The “Dravert Affair”: Paperwork and the Administration of Negligent Street Maintenance in Modern Paris

The Paperwork

At the turn of the twentieth century, Madame Dravert’s request for an indemnity for faulty street maintenance was hardly novel. Similar appeals multiplied. As part of the administration of accidents related to urban maintenance, the Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage had codified protocols for documenting them through record-keeping practices. A spectrum of legal issues concerning indemnities impacted the administration of such accidents, including the paperwork. In the late nineteenth century, the jurisprudence governing the cases was evolving, as tort law was catching up with the pace of industrial and urban change. The law granting the prefecture authority over indemnities for accidents caused in relation to public works dates from 1800, and it was traditionally understood in terms of harm caused to workers and bystanders on construction sites. ²⁰ Because this law was written before France’s urban modernization campaigns at midcentury, when infrastructure became imbedded in the experience of urban life, it did not take into account infrastructure’s constant need for repair and the kinds of accidents that resulted from its neglect. Over time, however, the interpretation of this law would change and make the prefecture financially liable for negligent maintenance. Understanding this judicial transformation helps us make sense of the Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage’s uses of paperwork to administer urban accidents.

A claim for an indemnity related to another slip-and-fall case in 1884 throws light on the changing interpretation of this law. An Englishwoman working as a schoolteacher in Paris broke her right leg when she stepped into a larger pothole on the sidewalk of rue Pigalle in Paris’s Montmartre neighborhood. ²¹ Despite having taken her case before the highest legal authority at the departmental level, her claim for an indemnity was denied. A few decades earlier, she would have lacked further recourse, simply because departmental authorities did not see themselves as responsible for accidents related to street maintenance. But the understanding of the law that governed such cases had recently changed. Traditionally, the Conseil d’État (Council of State)—France’s highest court for administrative law—had upheld the department’s jurisdiction over such matters. ²² From 1865 to 1872, however, the Conseil d’État began reversing decisions made at the departmental level. ²³ When this Englishwoman appealed to the Conseil d’État in 1886, it placed blame on the city of Paris for not taking the necessary precautions to maintain the sidewalk, or at least creating a physical barrier. The court overturned the departmental judgment and required the city to pay an indemnity.

This decision reflected the changing interpretation of the law and carried broad implications for the maintenance of infrastructure, which steadily became a public service. In discussing the legal ramifications of public works in relation to this case, the Conseil d’État underscored that “the responsibility of the administration is at stake just as much when it concerns maintaining them as when it concerns building them.” ²⁴ The Conseil d’État thus made clear that departmental prefectures could be held responsible for damages resulting from neglecting to properly care for urban infrastructure. In practice, however, this new understanding of the law was not without controversy. Although the departmental administration implemented mechanisms for reviewing and settling indemnities, the review of such claims, as previously discussed, was itself a contested process. Because the engineers charged with street maintenance also offered their expert counsel, the review process did not necessarily act in the interest of the claimant. The disputed nature of personal liability cases requires that we understand their administration as a consequence of negotiations between national and departmental authorities, instead of the result of a monolithic conception of state power.

The intensifying legality of these cases and the threat of the Conseil d’État’s involvement placed greater pressures on departmental prefectures to maintain and repair their infrastructure, and also to demonstrate their accountability in that process. The file detailing Madame Dravert’s accident was part of a specific record-keeping practice that coincided with the changing understanding of the law. The archives of the Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage contain records related to the administration of accidents in the city’s eleventh and twelfth arrondissements from 1883 to 1902. ²⁵ These records, which point to what was likely a wider practice given the fragmentary nature of the archive, comprise inventories of accidents ordered chronologically, listed by the name of the claimant, and classified in one of two principal ways. Some entries specify the kind of injury sustained, such as “wounded left arm,” “wounded groin,” “internal pain,” or “bruised thorax.” Others specify the nature of the occurrence, such as “sewer explosion,” “street sweeping machine collides with streetcar,” or “ruptured compressed-air pipe.” In addition to showing the range of accidents that transpired, these inventories reveal that the number of personal liability claims significantly increased from 1898 to 1902, the last period recorded in these files. During this time, the 128 reported accidents represented a 341 percent increase from the twenty-nine accidents logged in the period prior, from 1893 to 1897. Even though the data sample is small, these records are symptomatic of the growing currency of personal liability as part of the experience of modern Paris and urban governance practices.

