Fact and fiction: documents of the development of Parisian urban design history

“Few things in the history of humanity are as well known to us as the history of Paris. Tens of thousands of volumes are dedicated solely to the investigation of this tiny spot on the earth’s surface” (Walter Benjamin). Marcel Poëte, when he became librarian of the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris in 1903, saw cataloging this literature as one of his main tasks. This paper investigates how, by analyzing the contents of each cataloged work, Poëte sought to give the study of the city’s history the status of a science, a discipline with its own methods that would allow its facts to be verified and classified, and generalizations to be drawn from them. The Bibliothèque historique, and its associated Service historique would make historical data available to Paris’ municipality, as well as identify patterns or laws of transformation. In this way, it would be fully implicated in the study of the development of cities, i.e., the nascent science of urbanism