Regulating the Environmental Hazards of the Parisian periphery: The Stone Quarries of the Parisian Banlieue at the end of the Ancien Régime

Starting in the eighteenth century, urban reform efforts began reshaping Paris’s core and periphery, relocating historically concentrated trades and markets.  Urban spaces were reassigned from historically determined functions where specific trades had traditionally gravitated.  Displaced activities included market spaces (increasingly confined to Les Halles) and the leatherwork and chemical works (moved from the Seine to la Bièvre).  What a later generation would call zoning, the geographic fixing of life and work to demarcated areas, was practiced in an embryonic form at the end of the ancien régime. However, some industries were clearly immobile. This paper examines construction reforms of the end of the ancien régime that sought to limit the risk presented by these fixed and hazardous industrial sites. The stone quarries situated in much of the capital’s outskirts were already designated as the “banlieue,” particularly, the areas of Montmartre, Belleville, and Ménilmontant in the North and Northeast of Paris. At the end of the 1770s, collapsing buildings and industrial accidents alerted authorities to the pressing safety issues presented by stone quarries in a rapidly expanding built environment. The challenge of an ever-sprawling Paris brought new pressures to delimit the urban space, framing the banlieue as a “space for discharges and subjugation” (Louis Bergeron).  Delimiting the municipality of Paris, constantly spilling beyond city walls, led to the creation of new national authorities for inspections and control. Boundary-setting spurred protests among quarry and building proprietors, as well as construction experts, thus intensifying resistance to urban reforms.