Writing About 19th-Century Mid-Size Cities: An International Conference
The University of Tours
Tours, France
19-20 November 2026
Proposal Deadline: 15 January 2025
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the growth of cities led to irreversible changes in the balance of populations and power, particularly in relation to the emergence of the modern industrial state. These cities were dynamic places, structured by the social uses and practices of space, which in turn shaped the configurations of the groups that occupied them. The cities of Europe, with their own municipal governments, could operate as autonomous entities separate from central government (Weber, 1921).
The wide variety of ways in which writings on the city have been produced and used reflects various administrative, social, scientific and cultural practices. These have long been used and/or reinvented to assert the identities of mid-size towns in changing urban networks at various scales.
The production of administrative, antiquarian, archaeological, sociological, cultural and ordinary knowledges about the 19th-century city bears witness to the material forms, social organisation, cultural life and governance of these cities. It also indicates their role in the construction of the state and of memory. On a global scale, the richness and variety of national cultures in the 19th century were partly due to the tremendous growth of these mid-size towns, which had multiple facets: they were both laboratories for a municipalism that responded to economic, social and health problems, but also places conducive to the development of knowledge, political activism and the emergence of new cultural forms, (literary and artistic). The latter trend reveals new cultural practices that produced social identity: in a landscape that was radically altered by the political and civic consecration of the individual, the democratisation of new writing enabled new discursive procedures to justify speaking out –no longer in terms of predefined social groups, but in terms of an identity to be constructed and in relation to a changing community. The modern novel, for example, was above all a privileged place for the representation of individuality, which resulted fromthe emergence of the middle classes, economic individualism, and philosophical and technical innovations.
The aim of this conference is to focus on writings that take intermediate cities, which have been relatively less studied than the major capitals and the most dynamic metropolises, as their subject. The project covers a long period of the nineteenth century (from the 1780s to the eve of the First World War), with no exclusions as to geographical scope, so as to enable global and comparative approaches.
During this period, i.e., the long 19th century, these mid-size towns were multi-faceted: at once breeding grounds for new intellectual and political currents and new cultural, literary, and artistic forms, and producers of social identity. This urbanisation, which sometimes proceeded at a different pace, also raises questions about the relationship between these areas and their natural environments and the protection of their ancient architectural heritages (Geddes, 1915); the social effects of their spatial and economic transformations (Harvey, 2003); and the cultural, political and economic roles played by these intermediate towns in the national and global changes of the long nineteenth century (Osterhammel, 2017). Mid-size towns were thus able to nurture alternative projects and models to the ‘big city’ model. This conference will examine their ecological, aesthetic, social, collectivist and reformist developments.
Taking note of a rich historiography on: the writing of the city in the modern age (Histoire urbaine, 2023/1; Urban History, 2020/47, ‘Thinking spatially: new horizons for urban history”); the crossroads of the action of writing (GRIHL, 2016); the history of science and knowledge and urban history (Van Damme, 2012 ; Garnier, 2024); and cultural history (Revue d’Histoire Culturelle, XVIIIe-XXIe siècles), this interdisciplinary conference on writings about the city will endeavour to reveal the diversity of actors and modes of elaborating knowledge about mid-size towns and their mobilisation (or performativity) in the processes of (re)forming local, national, imperial and transnational identities on a global scale. The conference is open to all continents, while paying attention to colonial and comparative dynamics, in order to grasp this long 19th century in all its spatial and chronological extension.
Among the types of writing that take the intermediary city as their object, and without presupposing watertight boundaries between these different fields, proposals for papers may cover:
- administrative writings, in the broadest sense of the term (administrators’ reports, grey literature, cartographic documents, statistical tables, surveys, communal monographs, travel accounts, etc.), whether produced by administrators, scholars, craftsmen, notables, teachers or ecclesiastics, etc.;
- scholarly writings (antiquarian, archaeological, topographical, historical, etc.), at various stages of formalisation and institutionalisation;
- the writing of myths and mysteries, aimed at exalting (or toning down) local particularities, in a variety of media that were flourishing at the time (the press, travel guides, travel logs, postcards and correspondence, literary and artistic productions,etc.); and
- written documents produced by city dwellers (requests, petitions, addresses, grievances, etc.), more or less structured into groups (professional, religious, family, political, associative, artistic, literary, etc.) focused on their dealings with urban authorities, on the everyday life of the city, or as taken from the height of socio-political crises that challenged the harmony and social conventions of the established order.
Proposals of no more than 500 words, together with a one-page CV, should be sent to the following two addresses by 15 January 2025:
- Tri Tran : tri.tran@univ-tours.fr
- Stéphanie Sauget : stephanie.sauget@univ-tours.fr
All proposals will receive a response from the organising committee by 15 March 2025.
Conference scientific committee:
Pr. Philippe Chassaigne (CEMMC, Université de Bordeaux)
Pr. Aude Deruelle (POLEN, Université d’Orléans)
Pr. Stéphanie Sauget (CeTHiS, Université de Tours)
Pr. Tri Tran (ICD, Université de Tours)