War and urban catastrophes:
Responses from history to practice.
1863-1935
France
before and after WWI
Introduction
Thank you for this kind introduction. I am very grateful to colleagues who took time off their busy schedule to attend this lecture. Let me, above all, express my sincere gratitude to the Francqui Foundation and to VUB colleagues who deemed me worthy of their nomination for this appointment. It is indeed an honour to hold a chair named after Emile Francqui, not least for a historian of the First World War and of the reconstruction that followed. At the head of the Comité national de secours et d’alimentation, Emile Francqui played a key role in the transnational humanitarian effort that supported Belgian civilians in war and under occupation. It would also be remiss of me not to mention the role he and the foundation that perpetuates his name played in the enterprise of national and international reconstruction; an enterprise at the heart of which they rightly placed education and science.
The Chair has given me the chance to contribute to the excellent undergraduate and postgraduate programmes offered by VUB historians and urban studies scholars. I am indeed grateful for the opportunity to share many stimulating and productive conversations with students and colleagues alike. Today, I will attempt to thread together some of the key questions I have been exploring in both my research and teaching. Although, as I indicated a minute ago, I have devoted most of my scholarly efforts to the social and comparative history of war and of the First World War in particular, my work now stands at the crossroads of the urban history of war and of critical disaster studies.
At the crossroads of the urban history of war and of critical disaster studies
I am currently writing a transnational history of urban reconstruction in Belgium and France after 1918. This book was initially conceived as an urban history of the transition from war to peace, of what John Horne analysed as a process of demobilisation. The book will hopefully deliver on its original objective. But the teacher-scholars present in this room will know that no research project operates in isolation from our activities in the classroom. This book was indeed profoundly reshaped by the pedagogical agenda I have been pursuing at Warwick and, along with VUB colleagues, within the Eutopia European University. Together we are building an interdisciplinary teaching and learning community focused on urban vulnerabilities, disasters, and resilience since the early modern period.
Urbanization is conventionally held as a defining feature of modernity and its history. Although the majority of the world population did not live in towns and cities before 2008, the experience of urban life illuminates the making of the modern world. Centres of political power, cultural influence, and economic activities, towns and cities have long played a critical role in global history. As a result, urban disasters often threatened the long-term trajectories of cities and states alike as their human and material toll reverberated for years and decades thereafter. From the Great Fire of London in 1666 to Beirut in the late-twentieth century, the capacity of urban settlements to recover from environmental catastrophes, industrial accidents, economic decline, and from the ravages of war revealed the strengths and the weaknesses of their social fabric. In dramatic circumstances, urban reconstruction also brings to light many issues of great importance to modern historians: the link between the built environment and local identity, the nature of social cohesion, the relationship between state and civil society, the emergence of transnational solidarity, etc.
In the last decades, events across the globe have underlined the vulnerability of the urban environment and the challenges that reconstruction and urban recovery continue to issue to victims and policymakers alike. In Japan, a country dramatically affected by the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995 and the tsunami of March 2011, urban life has long been regularly punctuated by disasters. Europe, of course, is not immune to such devastation as attested by the earthquakes that destroyed L’Aquila in 2009 or Amatrice in 2016. In an increasingly urbanised world, towns and cities regularly bear the brunt of ecological disasters. In Europe, however, like in Japan or the Middle East, the devastation of urban communities is also indissociable from the man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century. To many, the names of Dresden or Coventry conjure up the memory of the Second World War, while the fate of Warsaw illustrates the conflation of modern warfare and genocide. The dissolution of Yugoslavia turned Sarajevo, Mostar, and many other cities into urban battlefields. Similar fate recently befell Palmyra or Aleppo. As I speak, of course, the Russian commanders who contributed to the destruction of countless Syrian communities pursue a relentless and criminal assault on Ukraine and its cities. Along with our students, we therefore focus on the most extreme urban crises brought about by epidemics, earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, and war of course. Concerned with the experience of urban disasters, we also pay attention to those practitioners – humanitarians, urban planners, architects, policymakers – concerned with the recovery of devastated cities. Likewise, my research focuses on the experience and trajectory of what Martin Kohlrausch and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann called, in their study of the urban aftermath of the Second World War, the “post-catastrophic cities”[1].
