in them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it, then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert place where there was someone; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery’ (trans. Wilbour).
3 Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot (trans. Marriage).
4 Louis Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980).
5 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 416.
6 Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (1781).
7 Yoshinobu Ashihara, L’Ordre caché. Tokyo, la ville du XXIe siècle (Paris: Hazan, 1994).
8 An ordinance of 1548, for example, cited in Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme à Paris (Paris: Association pour la publication d’une histoire de Paris, 1975), stated: ‘From now on there shall be no more construction or building in the faubourgs, by persons of any station or condition whatsoever, under penalty of confiscation of funds and building, which shall be entirely demolished.’ At the end of the eighteenth century, Mercier wrote: ‘The circumference of Paris is ten thousand yards. Several attempts have been made to define its boundaries; buildings have crossed these limits, marshes have disappeared and the countryside has retreated daily before the hammer and the set square.’
9 Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (trans. Hapgood), chapter 2, ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris’ (1832).
10 There were two walls before the thirteenth century, but they have been lost in the depths of time.
11 On the Right Bank, the wall of Phillipe Auguste began at the Louvre (its keep forming part of the wall), and followed a route corresponding to Rues Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, Montmartre, and Réamur. It then turned southeast, as far as Rue de Sévigné, and reached the Seine in the middle of the Quai des Célestins, close to Rue de l’Ave-Maria.
12 Except what was discovered when work was under way for the Grand Louvre, and incorporated into the décor of the underground shopping centre, as well as a small pile of stones from the Bastille that decorates the square at the corner of the Boulevard Henri-IV and the Quai des Célestins.
13 After the Porte Saint-Denis, the wall of Charles V turned straight towards the Louvre, following a line that today runs through the Rue d’Aboukir and the Place des Victoires. It reached the Seine close to what is now the Pont du Carrousel. On the Left Bank, which had scarcely developed in the meantime, this wall followed the earlier one of Philippe Auguste.
14 On the Left Bank, the route more or less followed the Boulevards des Invalides, Montparnasse, Port-Royal, Saint-Marcel and de l’Hôpital, but building on this side, along what are known as the ‘boulevards du Midi’, would get under way later, and on maps from the late eighteenth century you can still see the boulevard proceeding through open fields, well beyond the most outlying buildings of the city.
15 Henri Sauval (1620–70), Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, posthumous edition (Paris, 1724).
16 Émile de La Bédollière, in Paris Guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France (1867). This guide, written for the benefit of visitors to the Éxposition Universelle, had a preface by Victor Hugo.
17 Francis Carco, L’Équipe, roman des fortifs (Paris: Albin Michel, 1925).
2
Old Paris: The Quarters
Whilst the triumphal arch of the Porte Saint-Denis and the equestrian statue of Henri IV, the two bridges,1 the Louvre, the Tuileries and the Champs-Élysées all equal or surpass the beauties of ancient Rome, the city centre – dark, enclosed and hideous – stands for an age of most shameful barbarism.
– Voltaire, The Embellishments of Paris (1739)
Alas, Old Paris is disappearing at terrifying speed.
– Balzac, The Lesser Bourgeoisie (1855)
After many detours, I first reached Rue Montmartre and the Pointe Saint-Eustache; I passed the square of the Halles, then open to the sky, through the great red umbrellas of the fishmongers; then Rues des Lavandières, Saint-Honoré and Saint-Denis. The Place du Châtelet was quite wretched at this time, the fame of the Veau Qui Tette restaurant overshadowing its historical memories. I crossed the old Pont-au-Change, which later I had to have rebuilt, lowered and widened, then followed the line of the former Palace of Justice, on my left the sorry huddle of low dives that then dishonoured the Île de la Cité, which I would have the joy of razing completely – a haunt of thieves and murderers, who seemed able there to brave the correctional police and the court of assizes. Continuing my route by the Pont Saint-Michel, I had to cross the poor little square that the waters of Rues de la Harpe, de la Huchette, Saint-André-des-Arts and de l’Hirondelle all spilled into, like a drain . . . Finally, I sunk into the meanderings of Rue de la Harpe before climbing the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and arriving – via the Hôtel d’Harcourt, Rue des Maçons-Sorbonne, Place Richelieu, Rue de Cluny and Rue des Grès – on the Place du Panthéon, at the corner of the École de Droit.2
Such was Haussmann’s itinerary as a law student living on the Chauséed’Antin in the early years of the July monarchy. At this time, the city centre had changed little in the past three hundred years. Paris as circumscribed by the boulevard of Louis XIV, a square with slightly softened angles that could be seen as a figure of density and constraint, was still a medieval city. Like the famous knife of Jeannot, which sometimes had a new handle and sometimes a new blade, but always remained Jeannot’s knife, the streets of Paris, though their buildings were replaced over the years, remained medieval streets, crooked and dark. ‘Victor Hugo, summoning up the Paris of Louis XI, only needed to look around him; the streets bathed in shadow into which Gringoire and Claude Frollo disappeared were not so different from the streets of the Marais, the Cité, even the boulevards that he wandered in the 1830s and later described to us, in sentences similarly weighted with darkness and danger – in a word, of night – in Things Seen.’3
In the 1850s, Privat d’Anglemont described ‘behind the Collège de France, between the Sainte-Geneviève library, the buildings of the old École Normale, the Saint-Barbe college and Rue Saint-Jean-de-Latran, a large block of houses known by the name of Mont-Saint-Hilaire . . . a whole quarter made up of narrow and dirty streets . . . old, dark and crooked’.4 And the trades practised there – worm sellers, vegetable steamers, meat lenders, cheap illustrators, pipe seasoners – also went back to the depths of the Middle Ages.
Twenty years later, under the Second Empire, gas lighting, the great cuttings of the new boulevards, plentiful water and new sewers transformed the city’s physiognomy more than the three previous centuries had done. (‘Take any good Frenchman, who reads his newspaper each day in his taproom, and ask him what he understands by “progress”. He will answer that it is steam, electricity and gas – miracles unknown to the Romans – whose discovery bears full witness to our superiority over the ancients’, Baudelaire wrote in 1855 in L’Exposition universelle). Yet Paris did not completely leave the Middle Ages behind in the nineteenth century. Just before the Great War, Carco could still describe a Latin Quarter where Villon would not have felt so out of place: ‘The Rue de l’Hirondelle, a couple of steps from the Seine, which you reach via the narrow and stinking corridor of Rue Gît-le-Coeur, its clientele
