Session details
Organizer(s)
Shane Ewen (Leeds beckett university) and Marie-Aline Thebaud-Sorger (Centre national de la recherche scientifique)
Keywords
Fires, Community, Technology
Abstract
Fire has always been part of urban life, and so it continues as recent fatal fires such as at Grenfell Tower in London (2017) starkly illustrate. However the sensitivity towards fire hazards has gradually and continuously shifted from early modern times, revealing how the city has been in constant motion in dealing with the risk posed by fire. Instead of seeing citywide conflagrations, which razed entire blocks of flammable property, fire increasingly became localised to single properties or discrete urban districts, largely thanks to the piecemeal spread of fireproof buildings and the business of fire insurance. We also see the increasing specialisation of fire extinguishing, rescue and prevention techniques from the eighteenth century, ranging from individual warning and suppression devices to the formation of public bodies of skilled and paid firefighters trained in rescue and resuscitation in addition to the core business of fire-fighting. The movement of money, ideas, people and materials has, then, been integral to the changed urban fire regime.
This main session, which spans the early modern and modern periods, aims to look more closely at the relationship between fires and communities, including the roles played by neighbours (as first responders), witnesses, firefighters, technocratic experts, engineers, councillors, and the like – and the ways that they interacted with each other at different levels and over time. We wish particularly to focus on the ways that the evolving, but constant, threat of fire has fostered new sets of practices in protecting communities and, vice versa, how practices and experiences (at an individual or collective level) have shaped the perception and management of fires from the early modern to the modern period in Europe.
The main themes we will explore are the evolving relationship between fires and urban communities; the relationship between voluntarism and professionalization in the fight against fire; the business of urban fire; and learning from fire(s). We’re also interested in cultures of urban fire and its changing use, significance and meaning in a variety of contexts.
Papers
‘Les Risques ordinaires d’incendie’: Fire and Families in Working-Class Montreal, 1895-1935
Author(s)
Magda Fahrni (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Keywords
Fires, Risks, Homes
Abstract
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century Montreal was the commercial and industrial metropolis of both Quebec and Canada. A series of devastating fires over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries had destroyed wide swathes of the city’s commercial and residential districts. In the 1860s, a municipal fire department replaced the volunteer fire clubs that had fought the city’s fires for roughly a century. By the early twentieth century, Montreal’s fire department, equipped with up-to-date technology and a hierarchy of salaried employees that included an inspectorate devoted to fire prevention, considered itself the equal of any municipal fire department in North America; it frequently compared itself to its counterparts in Boston and New York City. Yet the considerable effort and resources (both human and financial) devoted to fire prevention in the early twentieth century were largely concentrated on commercial and industrial establishments; they neglected the “risques ordinaires d’incendie” found in the city’s numerous working-class homes. The annual reports and registers kept by the fire department, along with coroners’ archives and sensationalist coverage in the daily press, leave no doubt as to the devastation wrought by fires in these homes. The detailed descriptions of fires caused by defective chimneys, exploding lamps, stovepipes that ignited, attempts to thaw frozen water pipes, and children playing with matches reveal the vulnerability of working-class families living in inadequate and often dilapidated housing. In particular, they highlight the vulnerability of working-class children growing up in overcrowded flats and of mothers whose domestic labour remained a blind spot in early-twentieth-century fire prevention efforts. By examining domestic fires in turn-of-the-twentieth-century working-class Montreal, this paper builds on previous studies of fire, risk, and accident prevention undertaken by historians Arwen Mohun, Mark Tebeau, Shane Ewen, and Ciara Breathnach.
France, 1958: Urban Arsons as a Primetime Show: The Demolition of Ménilmontant as a Seminal Case Study for the History of Urban Fires
Author(s)
Hélène Jannière (Rennes 2 University) and Alessandro Benetti (Rennes 2 University)
Keywords
Fires, Planning, Clearance
Abstract
Apart from fatal events, the history of urban fires may also include their active, project-oriented exploitation. In 1958, eight decades after the precisely planned arsons of the Paris Commune, intentional fires make their spectacular comeback in the French capital’s landscape, in the form of controlled outbreaks lit by local firemen. In the frame of the city’s rénovation urbaine, the doomed working-class neighbourhood of Ménilmontant becomes the rehearsal stage for a large-scale demolition by the fire. The controlled fires of Ménilmontant are a seminal case study for the history of the visual representations and the reception of urban fires. In fact, alongside a curious crowd, several amateur and professional photographers, such as local expert Henri Guérard, attend and capture the event. Moreover, its images reach a wide public through local and national newspapers (including Le Parisien Libéré and Le Monde), specialized periodicals, and the TV show Les problèmes de la construction. Here Pierre Sudreau, Minister of Construction and Housing, describes them as a contribution to the invoked reconquête of Paris, promoted by the government against the slums. By praising the demolition by the fire as a “grandiose work”, Sudreau challenges the association between fire and the notion of destruction.
The Ménilmontant fires’ visual representations participate in an unprecedented attempt to construct a positive imagery on urban fires, and to share it with a mass audience; on the other hand, their circulation on multiple media, steered by different actors, opens up to a more nuanced interpretation of their reception by the public. This paper investigates the production, dissemination and reception of the Ménilmontant fires’ visual representations, in relation to the different narratives that they supported. It also seeks to frame this event and its imagery in the history of great urban fires, most notably those of the Paris Commune. To conclude, this study forms part of a broader attempt to enlarge the object of study of the history of urban fires, suggesting that the latter may be considered as an operative tool of city planning, and not just as catastrophic events.
Burning An Illusion: Race, Resistance, and the “Riots” in 1980s England
Author(s)
Aaron Andrews (University of Southampton)
Keywords
Fires, Protest, Tactics
Abstract
In 1980-81 and 1985, the streets of numerous English cities became the site of large-scale public disorder. Images of burned-out buildings and young people with petrol bombs came to symbolise, at least in much of the press, the violence and destruction wrought by the ‘rioters’. The spectre of lawlessness and ruination, however, only tells part of the story. This paper explores the history of the urban uprisings through the lens of fire and burning. Firstly, it examines the intertwined histories of protestors’ use of fire, and the evolution of police and emergency services’ tactics and technologies. Secondly, it explores the case of the ‘Bradford 12’ to investigate the politically, culturally, and legally contested meanings of protesters’ tactics. Finally, it turns to the 1985 Broadwater Farm and Brixton uprisings to argue that the means and ferocity with which protesters deployed fire affected the way their resistance was popularly understood.