Oliver Brax (UCL) - 2024-25 Students
oliver.brax.23@ucl.ac.uk

Housing Savages. Moral Reform in French Workers’ Housing, 1848-1889 

The much studied expansion of social housing in the early twentieth century has overshadowed its ambivalent origins, rooted in the identification of the working-class as a politically and biologically dangerous group. This PhD thesis considers developments in workers’ housing in France from 1848 to 1889, a period during which the necessity of addressing the issue of poor living conditions was first recognised at an institutional level. It aims to re-evaluate this seminal yet neglected period, by analysing the built environment as a space of political and social conflict and by studying the influence of policies aiming at moral reform on specific architectural designs.

Indeed, the transformation of workers’ dwellings into Cités Ouvrières destroyed various forms of community and political activity, leaving in its wake paternalistic and repressive models of housing. The aftermath of the 1848 revolution and the emergence of an organised workers’ movement in France ignited a strong confidence in the influence of architectural form as a safeguard against the overthrow of established order, a belief driven by the contradictory impulses of philanthropy on the one hand, and reactionary and repressive politics on the other.

This study aims to explain how notions of surveillance and moral reform, developed in writings by philanthropists and social theorists, found a material expression in the first examples of collective workers’ housing. Through the spatial, social and ideological analysis of primary material, this thesis offers insights into how the later transition from collective and urban models to individual and rural forms of workers’ housing embodied a belief in the rehabilitative effects of nature and private property, while also laying the basis for experiments in colonial settlement overseas. These innovative architectural programmes, by giving a material form to a moralistic and Orientalist discourse, conflated different groups considered as ‘savages’ by elite opinion.

Principal Supervisor: Professor Murray Fraser