The Other Paris Read online

  The frontispiece, by Célestin Nanteuil, for Les rues de Paris (G. Kugelmann, 1844)

  Boulevard de Ménilmontant, circa 1910

  Sometimes the histories of streets are inscribed in their names: Rue des Petites-Écuries because it once contained small stables, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire (Daughters of Calvary) after a religious order that once was cloistered there, Rue du Télégraphe marking the emplacement during the revolution of a long-distance communication device that functioned through relays of poles with semaphore extensions. Sometimes streets named by long-ago committees take on a certain swagger from their imposed labels: the once-lively, nowadays flavorless Rue de Pâli-Kao given a touch of the exotic (the name is that of a battle in the Second Opium War, in 1860), the stark and drab (and once extraordinarily bleak, owing to the presence of enormous gas tanks) Rue de l’Évangile endowed with the gravity of the Gospels, the already ancient Rue Maître-Albert made to seem even more archaic in the nineteenth century by being renamed after the medieval alchemist Albertus Magnus, who once lived nearby.

  Rue Cloche-Perce. Photograph by Suzanne Beaumé, circa 1900

  Among the oldest thoroughfares in Paris are the streets of the Grande and Petite Truanderie, which is to say the Big and Little Vagrancy Streets. There is the Street of Those Who Are Fasting (Rue des Jeûneurs), the Street of the Two Balls, the Street of the Three Crowns, the Street of the Four Winds, the Street of the Five Diamonds, the Street of the White Coats, the Street of the Pewter Dish, the Street of the Broken Loaf—one of a whole complex of streets around Saint-Merri church (near the Beaubourg center nowadays) that are named after various aspects of the distribution of bread to the poor. Many street names were cleaned up in the early nineteenth century: Rue Tire-Boudin (literally “pull sausage” but really meaning “yank penis”) became Rue Marie-Stuart; Rue Trace-Putain (the “Whore’s Track”) became Trousse-Nonnain (Truss a Nun), then Transnonain, which doesn’t really mean anything, and then became Rue Beaubourg. Many more streets disappeared altogether, then or a few decades later, during Haussmann’s mop-up: Shitty, Shitter, Shitlet, Big Ass, Small Ass, Scratch Ass, Cunt Hair. Some that were less earthy and more poetic also disappeared: Street of Bad Words, Street of Lost Time, Alley of Sighs, Impasse of the Three Faces. The Street Paved with Chitterling Sausages (Rue Pavée-d’Andouilles) became Rue Séguier; the Street of the Headless Woman became Rue le Regrattier.

  Rue Taille-Pain. Photograph by Paul Vouillemont, circa 1900

  Sometimes the streets come assorted in themes, such as the Quartier de l’Europe, which encircles the Saint-Lazare train station: Rues de Bucarest, Moscou, Édimbourg, Madrid, Rome, Athènes, and so on. The exterior boulevards are called les boulevards des maréchaux because they were all named after field marshals in Napoléon’s army: Brune, Masséna, Poniatowski, Sérurier, Ney, Murat, Macdonald, etc. You’ll note that the American names—Avenue du Président-Wilson, Avenue du Président-Kennedy, Avenue de New-York, Rue Washington—are clustered in the high-hat Sixteenth Arrondissement or the adjacent western edge of the Eighth. Names associated with the labor movement or left-wing motifs, on the other hand, tend to be restricted to the northeast of the city: Avenue Jean-Jaurès, for example, after the great Socialist leader assassinated in 1914 (and there is not a sizeable city or industrial suburb in France that lacks a thoroughfare named after him) or Place Léon-Blum, after the leader of the Popular Front in the 1930s, or Place de Stalingrad (officially renamed Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad in 1993, lest there be any confusion), or indeed Rue Marx-Dormoy, although it was named not for Karl but for the Socialist politician René Marx Dormoy, assassinated in 1941, who was no relation.

