Mellon Forum // Routes of Power: Transportation Technology and Socio-Urban Transformation in Early Modern Paris

Scholars of the early modern period have traditionally accorded carriages a symbolic role in the historiography as material expressions of ostentatious display and social elitism. Yet these objects are captivating for more than the signifying prowess of their ornate exteriors. This talk, using a case study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, reinterprets carriages as catalysts of profound social, political, and environmental changes. Drawing on legal records, financial accounts, guidebooks, and visual depictions of the capital, I reveal how the nobility and bourgeoisie’s adoption of vehicle technology physically embedded uneven power dynamics and social injustices into the city’s fabric. The erosion of walkable street space to accommodate wheeled traffic in the heart of the capital and the police’s use of carriages to covertly transport the city’s poor to prisons for colonial deportation illustrate how early modern vehicles emerged as contentious entities. The interaction between transportation technology and society in early modern Paris thus allows us to reconsider several key aspects of urban life: the enforcement of bureaucratic control, imperial expansion, socio-economic stratification, the development of city infrastructure, and the freedoms and constraints on everyday human movement.

Special funding for this session is provided by the Department of French & Italian.

The Fall 2024 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and African Studies, Anthropology, Art & Archaeology, Brazil Lab, Center for Collaborative History, Chadha Global India Center, Effron Center for American Studies, English, French & Italian, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Humanities Council, PIIRS, Program in Latin American Studies, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the School of Architecture.

Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Lunch is provided while supplies last.