David Austin and Susan Augustine
University of Illinois, Chicago

Visualizing Paris in the Past

Keywords: urban studies, 19th-century Paris, visualisation, digitisation, Internet

Introduction

The historian Johannes Willms refers to Paris as the Capital of Europe.¹ The political events alone that transpired in the capital of France make it one of the most important European cities of the 19th century. The country went from a constitutional monarchy to a republic and on to an empire in the space of fifteen years. Two major uprisings, one in 1848 and another in 1871, reflected the political unrest among intellectuals and ordinary citizens throughout the continent.

More clearly than any other city during the 19th century, Paris exhibited the transformation of cities from groupings of almost medieval villages to more easily administrated civic structures. The wheels of urban renewal were set in motion by Christophe-André-Jean Chabrol during the Restoration and the Comte de Rambuteau during the July Monarchy. Georges-Eugène Haussmann extended his predecessors' work by widening existing boulevards and constructing new thoroughfares. More importantly he incorporated sections outside the medieval city walls and organised the city into twenty arrondissements, or administrative districts, each with its own town hall.

Paris changed the focus of art collecting from royal or private collections to public institutions by throwing open the doors of the Musée de la Republique, later and better known as the Musée du Louvre. Collections in this former royal palace grew with treasures looted by Napoleon in Europe and North Africa. The subject matter of French art changed as well. The interest in biblical and historical scenes shifted to contemporary history and life, such as in David's Death of Marat. Later in the century, the introduction of Impressionism brought about even more radical changes.

Paris was also a barometer of architectural change. Stone gradually gave way to iron and steel as the preferred materials of construction beginning with the reconstruction of the Dome of the Halle au Blé, also known as the Halle aux Grains, from 1808-1813. The use of iron in Victor Baltard's cavernous pavilions of the Halles Centrals (begun 1854) and Gustave Eiffel's tower built for the Universal Exposition of 1889 demonstrated the 19th-century advances in construction. Indeed, steel and iron brought the focus of all of France and Europe to Paris with the construction of railroads and stations, bringing goods and people into the capital. By the end of the century, tastes in domestic architecture turned from the impressive hôtels, or town houses, to the more graceful Art Nouveau residences of Hector Guimard.

To conclude, Paris was at the forefront of changes occurring in many other capitals in Europe and abroad during the 19th century, earning it the title – the Capital of the Century. This paper demonstrates how we created an online tour of Paris during the 19th century.

The Map

1860 falls near the centre of the period described. The Rare Map Section in the Department of Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), possesses a map, Nouveau Plan de Paris divisé en 20 Arrondissements, published by Auguste Logerot, printed by Mangeon of Paris in 1860, and drawn by Charles Smith. Each arrondissement is carefully hand tinted in a different pastel colour.

Fig. 1. Paris. 1er Arrondissement. Detail of Nouveau Plan de Paris divisé en 20 Arrondissements, 1860.

Figure 1 shows the first arrondissement. A subsequent owner carefully drew in lines indicating the placement of the new, wider boulevards and avenues that Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann dictated from his office in the Hôtel de Ville when he was the Prefect of the Seine. The map reflects Haussmann's power and determination as he remodelled Paris from a medieval city to a modern one.

The Project

Our project plan called for an online architectural tour of 19th-century Paris called Paris, 1860. We were lucky enough to have access to this beautiful map of Paris and to an enormous microfiche collection of photographs and drawings that demonstrated the architecture of the city during the time when Logerot published the map. We linked the 1860 map of Paris to the detailed sections of the 20 individual arrondissements. We then created links from the arrondissements to images and descriptions of buildings, monuments, sculptural details, and places. Finally, we started creating metadata records for each image, so they could be searched within the website. The descriptions give the buildings a historical context, while the map gives the buildings a geographical context. The images allow users to study architecture by seeing the buildings in a meaningful context. When choosing images, we used 1860 as the focal year because we wanted to show users what the city looked like at the time the map was made. The images themselves were created before, during, and after the 19th century; however, with only a few exceptions, the digital versions of the pictures represent the structures seen in 1860. A couple of images depict how the buildings looked after 1860 (such as the Hôtel de Ville) and others show the progression of a building over centuries (such as the Louvre). These instances have all been noted in the online descriptions. As the project progresses, it will provide broader coverage of Paris from the French Revolution to the Belle Epoque, that is from 1789 to 1914, but the focus will remain on 1860 – roughly the midpoint of the period.

