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Tribute to Louis Chevalier

by Daniel Roche

Louis Chevalier (1911-2001)

Mr. Director,
Dear Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

In 1958, in the Civilisation d'hier et d'aujourd'hui collection, founded by René Grousset, appeared a flamboyant book, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses, à Paris, pendant la première moitié du XIX^e siècle. Louis Chevalier was the unforgettable author of this strange, unclassifiable masterpiece (P.-A. Rosenthal, J. Coulon). A professor at the Collège de France since 1952, Louis Chevalier's work was an essential milestone in his career. At the confluence of urban history and the history of Paris, of history and literature, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses still seems to bring together all the questions of a moment in history and 20^th century historiography. From the demographic to the social, from the social to the political, the hesitations, choices and remorse of the society of French historians are confronted, as are the projects proposed and carried out, the ideas launched and not received that are its lot.

If it is convenient to choose this moment to recall here the living memory of Louis Chevalier, whom some have met and known better than I - and this is one of my great regrets - it is not without realizing that it is a perilous choice. It focuses on a stroke of brilliance, but it leaves in the shadows the processes and the soil that enabled its creation, but it too clearly inflects the trajectory of a life and that of the development of a work between the before and after, between what is sometimes obscured and what is unfortunately heard in a way that would have done nothing to suit the complex person and life of Louis Chevalier, as well as his enriching ideas. Let's not forget what he wrote in his memoirs (Les Relais de Mer), which are above all the history of men for the time he lived, and are made up, above all, of stories - in the plural and in lower case: Despite all the work and merit of historians, I hardly believe in the resurrection of times we haven't lived through, unless literature comes to give them a serious helping hand, bringing them what is absent from the texts: sensations, passions, life. This, as much as an original position between the academic world and political and civil society, is a common thread that can be relied on to read work and life together, a sensibility that never separates the intelligence of things and the materiality of ideas that Louis Chevalier observed in the changes of the capital and of a society whose values and choices he did not share. If cities can also, in their own way, die, as he pointed out when he quoted the lines of a forgotten poet of the Lower Empire, Rutilius Namatianus, Cernimus exemplis oppida posse more (De Reditu suo, V, 414, L'assassinat de Paris, 1977, p. 1), it's because societies throughout history go through episodes of fever and crisis, from which they emerge with varying degrees of success. The historian Louis Chevalier was concerned to understand the mechanisms and workings of these moments, and this is the lesson he built into an original trajectory that he bequeaths to us, at the Collège de France, and, we hope, far beyond.

This original commitment to the struggles of the present comes at the end of a movement of training, achievement, primary production and rich intellectual and teaching activities, and as such deserves better than the brief remarks devoted to him in the summer of his death, in August 2001. Born into a modest family, he passed through the provincial lycées and the Khâgne d'Henri IV, a pupil of Alain, before entering the École Normale Supérieure in 1932. He began teaching in Reims in 1938. In 1941, he was appointed Professor at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, a position he held until 1952, when he took up a chair with the significant title ofHistory and Social Structures of Paris and the Paris Region (Founding of the City of Paris). Behind this chronological skeleton, we must not forget the triple lesson involved in this journey.

Louis Chevalier, from his native Vendée to Paris, from the modest village of Aiguillon-sur-mer to the honors of the capital, can illustrate an obvious republican elitism, a dazzling promotion. In his eyes, it was a way of reading how a rural, maritime soil, a tradition of families maintained on the spot, mobilized elsewhere, produces humble or illustrious descendants. Farmer, horse breeder and trainer, veterinarian, merchant, merchant sailor, close to all and a little beyond, the horse and the sea, the land and the road, an unstable and mediocre fortune already dominated his first awakenings. Having come from the depths of France, he was intuitively equipped to understand change and differences, as well as appropriateness; in the religious sphere, for example, and openings, such as the school, to the point where, he writes, describing the school is like describing the whole of Aiguillon: Here come the cows, here come the children going to school or coming from it. To his classmates and teachers, he owes his experience of the village, of the world near and far, of life. This was undoubtedly the starting point for what, in 1952, became a conscious affirmation of the urgency and opportunities of a social history effort. From the aftermath of the First World War to the last quarter of the twentieth century, the link with l'Aiguillon and a world never lost remained unbroken.

