The Paris Lectures

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We may put it even more simply: Scripture requires exegesis, and it requires the context of the community in which it came to birth and in which it is lived. This is where its unity is to be found, and here too its unifying meaning is opened up. To put it yet another way: there are dimensions of meaning in the word and in words which only come to light within the living community of this history-generating word. Through the growing realization of the different layers of meaning, the word is not devalued, but in fact appears in its full grandeur and dignity. Therefore the Catechism of the Catholic Church can rightly say that Christianity does not simply represent a religion of the book in the classical sense (cf. par. 108). It perceives in the words the Word, the Logos itself, which spreads its mystery through this multiplicity and the reality of a human history. This particular structure of the Bible issues a constantly new challenge to every generation. It excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text. To attain to it involves a transcending and a process of understanding, led by the inner movement of the whole and hence it also has to become a process of living. Only within the dynamic unity of the whole are the many books one book. The Word of God and his action in the world are revealed only in the word and history of human beings. Muth, J.F.: Rational expectations and the theory of price movements. Econometrica 29(3), 315–335 (1961) Now, the Paris population included national guardsman, come from the outside to take refuge inside. So, it’s rather like a medieval siege, from that point of view. You’ve got people from the outskirts coming in for food and safety; but, the population is slightly over two million people, and that’s a lot of mouths to feed. You’ve got 1,500 Americans, several of whom leave accounts of the whole thing, 40,000 Belgians, 30,000 Swiss and 5,000 English. So, you’re starting out with about — please don’t write these down — 24,000 cattle, 150,000 sheep, 6,000 hogs, and that is not enough to eat, and people become quite obsessed with what they’re going to eat. And you’re looking at somebody who basically does not like dogs at all but who loves cats, and canine butchers replaced horse butchers. The horses had mostly been eaten up or had been commandeered, as I said before, by the army.

And, so, here your basic idea is to create — the problem is how do you get from — this is north, this is south, and this is east, this is west — that there was no way of getting anywhere. The two biggest streets in Paris in terms of the most important ones were the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue Saint-Martin — please don’t remember these names. And, so, what they do is they create the Boulevard Saint-Michel, which is a disaster, here, and then — because McDonald’s and all this stuff, just awful, just terrible zoning; and then here, what became the Boulevard Sebastopol, the Boulevard Saint-Denis that goes out to the railroad stations. And, of course, Haussmann is often castigated for having built the railroad stations next to each other, without having anticipated the automobile, but how could he have known about the automobile in the 1850s and ’60s? So, they complete the sort of star, the Étoile here, which is the place, place of the Arc de Triomphe, and creates — he finishes the Rue de Rivoli here, and of course it’s along that axis, as you saw, that the troops come in May of 1851, decimating those who resisted in these neighborhoods. So, those are basically the plans that he wanted to do. Chapter 4. The East-West Dichotomy: Mapping the Character of the New Neighborhoods [00:23:00] No one is to lecture at Paris in arts before he is twenty years old. He is to listen in arts at least six years, before he begins to lecture. He is to promise that he will lecture for at least two years, unless he is prevented by some good reason, which be ought to prove either in public or before the examiners. He must not be smirched by any infamy. When he is ready to lecture, each one is to be examined according to the form contained in the letter of lord P. bishop of Paris (in which is contained the peace established between the chancellor and the students by the judges appointed by the lord pope, approved and confirmed namely by the bishop and deacon of Troyes and by P. the bishop, and J. the chancellor of Paris). Aghion, P., Bloom, N., Blundell, R., Griffith, R., Howitt, P.: Competition and innovation: An inverted-u relationship. Q. J. Econ. 120(2) (2005)

The life expectancy in Lille, for example, was about nineteen-years-old, the same thing in Manchester. That includes infant mortality, so that’s a little bit skewed; but, still, cities are unhealthy places. Old people, the miserably poor people also go to Paris to try to find charity and ultimately to die. Child abandonment, infanticide and all the things that I mentioned before — disease, the cholera disease rips through Paris in 1832 and 1849, again in 1884. So, basically cities, large cities replenish themselves only through immigration, through much of the nineteenth century. And, so, what happens is you’ve got this sort of super, hyper overcrowding of the central districts as immigrants from the north of France, from Normandy, from the east of France, also seasonal migrants from the Limousine who finally settle Paris pour into these central districts and then gradually head for the edge of the city. It’s not until the 1880s that you have the huge wave of Breton migration from Brittany; and it’s not just to Paris, also, but that comes later than we’re talking about.

