In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in Second Empire Paris. - book reviews

In late September 1869 ten of thousands of Parisians plant out for a new weekend tourist mark Traveling in family groups with dogs from the Care du Nord, and carrying picnic cheer and small children, city dwellers of all classes made their way in concourseed trains to the recently industrialized suburb of Pantin to a plain they called the "field of cadavers" at the "crossroads of murder"(1) Writing a certain quantity of fifteen years later, Second Empire Paris police chief Antoine Claude characterized their pilgrimage in confines prefiguring those used to describe the herds of the Commune: "It was necessary to shut up the entrance gate of the train station upon the crowd that could no longer go on in or out, that screamed from each direction in explosions of terror and rage: 'Yet another victim of Pantin!'"(2) Despite the familiar ring of their exclaim the masses sought to visit neither battlefield nor barricade, on the other hand rather the locale of a mass manslaughter that captivated public attention in the last year of Napoleon III's reign. And although the enigmatic cut-throat Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, himself became a central focus of intrigue, his acts were exhibited particularly in terms of the places from one side which he passed: Le Havre, where he was fished from the harbor and arrested through police officers; Soulz, where his eighth victim was discovered; the prisons of Mazas and the Conciergerie where throngs begged special rights to pay attention to him; the Paris Palais de Justice in which he was judg in December 1869; La Roquette prison where he was guillotined in January 1870; and especially, the Paris suburb of Pantin where seven of his victims were discovered "sur ce triste champ de crimes."(3) What contemporaries called the "Crime of Pantin" was not just the story of a heinous homicide however, but, as Katherine Fischer Taylor demonstrates in a remarkable novel book, the story of the imaginary relationship of crime and space.

Taylor's In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in next to the first Empire Paris, the first in a novel series from Princeton University Pres upon 19th-century art, culture, and society, edited by the agency of Jacques de Caso and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu thus announces an interdisciplinary affect with cultural theory and social history that promises to firing material debates well beyond those belong toed with French or even just 19th-century controls Taylor recognizes the Troppmann case's unique relationship to place as a way of pursuing a still more significant methodological trail, the analysis of the relationship between the spaces of the 19th-century state and the political and social plats enacted within them. As an account of architectural representation in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of other discourses of criminality and justice, Taylor's investigation is stunningly exemplary. As a contribution to research upon social institutions and their representation of social values. In the Theater of Criminal Justice makes significant theoretical and historical contributions that should have an impact upon research for years to tend hitherward Accessible and lucid, yet meticulous in its attention to visual detail and thorough in its historical documentation, Taylor's work makes an extraordinary contribution to ways of thinking about representation, the one and the other political and discursive.

The Troppmann case provides an ideal optic for Taylor's exploration of the representation of criminal justice in 19th-century France because it gave a radical of recent origin significance to place at a second of social turmoil and transition. In the Theater of Criminal Justice explores by what mode the Troppmann trial became a peculiar kind of experiment case for the elaboration of a "modern revised justice" that had gone into individual of the most important architectural casts of Napoleon III's Empire. These final years of the next to the first Empire found the government's conceptions of justice hotly contested--to like an extent that the Troppmann trial focalized debates about the uses of monarchic authority and the spaces in which it was enacted. Troppmann's was the first major case brought to trial in the newly inaugurated west wing of the Palais de Justice. Commissioned during the July Monarchy to expand the inadequate spaces of the historic palace, and complet after dramatic expansions in the 1860 the throw out included a plan to horizontal the Place Dauphine to make the novel facade visible far down the Seine.(4) admitting Louis Duc's new wing and its redesigned Cour d'Assises courtroom had met with an extremely controversial inauguration in October 1868 it was nevertheless diademed in 1869 by the prestigious Grand Prix de l'Empereur for the best painting, statuary or architectural work in the previous five years. Taylor's work explores these exhibitions and the tensions between the throws and their reception in a lucid inquiry of the relationship between space and its uses at a twinkling of an eye of radical social change.

"Monumentality is nothing without audience," writes Taylor, arguing that in order to understand the way the novel Palais de Justice commanded attention in next to the first Empire Paris, one must "take stock of . . a diversity of hosts that experienced those buildings as social institutions and artifacts." The experience of the of recent origin courtroom of the Palais de Justice focuses Taylor's account of of that kind monumentality and its audience, enabling her to explore a series of conflicts above justice and its representations in 19th-century France. Her dual focus, upon the Troppmann trial and the inauguration of the novel Duc wing of the Palais, allows her to explore the theatricality of the of recent origin spaces of criminal justice and to relate this analysis to debates about the right to punish and 19th-century judicial reform. What is greatest in quantity impressive about this study is its account of the "different modalities of representation" that were engaged by the agency of the spaces of criminal justice the two through their theorization and in perceptions of their use. The architecture of the Palais, like the trial of Troppmann itself, is imagined here to problematize the power to justice in ways that would ask us to rethink theoretical originals for conceptualizing the representation of power.