The move to Paris, no doubt, opens up a whole new field of experience, and authorizes a second lesson. From the Khâgne to the Institut d'Études Politiques, Chevalier met, mingled with and listened to eminent minds and intelligent, later-famous friends: André Siegfried, Roger Dion, Daniel Halévy, Georges Pompidou, Raymond Aron, Jean Stoezel all illustrate an intellectual milieu that was particularly attentive to current developments and particularly enriching in terms of historical, sociological and philosophical reflection. His move to the Institut National d'Études Démographiques was undoubtedly decisive, following an unsuccessful attempt to join the Fondation Carrel in 1942. Louis Chevalier was part of the original team assembled by Alfred Sauvy, who entrusted him with responsibility for thework and publications of INED's historical and geographical department. This placed Louis Chevalier, a reader of Maurice Halbwachs to whom he paid tribute in his opening lecture, in a different tradition, and gave him an eminent position in France and in the post-Second World War world in the field of population history, in which he acted as an expert, particularly for the journal Population. Here, he reported on Braudel's Méditerranée and Ariès's Histoire des populations françaises. At the same time, his lectures and work as a demographer helped to make the discipline's voice heard at university and elsewhere. He helped to set up several lectures on demography in French universities, and wrote the Dalloz textbook on demography (1951). This is why, at the time of its publication, some people still considered Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses to be a demographer's book.

This is another reason why dialogue with Fernand Braudel has proved particularly difficult, as witnessed by the review published in the Annales by our colleague opposed todemographic imperialism, disconcerted by what he sees as a manifesto and a challenge, in what he calls a compact and vehement work, a beautiful subject, a beautiful book, a black book, and whose stakes are the relationship to economic history, but also to the relay and collaboration of the Social Sciences as a whole. This is an example of a difficult dialogue, and also of the embarrassment of reconciling the double irruption of biological foundations and literary testimonies, or of the invasive universe of images to which Working Classes and Dangerous Classes bears witness.

In my view, this is a debate that is far from over, since the main issue at stake is the problem of understanding pathological social states in terms of their causes and effects. Here, we can see the value of rereading this great book to understand, even today, the difficulty of the causes at play and the effects that cannot come as a surprise, linked in the construction of the black and red bangs of crime and violence, insecurity and the means of its control. Here again, the crucial issue is the encounter between measurement and testimonies, between the lessons drawn from figures and the interpretations received, and the awareness of the obscurity of the depths of Parisian society in crisis. What is the city of the social sciences and the city of historians? What does it mean to understand time petrified in monuments and spaces? What is the dynamics and acceleration generated by the urban organism and its cultural dioptrics? For whom is the city and by whom is the city? These are the major questions that Louis Chevalier's pioneering work, and the works that preceded and accompanied it, can still pose to us, with a keen awareness of the inflection of a major civilizing role when it seems to him that the city has ceased to liberate mankind.

This perception is not separated for him from the lessons drawn from the theoretical and practical experience at work in the construction of Working Classes and Dangerous Classes, as in the preceding productions. This is the third lesson that stands out for us, an ability to contextualize, better today than yesterday, the continuity of an object, of a research theme that mobilizes in equal measure the committed expert and the scholar, historian and demographer. Louis Chevalier's career never separated the potential social utility of historical expertise from its impact on the implementation of public policy. He was an advisor to administrators, if not directly to the Prince, whom he wanted to make aware of a major problem: the spatial distribution of the population, its temporal evolution, the factors and effects of migration, and de facto the reflection on its measurements and observations, if not its controls.

He was thus following in the footsteps of André Siegfried, who had already posed the problem of the psychology of peoples and its historical and geographical determinations. By placing migration and the dynamics of social phenomena at the heart of the upheavals of ancient rural and urban civilization in his thesis, defended in 1950, he gave it a decisive autonomy. The migratory phenomenon is self-perpetuating, outside any economic relationship, and in constant imbalance in relation to resources. This is the biological state of the new urban society. This observation, developed in books and lectures from 1950 to 1970, draws heavily on expert experience.

Louis Chevalier was the author of several reports for the Delegation Générale à l'Equipement National, at least four of which were published between 1944 and 1945. He took part in INSEE conferences on the location of industry in France, speaking in February 1948 and March on the distribution of industrial zones and the role of Paris. At INSEE, he worked on national and international migration surveys, producing analyses on North African demographic problems, and in 1947 on Parisian problems and decentralization. In 1955, he was a member of the manpower and population commissions at the Ministry of Population and the Ministry of Labor. He took part in numerous temporary missions to the former colonies. He was France's expert on settlement issues at UNESCO. From 1956 to 1958, he played an active role in the commission preparing the development of Les Halles and Le Marais and the administrative division of the Paris region. Later, Louis Chevalier was appointed advisor to several prefects of the Seine, in charge of economic and social research, in order, he recalls in the Annuaire du Collège de France in 1956 (p. 237), to prepare, with the administrative services of the city and department, an initial economic and social assessment of the Paris conurbation.

