It's always human nature

I was sampling City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker yesterday to determine whether it would go to the beach this year.  This is an annual ritual.  I usually have 3-5 times as much time available for reading at the beach and therefore I want to get to some of the more dense books which get set aside in the hurly burly of business and life during the rest of the year.  

In well disciplined years, I keep it to a couple of bags of books.  In years of moral weakness and a backlog of good books it can reach as many as four bags.  

So which book gets included is important to me as a reader.  This is the time when there is the best chance that it will get read.

City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker looked interesting but I have nothing of the topic before and have read nothing by the author.   From the blurb:

Appointed to conquer the “crime capital of the world,” the first police chief of Paris faces an epidemic of murder in the late 1600s. Assigned by Louis XIV, Nicolas de La Reynie begins by clearing the streets of filth and installing lanterns throughout Paris, turning it into the City of Light.

The fearless La Reynie pursues criminals through the labyrinthine neighborhoods of the city. He unearths a tightly knit cabal of poisoners, witches, and renegade priests. As he exposes their unholy work, he soon learns that no one is safe from black magic―not even the Sun King. In a world where a royal glance can turn success into disgrace, the distance between the quietly back-stabbing world of the king’s court and the criminal underground proves disturbingly short. Nobles settle scores by employing witches to craft poisons and by hiring priests to perform dark rituals in Paris’s most illustrious churches and cathedrals.

So I pick it up to sample one evening.  A half hour's reading answer the question.  Definitely going to the beach.  Not only well written (so far) but when I reached a single page with two noteworthy observations, it definitely passed the marker for inclusion.  

The first observation was:

There were no sidewalks in Paris. No European city had them. In a futile response to the mud, many homeowners installed a protruding iron bar at ankle height in their home’s stone edifice, so visitors could scrape the foul muck from their shoes before entering. To avoid walking in the streets altogether, those who could afford to hire carriages increasingly did so. In the mid-seventeenth century, there were barely three hundred carriages navigating the streets. Within just a few decades, that number swelled to well over ten thousand, creating traffic jams in the narrow streets for hours at a time and, worse, a major safety hazard. As one Italian traveler wrote, “There is an infinite number of filthy carriages covered in mud, which serve to kill the living.

Echoes of Vision Zero (the totalitarian effort to eliminate all traffic fatalities through improved systemic design) and Walkable Cities (the authoritarian vision of walkable cities).  In both instances, central planners are attempting to achieve some utopian outcome without consent from the populace.  In both instances, being totalitarian and authoritarian, they are doomed to failure.  

There are plenty of strategies that are approved though the consent of the populace to reduce the dangers to pedestrians.   Traffic lights, police, DUI laws, speed limits, etc.  These move us towards safer streets, a desirable outcome.  But they will never achieve zero fatalities and walkable cities are only a pipe dream when everyone has the freedom to choose where they want to live.  

On the same page, just a couple of paragraphs further on, we have:

The new accessibility of pistols across social classes turned an already dangerous city into an even more deadly one. The product of the sixteenth-century discovery of saltpeter, guns revolutionized early European warfare overnight. By the 1640s the French had perfected flintlock-firing technology, which made guns much lighter, smaller, and less expensive to produce than traditional wheel-lock guns and rifles. Armed with pocket-size pistols under their cloaks, thieves became bolder. Parisians looking to protect their homes raced to buy handguns, making the city all the more unsafe.

In response to the rising violence, the Crown issued an edict in 1660 calling for the ban of all weapons including—and especially—handguns, by anyone other than soldiers, police officers, judges, and noblemen. The law did not have the desired effect. Another ordinance issued six years later repeated the 1660 law nearly verbatim. It also added that all handguns needed to be conspicuous, heavy, and with barrels that were at least fifteen inches long. Any person in possession of such a weapon was required to carry a lantern or a torch as he moved through the streets at night, so both law officials and citizens could see that the person was armed. Judging from the violence that filled the city after dark, few followed this mandate either. 

 

By night Paris became frighteningly claustrophobic. At sunset, soldiers pulled shut the massive gates of the city’s ramparts and lowered the barricades behind them. But the gates did little to protect those locked in with their fellow citizens. Nighttime revelers made their way across a city plunged into inky shadows, with only the faint glow of candlelight peeking through a drape or shutter illuminating a small stretch of street. Homeowners and shopkeepers battened down their homes and stores, pulling shut windows and doors for the night like sailors preparing for a storm. Here the weapons came in handy. As one Mademoiselle Surqualin said nonchalantly to the police after killing an intruder, she always kept a knife at her bedside precisely for that task.”

Gun control policy - failing for 360 years!

Technology (better guns) was never the problem.  The government's inability to provide basic security was.  But government's response to the populace acquiring guns for their individual protection was to try and ban guns.  A policy as successful then as now.  

Tucker connects the past with the present with facts.  I enjoy that invigorating history.  And you cannot avoid the obvious conclusion.  No matter what the problematic circumstances might be nor the logical and well-intended policy might be, it always come down to human nature.  Nothing is new under the sun.

City of Light, City of Poison is going to the beach.

This morning I cam across a passage in History of the Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides.  From, III 69-85, The Civil War at Corcyra.

The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.

Governance always comes down to an understanding of human nature.  Its not about guns, or traffic, or polarization, or AI, or poverty, etc.  Shaping policies to address human nature is what is always needed and so unpleasant that government rarely wishes to do so, ending up with the worst of all worlds.