Our goals were to give users a sense of Paris in the 19th century; allow them to access the underused and sometimes inaccessible images on microfiche; provide information about images that were, up to this point, stored without context; and to give viewers a taste of the broader collection of images available in this collection.

The Images

The Conway Library Microfiche (Haslemere, Surrey: Emmett Publishing, 1987) and the five-year update, 1987-1992 (1993) provided the source of the images that we linked to the map. The Conway Library is a part of the Courtauld Institute of Art located in Somerset House, London. The administration of the Conway Library entered into agreement with Emmett Publishing to make the photographs more generally available to scholars via microfiche. David Austin was hired by Emmett to create an index for the microfiche collection, so he had an intimate knowledge of the collection. The University of Illinois at Chicago is one of approximately 22 institutions that own a copy of the microfiche, and currently, David is the only one with a copy of his index.

The photograph archive is based on the collection of Sir Martin Conway (Lord Conway of Allington). Sir Martin started his collecting during the last quarter of the 19th century when he began comparing pictures as part of his study of art. This proved valuable when he became a Professor of Art at the new University of Liverpool.² He later met another photograph collector, Sir Robert Witt, and they decided to divide their collecting interests. Witt continued his activities in the areas of painting and drawing; Conway concentrated on all other areas of artistic endeavour, including architecture, sculpture, decorative arts, and manuscripts. Both collections eventually came to the Courtauld Institute.

In his efforts to make his collection comprehensive, Sir Martin sought out and purchased commercially available photographs, view cards, and postcards. He also bought stock-in-trade from the estates of dealers, bid at auction for other collectors' treasures, and sought out sale and exhibition catalogues before others began to collect and preserve them.

If a book or magazine contained a picture of value to his collection, he cut it out, and mounted it on heavy stock. If a publication contained illustrations on both sides of the page, he purchased two copies and usually discarded the textual content. His resulting collection proved the ideal place to find 19th-century photographs and appropriate drawings that could be linked to our map.

Three important factors entered into our decision to use images from the Conway Library Microfiche. Firstly, the images matched the period of the map. Secondly, the Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago owned the microfiche collection and we had access to an index.

Thirdly, the very size of the microfiche collection (approximately 750,000 images) assured that many of the buildings, parks, squares and gardens of Paris might be found among its images. Finding appropriate images, however, was a lengthy process. The organisation of the microfiche is as follows. Part I. Architecture of France and Italy; Part II. Architecture of the United Kingdom and the rest of the world; Part III. Architectural drawings; Part IV. Sculpture; Part V. Medieval arts; and Part VI. Manuscripts. To find images that relate to each other, we used the index and patiently matched up pictures from one part of the collection to those of another.

We applied the following criteria for the images we chose. Images within museums and art galleries are not included in the website. Therefore, only Rodin's sculpture as it appeared on the landscape of the city (i.e., nothing from the Musée Rodin) finds a place on the map. In addition, the temporal extent of the website follows the parameters established by Willms and other 19th-century historians (i.e., from the French Revolution to the Belle Epoque). Currently, with a few exceptions, only buildings and monuments as they looked in 1860 find a place on the map. As we continue to add more images, we will broaden coverage to include images from the period between 1789 and 1914.

Metadata

Images without descriptions pose difficulties for students and general users alike. Even for the serious scholar, commentary about a picture offers a valuable frame of reference. For web-based images, metadata has become the most generally acceptable method of providing some kind of description. On 5th October 2001 the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the approval of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (Z39.85 protocol). The Dublin Core version of Metadata includes fifteen elements necessary to describe a digital resource: Title, Creator, Subject, Description, Publisher, Contributor, Date, Type, Format, Identifier, Source, Language, Relation, Coverage and Rights. Since all elements are repeatable, and none are required, the Dublin Core's flexibility fit the needs of our Paris 1860 map project.

As we began to compile images for the site, we also started compiling data and descriptions in a FileMaker Pro 5.0 database. At present Paris 1860 contains images associated with only twenty sites. When we reach a critical mass in the future, we will link that searchable database to the site to allow users to search for images of particular structures, types of structures, or works by a particular sculptor or architect. For now the images display only three element sets: title, description and identifier.

For those who may be interested in embarking on a similar project, a description of the tools and methods we used is presented below.

