Henri Lefebvre by Merrifield Andy

Author:Merrifield, Andy.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135435035
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Revolutionary refrains emanating from below, from a street praxis, are admittedly hushed in The Urban Revolution. Lefebvre has given us a quieter, more reflective analytical text, more cautious in its militant musings. But the idea of “vanquishing by style” offers clues to his revolution hopes, even if they’re now dimmer. Here, for guidance, we must turn back the clocks briefly, to a pre-1968 work, La Proclamation de la Commune, written in 1965. It’s hard to decide whether Lefebvre’s subject matter here was 1871 or 1968—whether he was excavating the past or foreseeing the future; whether this was a historic day in March 1871, shattering the Second Empire, reclaiming Paris’s center for the people, toppling the imperial mantle of Napoleon III and sidekick Baron Haussmann or an imminent student-worker eruption that would almost smash the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle. Either way, it was the style of the Commune that whetted Lefebvre’s political palate. The Commune’s style, he says, “was, first of all, an immense, grandiose festival, a festival that citizens of Paris, essence and symbol of the French people and of people in general, offered to themselves and to the world. Festival at springtime, festival of the disinherited, revolutionary festival and festival of revolution, free festival, the grandest of modern times, unfurls itself for the first time in all its dramatic magnificent joy.”17

For seventy-three days, loosely affiliated citizen organizations, neighborhood committees, and artist associations converted Paris into a liberated zone of anarcho-socialism. It was, Lefebvre notes, “grandeur and folly, heroic courage and irresponsibility, delirium and reason, exaltation and illusion” all rolled into one.18 Insurgents somehow corroborated Marx’s notion of revolutionary praxis at the same time as they refuted it, for this was as much a geographical as a historical event, no worker uprising incubated in the factories; rather, it was “the grand and supreme attempt of a city raising itself to the measure of a human reality.”19 An urban revolution had made its glorious debut, reenergizing public spaces and transforming everyday life, touting victory while it wobbled in defeat. It was condemned to death at birth, despite the gaiety of its baptism. “The success of revolutionary movement,” Lefebvre says, “masked its failings; conversely, its failures are also victories, openings on to the future, a standard to be seized, a truth to be maintained. What was impossible for the Communards stays until this day impossible, and, by consequence, behooves us to realize its possibility.”20 “We are thus compelled,” he reasons, “to rehabilitate the dream, otherwise utopian, and put to the forefront its poetry, the renewed idea of a creative praxis. There resides the experience of the Commune and its style.”21

This rhetorical flourish lingers in The Urban Revolution. But there it takes on a new twist, has an even broader message and implication. The urbanism of Haussmann tore out the heart of old medieval Paris and reinvented the concept of a center, of a downtown of bright lights and conspicuous consumption. Erstwhile pesky proletarians would take hold of shovels, man the building sites, and have no time to make trouble.

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