A QUESTION OF LIFE OR DEATH: ADMINISTRATING BODIES AND ADMINISTRATIVE BODIES IN 19TH-CENTURY PARIS - HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Pré-publication, Document de travail Année : 2006

A QUESTION OF LIFE OR DEATH: ADMINISTRATING BODIES AND ADMINISTRATIVE BODIES IN 19TH-CENTURY PARIS

Stephen W. Sawyer
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Résumé

Amidst public outcry in the first half of the 19th century that Parisians were being buried alive, the Parisian administration pushed for new and sophisticated reforms for administrating the final moment in the life of its citizens. But while the administration was only too willing to extend its control over this event, the techiniques used to monitor death generated resistance among medical experts, local mayors, and families. In the end and in spite of the administration's tireless efforts, death in Paris remained a local and private affair and as a result Parisian families and their mayors ignored the attempts to reform the system of verifying the dead by precipitously burying their loved ones and ignoring the reforms designed to prevent premature burial. This study, then, turns around two bodies and their relationship: it explores how the individual, dead body found itself at the heart of the construction of the modern administrativebody in 19th century Paris.
Ultimately, this study suggests that the administrative power which was exercised in the extended moment of the dead body was not unified and did not simply fall under the sign of modern forms of bureaucratization, the detachment of expertise and population sciences like statistics. Rather, it argues that the dead body was, in Anthony Gidden's terms "regionalized" within overlapping spatial and temporal contexts, by conflicting administrative visions; different forms of power were deployed on the dead body within the durée which opened up between the moment that the individual was declared dead and finally buried. In the context of administrating death in 19th century Paris, the dead body was localized in space and time differently by two competing administrative processes: it was claimed for disembedded administrative forms of expertise proposed by the Paris Prefect, on the one hand, and a traditional "localized" form of social authority in the hands of the mayors of each arrondissement on the other. For in the case of Paris, the traditional forms of authority embodied by the mayors did not simply disappear as new forms of administrative power based on "population politics" and modern bureaucratization were created. Rather they existed side by side and imposed competing contexts of the time (reducing or extending the delay between death and burial) and space (removing or maintaining the presence of the body within the private home) of the dead body. In this sense, defining administrative power was also a battle over the control of the time and space of death in Parisian homes.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00068742, version 1 (16-06-2006)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00068742 , version 1

Citer

Stephen W. Sawyer. A QUESTION OF LIFE OR DEATH: ADMINISTRATING BODIES AND ADMINISTRATIVE BODIES IN 19TH-CENTURY PARIS. 2006. ⟨halshs-00068742⟩
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