  Porte Jean-Jaurès, leading to Pantin, probably 1914

  There is seldom a correspondence between a nominal theme and one of ambiance or architecture, and the disjunction can provide a sort of cognitive dissonance, frequently disappointing. If you expect a water tower on Rue du Château-d’Eau, for example, or think you might spot a knoll, let alone quails, on Rue de la Butte-aux-Cailles, you are more than a century too late. But the streets do develop their own thematic tendencies, not all of them imposed by architects or developers. Some of them have accrued through occupational necessity (all those large courtyards along the formerly artisan-intensive Rue Saint-Antoine) or topography (such as the tiered terraces that tumble down the hill in Ménilmontant, definitively spoiled by urban-renewal demolition and construction in the 1960s, but shown to advantage in Albert Lamorisse’s lovely short film The Red Balloon, 1956), or sometimes they were founded in the mists and are perpetuated by custom, such as the eternally carnivalesque Rue de la Gaîté. You see the way a theme will establish itself along a given street—for example, the Egyptian motif on Rue du Caire (the exception that proves the rule) or the country village ambiance of Rue de Mouzaïa or the august academic procession of Rue d’Ulm—and then be contradicted, sometimes radically, with the simple turn of a corner. The city is not just a palimpsest—it is a mass of intersecting and overlapping palimpsests. Even as it becomes socially more homogeneous, many of its streets and houses continue to bear witness to former circumstances. The tone of the Marais is still determined by medieval walls and Renaissance hôtels particuliers, and while today these are employed and intermittently decorated by the fashion industry and its ancillary commerce, if you look above the storefront level you can here and there make out traces of the centuries of misery that prevailed between the era of their construction and ours. You can admire the tenacious way the Canal Saint-Martin still assumes the existence of barge traffic, Rue de la Lune seems to have been designed for prostitution, or Rue Volta folds together about seven centuries, not necessarily including the present one.

  Walter Benjamin wrote, “Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different?” Paris invented the flâneur and continues to press all leisurely and attentive walkers into exercising that pursuit, which is an active and engaged form of interaction with the city, one that sharpens concentration and enlarges imaginative empathy and overrides mere tourism. The true flâneur takes in construction sites and dumps, exchanges greetings with bums and truck drivers and the women washing their sidewalks in the morning, consumes coffees and gros rouge at as many bus stop cafés as terrace-bedecked boulevard establishments, studies trash and graffiti and sidewalk displays and gutters and rooftops, devotes as much attention to the arcades filled with dentists’ offices or Indian restaurants as to the ones lined with antique shops, spends more time in Monoprix than at the Louvre.

  Rue des Immeubles-Industriels, Walter Benjamin’s favorite street, circa 1910

  An illustration by José Belon for Paris anecdote, by Privat d’Anglemont, 1885 edition

  The history of Paris, the active and engaged history of the streets, was written by flâneurs, and each conscious step you take follows their traces and continues their walk into a continuous walk across the centuries. The great text of the streets was given voice by those relentless walkers who were also writers: Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Nicolas-Edmé Restif de La Bretonne in the eighteenth century; Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, Victor Fournel, Alfred Delvau, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Victor Hugo in the nineteenth; in the twentieth, Georges Cain, André Warnod, Francis Carco, Léon-Paul Fargue, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Yonnet, Jean-Paul Clébert, Robert Giraud, Richard Cobb, Louis Chevalier, and the members of the Lettrist International, most notably Guy Debord and Ivan Chtcheglov; thus far at least Éric Hazan in the twenty-first.* This to name only the most significant and most committed—there have been hundreds of others. Of course there were also those who expressed themselves by different means. These would include the artists Constantin Guys, Célestin Nanteuil, Honoré Daumier, Gavarni, Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Jean-François Raffaëlli, Georges Seurat, Théophile Steinlen, Félix Vallotton,
André Dignimont, and the photographers Charles Marville, Gabriel Loppé, Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Germaine Krull, Eli Lotar, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, and Ed van der Elsken, among others, including some of the seldom-credited press photographers of the past and the anonymous makers of the very local postcards that were produced in Paris before World War I. Even those whose habits are unknown to us can be considered part of the company by virtue of the fact that they were observers who caught things on the fly—they moved through the streets, collected and preserved their impressions, and left us with valuable information about time and place, in addition to beauty.