The additional contents of these files further attest to the legal status of such accidents. Through a system of cross-referencing, each accident is correlated with the number of a register in which the accidents were first logged, and a file that contains detailed reports and recommendations for each case. The agency implemented similar record-keeping practices for all of its maintenance and repair work. The agency used handwritten records, including reports, meeting minutes, inspection records, contracts, ledgers, and leather-bound registers that specify the date, location, cost, and nature of each operation it undertook, whether for fixing pavement or street cleaning. It is useful to relate the agency’s broader use of paperwork to Christopher Henke’s analysis of the role of repair workers. For Henke, “repair workers also ‘fix’ social order”; that is, they facilitate the proper functioning of the physical environment and the people who inhabit it to create a sense of “normalcy.” ²⁶ Understanding this point in relation to the record-keeping practices of the Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage underscores the role of paperwork in the ongoing and often repetitive work associated with repairs to ensure the city’s proper functioning, and the means by which this sense of “normalcy” was achieved. The use of similar record-keeping practices for administering accidents submitted these cases to the same rational, bureaucratic logic to create a sense of “normalcy” in light of the modern city’s new risks. Furthermore, the records created a paper trail that could be used in arbitration, either at the level of the department or the Conseil d’État.

The evidentiary status of the paperwork was nowhere more apparent than in the records of the gravest cases in which lives were lost. The Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage included graphic reconstructions of these perilous accidents in an attempt to show how they occurred and deduce their causes. For example, a file concerning an investigation into the case of a woman who had been run over and killed by a horse-drawn wagon on the Boulevard de la Bastille on June 4, 1901, includes a storyboard comprising several hand-drawn vignettes that reconstruct the circumstances of her death. ²⁷ Her widower sought an indemnity from the city because he blamed the traffic accident on the subtle irregularities of the street grading near the streetcar tracks that run along the boulevard, which potentially caused the carriage to veer in the direction of the victim. The most dramatic image is a scaled reconstruction of the accident in a street plan. The drawing illustrates the precise locations and paths of the carriages as they veered onto the tracks, with the woman’s horizontal body superimposed beneath the moving carriages (Figure 1). A series of more prosaic drawings are equally instructive, as they diagram, measure, and reconstruct the material conditions of the boulevard and scene of the accident. They include measured drawings of the vehicles (Figure 2), a street section showing irregularities near the tracks (Figure 3), and details of the tracks in section (Figure 4). In illustrating section and plan details, these vignettes evoke contemporary graphic conventions for representing public works to forge a graphic language for the reconstructions of accidents. In so doing, these drawings became a form of evidence, in anticipation of the rise of forensic engineering. These drawings, along with the ways that the agency assembled and ordered the paperwork, were expressive of the administration’s protocols for compiling evidence to assess responsibility and make a recommendation to the prefecture. These protocols framed the case of Madame Dravert.

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Figure 1.

Plan of the site.

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Figure 2.

Views of the vehicles.

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Figure 3.

Transversal street section.

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Figure 4.

Sections of the streetcar rails.

The Investigation

The investigation into Madame Dravert’s accident, led by two engineers, looked into the circumstances of her fall and evaluated the state of the degraded sidewalk on the Pont National. ²⁸ The engineers conducted a number of interviews and repeatedly visited the bridge to identify and document the pothole. This led to the assembly of the engineers’ principal report recounting the accident, which was accompanied by the additional paperwork, including testimonials, doctor’s letters, and two photographs recording the sidewalk’s condition (Figure 5). Due to the time lost between the accident and when it was reported, however, the engineers principally composed their report from a series of interviews with the various people who interacted with Madame Dravert around the time of her accident, including a police officer who assisted her after her fall, her daughter, and her daughter’s fiancé. To launch their probe, the engineers first contacted the police officer, who, as a civil servant, would have been the most impartial in assessing the case. The engineers asked the officer to take them to the Pont National and identify the “dangerous hole.” At the site, the officer pointed to what the engineers later described as “a small crack” in the pavement above the bridge’s first pier near the Right Bank. Because the officer’s testimony and identification of the pothole seemed to corroborate Madame Dravert’s letter, the engineers continued their investigation.

