Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Paris

In Paris as in other cities, "scenes" play an essential part in the appraisal of crime realities and crime imaginary. In the nineteenth century, the great social and urban changes that can be synthesized as haussmannisation deeply modified the topography of "vice" and delinquency in the capital. This article studies the evidence, the unwieldiness, and the shifting of that topography. Based on a corpus of widely distributed texts (feuilletons, dime and "popular" novels, Parisian columns, broadsheets), it shows how social imaginary adapted to the disruptions and played with the memory of places, pointing out the strong autonomy of Paris representations.