The city in trans-’national’ perspective

To begin, it is worth reflecting on the place of the city in the transnational arena. How do we situate the city within a conceptual framework whose very etymology is constructed around the idea of the nation, and the realization that the forces which shaped it took form beyond the confines of its borders? To be sure, the city can be understood as a foundational element of the nation, and indeed many municipal-level actors of the period conceived their efforts as part of a broader nation-building imperative. For A.B. LaRocque, Laberge's predecessor at the Montreal health board, improving sanitary conditions in the city was nothing less than an ‘oeuvre nationale’,Footnote ⁵ while in Belgium a prominent urban planning journal insisted upon the efforts that had to be made in order to ‘conciliate modern needs with the artistic aspirations of our race’ and to integrate the progress undertaken in other countries into the ‘national crucible’.Footnote ⁶ As historian Daniel Rodgers argues in his path-breaking study of ‘transatlantic crossings’, the thinking of the time acknowledged that ‘if the nation was to be reformed, it would be by seizing the social possibilities of cities’.Footnote ⁷

But the priorities of the city were not necessarily those of the nation, and transnational exchanges often took place on a municipal rather than a national scale. As Pierre Chabard argues, early twentieth-century urban planners in North America and Europe quickly realized that the most effective way of implementing change on the ground was to develop alliances directly with other municipalities rather than with organizations that claimed to have a national standing.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, the tenor of the letters cited at the outset is indicative of efforts by municipal-level players to bypass national references and seek their own prestige, a reminder that a city's modern and metropolitan status, its role as a hub of economic, political and cultural activity, was understood to be bound to its own visibility on the global stage of transnational interaction. If, as Rodgers argues, moving beyond the ‘analytical cage’ of national boundaries and on to a ‘web of global interdependencies’ enriches our understanding of social processes, so too can we conceive of these interconnections and processes in terms of how they functioned in their immediate context, on the scale of the urban environment people experienced on a daily basis. In a modern world shaped by the development of the nation-state and globalizing trends, the city continued to form a discrete referent of social belonging.

Montreal and Brussels: points on a transnational web

The cities of Montreal and Brussels offer telling examples of how these scales interacted in the formulation of discourse about the urban environment on both sides of the Atlantic world. In Brussels, urban development was the product of a layering process through which new strata of public buildings, factories and homes were built upon the foundations of an established medieval city. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the city undertook extensive renewal and sanitation projects that resulted in the demolition of its ramparts in order to facilitate communication between the central city and its surrounding areas,Footnote ⁹ and in the vaulting of the polluted river Senne, around which the city's economic and social life had long gravitated.Footnote ¹⁰ By the 1870s, both of these gaping scars had been covered over with majestic new boulevards, constructed on a Haussmannian model, and designed to transform the remnants of the old medieval core into a modern stage of luxury, wealth and consumerism.Footnote ¹¹ In its architecture and layout, the city embodied the hegemonic aspirations of a French-speaking and liberal bourgeoisie, intent, moreover, on showcasing the capital as a symbol of the young country's independence and viability.

Montreal, in contrast, had developed in a more outspread fashion. Growing out of a small but prosperous seventeenth-century fur-trading settlement, the Canadian metropolis benefited from a vast hinterland that offered not only the raw materials for commerce and industry, but also the space needed to build the vast factories, warehouses and transportation infrastructures necessary to ensure the city's prosperity.Footnote ¹² Lacking Brussels’ status of national capital, Montreal was nonetheless Canada's economic focal point, its streets and neighbourhoods reflecting the country's linguistic duality and class disparities. Whereas the reins of the city's rapid industrialization were quite firmly in the hands of the city's English-speaking minority, the bureaucrats hired to manage the concomitant urbanization tended to belong to an emerging middle class of Francophone professionals.