Any one of us is sadly familiar with the images of contemporary devastation wrought upon cities by environmental disasters or military conflict. Such pictures invite a comparison which, in many ways, appears self-evident. The language of disasters has indeed long been deployed to speak of war and its destruction. Los Desastres de la Guerra was the title that Francisco Goya gave to his etchings denouncing the conduct of French troops during the Peninsular War. Students of military conflicts have also resorted to similar metaphors. To take but one example, Arthur Marwick entitled his social history of the Great War, The Deluge. It is therefore rather surprising that wars and environmental disasters are hardly ever positioned within the same analytical framework. This is all the more surprising to a historian of the first half of the twentieth century. This period, defined in many regions of the world by the experience and legacies of military conflicts, also witnessed a large number of large-scale urban disasters. Think of the earthquakes which devastated Valparaiso in 1906, Messina in 1908, Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923, or New Zealand in 1931; of the fires that raged through San Francisco in 1906 or Thessaloniki in 1917; of the accident that destroyed Halifax, Nova Scotia in the same year. Between 1925 and 1928 alone, the International Union for the Relief of Disasters, an agency of the League of Nations, counted no fewer than 788 disasters in the world.[2] It is indeed rather tempting to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm and to describe the period as the age of urban catastrophes.
Bringing together the history of war and the study of disasters also highlight obvious but relatively neglected areas for research, including the link between militarism and disaster relief since the late nineteenth century. The response to the Great Chicago fire of 1871 or the 1906 Valparaiso earthquake for instance illustrate how dominant sections of the urban communities, in the grips of what sociologist Kathleen Tierney called “elite panic”, deployed martial law and military violence to suppress perceived threats to the social order. In 1908 however, the Messina earthquake demonstrated the positive role that military personnel could play in rescue and relief operations. The disaster constituted an early example of national armed forces responding in effect as part of a transnational humanitarian expedition.
The period also witnessed the organisation and professionalisation of two fields of practice – urbanism and humanitarianism – whose expertise and experience came to shape the way we think of urban disasters. Urbanism and humanitarianism both emerged around the mid-19th century; they respectively sought to address the social ills associated with urbanisation and the suffering caused by the medical and legal neglect of the victims of war. Each of these transnational movements drew on a pluralist ideological heritage and mobilised a complex set of professional skills. There is no time for me here to discuss this in detail but suffice it to say that the early twentieth century was a critical period in their history. Urban disasters unsurprisingly commanded the attention of and mobilised urban planners and humanitarians alike. Several officials of the American Red Cross operating in Europe between 1914 and 1920 had for instance been delayed in response to the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. After the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, Japanese commentators and policymakers often evoked its unprecedented damages as akin only to the devastation visited upon the former battlefields of the Great War. Indeed, Japanese urban planners and civil society organisations corresponded with their Belgian counterparts in the hope they could draw lessons from the urban reconstruction of Belgium then underway.
The history of urban catastrophes in the early twentieth century therefore seems a productive way to bring together the history of war and disaster studies. It is indeed in the interwar period that emerged the first social-scientific studies of natural disasters. To name but two celebrated examples: Samuel Prince defended a doctoral dissertation on Catastrophe and Social Change at Columbia University in 1920; L.J. Carr published his “Disaster and the sequence-pattern concept of social change” in the American Journal of Sociology in 1938. While these precursors are not wholly ignored, disaster studies specialists and practitioners generally pay little attention to the genealogy of their field and to the nature of the crises that brought it forth.
I would suggest that this project also offers an opportunity to engage in a critical and sustained manner with the concepts elaborated by scholars and practitioners alike since the onset of the Cold War. Then, the study of disaster management undeniably benefited from the attention and financial support of civilian and military authorities anxious to mitigate the impact of a nuclear conflict. Subsequently, environmental disasters become of particular interest to development scholars, in a postcolonial world increasingly defined by the social and ecological vulnerability of the global south. Later, the recurrence of industrial accidents formed the backdrop of an interdisciplinary reflection on the technological hazards constitutive of what Ulrich Beck called the Risk Society. Today, the combination of climate change, terrorism, and the Covid-19 pandemic ensures that the question of urban resilience remains at the heart of discussions about urban growth, infrastructure, planning, and politics.
History, I would suggest, has a critically important role to play in this wider interdisciplinary effort. It can help interrogate the practices as well as the intellectual and analytical tools developed in response to urban catastrophes. The comparative history of the early twentieth century does demonstrate the remarkable number of large-scale urban disasters it witnessed was not simply a matter of concomitance and coincidence. It does indeed demonstrate that these most extreme urban crises revealed defining features of the urbanisation process as well as of the nature of modern war.
In the time that remains, I will consider the reason why the history of war and disaster studies still largely operate in the disciplinary silos that we must challenge and bring down. It is here imperative to question the normative exceptionalism which still sustain them.
