Anthropocene Under Paris? Rethinking the Quarries and Catacombs

ABSTRACT

This essay takes the Paris underground as a ‘naturalcultural contact zone’ that allows us to consider what current eco-critical discussions of the Anthropocene might contribute to nineteenth-century French studies. Although the origin-point of the anthropocene era continues to be debated, some scholars point to late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century geological theories of deep time as causing a crisis of representation; the Paris basin emerges as a stratigraphic site that makes visible the incommensurability of human and Earth timescales. I put recent critical work on non-human agency of la terre into dialogue with writings by Nadar, Simonin, and Balzac.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• catacombs
• Balzac
• Nadar
• Simonin
• eco-criticism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on the contributor

Andrea Goulet is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Chair of the Nineteenth-Century French Studies (NCFS) Association. She is the author of Optiques: the Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (2006) and Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction (2016), as well as co-editor of Orphan Black: Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics (Intellect Press, 2018). She currently co-directs the interdisciplinary Humanities + Urbanism + Design program at Penn and is working on a book about anti-Americanism and representations of Quakers in nineteenth-century French popular culture.

Notes

1 Haraway introduced the term in order to connect post-human cyborg and animal subjectivities, but natureculture seems useful to me beyond that contemporary 21st-c. context. More recently, Haraway (2016) has resisted the trend of ‘Anthropocene studies’ for its anthropocentrism, though her ideas on globalism and multispecies interrelatedness continue to inform Anthropocene criticism, such as Heringman 2003.

2 Stone holds particular importance for a discussion of underground quarries, but other materials to which agency has been attributed include fire (Pyne 1995) and volcanoes (Heringman 2003).

3 Reading recent critical debates can easily put one on the defensive: am I practicing ‘bland antiquarianism’ (Griffiths and Kreisel 2020) when I write about past geo-literary models? Do I fall into the ‘pernicious’ error of ‘relevance’ (Freedgood and Sanders 2017) when I try to connect nineteenth-century thought to today’s issues? They propose an ‘open’ ecology, a ‘humble’ exploration of ‘crooked roads’ in open-ended inquiry.

4 See also Ghosh 2016.

5 The chemist Paul Crutzen (2002), who argues for starting the Anthropocene in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when carbon dioxide and methane were increasingly trapped in polar ice, notes too that James Watt designed the steam engine in 1784. Valantin (2017) traces the roots of our contemporary geo-political crises to the militarized industrialization of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe and the U.S.

6 Nineteenth-century readings in the volume include Karen F. Quandt on Victor Hugo and the politics of ecopoetics, Claire Nettleton on animal aesthetics in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Daniel Finch-Race on the ecopoetics of Rimbaud, and David E. Evans on Marie Krysinska’s free verse.

7 This issue of Modern & Contemporary France continues to expand eco-critical studies of the francophone world into the realms of colonialism, genocide, and epidemics; it also features essays on nineteenth-century authors like Sand (James Illingworth on her ‘Volcanic Imagination’) and Zola (Finch-Race on industrial Normancy and Arthur Rose on the ‘Coal Politics’ of Germinal).

8 In his Forward, Julien Vincent (2020) organizes the contributions to the Romantisme volume according to three areas of inquiry: modern (nineteenth-century) ontological reinventions of the nature/culture distinction; political, economic, and scientific notions of the anthropocene in the context of the industrial age; and anti-capitalist ‘écologies romantiques’ that resist the exploitation of nature by human agents.

9 The field of French eco- and anthropocene studies is gathering steam, as it were: Jessica Tanner, for example, has a forthcoming article in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, whose title – ‘Paris, Capital of the Capitalocene’ promises a highly relevant look at issues discussed here; and Göran Blix is working on a book project called Coal Culture and Fossil Fiction: Landscape Ecology in the Late Nineteenth Century. In April 2021, the Société des études romantiques et dix-neuvièmistes (SERD) ran a workshop organized by Aude Jeannerod on the ‘Approche écopoétique du XIXe siècle’ and Seuil has a new collection devoted to Anthropocene studies across humanistic and scientific fields: https://www.seuil.com/collection/anthropocene-618. Between the first draft of this essay and my current revision, I have been playing catch-up on relevant publications and have surely missed other contributions on the horizon. One useful source for tracking the field is Phillip Usher’s web project The Humanist Anthropocene, which provides a ‘first bibliography’ of French ecocriticism: http://thehumanistanthropocene.weebly.com/blog/category/french-lit

10 Lucas Hollister has also joined Roger Célestin and Eliane DalMolin as Guest Co-Editor of two volumes of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: Sites on the ‘Frontiers of Ecocriticism’ (2021: 25.1-2). Other journals with recent special issues on French eco-criticism beyond the nineteenth century include Fixxion (‘Écopoétiques’, Romestaing et al. 2015) and the new on-line Revue Pagaille (‘Marâtre Nature’, 2021).