Setting aside these specificities, my interest in examining Montreal and Brussels together lies less in comparing the form of their evolution, than in contemplating their simultaneous experiences with industrialization and urbanization in order to shift the discussion of these processes from the local scale on which they are more typically studied, to a transnational one that accounts for the global linkages through which they took root. Individual experiences of city life were conditioned by numerous factors, including specific national context, ethnicity, gender, age or social class. But in this period, more and more people lived in an urban setting, structuring their daily lives and forging their identities in reference to it, making city life an experience shared by people around the world, whose backgrounds and trajectories were otherwise unconnected. In both Montreal and Brussels, turn-of-the-century residents witnessed profound transformations to the physical landscape and social make-up of their environment, such that the neighbourhoods in which they settled were the theatres of a movement of global scope. Montreal and Brussels offer the opportunity to transfer our exploration of modern developments away from the large centres in which they originated, and to see how these forces operated in smaller cities, not quite at the centre of this interconnected world, but constantly more attracted by its gravitational pull.Footnote ¹³

Tapping into the specific interactions among municipal officials is a useful way to place the city at the centre of transnational analysis, argues historian Pierre-Yves Saunier, conceptualizing these networks as a web constituted through the flow of persons, ideas and information from one locality to another.Footnote ¹⁴ Before undertaking a major sanitation project, for instance, municipal officials sought out the expertise of counterparts in other cities who faced similar challenges, or who had successfully embarked upon similar ventures. This was a web of sustained communications, spun around intellectual exchanges, as both public administrations and private reform organizations dispatched delegates to conferences, undertook exploratory missions, maintained ties through regular letter exchanges and shared statistics mapping the progress of their battles against disease and insalubrity.

In this sense, Montreal and Brussels did, albeit infrequently, find themselves within each other's ambit of transnational references in matters of urbanism. If their specific spatial realties differed, the two cities nonetheless shared in the broader infrastructural problems of burgeoning metropolises struggling to keep abreast with this feverish expansion. Thus it was with keen interest that a civil engineer studying the construction of sewer networks in Europe, Jules Émilien, used Brussels as his primary example when reporting to Montreal's health board about the imaginative solutions other cities had adopted to eradicate the threat of disease posed by inadequate wastewater evacuation systems, liberating its residents of the ‘putrid exhalations’, ‘miasmas’ and ‘vapours’ that had once haunted it. More than a question of technical solutions to a problem of urbanism, this engineer saw in the issue of sewers a way for Montreal to follow in the footsteps of the great cities of the world, and nobly safeguard the future of its growing population by addressing nothing less than a great ‘humanitarian problem’.Footnote ¹⁵ For his part, Charles Buls, the sometime mayor of Brussels, as well an avid defender of ‘culturalist’ urban development centred on heritage preservation and the creation of pleasant atmospheres, included a visit to Montreal in his many international travels, though he was evidently unimpressed. Referring in his travel diary to a ‘truly infernal’ city reminiscent of Dante's inferno, Buls saw nothing worth emulating on what, to him, was an ugly, dirty and smoke-covered skyline, one that captured the prevalent tendency towards an urbanism of geometry, desolation and banality which he had decried in his published work on this theme.Footnote ¹⁶

Occasional visits among representatives of any two given cities, it must be recognized, are not evidence of well-established collaboration. One did not travel between Montreal and Brussels in the way others went back and forth between London, New York and Paris, or, for that matter, between Montreal and Boston, or Brussels and Berlin. Despite more accessible transatlantic travel, Montreal urbanists still tended to seek collaborative pursuits in the United States, while those in Brussels forged alliances primarily with colleagues in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. In fact, some viewed transcontinental exchanges with scepticism. As his comments on Montreal attest, Buls was generally rather disdainful of North American urbanism, which he considered unimaginative.Footnote ¹⁷ For his part, the French-Canadian nationalist Olivar Asselin argued that it was with the United States that urban reformers should engage in developing the ‘ideal city’, as municipalities on both sides of the border faced the ‘same perils’, adding dismissively that ‘nothing in the experience of the “Old World”, or almost nothing, can guide us’.Footnote ¹⁸ To be sure, Paris was frequently cited as a source of inspiration for both cities. Though the aura of the French metropolis shone brightly over the entire web of transnational urbanism, its proximity to Brussels made it an obvious destination for specialists there. As for Montreal's French-speaking bureaucrats operating in an Anglophone continental setting, it can well be supposed that linguistic affinities further strengthened their interest in conversing with their Parisian peers. “Why should Montreal not strive to be the Paris of Canada?” boldly asked the writer and politician G.A. Nantel.Footnote ¹⁹