So, you’ve got your basic, extraordinarily crowded city, the ranks of the poor, above all, swollen by immigration. The difference, one of the differences between the nineteenth century and now, for example, is in the nineteenth century most people, the people coming into Paris were already poor, were poorer than the people who were already there. Now, in the 1950s and 1960s that changes, the 1950s and 1960s. You have les jeunes couples, you have young married couples, upwardly mobile, who come to Paris with enough money that they’ve put together to rent and then finally maybe to buy an apartment, et cetera, et cetera. But you have a mass of poor people, masses of poor people coming into Paris, and Paris is unhealthy. The aim of the Amsterdam-Brussels-Geneva-Paris Doctoral School on “Quantum Field Theory, Strings and Gravity” is to provide first-year PhD students with advanced courses in theoretical physics that help bridge the gap between Master-level courses and the most recent advances in the field. Responsible for the organization as well as for teaching the courses are the ULB, the VUB, the University of Amsterdam, various institutions in Paris led by Ecole Normale Supérieure, and various institutions in Switzerland led by the Swiss network "SwissMap" (ETH, U. Bern, U. Geneva, CERN).In Detroit, in 1968, when I was a kid, or was it 1967, I went to a Tiger game and we came out of the Tiger game, double-header with the Yankees, and the city was on fire, and it was the riots of Detroit. And much of Detroit is still decimated, has never recovered from that, never, despite the Renaissance Center, and the occasional success of the Tigers, and all good things like that. And one of the suburbs of Detroit tried at one point to change the street patterns so that they, that is the poor people from the center, could not come out to Grosse Pointe, or Farmington Hills, or one of those elegant places. And I remember that very, very vividly. Now, why did that all happen, why? And we talk — and two years ago we had these big riots in France in the suburbs, and it began in Clichy-sous-Bois, and all over the place; some were exaggerated and all of that, and Sarkozy spun it out of control by calling them scum, the people that live on the periphery, they’re scum, “ racaille, ils existent, la racaille,” and all this stuff. It was just pas possible.

Bensoussan, A., Frehse, J.: Nonlinear elliptic systems in stochastic game theory. J. Reine Angew. Math. 350, 23–67 (1984)And, so, as things are going downhill many people in Paris said look, we must keep fighting, but we must imagine a different world where — we have, we’re being betrayed by the provinces that are not helping us, and we need to have help from the provinces. And, in January, somebody puts up a sign, a big red sign, red being the color of the Left — red was illegal, the color red was illegal between 1849 and 1851, because it was believed to excite one group of people against another, which is an exact quote from the French Law — and it’s a big red poster that says, “make way for the Commune, that the people of Paris would have the right to defend themselves and to create a better world in the future.” Remember what I said in L’Assommoir that Gervaise dies like a dog on a bed of straw, more or less. The last dignity that you had was to still have a mattress, and when things got so bad that was what went, the mattress. And so these folks are tearing out — carrying mattresses to try to get what they can from them. And then you’ve got the very poor down-and-out being expelled to the periphery even more. This is a place where people could get a little bit of food from charitable organizations. This is in Montmartre. And I just put this in, it’s around the corner actually from our apartment, but this is a classic kind of Haussmann building, and architects had started to sign their work on the première étage, on the second floor. So, this architect was called David and it has the date there. And these balconies are more ornate, really, than the ones that they did in general, at the time of Haussmann. These are more sort of Third Republic ones. But these are some very handsome buildings that lined — this is that line of boulevard that lines the Rue du Temple.