Histoire des routes et des transports en Europe : des chemins de Saint-Jacques à l'âge d'or des diligences

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2005 by Flonneau, Mathieu

Georges Livet, Histoire des routes et des transports en Europe : des chemins de Saint-Jacques à l'âge d'or des diligences, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, Strasbourg (2003), 608 pp., euro36.10. David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, Routledge, New York (2003), 372 pp., US$31.95.

These two books bring a holistic approach to the analysis of transport and transport networks. Livet's work is a model for all aspiring transport historians. He spans the medieval and modern ages, offering a synthesised account of the impact of roads and differing transport modes in Europe. His main argument is that by the end of the eighteenth century the system of traditional post services, carnage and stage coaches reached a point of near-perfect operation. Of course, this could not last, as the temporal and spatial impact of railways, mechanisation and new conceptions of networks produced a revolution in transport thinking. Nonetheless the new age was shaped perhaps more by the old than historians have been ready to admit. Livet's approach is influenced by Fernand Braudel, who tried to conceptualise history as longue durée. All chapters are oriented by a time schedule framed by large conceptual spaces, concerning the economy, changes in science and technology.

Livet, who died before the book's publication, capitalises on his experience at Strasbourg University, where he was an expert on road use and where he brought alive past societies' travel cultures. More prosaically he also brought to life a former work culture centred upon the horse. Many documents, maps, graphs, photographs and prints help to reconstruct everyday life within the format of a large-scale analysis. The major weakness is the lack of an index, a serious omission in a book such as this.

Paris remains a publishers' favourite topic. Alongside recent works in English by Patrice Higonnet and Philip Mansel we also have the latest offering from David Harvey. A distinguished Marxist geographer and famously the author of The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey has long been fascinated by the French capital - indeed, this book is a reworking of an edition from 1975. His writing on Paris is framed within a familiar Marxist theory of urban space. The originality here comes from his concern with modernity and modernisation as expressed in literature from authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and Emile Zola and the cartoons of Honoré Daumier. Harvey examines the disjuncture of everyday life in the city brought about by revolution, with Paris conceived as a living laboratory of social and urban change. This ambiguous space could not last, however, with tensions over the street being played out between the French State and the followers of Marx and Saint-Simon. Nineteenth-century French society was no guarantor of stability, as the 1871 Commune made clear when all these tensions were brought out into the open.

Harvey's book sits within a classic genre familiar to those versed in the works of Jacques Rougerie, Louis Chevalier, Gérard Jacquemet or Jeanne Gaillard. However, for historians of transport and town planning the work suffers from lack of attention to recent studies on 'Haussmannisation' such as Pierre Casselle's Commission des embellissements de Paris : rapport à l'empereur Napoléon III or Nicolas Chaudin's Haussmann au crible. Nonetheless the reader will appreciate the maps and statistical data, not to mention the humour of the final picture of a Statue of Liberty built on the Butte Montmartre, involved in a peaceful intellectual fight against the Sacré-Coeur basilica.

Mathieu Flonneau, Université Paris I

Panthéon-Sorbonne