Slaughter in the city: The establishment of public abattoirs in Paris and Berlin, 1780--1914 (France, Germany)

My dissertation investigates the history of slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Paris and Berlin to uncover how the complex interrelationships between humans, animals, and the environment influenced the urbanization of European cities. More specifically, the project examines how the small-scale slaughter of animals, carried out in private butcher shops located all over the city, was transferred into a centralized municipally-run mass-industry that was segregated to poor outlying neighborhoods and hidden from public view. Why were such public slaughterhouses built, how did they operate, and what did they illuminate about the role of animals and meat in nineteenth-century Paris and Berlin? Exploring how the reform of slaughterhouses exposed the close connection between health and disease, hygiene and pollution, as well as life and death, I argue that these reforms were driven by the politicization, medicalization, and mechanization of butchering. Focusing both on the discourses about slaughter and on the everyday practices of butchering, I show how the reform of abattoirs was a cumulative process that started over environmental concerns regarding the cleanliness of urban space, but soon expanded to also focus on the health of (human and animal) bodies. Arguing that the establishment of public slaughterhouses involved the continuous negotiation of the promises (meat, valuable by-products) and threats (pollution, disease, death) inherent in meat production, I demonstrate that the centralized and segregated mass-facilities of Paris' La Villette and Berlin's Central-Viehhof were built to contain disease, control pollution, and hide the mass-killing of animals.; The objective of my project is three-fold: (1) to provide a history of public slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Paris and Berlin; (2) to assess how slaughter reform was linked to the emergence of European public welfare politics; and (3) to explore how the interdependence among humans, animals, and the environment can be incorporated into the critical study of social history, particularly with regard to the urbanization of nineteenth-century Europe. Offering an alternative history of the body, its corporeal, spatial and ethical dimensions, this project seeks to contribute to a historical understanding of the hybridity that transgresses the boundary between the natural, social, human, and animal.