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Figure 5.

Report cover, 26 May 1903.

Conflicting accounts of the accident quickly complicated the investigation. The engineers summoned Madame Dravert to their office. On April 8, 1903, her daughter arrived in her stead, explaining that her mother still could not walk. When her daughter recounted the events of January 4, 1903, there were significant discrepancies between the information she provided and what the engineers had observed. She explained that the pothole was about eight to ten centimeters deep and not above the bridge’s first pier, but near the center of the crossing. The engineers requested that she accompany them back to the bridge and show them this larger pothole. At the site, Madame Dravert’s daughter located the other hole in the center of the bridge. In the middle of the hole was a pebble upon which, she explained, her mother had tripped. She noted that someone must have since filled in the hole, since it had been much deeper at the time of her mother’s fall: “eight to ten centimeters,” she repeated. The engineers then brought her to see the pothole that the police officer had previously indicated. She insisted, however, that it was the hole in the sidewalk near the center of the bridge that had caused the fall. The engineers thus examined the hole indicated by Madame Dravert’s daughter, noting that the pebble was “about the size of a nut,” and nothing more than a protrusion of mortar from the bridge’s foundation.

The engineers attempted to reconcile the inconsistencies over the hole’s location. They decided to contact another witness: Madame Dravert’s future son-in-law, Pierre Lalut. On April 14, 1903, they visited Lalut at his place of business, the department store La Samaritaine. “The hole,” Lalut explained to the engineers, “was elongated and deep.” To give an idea of its depth, Lalut compared it to the length of his hand and forearm: “fifteen to twenty centimeters.” Moreover, Lalut told the engineers that the fissure was located on the bridge near the Right Bank. As the engineers heard Lalut corroborate the police officer’s story rather than his fiancé’s, they asked him to comment on the protruding pebble in the hole on which Madame Dravert had supposedly tripped. In response, he again contradicted his fiancé: “It was more like a cut in the masonry than a pebble.” Due to these inconsistencies, the circumstances of Madame Dravet’s accident remained unclear. The engineers subsequently sent Madame Dravert a letter dated April 17, 1903, again requesting her presence on the Pont National to identify the hole herself. Because Madame Dravert was still under doctor’s orders to remain sedentary, her daughter again appeared in her stead on April 20, 1903, doctor’s note in hand. She apologized to the engineers, conceding that she made a mistake. She clarified that the hole was situated closer to the Right Bank, as indicated by her fiancé and the police officer. Agreeing on the hole’s location, the engineers concluded their interviews, which they compiled in the file and summarized in their report. They then began to survey and assess the hole’s condition.

The Photographs

Despite the scrupulous details of the interviews, the photographic evidence in the file, including two images—each appended to a separate piece of paper—were accorded primacy in the ultimate decision to deny Madame Dravert’s claim. The power assigned to the photographs is curious, since the images, taken three months after the accident, were unable to document the conditions of the site at the time of the fall. Nevertheless, assumptions about the photographic medium’s truthfulness seemed to sway the final decision. An understanding of what the images represent and of their relation to the broader institutional uses of photography in the period helps clarify their important position among the paperwork.

