4 ideas
Haussmann's boulevards did more than modernize Paris: cutting wide straight avenues through the dense medieval core broke up the working-class neighborhoods where insurrections had formed and barricades had held. They also made streets easy for troops to move through and raised rents enough to push the poor out to the periphery. Urban renewal here worked as counterinsurgency and class removal presented as hygiene and beauty.
The chiffonniers were a large, organized underclass who went through Paris refuse at night with a basket and a hook, sorting rags, bones, paper and scraps to sell to wholesalers. Industry depended on these materials for paper and other goods. Their trade was undone by Prefect Eugène Poubelle's 1883–84 order requiring covered household rubbish bins, and his name became the French word for trash can.
The lives of the poor rarely survive in official histories, so Sante rebuilds them from material nobody meant to keep: fait-divers crime items, police mugshots, street-song lyrics, slang dictionaries, postcards and cheap photographs. Throwaway documents keep the texture of lives that monuments and archives leave out. The historian's job becomes gathering scraps, much like the ragpicker's.
Around 1900 the Paris press invented the name 'Apaches' for the loosely organized street gangs of Belleville and the outer arrondissements. Sensational reporting turned scattered young toughs into a coherent, romanticized threat, complete with their own dress codes, dances and argot. The label also fed back into the gangs themselves, who took on the identity the newspapers had handed them.