I will then briefly show how the history of the urban aftermath of the First World War in Western Europe benefit from the key insights of the emerging field of critical disaster studies.
Finally, I will draw on the environmental humanities and on literary scholarship in particular to show what social history might contribute to the contemporary discussion of a most problematic term: urban resilience.
Against normative exceptionalism
Urban historians of war have so far rarely engaged with disaster studies. This, I would suggest, stems from the prevalent notion that war and disaster are fundamentally different phenomena whose study require starkly different analytical framework. This is a notion one can only entertain if we ignore the profound renewal that both disaster studies and the history of war underwent in the last 40 years.
Allow me to start with the central proposition which now underpins the social scientific study of disasters. There is no such thing as a natural disaster. While popular discourses and too many policymakers continue to insist that disasters are facts of nature, and while the implications of this proposition have only recently been systematically explored, this is a rather old idea.
After a compound disaster – an earthquake followed by a tsunami and then a fire – destroyed 85% of Lisbon on All Saints’ Day in 1755, a fierce debate mobilised theologians and philosophers and famously pitted Voltaire against Rousseau. While the former used the disaster to reject the notion of a benevolent God, the latter could no more reject providence than he could absolve humankind of its responsibility. A known critic of urban life, Rousseau indeed argued that urbanisation itself – and the men who had allowed and facilitated it – had turned a geological event into a disaster. Neither God nor Nature could be held responsible for the construction of the capital of the mighty Portuguese empire on a site which exposed its population to severe environmental risks. Indeed, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or floods are natural hazards. In and of themselves, they do not constitute a disaster. The disaster is produced when the hazard affects a human settlement which finds itself vulnerable to it. As Ilan Kelman recently put it, “nature does not choose, but we do. We can choose to avoid disasters, and that means disasters are not natural.” It is therefore misleading to conceive a disaster as an event, for it is in fact the outcome of a long-term process that social scientist must account for. Pace Rousseau, there was little questioning of the “naturalness of disaster” up until the late twentieth century. One notable exception was André Mater who called in 1939 for a “sociology of calamity.” Few scholars systematically explored disasters as social construct before the 1970s. Only then did we genuinely reckon with the Greek etymology of catastrophe: the denouement of a dramatic play; the completion of an action, therefore produced by pre-existing factors and processes.
Andy Horowitz’s history of Hurricane Katrina offers a remarkable vindication of such an approach. Entitled Hurricane Katrina, 1915-2015, the book demonstrates the devastation of New Orleans was not merely the result of technological failures. Katrina was not simply flooded because the levees designed to protect it had failed. Katrina was exposed to the elements by vulnerabilities constructed over a century. The growing role of the oil industry in Louisiana, the racist housing policies imposed upon the city’s African American populations, the spatial segregation created by economic inequality, anthropogenic climate change: all combined to increase the risk of hurricanes – a fact of life in the Gulf of Mexico – as the region’s ecosystems and the city’s population were deprived of the resources to withstand environmental stresses. Katrina was therefore less an event than a secular catastrophe.
WWI as urban catastrophe
Merely a few hours after Germany declared war against France on the 3rd of August 1914, the Goeben and Breslau battleships marked the outbreak of military hostilities with the bombardment of the Algerian cities then known as Bône and Philippeville. André Gaglione, a road maintenance worker killed in Bône that day, was certainly the first French victim of the First World War.[3] A fitting illustration of this clash of empires, the shelling of these colonial cities also emphasised that this war would also be an urban catastrophe. Later that month, the invasion of Belgium brought industrial warfare to the urban heart of Europe. Marching through its densest and most urbanized country, the German forces turned towns and cities into battlefields. Liège, Leuven, Mons, and then Ypres: for most contemporaries in Western Europe and beyond, the names of these cities punctuated the unfolding story of the conflict.[4] The shocking devastation visited upon the cities of Europe by industrial warfare, the particular form of urban victimisation it brought about, is perhaps enough to consider the First World War as an urban catastrophe. One could also argue that this was a war made in cities, less in Sarajevo perhaps, than in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, St Petersburg, and London, where policymakers led their country into the conflagration. Provincial towns and cities were also critical sites of military, economic, and social mobilization. By 1914 of course, urbanization still remained an uneven and incomplete process.[5] The majority of combatants were not city-dwellers but farmers and rural labourers. However, by 1914, towns and cities had, like war itself, been transformed by the process of modernization that characterized the long nineteenth-century.[6] Though the domestic and international political dynamics which brought about the conflagration had played out in a few weeks, they had been decades-long in the making. Though military mobilisation transformed cities overnight, they had long been involved in the production and distribution of the human, cultural, and economic means of industrial warfare. However, shocking the declaration of war, it was less a brutal event than the culmination of a manifold and long-term processes.