The two photographs, which the engineers shot with a handheld camera, show the same scene on the roadway of the Pont National. In the photographs, the engineers fixed the scene according to a rational, calculable order (Figures 6 and 7). The camera angle introduces this logic spatially through the deep recessional space of one-point perspective. The pavement retreats in a straight line and converges at the vanishing point, framed by the sharp linear recession of the bridge’s parapet to the right. Although the passersby in the background are blurred and seem extraneous to the photographs’ rational logic, another figure—the engineer in a black overcoat who ominously looms over the scenes with his face cropped out—plays a more exacting role. He acts as a scale to approximate the size of the hole at his feet. Both photographs frame the pothole in the foreground and show a more precise measuring instrument set into it. In the first photograph, the hole is hardly noticeable and appears as a shallow impression in the bitumen sidewalk. The ruler probes the depression and conveys its dimensions, which are transcribed in the appended report and measure 0.40 millimeters long, 0.18 millimeters wide, and between 0 and 0.27 millimeters deep. In the second photograph, the hole is deeper because the engineers had dug out the loose dirt that filled it. The same instrument measures the maximum depth of the emptied hole as 0.35 millimeters, registering a minute difference in depth in comparison to the hole in the first image.

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Figure 6.

Submittal A, photograph of the hole (before removing the dirt), April 20, 1903.

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Figure 7.

Submittal B, photograph of the hole (after removing the dirt), April 20, 1903.

The perspectival space of the photographs, the faceless technician who acts as a scale, and the presence of the ruler all create visual cues about measurement. Because the measurements of the ruler are too small to be ascertained in the photographs, however, the images fail to provide any definitive metrics (the dimensions of the hole were only accurately conveyed in the accompanying written report). Rather, the photographs display the act of measuring. ²⁹ The photographs create a narrative about optical factuality aligned with the historical understanding of photography’s role as a “document.” For Molly Nesbit, the document occupied a privileged position at the turn of the twentieth century: “Whether drawn or photographed, the document was playing an increasingly important role in the elaboration of scientific and historical proof.” She further argues that the document “became a standard way of expressing knowledge; it became a means to knowledge; and it put together pictorial forms of knowledge.” ³⁰ Moreover, the photographs’ status as documents was not only achieved pictorially, but also through their material handling: they were labeled submittal “A” and submittal “B” to establish their role as evidence, affixed to paper, marked up with the conditions of the site, and stamped with ink from the desks of the engineers who had examined and signed off on them. ³¹ By means of their visual and material attributes, the documents did not merely record the pothole; they inscribed it within the putative rational logic of the administration and its record-keeping practices to make the documentary evidence seem unbiased. Furthermore, the appearance of the paperwork as documents (and not only photographs) likely explains why they have not been pulled from the file and preserved in a photographic collection.

Since the photographs are unique among the extant files of accidents, they do not fully adhere to the same graphic protocols of the records in similar cases. Nevertheless, the resonances of civil engineering and detective work also permeate these documents, much like the drawings created for the case concerning the woman run over by a horse-drawn wagon, with some important exceptions. First, the drawings more effectively communicate the material conditions of the site, since they include precise measurements and do not require separate sheets of paper to log them. Moreover, if both the drawings and the photographs furnish a posteriori accounts of the scene of the accidents, the drawings are reconstructions that graphically hypothesize how the accident transpired. By contrast, the photographs do not provide a reconstruction of Madame Dravert’s fall. If the drawings contain more data on a single piece of paper and are thus more graphically efficient, we are left wondering why the engineers photographed the pothole on the Pont National instead of rendering it by hand.

The importance of the photographs can be understood in terms of the wider evidentiary uses of the medium at the turn of the twentieth century by other state institutions, on one hand, and in terms of its currency among state engineers, on the other. In the first instance, in the late nineteenth century, prisons, hospitals, and insane asylums used photographs as visual proof of disease, madness, and deviance. ³² Alphonse Bertillon’s applications of photography within criminology—as part of his contribution to forensic science at Paris’s Prefecture of Police—are particularly relevant. First, Bertillon used photographs in his record-keeping system for criminal files, which cross-referenced photographs of mugshots with precise records of bodily measurements. ³³ Second, he developed conventions for documenting crime scenes through what he called “metric photography,” which involved documenting a crime scene in an image that was scaled and which recorded the dimensions of a space and its contents (Figure 8). ³⁴ Such photographs were affixed to a standard form that inscribed the images within a ruled frame, so that measurements could be taken directly from the photograph (notably, these forms also contained a header reading “affair,” where the case’s name would be completed by hand). The engineers’ photographs evoke these visual conventions for assembling forensic paperwork and evidence. In this light, even if the photographs could not depict the accident at the time it transpired, they still conveyed the sense that the scene of the accident might contain clues.

