Cities of Power. Göran Therborn
the main enduring capital-city effect of the revolutionary French route to political modernity and a nation-state is this: national Paris has never had the time and/or money to construct monumental buildings of national institutions, although from the very beginning of the Revolutions there were grandiose plans.21 The Palais de l’Élysée, the Presidential Palace, is an ordinary aristocratic town palace in a side street of the Rive Droite, once belonging to Madame de Pompadour, the most notorious of royal mistresses. The National Assembly has a nice location by the river, but is no more than a former palace of a minor Bourbon royalty. During the Paris Commune of 1871 it had to move to Versailles, and in 1875 it decided on this principal site of the ancien régime as its permanent location (a permanence reversed after four years). France did not have an official prime minister (then called Président du Conseil) until 1946, but this position existed de facto from 1934, lodged in Palais Matignon, another former aristocratic townhouse, on the Rive Gauche. The last royal palace, the Tuileries, was burnt down during the Paris Commune.22
Instead of institutional landmark buildings, Paris has a set of places de ruptures, heavily invested with meaning to this day. The eastern Places de la Bastille, de la République and de la Nation all refer to domestic French history, and they all have a left-of-centre connotation and a similar function of gathering or demonstrating arrival.
Correspondingly, the French right have their places of assembly and destination to the west, mainly commemorating external wars, from the Jeanne d’Arc statue and Place de la Concorde along the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, or, at the Rive Gauche, les Invalides. To this day, French politics is much better at mass demonstrations and short strikes than at building institutions and organizations.
When did Britain become a nation-state, a multinational one of (at least) the English, the Scots and the Welsh, and London a national capital? These are questions rarely raised in British historiography, in contrast to questions of national identity and nationalism.23 Terminus ab quo is the ‘Revolution’ of 1688, which, whatever its unintended modern consequences, was basically a revolution in the pre-modern sense, literally a ‘rolling back’* to the Tudor times of ‘free-born Englishmen’ and Protestant monarchs. No section of a nation-state, and no party wanting to create a nation-state, can possibly invite a foreign prince to conquer the country and rule the state, like the seven ‘gentlemen and aristocrats’† who invited the Dutch stadhouder Prince William of Orange on 7 June 1688, did. The official motivation of ‘the Great Restorer’, as John Locke aptly called William, ‘to appear in Arms’ was ‘Preserving of the Protestant Religion, and for restoring the laws and liberties of the ancient kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland’.24 Through his marriage to the daughter of King James II, William also had a claim to the succession. The year 1688 was part of a two-centuries-long armed and religiously impassioned dynastic rivalry and inter-state princely power game over the British crown – also involving the French and the Spanish monarchs – that went on until 1746, when the army of a new Hanoverian Protestant dynasty finally defeated that of the Catholic Stuarts.
Terminus ad quem would be the 1830s. Iconographically, 1830 was a crucial year, when the new central square in London was in the end not called King William Square as expected. With the king’s consent, it became instead Trafalgar Square,25 on which the National Gallery was soon built and Nelson’s Column erected. Parliamentary reform – now meaning looking forward and not back to some pure past – in 1832 made at least the House of Commons less a medieval privilege and more of a modern representation of the nation. Its new monumental landmark building, the Westminster Parliament, was decided upon in the late 1830s and began to open in 1847 (starting with the House of Lords).
The eighteenth century saw a gradual nationalization in Britain, of state power as well as of public monumentality. Wars were no longer financed by grants and loans to the king but by a ‘national debt’, a neologism of the 1730s, guaranteed by Parliament. In 1760 the king traded his property and income from it for a parliamentary Civil List grant.* By the time of the Hanoverian invitation to the throne in 1714, the power of Parliament to install a proper Protestant succession to the throne was established.26 The power of the former grew steadily and that of the monarch faded gradually into ritual respect; 1834 was the last time a British monarch could appoint a prime minister against the opposition of the House of Commons.27
Somewhat bewilderingly, British patriotic celebrations during the Napoleonic Wars ‘subsumed national achievements in glorification of the monarch’.28 Characteristically, the new elegant main street of London’s West End was named Regent Street, though it ended in Waterloo Place, where the prince regent then resided. (Below, we shall encounter some similar national monarchism in Japan.) Enthusiastic and very profitable Scottish investment in the empire furthered national Britishness.
Around Chaucer’s tomb monument, there developed in the eighteenth century a Poets’ Corner of national memorials in Westminster Abbey, including Shakespeare, Milton and others. In the 1790s, the main church of the City of London, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, put up statues of four national benefactors: the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the Orientalist William Jones, the painter Joshua Reynolds and the prison reformer John Howard. Linda Colley ends her great work Britons with a conclusion around a prominent 1822 Royal Academy painting, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo, displaying diverse representatives of a victorious British nation.
Final British victory in the Napoleonic Wars shaped the new national iconography of London, generating Waterloo Place, Waterloo Bridge, Trafalgar Square, the Wellington Arch and Nelson’s Column. The latter, including its reliefs of Nelson’s four major victories and his guard of lions, took three decades to complete (in 1867), even though the column and the statue upon it were visible from November 1843. The government was reluctant to put any money into celebrating the nation’s hero.† No domestic event or hero has ever been commemorated with such grandeur. No national building of worship was added to, not to mention ever replaced Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but the latter expanded its function as a national pantheon with an extraordinarily pompous tomb monument to the Duke of Wellington.
London grew as an imperial city, the world’s largest by 1800. Apart from national-imperial iconography – including its majestic new Parliament – nation-state London was little nationalized. The old duality of the commercial and financial City of London, with its own Lord Mayor and guild institutions, and, on the other side, the royal and aristocratic Westminster and West End continued, although the two were increasingly connected by new land transport rather than by river boats. Before the nineteenth century, the City (with a capital C), had been a kind of sober, Protestant, liberal area of mercantile residence as well as offices, a sort of ‘Amsterdam’ in contrast to the more luxurious and exorbitant ‘Venice’ of the aristocratic West End. In the nineteenth century it was largely emptied at night, while opening in the morning, filled up with offices of world trade and finance.29
National London was in the grip of parliamentary power, which did pay attention to the functionality of the capital, establishing (in 1855) the Metropolitan Board of Works, which, overdue, produced the most extensive sewer system in the world and a metropolitan police force, while the City of London maintained its own. It also funded extensions and embellishments of a rather second-rate aristocratic palace (Buckingham), which in the eighteenth century became the townhouse of the Hanoverian kings, without ever allowing a royal presence in London on par with that in Paris of the Louvre or Tuileries, in Vienna of the Hofburg, in Berlin of the Stadtschloss, or of smaller capitals like Stockholm and Oslo. Street layout remained largely traditional, on the whole without parade axes similar to those of Paris, Vienna and Berlin. London was a city of imperial wealth and power, but not of royal or national splendour.
In some sense the London equivalent of the royal and national-imperial landmark planning of Paris – and the alternative to the grands boulevards – are the West End squares, laid out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by wealthy aristocrats who were also big urban property owners, with homogenous architecture for aristocratic or gentlemanly townhouses, usually with an enclosed garden in the middle. The squares usually carry the names of their creator-owners, Grosvenor (the family name