along the roads leading to Orléans and Italy.
Since July 1789, when the Bastille was destroyed and its stones made into souvenirs – just as fragments of the Berlin wall would be sold exactly two centuries later – there is nothing left of the wall of Charles V: its curtain, its rampart walk, its fortress gates, its bastions used for evening strolls, its moats where people fished with rods. Nothing physical, at least.12 But its route
along the ancient course of the Seine is still one of the fundamental lines of the city structure, completing in a wide circular arc the rectilinear plan inherited from the Romans. Between the Bastille and the Porte Saint-Denis, the noble curve of the boulevards that today bear the names of Beaumarchais, Filles-du-Calvaire, Temple and Saint-Martin precisely matches the line of the old wall. The design of the Grands Boulevards was already prefigured.13
This wall would last a good while. Reinforced by great bastions under Henri II, doubled here and there to face up to the Spanish artillery, it defended a Paris ruled by the Ligue against the forces of Henri III and Henri IV. Half a century later it would challenge royal power for a final time, in the magnificent episode of the Fronde, when La Grande Mademoiselle – Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans – had the guns of the Bastille fired against Turenne’s army, to cover the retreat of Condé’s forces through the Porte Saint-Antoine.
Louis XIV, as a child, had to flee from Paris under the Fronde. In the 1670s, he ordered the old wall to be razed and an avenue of trees planted in its place, making a walkway more than thirty metres wide right round the city. Those in charge of this unprecedented project, François Blondel and Pierre Bullet, drew a line that followed the old wall from the Arsenal and the Bastille to the Porte Saint-Denis, continuing in a line that is now that of the Grands Boulevards up to the site of the Madeleine. The route then reached the Seine via the Rue des Fossés-des-Tuileries, passing the far end of the gardens and the present Rue Royale.14 This was ‘an avenue planted in three lines, the one in the middle being sixteen yards wide . . . bordered by walls of dressed stone, thanks to the gentlemen provosts of merchants, who were also responsible for the conduct of all these ramparts and avenues that serve the public as a promenade. It has been ordered that ditches twelve yards wide will be left, as a course for the city sewer . . . and within the rampart a paved street four yards wide.’15
Established on the former fortifications, Louis XIV’s avenue received the name boulevard, which entered current usage and was used for a number of Paris boundaries, with slippages that can cause confusion today. In the nineteenth century, the boulevard that took the place of the wall of the Farmers-General was called the ‘external’ boulevard (Goncourt brothers’ Journal, just after the destruction of the wall: ‘I walked along the external boulevards widened by the suppression of the rampart walk. The aspect is completely changed. The guinguettes have disappeared’). ‘External’ is used here as opposed to the ‘internal’ boulevard, that of Louis XIV, which, in its segment running from the Châteaud’Eau to the Madeleine, had become permanently known as the Grands Boulevards, or simply the Boulevards (‘The Boulevards may be compared to two hemispheres. Their antipodes are the Madeleine and the Bastille. The equator is the Boulevard Montmartre, where warmth and life flourish.’16). Later, in the 1920s, when Thiers’s fortifications had been demolished, the label ‘external’ came to be applied to the boulevard constructed in their place (Francis Carco: ‘In the scattered bars of the external boulevards, and the sloping streets that join them, he would enter with the air of waiting for someone unknown’17). The boulevard of the Farmers-General suddenly lost this name and never found a new one in the Paris vocabulary. In the 1960s, with the building of the Périphérique – and no doubt to avoid confusion between the ‘external boulevards’ and this ‘external’ Périphérique, dear to ladies who listen to the radio for news of Paris traffic jams – a new expression appeared to denote the boulevards that had taken the place of the ‘fortifs’: the ‘boulevards of the marshals’.
It will be helpful if I use the term ‘Old Paris’ for the part within the boulevard of Louis XIV, and ‘New Paris’ for the part outside. This New Paris is itself divided into two concentric rings. Between the boulevard of Louis XIV and the wall of the Farmers-General is the ring of the faubourgs; between the wall of the Farmers-General and the ‘boulevards of the marshals’ is the ring of the villages of the crown. But this is not just a matter of names. Whenever Paris advanced from one boundary to the next, this signaled a time of changes in technology, society and politics. The shift in stones and ditches was not the cause; it was rather as if the emergence of a new epoch led both to the obsolescence of the old walls and to transformations in the city’s life.
We can take the example of street lighting and the maintenance of order, important both in terms of entertainment and in order to ‘discipline and punish’. In the Middle Ages, only three places in Paris were permanently illuminated at night: the gate of the Châtelet tribunal, where Philippe le Bel had placed a wood-framed lantern filled with pig bladders to deter the criminal enterprises that were hatched right outside; the Tour Nesle, where a beacon marked the entry to Paris for boatmen coming up the Seine; and the lantern of the dead in the Innocents cemetery. Those heading into the dark of the city were advised to make use of an escort of armed torchmen, as one could hardly trust the protection of the watch, whether civic or royal.
At the same time as Louis XIV made Paris an open city, and launched the construction of his new avenue, he took two measures that marked the beginning of the modern age: he had nearly three thousand lanterns installed in the streets – glass cages protecting candles, hung from ropes at first-floor level – and he established the post of lieutenant-general of police, in command of a significant armed force. (It was the first of these officers, La Reynie, who emptied out the courts of miracles and embarked on the ‘great confinement’, shutting up beggars and deviants in the new prison hospitals of the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre.)
A century later, in parallel with the building of the wall of the Farmers-General, the technical headway made in the Age of Enlightenment had its effects on street lighting: the old lanterns with their candles were replaced by oil lamps equipped with metal reflectors, with a longer range. Sartine, the lieutenant-general of the time, held that ‘the very great amount of light these give makes it impossible to believe that anything better could ever be found’. Sébastien Mercier was of a different opinion: ‘The lampposts are badly placed . . . From a distance, this reddish flame hurts the eyes; close up, it gives only little light, and below, you are in darkness.’
It was the 1840s, the time when Thiers’s fortifications enclosed the city once again, that saw the general spread of gas lighting and the uniformed sergents de ville. Electric light replaced gas after the First World War, when the ‘fortifs’ were demolished. In the 1960s, the construction of the Boulevard Périphérique – the latest of Paris’s fortifications and not the least formidable – was accompanied by the replacement of incandescent lamps by neon lighting, the disappearance of bicycle police with their capes, known as hirondelles (swallows), and the proliferation of motorized patrols; the blessings of community policing were still to come.
It would be possible, therefore, to write a history of Paris in politics and architecture, art and technology, literature and society, the chapters of which would not be centuries – a particularly inappropriate division in this case – nor again reigns and republics, but rather the expanding city precincts, which mark a discontinuous and subterranean time. In the fifteenth of his ‘Theses on the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin remarked that ‘calendars do not measure time as clocks do’. The time of city walls resembles the time of calendars.
1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 88.
2 Honoré de Balzac, Ferragus (trans. Wormeley). Perhaps Victor Hugo had this passage in mind when he described the surroundings of the Salpêtrière in Les Misérables: ‘It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it
