invited the Dutch stadhouder Prince William of Orange on 7 June 1688, did. The official motivation of ‘the Great Restorer’, as John Locke aptly called William, ‘to appear in Arms’ was ‘Preserving of the Protestant Religion, and for restoring the laws and liberties of the ancient kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland’.²⁴ Through his marriage to the daughter of King James II, William also had a claim to the succession. The year 1688 was part of a two-centuries-long armed and religiously impassioned dynastic rivalry and inter-state princely power game over the British crown – also involving the French and the Spanish monarchs – that went on until 1746, when the army of a new Hanoverian Protestant dynasty finally defeated that of the Catholic Stuarts.

      Terminus ad quem would be the 1830s. Iconographically, 1830 was a crucial year, when the new central square in London was in the end not called King William Square as expected. With the king’s consent, it became СКАЧАТЬ