The First World War also brought about urban disasters which might be better understood as liminal catastrophes. In Thessaloniki in August 1917, a domestic accident turned into a massive conflagration that engulfed and destroyed a third of the city, displaced tens of thousands of people and a large part of the city’s Jewish community. Efforts to contain the fire and avert the disaster were certainly hampered by the presence of Allied troops and the attitude of their commanders.[7] On the 6th of December of that year, in the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia on the eastern seaboard of Canada, a French cargo ship carrying 2,600 tons of high explosive to the front collided with a Norwegian boat transporting supplies for the relief of Belgium. 20 minutes later this accident produced the largest man-made explosion up until Hiroshima. The blast killed about 2,000 people, flattened a large part of the city, and even produced a small tsunami. In both cases, the circumstances of the war combined with pre-existing vulnerabilities – to fires and industrial accident – to produce disasters that cannot be exclusively attributed to the conflict. In other words, such cases invite us to consider the extent to which the experience of war is extraordinary but not exceptional when placed in a wider reflection on urban disasters.
The historiographical separation long maintained between disasters and conflicts stems from the assumption that wars, irrespective of their duration, are events that mark sharp ruptures in the fabric of time. This is a remnant of the long domination that political and diplomatic historians, traditional proponents of what is known in French as histoire événementielle, exercised over the discipline. The cultural history of the Great War, emphasising the rupture brought about by the conflict, did not fundamentally challenge this vision. Today, however, social and comparative historians of the conflict strive to position the Greater, global war of 1912-1923 onto a wider chronological as well as geographical canvas. On their end, disaster scholars operate in a field where popular representation of catastrophes “tend to reduce disasters to discrete events, initiated” – in the words of Fiona Williamson and Chris Courtney – “on the shallow causal timescale of meteorological fluctuation or seismic disruption.” By contrast, they argue that disaster are processes that played out on different timescales. To this social historian of the First World War, such an approach is just as persuasive. For I understand the conflict not as an “incident” – let alone as a historical accident -, but as the culmination of the socio-economic, ideological, political and technological changes which transformed Europe and the world since the late eighteenth-century.
The disaster as a critical lens
Critical disaster scholars have therefore moved on from the definition of disasters offered in 1961 by Charles Fritz who approached it as “an event, concentrated in time and space.” Along with environmental historians, they seize on the disaster as a critical lens which reveal the systematic vulnerability undermining urban communities as well as the built environment of cities. Urban catastrophes, as Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud put it, are “discontinuous moment that reveals the maladjustment of the city to its environment or to its socio-economic relationships.” The specific type of urbanisation associated with industrial capitalism since the 19th century is therefore best seen as the manufacture of urban vulnerabilities. From an environmental point of view, urban disasters must be part and parcel of a history of the Anthropocene. Besides, as Jacob Remes and Andrew Horowitz persuasively argue, their study offers “a way of trying to answer different, broader questions about power and inequality, community and trauma, nature and society, order and instability, and the cultural beliefs that shape people’s uneven experiences of misfortune.” This is why it seems imperative to bring the tools of critical disaster studies to bear on the history of urban reconstruction after 1918.
The uneven, uncertain, and unequal urban recovery after 1918
I hope to build on the many excellent but often strictly economic, financial, and state-centred histories of the stabilisation of Western Europe to offer a social and urban history of reconstruction; to highlight its complex geographies and temporalities.
Geographies and temporalities of the urban transition from war to peace
The Armistice of November 1918 uncovered the landscape of destruction carved out by industrial warfare. In Belgian and French cities laid to waste by military operations, the war clearly did not end with the peace treaties and the return of war veterans. There, ruins and devastation formed the backdrop of demobilisation, whose geography was not simply defined by the boundaries of the nation-state. In France, 10 départements of the north and north-east of the country had endured such destruction that 91% of their settlement had suffered material damage. Of those, 620 communes had been entirely destroyed.[8] In Belgium, few regions had been spared the devastation and the reconstruction was a truly national undertaking: 200,000 buildings, 4,000 km of railway tracks had been destroyed.[9] While West Flanders had suffered the most extensive damage after the stabilisation of the battlefield, towns and cities on the path of the German army had suffered substantial destruction too. The following maps underline the uneven geography of destruction, including in those regions administratively defined as devastated areas.