While transnational history typically pursues specific linkages, I nonetheless wish to argue that the limited direct communication between officials in Montreal and Brussels need not preclude their analysis within a single transnational lens. Indeed, adopting a transnational approach need not imply that we focus exclusively on the specific actors and mechanics of network formation, but that we look also at how the ideas that circulated in this way shaped perceptions on the ground, and produced a contextual dynamic that underlay many aspects of city life. The very notion of a web implies more than movement from one point to another, and suggests that we think in terms of the various threads with which it was woven. How did residents of Montreal and Brussels formulate their own ideas and experiences within these broader global connections, upon this web of countless flows proceeding in myriad directions, along any number of circuitous paths? The objective here is not to undertake a bilateral comparison of urbanism in the two cities, but precisely to examine how a common discourse that circulated on a global stage during this period took root in different, relatively unconnected settings on both sides of the Atlantic. The similar attitudes through which urban actors in Montreal and Brussels discussed and related to their environment offer evidence of how themes and issues pertaining to city life crossed regional and national boundaries, thus interlinking local context with global frameworks.

Following the body

The examples cited above also show that public health, hygiene and sanitation were among the primary issues of concern for practitioners of transnational urbanism at the turn of the century.Footnote ²⁰ For instance, in the Montreal report on sewers, the author focused on strategies for ridding the urban habitat of sensorial nuisances resulting from a rate of population growth that surpassed the infrastructure's capacity to live up to evolving expectations. The measure of Brussels’ success in this endeavour, Émilien insisted, was its ability to develop the technical means of providing its residents with a living environment free from unpleasant smells that were still widely understood as a source of disease in and of themselves. This was considered particularly important in ‘les hauts quartiers’, namely the wealthier and more prestigious neighbourhoods situated on the upper side of the city's abrupt eastern flank. As historian Anne Rasmussen argues, the search for an intellectual and scientific mastery of ‘universal’ hygienic issues at conferences like those attended by municipal bureaucrats ultimately intertwined local and international scales, bringing the problems of one into the realm of the other for discussion and solutions.Footnote ²¹

At the core of the debates and exchanges formulated on this globalized plane were fundamental questions pertaining to people's bodies, and how best to manage and protect them in a context of unprecedented urban growth that often outpaced evolving scientific knowledge and social standards of hygiene. When those responsible for the planning and management of modern cities around the world gathered to discuss vaccination measures, sewage treatment techniques or food inspection policies, their concern ultimately lay in issues that directly involved the bodies of urban dwellers. And in many cases, the individual's own corporeal experiences intervened in the formulation of such ideas. Was it not upon his own bodily appreciation of the urban landscape that Buls based his negative judgment of Montreal; the light, the dirt and the smoke affecting his sense in displeasing ways, giving him the impression of arriving not in a place of modernity, but in the pits of hell.

What connections can we establish between the transnational processes of industrialization and urbanization that reshaped societies across the globe, and the body, a material and cultural signifier of people's individual existence, one that sets individual members of a society apart from one another? References to the body underpinned much of the discourse on this transnational spectrum, both in abstract terms of how specialists conceived of the relationship between the body and the urban environment, and in more specific allusions to individuals’ own corporeal experiences with their milieus. Bodily experiences with industrialization and urbanization preoccupied city dwellers on a personal and subjective level, and gave rise to new ways of understanding these societal developments. The texts produced by these specialists are tinged with allusions to their physical encounters with the city, demonstrating how it was also through sensorial encounters, movement and physical contact that these individuals produced knowledge about and gave meaning to the environment. As an object of public health concerns, as well as a trope bearing cultural meaning, the body was a common denominator to discourses about both local environments and the global trends that transformed them, bridging the shifting scales and tangled webs of transnational movements.

As cultural historians and anthropologists have shown, the seemingly mundane ways in which we relate to noises and odours, the ostensibly banal gestures we perform with our bodies on a daily basis, are laden with social codes and cultural understandings that define relations of class, gender, ethnicity and power.Footnote ²² In a time when cities like Montreal and Brussels experienced unprecedented expansion in industrial production and dramatic population increases, the resulting intensification of sensory stimuli linked to these developments transformed the way residents experienced and thought about life in these cities.Footnote ²³ The large factories, warehouses and transport infrastructures that confronted the eye, the noise and rumblings, the vast plumes of black smoke that thickened and fouled the air, as well as the increasing population density that resulted in a new level of physical proximity among individuals, often in crowded and unsanitary conditions, made urban dwellers acutely aware of their bodily contact with the environment, and were denounced by hygienists as the ‘evils’ common to the ‘prosperous’ cities of Europe and North America.Footnote ²⁴