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Figure 8.

Alphonse Bertillon’s metric photography.

In the second instance, photography’s privileged role within the French engineering profession also informed the images in the file. Beginning in 1857, state engineers routinely commissioned photographers to document the construction of urban infrastructure (Figure 9), as part of the city’s dramatic urban transformation begun in the Second Empire (1852-1870). ³⁵ Their use of photography contributed to the wider streamlining of design and construction methods: the burgeoning of working drawings, building codes, and construction oversight all organized the city’s worksites according to the rational strictures of managerial efficiency. ³⁶ Engineers appended photographs to site reports and project dossiers to expedite the offsite surveillance of the construction site and ease the approval process of building campaigns within the state’s expanding bureaucracies. Furthermore, engineers—including those of the Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage—used photographs to publicize their building campaigns, disseminating them in the illustrated press, in official publications, and at universal expositions (Figure 10). ³⁷ Whether engineers used photographs to celebrate the spectacle of modernity or for the bureaucratic practices of paperwork, the images were structured by a particular understanding of the medium grounded in notions of objectivity—notions that trumped their inability to express metric data. In the late nineteenth century, these notions reflected the belief that photography’s mechanical automation and visual truthfulness were free of the potential inaccuracies of hand drawing. ³⁸ For French civil engineers, such assumptions had been traditionally instilled since 1858, when photographic instruction became integrated into their training and emphasized the medium’s scientific implications as a neutral form of visualization. ³⁹ Lucien Bordet, who taught photography to engineering students at the École des Ponts et Chaussées, France’s centralized school for state engineers, had underscored, in 1888, the utility of photographs for recording accidents. In addressing the benefits of photography for engineers in his course manual, Bordet states, “The [photographic] view of a worksite or of the scene of an accident sent to an engineer far away from his work can replace, quite advantageously, a long report.” ⁴⁰ In practice, the photographs did not necessarily supplant the written report; however, the expectation of the photographs’ efficiency remained salient.

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Figure 9.

Hippolyte-Auguste Collard, Pont du Point du Jour, 1863/1866, Albumen silver print.

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Figure 10.

Photograph of a street cleaning machine. 1910. Gelatin silver print.

The neutral conception of the photographs of the pothole was only reinforced by the use of a novel photographic technology: the handheld camera. The handheld rolled-film Kodak camera was developed in the late 1880s, and French engineers adopted the device in the mid-1890s, precluding the need for cameramen on the worksite (Figure 11). ⁴¹ The handheld camera was particularly expedient for recording site conditions in ways that were quicker than hand drawings, even if they did not covey the same kinds of information. However practical the handheld camera was for documentation, its use was hardly neutral. As John Tagg underscores, the camera “arrives on the scene vested with a particular authority to arrest, picture, and transform daily life.” Tagg asserts that the uses of the camera reflect “the power of the apparatuses of the local state which deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs to stand as evidence or register a truth.” ⁴² The authority of the photographs in the file of Madame Dravert’s case was shaped by the photographic practices of criminology, which structured protocols for rendering images as a form of evidence, and by the French engineering profession, which understood the medium as an impartial method of representation. The photographic documents in the file demonstrate the ways that the paperwork could be shaped through broader cultural practices, which ultimately framed the administration’s use of the medium as a form of evidence and a manifestation of administrative power.

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Figure 11.

Engineer holding a handheld camera.