The study of urban reconstruction must also reckon with and account for the contrast between official chronologies of recovery and its lived temporalities. Material devastation transformed both the context and dynamics of demobilisation and forged, to use Reinhardt Koselleck’s categories, specific “spaces of experience” and “horizons of expectations”.[10] In the devastated regions of Europe, the process of reconstruction imposed its own temporalities. As local populations projected themselves into the post-war future, they were keenly aware of the particular historical trajectory of their communities. Their war experience was not just defined by mass military and social mobilisation, by collective mourning, and temporary economic dislocation. It was also irremediably shaped by the destruction of their physical environment and the upheaval of their most basic, material conditions of existence. This accounts for the divergence of local and national temporalities of demobilisation, as the necessities of reconstruction imposed their own timeframes. This also explains the difficulty to offer a definite chronology of reconstruction. The planning for, if not the actual work of, reconstruction began as soon as the German army penetrated onto Belgian and French territory. Reconstruction was, in this sense, concomitant to destruction; its history therefore starts in August 1914. It is however considerably more difficult to establish its endpoint. By the mid-1920s, most towns and cities affected by military operations had made great stride towards their reconstruction, even in France. National authorities and financial institutions were keen, for different reasons, to proclaim the end of reconstruction as André Tardieu explicitly and hastily did in November 1929[11]. What is certain is that many communities were still completing their reconstruction when they had to face another war and its new trail of destruction. The study of reconstruction underlines the fact that demobilization was an uneven and contested process. It underlines in particular the existence of a particular geography of demobilization, for the populations of the devastated regions experienced the transition from war to peace in specific ways.
In a context marked by fiscal retrenchment, national authorities had made the strategic and pragmatic choice to prioritise industrial reconstruction and the restoration of the productive apparatus. Though not neglected, the reconstruction of towns and cities was never afforded the pre-eminence that urbanists and urban populations expected. It was, as a result, an uneven process which did not fit the story of linear, uninterrupted progress that national authorities were keen to promote throughout the 1920s.
Disasterdom as uncertain transition
Urban reconstruction was not simply about the restoration of the built environment. For many of the 4 million French and Belgian refugees who had fled before the German army and sought refuge away from the combat zones, reconstruction was also relocation and resettlement. The study of reconstruction raises questions about the process whereby refugees moved from one social status defined by the experience of exile – refugeedom – to another – that of sinistrés – defined by the destruction of the material basis for domestic and community life. I want to suggest that the particular transition that the inhabitants of the devastated regions experienced represented their entry into – to coin a phrase – disasterdom. The transition from refugeedom to disasterdom occurred not simply as a result of the physical relocation. It was a manifold process underpinned by material, legal, ethical/cultural and political dynamics that I will try to outline very briefly before you. It was a process defined by uncertainty and anxiety about the possibility and the conditions of return. After the 1918 Armistice, Belgian refugees were often the first workers to be laid off by munitions factories in Britain. Similar fear of unemployment also led the British authorities to encourage speedy repatriations. By the spring of 1919, the UK government had stopped its assistance. Most Belgians had left the Netherlands by July 1919.
The material conditions of the refugees’ return were very difficult indeed as the French state in particular failed to stem the early flows of returnees. The relocation from host to home communities was not simply a spatial experience, defined by mobility. It also marked the beginning of a transition from one legal status to another. There is perhaps not better illustration than the loss of the allowance paid by the national government to their own refugees. The French government conditioned its allowance to the authorisation of return, and it could only be claimed for up to three months after their resettlement. The return to Reims for instance was allowed on the 7th of August 1919. By the end of October, 4,000 school pupils had returned, but their classrooms had neither doors nor windows.
The Belgian and French governments did not ignore the plight of the devastated regions and the needs of their populations. Legal initiatives were taken to provide for the reconstruction. In Belgium, an Arrêté-loi was signed on the 23rd of October 1918; France passed a law on the 17th of April 1919. In both countries, reconstruction or the “reparation” of war damages was considered to be the duty of the nation. Those victims of the war were entitled to national solidarity and reparation was expected to be integration. I have previously argued – and I am sorry to say consigned to print – that legislators had created a new legal category for the populations of the devastated regions. I was wrong. They did no such thing. The reconstruction legislation defined the damage, but not the sinistrés themselves. The legislation listed the legal personalities with a potential right to indemnity for reparations of war damage: Individuals and their heirs, voluntary organisations, public legal entities including municipalities and local authorities, businesses.