From Microfiche to the Internet

We used a Canon Microfilm/Microfiche Scanner 500 to copy selected frames of the microfiche. We then scanned the photocopies at a resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi), using an Epson Expression 636 scanner. The image editing software, Adobe™ Photoshop 5.5, was used to rotate, crop, sharpen, blur, brighten and add contrast to the digital images in TIFF format. We also digitally removed paper-fold marks, fingerprints, smudges and mold spots before saving the images to Zip discs and then archived them to CD-ROMs. TIFFs were converted to JPEGs and resized to fit more conveniently on computer monitors. Each image required approximately thirty minutes from scanning to the burning on the CD. Many of the microfiche images however were spotty and dark. A project using cleaner images may not require as much time.

Creating Web Pages

We learned many lessons in the creation of this website. First, it was important that the structure of the site be determined before any pages were created. This allowed us to have a clear vision of what exactly needed to be done. We also found it helpful to create a directory on our workstations that matched the one that existed on the server. This allowed us to transfer (FTP) entire folders back and forth between the server and our desktops. It also let us test the links and construction of parts of the site before loading them onto the server.

We used Macromedia Dreamweaver 2 to create the pages and Macromedia Fireworks 4 to make links on the maps. Because each map was a JPEG image, it was necessary to add invisible layers to allow multiple links on each map. When users first enter the site, they will find that the maps load rather slowly. After each map is loaded once, however, the images remain in the computer's cache. This allows quick and easy manoeuvering around the site.

The structure of the site is relatively simple, and can be described with the following hierarchy.

1. Home page (includes instructions, a description of the project and a link to a bibliography);

2. Complete Map of Paris with links to individual arrondissements;

3. Maps of arrondissements;

4. Top-level page for each building or monument (includes image, description and identifying number from the microfiche collection);

5. Lower-level pages for each building or monument (includes detailed images and brief descriptions).

Future of Paris, 1860

Because of copyright restrictions related to the Conway Library images, we limited access to the website to the University of Illinois at Chicago community for strictly educational purposes. We do intend to continue work on the digital map until all twenty arrondissements contain appropriate images and the related metadata is searchable. The focus will remain on 1860, but we will expand coverage to include images from the French Revolution to the Belle Epoque. We believe that any scholar or student at the University of Illinois at Chicago interested in the history of architecture, Paris, or urban planning will find this a valuable tool.

Conclusion

Every Library contains a number of underused materials. Those in irregular formats (such as microfilm) seem even more remote to the user. The University Library at UIC has access to the Conway Library collection of incredible photographs and drawings, available outside London only on the microfiche. Moreover, they existed without any kind of context. Our project attempts to place the images in a geographical, architectural and historical context by linking them to a map, highlighting details and floor plans, and adding text to describe the history of each building or monument. In addition, we aim to make these resources more accessible to the UIC community by putting them online. Digitising library resources, especially images, is a relatively new phenomenon that services our users who cannot always come into the library. Finally, digitising and contextualising these images helps the University of Illinois Library by promoting an important segment of its collection that might otherwise be ignored. We hope that the project will draw interested users into the microfilm department to view even more images from this rich collection.

November 2001

Bibliography

Baedeker, K. (1891), Paris and Environs with Routes from London to Paris. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker.

Hillairet, J. (1963), Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris. 4th ed., Paris: Minuit.

Muirhead, F. and Monmarché, M. (1922) (Eds.), Paris and its Environs (Blue Guide). London: Macmillan.

Poisson, M. (1999), Paris. Buildings and Monuments. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

[c1986] La Sculpture française au XIXe siècle : Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 10 avril-28 juillet 1986. Paris : Ministère de la culture et de la communication, Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux.

White, N. (1991), The Guide to the Architecture of Paris. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Willms, J. (1997), Paris. Capital of Europe. From the Revolution to the Belle Epoque. New York: Holmes and Meier. (1st Ger. ed. 1988, Paris. Haupstadt Europas, 1789-1914, Munich: C. H. Beck.

Notes

1. Willms, J. (1997), Paris, Capital of Europe. From the Revolution to the Belle Epoque. New York and London: Holmes & Meier. 1st Ger. ed. (1988): Paris: Haupstadt Europas 1789-1914. Munich: C. H. Beck.

2. Grant, L. (1998), "Time and the Conways: The Beginnings of History and Collecting of Photographs in Britain", Visual Resources, 9, pp. 299-307.