11 We could posit that the nineteenth century’s intersection of geological discovery and accelerated industrialization marks a point where Anthropocene discourse meets the beginnings of a more modern ‘infrastructural turn’ (see Rubenstein et al. 2015).

12 He cites Benjamin Morgan’s study of Hardy’s narrative attempts to confront ‘the real epistemic challenges of nonhuman time scales’ through depictions of encounters between human characters, sea-cliffs, and fossilized bones. (Clark 47; Morgan 2017; 145)

13 ‘Vous êtes-vous jamais lancé dans l’immensité de l'espace et du temps, en lisant les œuvres géologiques de Cuvier? Emporté par son génie, avez-vous plané sur l’abîme sans bornes du passé, comme soutenu par la main d’ un enchanteur? En découvrant de tranche en tranche, de couche en couche, sous les carrières de Montmartre ou dans les schistes de l’Oural, ces animaux dont les dépouilles fossilisées appartiennent à des civilisations antédiluviennes, l’âme est effrayée d'entrevoir des milliards d'années, des millions de peuples que la faible mémoire humaine, que l’ indestructible tradition divine ont oubliés et dont la cendre entassée à la surface de notre globe, y forme les deux pieds de terre qui nous donnent du pain et des fleurs. Cuvier n’est-il pas le plus grand poète de notre siècle? Lord Byron a bien reproduit par des mots quelques agitations morales; mais notre immortel naturaliste a reconstruit des mondes avec des os blanchis, a rebâti comme Cadmus des cités avec des dents, a repeuplé mille forêts de tous les mystères de la zoologie avec quelques fragments de houille, a retrouvé des populations de géants dans le pied d’ un mammouth. Ces figures se dressent, grandissent et meublent des régions en harmonie avec leurs statures colossales. Il est poète avec des chiffres, il est sublime en posant un zéro près d'un sept. Il réveille le néant sans prononcer des paroles artificiellement magiques, il fouille une parcelle de gypse, y aperçoit une empreinte, et vous crie: Voyez! Soudain les marbres s’animalisent, la mort se vivifie, le monde se déroule! Après d’innombrables dynasties de créatures gigantesques, après des races de poissons et des clans de mollusques, arrive enfin le genre humain, produit dégénéré d’un type grandiose, brisé peut-être par le Créateur. Echauffés par son regard rétrospectif, ces hommes chétifs, nés d’hier, peuvent franchir le chaos, entonner un hymne sans fin et se configurer le passé de l'univers dans une sorte d’Apocalypse, rétrograde. En présence de cette épouvantable résurrection due à la voix d’ un seul homme, la miette dont l’usufruit nous est concédé dans cet infini sans nom, commun à toutes les sphères et que nous avons nommé LE TEMPS, cette minute de vie nous fait pitié. Nous nous demandons, écrasés que nous sommes sous tant d’univers en ruines, à quoi bon nos gloires, nos haines, nos amours; et si, pour devenir un point intangible dans l’avenir, la peine de vivre doit s’accepter? Déracinés du présent, nous sommes morts jusqu’à ce que notre valet de chambre entre et vienne nous dire: ‘Madame la comtesse a répondu qu’elle attendait monsieur!’

14 Cuvier and Brogniart’s stratigraphic studies of the Paris basin used fossil remains to reconstruct extinct species and support the geological cataclysmic theory.

15 More commonly discussed scenes of the Paris underground appear in Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, Dumas’ Les Mohicans de Paris, Berthet’s Les Catacombes de Paris, Hugo’s Les Misérables, Leroux’s La Double vie de Théophraste Longuet and Le Fantôme de l’Opéra.

16 See also Graham Huggan (2009) on postcolonial eco-criticism and debates around ‘Green Romanticisms.’

17 See Aït-Touati and Coccia (2021); their edited volume brings together essays in honor of Bruno Latour’s 2015 Face à Gaïa.