There is here a significant tension for the inhabitants of the devastated regions were quickly identified as sinistrés. Indeed, the French April 1919 law is referred to as the Charter of the sinistrés – of course charters have long played an important role in the history of constitutional monarchies and liberal republics like the Kingdom of Belgium and the French Third Republic. Charters do recognise the rights and duties of subjects or citizens they defined. This law did nothing of the sort. In the immediate aftermath of the war, both Belgium and France passed legislation to organise the evaluation and compensation of the damages. They adopted a narrow, financial understanding of the loss suffered by sinistrés. There was literally no accounting for what the returnees considered to be their specific sacrifice and loss. It is, I believe, significant that this legislation did not define the sinistrés in the way refugees had previously been defined when allied state had to provide for their reception and relief. The legislation did define damages and the very broad categories of potential beneficiaries. It applied a compensatory logic strictly based on property rights and values, in keeping with the restoration of the liberal economic order and austerity policies that governments committed to in the interwar period.
Furthermore, to benefit from the state’s support, returnees had to file claims with War Damages Tribunals that would evaluate and adjudicate them. Where the experience of exile had created a legal status for refugees, the sinistré was never defined in law. The recognition of their experience was by contrast conditioned and determined by a claim process. In other words, the recognition of their victimisation was predicated on their subjection to a process that precisely rested on the contestation of their claim. As they struggled to reconstitute their home and their livelihood in dire material conditions, as their plight was obvious to anyone who travelled through the devastated regions, they nonetheless found themselves in the position of claimant, whose status and recognition was dependent on the good will of the state and their national civil societies.
Reconstruction and resilience
Urban devastation as slow violence
In his work on the environmentalism of the poor, Rob Nixon, a postcolonial literary scholar invites us to think of the environmental damages suffered by communities of the global south as slow violence. Nixon is concerned with “slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” that “occur gradually and out of sight”. Slow violence in his reading is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive.” I would suggest that the continuation of war for the populations of the devastated regions may productively be approached as slow violence. Nixon is indeed concerned with the representational challenge posed by slow violence, with “the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time.” Contemporary narratives as well as historical works demonstrates how little attention was indeed paid to the sinistrés.
It is certainly useful at this point to say a few words of the archive of reconstruction at our disposal. In another lecture I recently gave at VUB, I describe the First World War as a literate war; a conflict accompanied by an outpouring of publications and ego-documents documenting the experience of belligerent populations. Facilitated by rising rates of literacy, this was also a response to the experience of separation of soldiers and refugees from their home communities. Reunited with kith and kin, the urge to consign one’s impression diminished while the immense, tedious, unspectacular labour of urban and domestic reconstruction left little time and even less energy for the documentation of one’s experience. This is why the archive of reconstruction is largely an archive of intervention. Urban reconstruction is mainly documented by the administrative bodies and professional groups involved in the restoration of cities. The voice of sinistrés is often marginal in the archival record which makes the iconographic record of the period all the more important.
By contrast, urbanists for instance devoted thousands of pages to the reconstruction they perceived as an opportunity. As I recently demonstrated in the French case, they paid little attention to the social conditions created by urban devastation. This hindered their capacity to engage with the local populations in a sustained and positive manner. Unable to apprehend the socio-political dynamic at work in the devastated cities, urbanists were unable to exercise the kind of control over reconstruction they had claimed and craved for the duration of the war. Anxious to bring about the modernisation of towns and cities, they appeared remarkably oblivious of the specific challenges raised by post-war reconstruction. Urbanists virtually ignored the problems that the reintegration of demobilised combatants and disabled veterans in devastated cities might pose. Likewise, those practitioners of municipal politics never considered how foreign occupation and its legacy might hindered the reconstitution of urban politics. Despite their hygienist concern, they also paid little regard to the personal development and education of children whose schooling would be further disrupted for months and in some cases years. Those concerns were however foremost on the minds of sinistrés.
Resilience as contestation
Unsurprisingly, the slow pace of reconstruction soon gave rise to endless complaints and recriminations. Regardless of the immensity and complexity of the tasks, the local populations expressed their anger at what they perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be the inadequacies, incompetence, and corruption of local and national authorities.[12] Police reports in 1919 and 1920 regularly evoke the risks entailed by the growing discontent in the devastating regions. In the context marked by the rise of Bolshevism and concerns about law and order, the potential for violence loomed large on officials’ minds.
