| As traditional forms of spatial organization broke down during the eighteenth century, individuals were forced to confront an urban space that appeared increasingly threatening and unknown. How did city dwellers acquire the ability to negotiate these crowded spaces with ease? This dissertation traces the individual bourgeois walker's accommodation to the environment of the modern city, a reconciliation mediated through a newfound conception of reserve. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, an autobiographical book from his last years in Paris, provides one of the most remarkable accounts of this physical and psychological rapprochement. So often thought of as a celebrant of nature's purity and of a sentimental approach to landscape, Rousseau may rather be read as struggling to articulate a reassuring, if fragile, autonomy in the face of a city whose density threatens to overwhelm the self. New architectural spaces in the city participated in this transformation of the crowd into a series of independent solitudes: the first boulevards, which mediated between city and countryside, or the transposition of the garden into the urban fabric in the Place Louis XV, for example, were spaces in which this novel, ambivalent form of sociability was practiced, Sociologist Georg Simmel famously wrote of reserve in his essay on the psychology of the city-dweller. For Simmel this withdrawal of affect was a purely defensive maneuver in the face of the traumatic character of modern urban experience. Yet Rousseau allows us to understand reserve as a rather more complex phenomenon: not simply as an armor that protects the self from the shock of encounters in the crowd, but as a retreat to the interior which deepens the individual's very sense of self. It hollows out a space of autonomy that had not previously existed, an autonomy constitutive of the modern subject. We can no longer relegate Rousseau to the margins of city life; as the Reveries show, his experience of the later eighteenth-century city as a space of reserve is, largely, our own. |