Montesquieu reaches this judgement: “Paris may well be the most sensual city in the world, which is aware of the most sophisticated of pleasures; but it may also be the city where life is hardest” (Lettres persans). The restless, universal pursuit of happiness and enjoyment, in which everyone takes part, makes Paris “… a city which is the mother of novelty”. The extraordinary mobility of the mind, which must constantly refocus while in turmoil, is also the reason for moral instability and insoluble ethical dilemmas. Its moral contradictions push the individual to debate with his conscience.
The metropolis is the scene of experiments in humanity. Yet, as Rousseau’s Émile casts back, the city, which has just been the place where everything is possible, appears in a totally negative light: “Well, then, Paris, adieu, famous city of noises, smoke and dirt, where women have forgotten all about honour and men all about virtue.”
Amusement with a hood, Paris, c. 1340.
Embroidered purse, gold and silver thread on linen,
16 × 14 cm. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg.
Bartholomeus Anglicus, Book of the Prophecy of Things, Paris, c. 1400.
Herzog-August-Bibliothek, 1.3.5.1 Aug. 2 fol. 146r°, Wolfenbüttel.
In Nougaret’s three-volume book, Parisian Adventures Before and After the Revolution (1808), there are a number of anecdotes that reflect the spirit of the new age. Nougaret, too, sees Paris as a city of anonymity and alienation:
Everything in this unimaginably vast capital is mixed up; neighbours are strangers, and one only learns about the other’s death by reading the obituaries or by finding a notice pinned to the door when one comes home in the evening… Do you want to be thought a man who matters? Do you want to live a bachelor’s life whilst you’re married? Would you prefer to be popular or to live alone like a bear? Then come to Paris, because no-one will care how you live or what you get up to.
The city is a whole in which everything, even debauchery, has its necessary place: “Paris needs people of every possible kind, every type of temperament – for they all find their place, even quack-doctors, even cabaret artists and ladies of easy virtue.”
The French Revolution can also be interpreted as the final outcome of this modern “experimental metropolis”. The torch of liberty lit up all of Europe at that time. What chroniclers – whether enthusiastic or alarmed – reported from Paris were impressions that often combined political and erotic freedoms. “For what would a revolution be without universal copulation!”, wrote Peter Weiss in his Marat/Sade play. The Europe-wide influence of the French Revolution established the myth of Paris. “Liberty” was an indivisible concept: Paris, the city of erotica, was also a metaphor for a city of other liberties. In this context, liberty took on not just a political but also an erotic character: it promised a totally different kind of life.
In the period between the July Revolution of 1830 and the February Revolution of 1848, Paris became a refuge for Germans of various different classes and social strata, driven out of Germany by material as well as spiritual hardships. The total number of Germans in Paris increased dramatically in these two decades, until 1848, it had reached 60,000 to 100,000 – a figure which rapidly declined after Napoleon’s coup d’état. Paris then became the centre of intellectual opposition to the reactionary political system of the Germanic countries.
For Heine, Paris was the scene of the Zeitgeist itself. In Paris, in the rich tapestry of its daily life which brings forth all possibilities and contrasts, a new European world is born. He writes in 1832:
Paris is not merely the capital of France, but of the whole civilised world… a place where all its most noble spiritual qualities are assembled. Gathered together here is everything which has achieved greatness through love or hate, through feeling or thought, through knowledge or skill, through good or bad luck, through the future or the past. If you consider the agglomeration of illustrious or outstanding men who meet here, you will regard Paris as a pantheon for the living. A new art, a new religion, and a new way of life are being forged here, and the creators of this new world joyfully swarm about it. The powers-that-be are behaving pettily, but the mass of ordinary people is huge and acutely aware of its great and sublime destiny.
“Creators of a new art and a new way of life” is what, 90 years later, Surrealists also wanted to be; their ideas sprang from the same soil. Paris is a perpetual revolution.
The title of Heine’s book is Französische Zustände (Conditions in France). In fact, however, he is referring only to conditions in Paris, for “Paris is the real France – which is, in reality, only the outer districts of Paris”. And Paris is the surface on which the dream of a new Europe will be projected, on which all erotic desires, as well as political ones, are focused.
Vignettes, illustrations for a calendar, 1650.
Engravings on wood.
Vignettes, illustrations for a calendar, 1650.
Engravings on wood.
Vignettes, illustrations for a calendar, 1650.
Engravings on wood.
Vignettes, illustrations for a calendar, 1650.
Engravings on wood.
Maître du Champion des dames, The Chapel of Venus,illustration for The Champion of the Women, 15th century.
François Villon
Is Paris the Babel of sin? Observing the degeneration of morals, a 15th-century priest exclaims with disgust: “Oh, my God! I do not think that since the days of our Lord Jesus Christ vice has ever reigned anywhere in such profusion as it does now in Paris…” It was this Paris into which Villon was born.
François Villon was born in Anvers, near Paris, in 1431. He attended the University of Paris, which was founded in 1150, and is thus one of the oldest in Europe. The loose life led by students at that time attracted him more than the acquisition of knowledge itself. The district around the university was the noisy centre of all pleasures and lewdness at that time – what one might call the Montmartre of his époque.
For the students, the art of living in a pleasurable, dissolute way meant more than the pursuit of knowledge. As early as the 12th century, word went out from students in Paris that they preferred to contemplate the beauties of prostitutes rather than those of Cicero. From amongst them, it was mainly the clerics and “scribes” – that is to say the jurists – who had the reputation of being “skirt-chasers”.
After completing preparatory studies in the Arts Faculty and gaining a Master of Arts, Villon began a further course of study (presumably theology), but did not complete this. Instead, possibly during the nearly year-long strike of Parisian teachers from 1452 to 1453, he sank into the numerically larger academic proletariat within the city, and seems to have joined various criminal groups – presumably even the “Mussel Brothers”, who were feared throughout northern France. Villon sank deeply into the maelstrom of a dissolute life. “Loving” became his principal preoccupation. He felt comfortable when among prostitutes, pimps, and thieves