The sinistrés’ frustration was expressed in a most symbolic fashion in September 1919 with a meeting of the Estates General of the Devastated regions. To underline the gravity of their grievances, those had previously been consigned into Cahiers de doléances produced by local committees.[13] The reference to the French Revolutionary experience is here of course transparent. Both the cahiers and orators brought before the Estates General lamented excessive centralisation and called for the local management of the reconstruction. Those demands were all the more striking for being formulated by regional notabilities, who were used to wielding significant influence on the policymaking process. It would not take long for former delegates to express their disappointment as they railed against the centralised and technocratic approach to reconstruction.[14] To many, this revealed how little regard the state and the nation paid to the opinions of the victims of the war.
Five years after an Armistice that did not deliver the international support they had been promised, the populations of the devastated regions were still clearly anxious not to be forgotten. A local leader pointedly asked: “Has the time passed so fast that one has already forgotten what the sinistrés have suffered? Has the memory of [their] martyr disappeared?”[15] In 1925, the Comité d’Action des Régions Dévastées, a rather forceful and militant organisation led by left-wing and left-of-centre local politicians from the North and East launched a new publication, Le Sinistré, to advocate for the regions. To them, the public and official commitment to national solidarity had faded by 1920-1921. They were particularly scathing of the way in which the national press had exploited a few isolated cases of illegitimate enrichment and turned them into the so-called “scandal of the devastated regions”.[16] Deprived of a fully-fledged legal status, sinistrés now had to defend their integrity and remind the rest of the nation of their continuing plight. They protested the lack of material progress and the confiscation of their voice by state officials and local notabilities alike. They denounced the reconstruction as a fundamentally unequal process. Their mobilisation underlines the contested nature of urban reconstruction and invites us to question dominant visions of urban resilience.
Urban resilience as a political project
Though I use the term resilience as a convenient portmanteau for the manifold process of urban recovery, I share many a reservation expressed by critical disaster studies scholars about the term. Resilience was initially deployed by biologists in the 1970s to describe the capacity of an ecological system to return to a state of equilibrium after experiencing severe stress. Since then, Covid-19 established the omnipresence of resilience in public discourse. From children’s mental health to global supply chains, the term is applied to every conceivable context. It means so many different things to so many different people that it has become practically useless as a category of analysis. This is a problem reinforced by the imaginative flexibility of the English language, now the dominant language of international science and policymaking: resilience is described as bouncing back or falling forward, etc… But resilience metaphors obscures as much as they illuminate the past and present of post-catastrophic cities. Apparently innocuous and apolitical, discourses of resilience are often co-opted by technocratic or neoliberal agenda and often serve to confiscate the voice of disaster victims, to obscure the unequal and contested nature of reconstruction. For urban recovery is not the product of a consensual process. It is indeed highly contested for it is fundamentally about the allocation of scarce resources. Deciding what to rebuild, when, and where does reveal a political vision of a town’s future.
At the centre of France’s coal mining heartland, Lens was a bastion of socialist and working-class politics. Recognised among the country’s “martyr towns”, entirely destroyed by military operations, Lens never enjoyed the symbolic prominence of Leuven or Reims and did not recover at the same pace. Temporary shelters were dismantled in Reims from 1923 and had disappeared by 1928. By contrast, there were still almost one thousand temporary housing units in Lens in 1930, although Lens was only a third of Reims’s size in 1914.[17]By 1924, builders struggled to find work in Reims and the city could organise a parade to celebrate the return of the 100,000th inhabitant in 1926. In Lens, key sites of urban life, like the main Catholic church or the trade unions’ headquarters were not rebuilt before then. The delayed recovery of Lens illustrates the political economy of urban reconstruction, a process defined by unequal access to capital. Lens’s capital-intensive mines lay on the outskirts of the city and their reconstruction certainly posed great difficulties. Of strategic importance for the country as a whole, the reconstitution of the mines took precedence over the needs of the city. Coal extraction did not resume before 1921 and only returned to full capacity in 1923. Meanwhile, the city never benefited from the transnational attention and assistance that Leuven or Reims could command. Likewise, urbanist milieux largely ignored the city.
Yet, Lens does provide a stunning example of urban resilience. In spite of the difficulties the city faced, it seized on the reconstruction as an opportunity to remodel its urban infrastructure and morphology. A rapid comparison of the maps of Lens before and after the reconstruction quickly highlights the expansion of the city and the emphasis placed on the rational reconfiguration of its circulation plan.
