Dr Will Clement

My research focuses on the social, cultural, and urban history of France in the long nineteenth century. I am interested in the history of the state’s relationship with housing and hygiene as well as the history of religious conflict in an urban context and the history of urban environmental disasters. I am currently preparing a book on the history of ‘unsanitary housing inspectors’ in nineteenth-century France.

I completed my BA in History at Durham University, before coming to Oxford for my MSt in Modern British and European History at Pembroke College and my AHRC-funded DPhil in History at St John’s College. I was the 2017 recipient of the Ralph Gibson Bursary from the Society for the Study of French History, and I have previously held a Visiting Doctoral Studentship at Sciences Po, Paris and a Visiting Lectureship at Royal Holloway, University of London. I have been at Brasenose since 2019.

I am one of the convenors of Oxford's Long Nineteenth Century Graduate Research Seminar, which runs in Michaelmas and Trinity terms.

Research Interests

• Housing
• Urban hygiene
• Environmental disasters
• Religion

I am currently preparing a book comparing the work of ‘commissions des logements insalubres’ (unhealthy housing commissions) in French provincial cities between c. 1815-85. A national law on housing of 1850 allowed the creation of these commissions. They were to be staffed by local ‘experts’, including a doctor and an architect, and were charged with identifying houses deemed ‘insalubrious’, making visits to them, and ordering any improvements to be made. In theory, these commissions were meant to operate uniformly across France; in practice, the lack of strict government oversight and the commissioners’ own confusion in interpreting their remit meant that they quickly became vehicles for local municipal elites to pursue their own moralistic, nationalist, or hygienist agendas. Moreover, the archival records of these commissions are full of letters from landlords and tenants, either challenging the commissioners’ conclusions or inviting them to revisit and force through improvements. As a result, these commissions became a battleground for issues around private property and public health.

Through comparing the work of these commissions in the three departments of the Nord, the Rhône, and the Haut-Rhin, my research explores the bureaucratic revolution in government during the nineteenth century by showing the intersection between national legislation and local implementation, between subjective sensory depictions of disgust and supposedly objective architectural language, and between theories of housing reform and realities of workers’ lived experience in nineteenth-century France.

My next project is a microhistorical work of environmental history. I will explore the impact of a devastating flood of 1856 in the south of France on urban populations, construction, and politics. My research also explores the way that religion operated or came under challenge in French cities in an era of radical growth. This has led to my writing about the national and international aftermath of a blasphemous bar crawl in the northern French city of Roubaix as well as a forthcoming article on Catholic petitions for a new church in a Calvinist-dominated Alsatian city.