The Verdict

The conception of the two photographic documents as objective forms of evidence played an important role in the ultimate recommendation to deny Madame Dravert’s claim, and in making the paperwork of the investigation appear neutral to show that the administration had not been negligent. A higher-ranking engineer based his recommendation about the case on the paperwork compiled by the engineers who were charged with the investigation. Indeed, the investigating engineers had undertaken their inquiry in earnest. In their report, they noted that bitumen degrades easily, suggesting that “it is quite likely that the hole made from the wear of bitumen had dimensions lower than at present.” Despite their admission of possible fault, their superior rendered his decision in an authoritarian manner. Having reviewed the dossier, the higher engineer found the witnesses’ testimonies inconclusive due to the inconsistencies in their stories. More convincing to the engineer was the photographic evidence. The higher official accepted the measurement as initially recorded onsite and verified by the first photograph. After explaining that a depression in the pavement of 0.27 millimeters did not constitute a “dangerous hole,” he added,

There is certainly no city, burg, or village without a gradient of 0.27 millimeters within the gentle slope of the pavement . . . In our opinion, not only is the Pont National not in a poor state for traversing, its maintenance rivals that of certain areas in the center of Paris and the city could not have a more perfect appearance. ⁴³

As the engineer contended that the bridge was in excellent condition, he therefore proposed an alternative cause for the accident, suggesting that Madame Dravert was “hardly sensible on 4 January” and thus at fault herself. Probing Madame Dravert’s intentions, the engineer also questioned her integrity: “Perhaps even while slipping on an orange peel, she thought of a ‘dangerous hole’ as a means to garner compensation from the city of Paris.” ⁴⁴ With the engineer’s letter, Madame Dravert’s demand for an indemnity was denied. ⁴⁵

The recommendation to deny her case raises issues concerning the ways that the paperwork mediated Madame Dravert’s claim and her experience in the city. In assessing Madame Dravert’s petition, the engineer assigned a privileged role to the material qualities of the metropolis. For the engineer, the millimeters of the city’s crevices, the compactness of its infill, and its “perfect appearance” provided resolute evidence against Madame Dravert’s claim. Although the higher engineer used the photographic documents to demonstrate his material-based assertions, which seemed more stable than the conflicting testimonies, the photographs themselves, the engineer asserted, did not properly convey the state of the bridge at the time of Madame Dravert’s accident. Despite the inherent contradiction of the images, the first photograph offered enough evidence to demonstrate the acceptable condition of the sidewalk. Paradoxically, the photographs that made visible the pothole and Madame Dravert’s claim also served to bury her accusation beneath the paperwork.

A second issue raised by the higher engineer’s letter concerns questions about the gendering of the city. By demanding that the city account for her personal experience, her claim contested traditional ideas about urban public space and the municipality’s role in its stewardship; conventionally, the municipality operated on behalf of the collective rather than the individual. In her request for compensation, she placed her own experience before her attachment to a body politic, thus breaching notions about public space as a shared arena. As Madame Dravert’s claim defied these conventions, the higher engineer interpreted her petition as a volatile threat against the city itself. His reaction is therefore not wholly unexpected, if we recall that engineers were accustomed to conceptualizing and maintaining urban space, not as a place of individual experience, but for the congregation and benefit of a collective public. While the engineer associated the maintenance of the capital with the safeguarding of public space, however, he also upheld the modern city as an arena of masculine experience. As Janet Wolff argues, Parisian public space reflected a particularly masculine construction of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, in which women lacked the access to the city that men enjoyed. ⁴⁶ That Madame Dravert, a working-class woman, asked for her experience to be acknowledged as part of urban life threatened to destabilize the gender norms of the modern city—an anxiety apparent in the misogynistic overtones of the higher engineer’s claim that she was “hardly sensible.” This misogyny reflected bourgeois stereotypes about the subordinate role of working-class women in public life at the turn of the twentieth century. ⁴⁷