Led by the Socialist municipality, the material reconstruction of the city was meant to provide the platform for an ambitious social policy that placed the education and emancipation of the working classes front and centre.[18] The reconstruction of Lens nonetheless pursued most of the objectives formulated by those experts who defined urbanism as a progressive agenda of social reforms. The rebuilding of infrastructures, from sewers to medical facilities, as well as the reshaping of streets was designed to improve living conditions in accordance with dominant hygienist principles. Most significantly, the municipality used the enormous quantities of rubbles and refuse produced by the destructions to fill the swamp located to the east of the city. It thus provided for its physical expansion and the creation of a public park and other amenities.[19] The ambition and modernity of the city’s reconstruction found another spectacular expression with the 1927 inauguration of the train station, relocated and rebuilt in Arts Déco style by one of Le Corbusier’s disciplines, Urbain Cassan.[20]
Reconstruction was conceived by the municipality as a way to deal with pre-war urban vulnerabilities. Let me end with the briefest of comparisons with a Belgian town. In Dinant for instance, liberal opinion prevailed, and reconstruction policies gave precedence to the interest of property-owners. By 1926-1927, the commercial and political leadership of Dinant sought to erase, with the last temporary shelters, the traces of war which undermined the aesthetic coherence of this touristic city. The prevailing logic was that of slum clearance, not of social reform. Little consideration was indeed paid to the continuing housing crisis which affected the town’s working-classes and moreover left them vulnerable to the risk of flooding.
Conclusion
To conclude, the history of urban reconstruction demonstrates that urban recovery is as political a process as the disaster itself. Resilience is not disaster specific unless in a material, technological sense of the term. Architecture and engineering have long been much concerned with fire, flooding, or seismic shocks. The resilience of the built environment is essentially technological preparedness, but it relies on rules and regulations. It depends on the legislative process, on state power and on bureaucratic efficiency for their implementation. Resilience therefore depends on a democratic commitment to the public interest. The potential of cities to withstand severe shock rests on their capacity to address their vulnerabilities and to face up to the vested interests and groups which manufactured or perpetuated them. This is where the history of post-catastrophic cities must be firmly positioned within a critical intellectual project. Resilience is never a given, a set of indicators that one can measure. It is in fact a struggle for democratic accountability and against the production of urban vulnerability in the name of rent-seeking. The social history of reconstruction may thus sheds light on urban resilience as a dynamic and contested process; an open-ended process whose outcomes are never pre-determined but shaped by political choices.
References
[1] Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, Martin Kohlrausch, and Manfred Hildermeier, eds. ‘Post-Catastrophic Cities’. Journal of Modern European History 9, no. 3 (2011).
[2] Carr, Lowell Juilliard. ‘Disaster and the Sequence-Pattern Concept of Social Change’. American Journal of Sociology 38, no. 2 (September 1932): 207–18, 209.
[3] Jean Mélia, Les Bombardements de Bône et Philippeville (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1927).
[4] Schaepdrijver, Sophie. La Belgique et La Première Guerre Mondiale. Bruxelles: Archives & Musée de la littérature, 2004.
[5] Clark, Peter, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
[6] Chickering, Roger, and Marcus Funck, eds. Endangered Cities: Military Power and Urban Societies in the Era of the World Wars. Boston: Brill, 2004; Goebel, Stefan, and Derek Keene, eds. Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War. Historical Urban Studies Series. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
[7] (Papastathēs and Chekimoglou 2010)
[8] Clout, H. ‘The Great Reconstruction of Towns and Cities in France 1918-1935’. Planning Perspectives: An International Journal of History, Planning and the Environment. 20, no. 1 (2005): 1–34. La Contemporaine, F delta 874/9
[9] Van Ypersele, Laurence. ‘Héros, Martyrs et Traîtres: Les Fractures de La Belgique Libérée’. In Sortir de La Grande Guerre. Le Monde et l’après-1918, edited by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson, 213–36. Paris: Tallandier, 2008, 228.
[10] Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.
[11] Le Figaro, 8 November 1929
[12] Archives Nationales de France, F7 / 1001 ; Marne
[13] AN F7 2/2103, Le Matin, 1 and 3 September 1919.
[14] Bellesort, Un an après, 444.
[15] Hubert, Lucien. La Renaissance d’un Département Dévasté. Paris: Boivin & Cie, 1923, 357.
[16] Le Sinistré, 6 December 1925
[17] Ginette Haÿ, La renaissance de Lens, 1918-1932 : chronique d’une résurrection, (Lens, 2007), p. 181
[18] Archives Municipales de Lens, 1 Per 1, L’oeuvre d’une municipalité socialiste. Compte rendu des travaux du Conseil Municipal, 1919-1929, p. 26.
[19] Le Télégramme, 17 juin 1919
[20] Alain Bocquillon, Pascale Bréemersch, and Bernard Ghienne, Lens. La Gare, Le Dépôt, La Cité Des Cheminots. (Lens, 1996).