By the end of the nineteenth century, body and city were increasingly conceptualized in similar terms by specialists of both entities. Like the body, the city was understood as the sum of its constituent components, globally weakened by the ailment of one part. As sociologist Christian Topalov explains, urban reformers, doctors and hygienists viewed the ‘congested’ city much as they did a sickly body. Like the parts of the body, the different districts of the city had to be maintained in good health, in proper functioning order, and the emergence of a pathology in one area had to be attended to, lest it contaminate the whole.Footnote ²⁵ This was a period in which the ‘medical gaze’ equated the circulatory system of the body with the economic patterns of the city – free flowing circulation was essential to the well-being of both. ‘The care of the city and care of the body became as one, just as the health of the city and health of the body were one’, writes historian Patrick Joyce.Footnote ²⁶ Although increased public investments in health and sanitization programmes improved conditions by the turn of the century,Footnote ²⁷ reformers and hygienists continued to insist they were waging an uphill battle: ‘what we have accomplished up to now is so minimal compared to the immense field of reform with which we have been entrusted’, commented a leader of a Brussels workers’ housing philanthropy.Footnote ²⁸

If global processes were themselves understood in corporeal terms, specific initiatives relating to bodily matters were often presented using language that made a claim to transnational grounding in order to lend additional credibility to the proposed endeavour. When Alfred Bertin, a Montreal entrepreneur, submitted an elaborate tender for the construction of public toilets on the city's streets, he cloaked his discussion of urban dwellers’ ‘natural needs’ in the prestige of world capitals, ensuring the administration that his establishments would be based on models existing in Paris and other European cities. Promising clean, hygienic and well-constructed facilities, decked out with clocks, telephone booths and newspaper stands, Bertin affirmed that residents of Montreal were entitled to the same services as were offered in ‘other large centres of population’.Footnote ²⁹ Transnational emulation and the desire of municipal administrations to embrace modern developments thus inspired the way they pondered corporeal behaviour of an otherwise personal nature.

In a similar vein, the architect Émile Hellemans placed the question of intimate bodily practices into a transnational frame of reference as he pleaded with a group of workers’ housing specialists in Brussels to encourage the construction of public baths in the city. In his presentation, Hellemans appealed directly to the evolution of ideas about personal bodily cleanliness, noting that if it was once considered to be the luxurious preserve of the upper class, everyone now knew that it was workers, above all, who needed access to bathing facilities the most. This, he explained, owed to the specificity of the bodily practices associated with the nature of their livelihood: the perspiration it caused, the inability they faced to change their clothes as frequently as they should, the dust-filled atmosphere in which they were plunged, the sullying materials their profession obligated them to handle. Antiquated practices that consisted simply of washing the hands and covering the visible parts of the body with clothes ‘white enough to avoid drawing attention’ no longer sufficed, he insisted. Modern bacteriology had proved the opposite, calling attention to the germs that ‘lived under the nails, between the toes, in the folds of the skin and on mucous membranes’. Hygienists, industrialists and municipal administrations, he pursued, had no choice but to recognize the need to provide workers with access to public baths, the very key to their healthiness and well-being. Efforts to improve housing did not go far enough, he affirmed: ‘we must also give them health, bodily cleanliness’. Beyond this scientific knowledge to which he referred, Hellemans also provided practical examples of the ways in which the authorities of Vienna, Berlin and other cities had responded by building various types of bathing and showering installations. ‘Why should we not attempt what our neighbours have succeeded in accomplishing?’ he asked with transnational rhetoric.Footnote ³⁰

While Bertin and Hellemans were concerned with specific issues of hygiene and city planning, their language of scientific progress and references to other urban centres is indicative of the global scale on which these local issues were thought about. Of additional significance, moreover, is the fact that the questions thus discussed also pertained to matters of a personal and intimate nature, bringing the individuality of the urban dweller's body into this transnational framework of understanding. In both Montreal and Brussels, for instance, the issue of public toilets was seen as a particularly delicate question, one that had to be discussed for sanitary reasons that were obvious in the eyes of municipal authorities, but that nonetheless inspired a certain level of discomfort, and which evidently many preferred to avoid altogether. ‘And what of the urinals?’ asked Laberge in his annual report for 1885. ‘They do not exist!’ Or rather, he specified, the few that had been installed were in such a state of disrepair that they almost seemed to have been constructed ‘in order to entirely disgust the population of these ever so important establishments’. Presaging the very language Bertin would later use to sell his project to the city, Laberge ominously added that ‘other cities have understood; only Montreal, the Metropolis of Canada, remains quite backward on this issue’.Footnote ³¹ Similar shortcomings were also denounced at the Brussels municipal council, where the minute takers dutifully reported the salacious puns and outburst of laughter that inevitably accompanied such discussions, as when one alderman jestingly insisted that urinals be placed in ‘propitious’ (propice) locations.Footnote ³² The sophomoric humour masked the awkwardness felt by members of this august assembly when publicly debating the type of urinals best suited to their electorate's needs. Indeed, the question of such intimate bodily practices on the streets of the city was problematic to the extent that it required municipal officials to balance hygienic imperatives with the image of respectability expected of a city that aspired to metropolitan status, a respectability that, as we shall now discuss, increasingly depended on the disappearance from the public eye of bodily functions deemed contradictory to evolving norms of decency and decorum.