But gender politics alone do not explain the judgment. On a broader level, the growing currency of personal liability as part of the experience of the modern city was contested at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite the changing interpretation of the law concerning accidents resulting from negligent maintenance, departmental authorities often resisted granting such indemnities. Consider, for example, another case. When a municipal street cleaner was sweeping up a piece of manure on Boulevard Voltaire on the morning of September 14, 1902, he struck a boy riding a bicycle with his broom, knocking the boy onto the nearby tracks of an approaching streetcar, which hit him and severed his left foot. While the boy’s father sought an indemnity from the city for the maleficence of the street cleaner, the Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage insisted that it was the fault of the boy and not of the municipal worker. This decision was based on the testimony of the worker, who swore that the boy had been riding his bicycle too quickly in an effort to pass in front of the streetcar, oblivious to the broom in his way. ⁴⁸ Yet it is also possible that the street cleaner did not survey the surrounding area before he went to scoop up the manure. This is another example of the departmental authority blaming the victim, while the administration and its agents were presumed to be impartial and unbiased. In Madame Dravert’s case, the eyewitness testimony of the victim was eclipsed, simply because the engineers did not visit the sedentary women in Ménilmontant. Moreover, the engineers made no attempt to contact their colleagues charged with street paving, or to examine their records as part of the investigation. Instead, the various forms of documentary evidence assembled the case to privilege the putative neutrality of the engineers and uphold the role of the administration. As this paperwork was circulated through the bureaucratic channels of the prefecture as evidence in the investigation, its ability to defend the agency and build a defense for the city were also at stake. Given the currency of cases related to negligent maintenance, once the law had caught up with the pace of industrial and urban change, it was the departmental administration that needed to catch up with the new understanding of the law to account for personal liability as part of the reality of modern urban life.

Paris on Paper

Given the evidence gathered by the engineers, it is not possible to verify the events of January 4, 1903 on the Pont National. Regardless of whether Madame Dravert’s claim was factual or fictitious, the decision to deny it was colored by the presumed optical factuality of the photographs, as well as by the legitimacy of the administrative marks impressed upon them and the file’s other paperwork. Yet the papers that the engineer adopted as proof of the metropolis’s material durability may have very well betrayed the bridge’s condition on the day of Madame Dravert’s accident, especially if the engineers had not yet filled in the hole, as seen in the second photograph. Treated as objective records, the paperwork wielded authority over Madame Dravert’s complaint. In so doing, the higher engineer exploited the photographs as evidence of the bridge’s condition to assert the myth of the city’s material durability and perpetual modernity. Madame Dravert’s agency therefore became diffused under a pile of paper, demonstrating Kafka’s claim that paperwork refracts “agency through its medium.”

Paperwork’s role in making the investigation appear neutral and in mediating Madame Dravert’s experience invites a reconsideration of modern urban life in light of the city’s changing material and social relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Writing about Weimar Berlin in 1924—another paradigmatic moment in the history of urban modernity—Siegrfied Kracauer suggested this kind of historical analysis when he remarked: “One’s body takes root in the asphalt.” ⁴⁹ Kracauer described this occurrence at night and suggested that it was coextensive with a different technology of modernization: the electric lighting that made advertisements into “glittering sentences.” While Kracauer’s observation does not attend to the role of paperwork, he nevertheless enmeshes bodily experience in the historical materiality of the modern city. As much as artificial light created certain material conditions for the city, so too did the paperwork of urban governance. In the case of Madame Dravert, her experience was structured by the administration and its paperwork the very moment she stepped in the pothole in the bitumen sidewalk of the Pont National. The bridge and its sidewalk were not merely physical components of Paris’s urban fabric; they were also inscribed within the administration of urban maintenance and the governance of the city. This association linked the bridge’s street pavement to its municipal caretaker, the Service technique de la voie publique et de l’éclairage, in a period when the understanding of urban maintenance and its administration was changing. ⁵⁰ Accordingly, Madame Dravert’s experience on the bridge was impacted by the administration’s drive to appear neutral in assessing the cases, on one hand, and the contested status of personal liability in the period, on the other. The administration embraced the paperwork to manage these disparate pressures. As Paris emerged on paper, its distinct material and visual qualities mediated the modern city through changing notions of urban governance, urban maintenance, and urban experience at the turn of the twentieth century.