He therefore imagined a useful History, in the service of regional planning, the hope of which would have been to identify effective action on the ground, taking into account the dispositions and history of the populations. His field is that of current affairs, that of a France rebuilding itself after a disaster, and where the upturn is prompting calls for migration. His hope was to reconcile knowledge of traditions and history with the contribution of contemporary statistics, and to bend the necessary dirigisme and avoid the phenomena of enclosure in the world of expertise, which he chased under the name of technocracy, whose abstraction he denounced. Conceived in this way, history does not appear as the more or less reliable purveyor of examples to be followed or avoided; it identifies itself with current events, from which it does not hesitate to annex vast areas and from which it refuses to dissociate itself. Contemporary research and historical inquiry are one and the same, and both are informed by the other (Pour une Histoire de la population). From the formation of the Parisian population (1950) to the working classes (1958), in the 1960s-1970s lectures devoted to Parisian society and Parisians, contemporary surveys and the problems of his time enabled Louis Chevalier to bring together documents and questions in a seamless fashion, thus multiplying the points of interrogation. Between 1TNED, Sciences Po, government departments and the Collège de France, a common ground was able to exist and give the work a political dimension, but not without contradiction between tradition, conservation, change and reform - in short, a philosophy that was essentialist without being deterministic, biologizing, but also historicist, conservative no doubt, but in sympathy with the people and those of little means. Louis Chevalier believed very strongly that culture is more often found in bistros than anywhere else. He attached as much importance to the songs of Frehel or Damia, to the trivia of the Petit Journal as to the mercurials of the official moralists.

The work thus took a new direction, abandoning the original statistics in favor of images and representations. A series of general or Parisian publications marked the evolution: Les Parisiens (1967), Histoire anachronique des Français (1974), l'Assassinat de Paris, (1980), Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (1980), Les ruines de Subure, Montmartre de 1939 aux années 1980, not forgetting Histoires de la nuit parisienne in 1982. It is these works that make Louis Chevalier an intelligent teacher, as the public and the mainstream press discover in them a way of seeing and loving the capital. Louis Chevalier denounces a policy of development, destruction and construction, at every turn drawing on his geographical, demographic, historical and literary, monumental and urbanistic knowledge of Paris and its people. It was then that his literary talent and pamphleteering verve came to the fore, following in the footsteps of the moral observers of the Age of Enlightenment, such as Sébastien Mercier and Rétif de la Bretonne. It was then that he rediscovered the accents of those he knew by heart: Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Miller, Carco and other pedestrians of Paris. It's also a kind of tomb for the memory of a beloved city, as we watch it disappear, age and change. The barbarians and murderers, the people responsible, have only themselves to blame. Promoters, administrators, money men, politicians with a single goal - profit - have failed us. The destruction of Les Halles, the Arche de la Défense - the Arche du fric, he preferred to say - and the loss of meaning of old districts like Montmartre symbolize, in his eyes, the scandal of a memorable assassination. What have you done with Paris? he shouts at those responsible, for they have bet on consumerism and provoked, programmed abandonment and emptiness. Louis Chevalier, on the other hand, didn't give up, he denounced the wrongs.

His lectures and books reflect this inflection, and no doubt the inspiration he drew from his walks and observations, from Rue du Cardinal Lemoine to Boul'Mich and Sébasto, from Rue Saint-Denis to Montmartre, especially at night when the poetics of the city are revealed. The object of the lectures is a lost Paris, a disappeared Paris, a Paris without a future. However, the testimonies of his friends and the answers given to journalists who appreciated this paradoxical and convincing character suggest something other than complete pessimism. Louis Chevalier believed in youth and the rejection it would inevitably bring to the municipal culture of the enarques. Louis Chevalier still believed in the beneficial effects of the intermingling of men who had come to Paris from all corners of the world.

Louis Chevalier's historiographical project gradually changed, and the modernization of the capital certainly tinged it with bitterness. The place of official expertise receded in his life, but without forcing him into silence and loss of influence, his critical works on questionable planning choices had a great echo. His influence can also still be felt in his call not to give in to the domination of statistics and their techniques according to the models of economics or quantitative demography. Louis Chevalier invited us to make room for the historian's know-how in developing the method and narrative for the production of a personal work. We'll reread his work without artificially separating Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses from the books that followed it, because from the 1950s to the 1980s, it's the same invitation to understand the interweaving of qualitative and literary, numerical and quantitative readings that they teach. To the challenge of precision posed by statistics is added the far more unbearable challenge of beauty that arises from these descriptions I have mentioned... he points out in his opening lecture. The lesson, then, is to reflect on the close correspondence between literature on the one hand, and statistics and social surveys on the other. At the time of the July Monarchy, as in more recent times, it was a way of grasping a general concern and reading the social reality of the Empire of signs that dominated urban life. He leaves us with the memory of a fascinating and endearing character who succeeded in turning bad humor into an analytical category. This is the hallmark of angry geniuses who never give up.

I would like to thank P.-A. Rosenthal, Chr. Charle and Sabine Melchior-Bonnet for their help in preparing this text.

Daniel Roche, 2003.