The global scope of the private body: inspecting workers’ homes

During this period, the massive influx of migrants under the impulse of growing demands for industrial labour – yet another form of transnational movement that transformed cities like Montreal and Brussels – brought matters of bodily well-being directly into the private sphere. Moving into an even more localized scale than that of the city, and analysing the discourse that shaped representations of the home in both Montreal and Brussels during this period, sheds additional light on the interplay between bodily intimacy and ideas forged in the transnational arena. As Hellemans’ discussion on baths indicates, and indeed as the historiography has made abundantly clear,Footnote ³³ municipal officials and urban reformers frequently expressed concern about the hygienic conditions and overcrowding that characterized working-class districts. Framing his comments in reference to notable world cities, the industrialist, alderman and philanthropist Herbert Ames noted in 1897 that if Montreal workers were not necessarily as poorly housed as those in New York or Chicago, their situation nonetheless called for urgent action as few disposed of what were, by then, considered minimal housing requirements: single-family units with one room per member and facing a through street, as well as adequate water-closet accommodations.Footnote ³⁴ In line with the organic conception of the city to which many reformers adhered, members of such circles viewed with suspicion, even fear, the corporeal implications of such living conditions, seen as potential threats to the health of the wider urban community.

Indeed, just as the health of the city and of its various parts were connected, so, too, reducing the scale, were the health of the body and the home intertwined.Footnote ³⁵ ‘The lack of sunlight, of air circulating around houses, their humidity, diminishes the vitality of individuals, prepares them for disease, in a word, deteriorates the race’, cautioned a Montreal expert.Footnote ³⁶ The recent bacteriological discoveries discussed in transnational forums gave a new impetus to a growing army of disciples of the hygienist cause.Footnote ³⁷ Hygienists contributed prolifically to this discourse by multiplying studies exposing urban sanitary failings, as well as more accessible instruction manuals designed to show urban dwellers how to improve their bodily practices, and make them more amenable to modern sanitation standards, urging ‘a new discipline of the body’ that corresponded to the diffusion of new social and political norms of sanitation and cleanliness.Footnote ³⁸ In a self-help guide intended to ‘inspire in young women a love of family and domestic duty’, for instance, the Belgian hygienist Marie Du Caju reminded her readers that ‘bodily uncleanliness is the most degrading and contemptible form of negligence’, while a poorly kept home was a sign of ‘laziness, vice, squalor and disease’. Only cleanliness, ‘like a benevolent fairy embellishing all that it touches’, could remedy such wrongs.Footnote ³⁹

In this context, home inspections conducted by formal patronage committees, journalists, politicians, philanthropic organizations and public health officials offer a wealth of material with which to analyse these conceptions. Proclaiming their intention to gather scientific data about housing conditions, to redress their city's image and to succour society's less fortunate, this steady traffic of middle-class observers occurred even as the distinction between public and private spaces, and the specificity of activities and corporeal practices performed within each realm, became increasingly delineated in bourgeois circles.Footnote ⁴⁰ In western society, the home became a marker of this distinction, and the house itself was designed, with parlours and bedrooms, to offer privacy to individual members of the family.Footnote ⁴¹ These evolving norms, however, did not prevent middle-class observers from actively seeking and developing a detailed familiarity with working-class houses, all the while proclaiming their commitment to providing workers with more intimate living conditions. ‘We have all, with more or less frequency, penetrated the homes of workers’, boasted one Brussels reformer,Footnote ⁴² also a member of an organization devoted to promoting the constructions of homes offering enough private space to allow ‘our brothers and sisters of the working class to live in dignity’.Footnote ⁴³

On both sides of the Atlantic, the stated objective was to collect data and identify rational solutions to sanitary lacunae. Workers’ homes in Montreal and Brussels were coldly represented as the sum of statistical characteristics regarding numbers of inhabitants, types of ventilation systems, the number of available toilets, the quality of the water supply, the presence of courtyards, staircases, and even the proximity of establishments selling alcohol. Though the archives do not offer evidence that state-mandated and philanthropically minded inspectors in Montreal and Brussels consulted each other's findings, their similar methods suggest that the transnational language of urban reform found echo in these distinct local contexts. But comparing their findings reveals more than formal similarities. In both cities, these observations and representations were typically framed through qualitative references to the bodies of the occupants of these homes and to the dangers facing them, as well as to the sensorial experiences of the inspectors themselves, showing that if transnational ideas influenced the way urban issues were approached, this knowledge and these perceptions were themselves produced through direct, physical encounters with the immediate environment.

Inspectors frequently depicted workers’ houses as being small, unventilated and dark. For the hygienist Gouin, this ‘triple defect’ that afflicted individual homes could be attributed directly to global processes, and it was the ‘modern transformations of industry, the machinery, concentration of capital, the creation of large corporations, the development of transportation forces’ that had forced so many people to live in such limited space, deprived of air and light.Footnote ⁴⁴ Conditions like these, lamented hygienists, simply prepared the body for disease. ‘We know that air introduced into the lungs at each moment serves to purify the blood, and this purification is necessary to maintain the vitality of the individual.’ But if the lungs were filled with polluted air, impure blood would flow through the body, and its organs would be unable to perform their functions normally, causing fatigue, lack of attention, headaches, loss of appetite, nausea, insomnia, dyspepsia and anaemia.Footnote ⁴⁵ The global process of industrialization, the urban layout, the home environment and the functioning of the body were thus inextricably interrelated, and the house meant to relieve and revitalize the worker after endless hours of dangerous industrial work, more often than not exposed it to weakness, disease and death.

But while microbiology legitimated such sanitary concerns, hygienists also sought to capitalize on the scientific foundations of their discipline to amplify the reach of their message, to scandalize and shock authorities and citizens into action.Footnote ⁴⁶ Corporeal references were central to this strategy. For example, insisting on the scientific rigour of his investigation, free, he claimed, of ‘sentimental declamations’, Émile Hellemans could not hold back from registering his disgust at the state of the latrines in certain homes. ‘Furthermore (would that I be pardoned for mentioning this vulgar detail, but one of capital importance), it is no longer possible to tolerate that one single latrine be used by more than seventy-two (72) people!’Footnote ⁴⁷ Feeling the need to apologize for the ostensible impropriety of what he is about to say, the architect is nonetheless willing to upset middle-class sensibilities by making an explicit allusion to a part of the living environment, and the bodily functions associated with it, that his contemporaries would have found distasteful to discuss. As historian Jean-Pierre Goubert argues, this period was characterized by the privatizing of bodily practices, particularly those associated with the toilet, which, in middle-class homes, was moved from the outdoors to the privacy of the home.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hellemans’ uses of italics, his repetition of the figure 72, and the exclamation point with which he punctuates the sentence may seem like grammatical details, but they underscore his sense of exasperation and repulsion toward practices that clashed with the new and increasingly broadly shared standards to which he adhered.

Municipal investigators at the service of the Board of Health in Montreal made similar descriptions, notably in denouncing the ‘offensive exhalations’Footnote ⁴⁹ emitted by ‘the most primitive’ privy pits dug directly into the ground, reinforced with a few wooden planks susceptible to rotting awayFootnote ⁵⁰ and leaving a ‘deposit of fecal matter on the floors. . .from two to three inches thick’.Footnote ⁵¹ Noting that entire working families, even two, were sometimes housed in a single room, one doctor concluded that ‘in Montreal there are houses in which a farmer would not leave his animals’.Footnote ⁵² The Montreal hygienist Elzéar Pelletier compared some of the homes he visited to medieval dungeons, where, ‘when one wanted to eliminate a dangerous rival without violence, one would lock the individual up in an obscure cell and he would soon cease to be dangerous; if he came out, he would only be a shadow of his former self’.Footnote ⁵³ Faulty plumbing caused smells and filthiness that bothered these inspectors on a personal level, and contributed to conditioning their attitudes. Qualifying these spaces as backward and barbarian, moreover, cast them and their inhabitants as hindrances to the progress and civilization promised by this globalizing modernity.

To be sure, caution must be exercised to avoid reifying these descriptions of working-class homes as empirical observations of a fixed reality.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet this sensorial and emotional language was central to bourgeois spatial narratives within these cities, particularly in this period where understandings of individual privacy were sharpened, and bodily practices increasingly relegated to specially designed spaces hidden from the gaze of others. While these comments undeniably speak to the condescension with which class differences were expressed at the turn of the century, entering these homes was also a poignant experience on a personal level for reformers drawn from the upper echelons of modern society. If hygienists were prone to exaggerating their observations in order to buttress their cause, the evocative tone and vocabulary they employed also revealed elements of their own interiority. Bodily experiences conditioned subjective feelings of surprise, shock and shame, while reformers’ repeated transgression of the public–private divide suggests that this distinction remained under cultural construction. The frequently recurring tension between the self-assured objectivity in which these globally minded reformers framed their inspections, and the profound sensorial and emotional effect these appear to have had upon them, is indicative of how their own bodies, their own corporeal confrontations with the effects of modernity, their own standards of revulsion and their own fears informed the perceptions with which the relationship to these sections their cities was constructed.

For middle-class observers, these experiences were startling not just on a bodily level, but on a moral one as well. To varying degrees, virtually all of the written sources addressing the question of housing in Montreal and Brussels contain explicit references to the connection, in the minds of their authors, between good hygiene and sound moral standards, placing the discourse in these two cities firmly within the orbit of a generalized ‘moralization of cleanliness’ in the west during this period.Footnote ⁵⁵ Gouin, for example, insisted upon ‘this essential interdependence between the moral state of the family and the material state of the home’.Footnote ⁵⁶ His feelings were echoed in Brussels by the judge and housing reformer Albert Soenens who argued that the housing crisis should be the purview of ‘moralists’ as much as of hygienists, seeing improved lodging conditions as ‘the essential basis for social renewal’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the same way that hygienists saw the quality of the home as having a direct effect on the health of the body, the home environment was also seen as having a direct influence on the health of the soul.

In this regard, housing reformers in both Montreal and Brussels frequently denounced what they considered to be the immorality and vice that reigned in working-class homes. Workers in both cities were frequently accused by housing reformers, as well as by their employers, of indulging too frequently in the pleasures of drink, squandering away their already meagre salaries instead of investing their earnings in better lodging for their families. The insalubrious atmosphere of their homes was directly invoked, for, as one specialist explained, these dwellings ‘do not offer the slightest charm, and naturally push the worker to find entertainment in bars, thus favouring alcoholism and its deadly consequences’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In both cities, responsibility was placed squarely on the shoulders of women, whose responsibility it was to make the home sufficiently welcoming for their husbands. ‘What will become of family life’, asked a Belgian politician, ‘if, lacking in domestic virtues and affability, women fail to make the home attractive. . .and keep their husbands safe from the temptations of the cabaret?’Footnote ⁵⁹

Further complicating the moral stigma of the working-class home was the thorny issue labelled promiscuity. In the eyes of these reformers, the closeness resulting from the concentration of so many individuals in these narrow dwellings augured not just sanitary problems, but also the threat of behaviour deemed inappropriate, particularly when it came to shared bathing and sleeping accommodations among members of the opposite sex, in many cases of the same family. Decency required that homes have enough bedrooms to accommodate parents and all children of different sexes, emphasized Gouin. ‘The exiguousness of the home, the communal bedrooms that result’, he added, ‘give rise to dangerous promiscuities: as a result, modesty is lost, evil is learned, detestable faults are committed.’Footnote ⁶⁰

Scientific knowledge and moral values shared across national boundaries thus galvanized reformers’ resolve to confront these issues. They came to believe that individuals, by following the laws of hygiene, could shape their surroundings in ways that limited the spread of disease, fostering the creation of a healthy environment in which society could thrive.Footnote ⁶¹ This feeling of agency could thus be directed at the moral and social problems in cities. The problems posed by industrialization and urbanization, as well as their solutions, were discussed by a wide array of reformers and professionals who engaged in transnational exchanges. But their understanding of these problems and the experience they brought to transnational forums were also rooted in their individual corporeal experiences, as well as in the subjective realm of their understandings of civility, bodily deportment and moral rectitude.