  Nicolas-Edmé Restif de La Bretonne

  Baudelaire most famously defined the flâneur: “The crowd is his domain, as air is that of a bird, as water is that of a fish. His passion and his profession is to marry the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure to make a home in the multitude, in the flux, in the motion, in the fleeting and infinite.” Richard Cobb, the British historian of France, specified further that the task requires going “into the streets, into the crowded restaurant, to the central criminal courts, to the correctionnelles…, to the market, to the café beside the Canal Saint-Martin…, to the jumble of marshalling yards beyond the Batignolles, to the back-yards of the semi-derelict workshops of the rue Saint-Charles, to the river ports of Bercy and Charenton…” It is imperative “to dawdle, to stop, to see, to notice small changes and to have one’s attention caught by a drawn blind, by a closed shutter, by a shop-door without its handle, by the small square of a white notice, Fermé pour cause de décès [closed on account of death], or fermé jusqu’au 1er septembre, by a sign-painter painting out a familiar name, by a child’s face at a window, by a geranium in flower.”

  An illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Barabbas: Paroles dans la vallée, by Lucien Descaves, 1914

  The flâneur is not a reporter. Reporters are in the business of asking specific questions, to which they require specific answers. The flâneur may entertain questions in the course of things, but overall he or she is in the business of negative capability. The flâneur must be alive to the entire prospect, to the ephemeral and perishable as well as the immemorial, to things that ordinarily lie beneath notice, to minute changes and gradual shifts of fashion, to things that just disappear one day without anyone paying attention, to happenstance and accident and incongruity, to texture and flavor and the unnameable, to prevailing winds and countercurrents, to everything that is too subjective for professionals to credit. The flâneur must possess a sixth sense, possibly even a seventh and an eighth, must have an intuitive suss for things about to occur without warning and things that are subtly absent and things that are silently waving goodbye. The flâneur must be able to read the entire text of the streets, including its footnotes, interleavings, and marginal commentary. The flâneur must comprehend the city holistically, must understand it as a living being—on the order of, though infinitely more complex than, those mushroom colonies that may cover hundreds of square miles while remaining a single entity—and must constantly risk overidentifying with his or her subject.

  “Who opens the door of my death chamber? I said that no one shall enter. Whoever you are, go away!” Plaque marking the house where Lautréamont died, 7 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre

  Among the intuitive stretches required of the flâneur is a lively belief in ghosts that does not particularly assume a belief in the supernatural. The past is always present, if sometimes in the way of those movie spirits who can be seen in the room but not in the mirror, or vice versa. All the tyrants and landowners and monopolists in vain set their shoulders to bulldoze the past out of existence, but it stubbornly remains, sometimes in the most indefinable and evanescent way and sometimes as a bad conscience. If you are properly attuned you can feel it even in the middle of the Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir, the footbridge across the Seine that links the Parc de Bercy with the Bibliothèque Nationale, a place from which it is nearly impossible to see anything much more than twenty years old—and yet in that formerly industrial location countless people labored and many died, from accidents and floods and wars, in the complex of wine depots on the one side and the vast railroad freight terminal on the other. A bit farther down, near Rue Watt, on the Left Bank side, under residential high-rises and the Diderot branch of the University of Paris, is the site of the municipal storehouses (Magasins Généraux), which beginning in November 1943 were employed as an internment camp for Jews.

  The popular historian G. Lenotre, who arrived in Paris from Lorraine as a teenager at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (and then, over the next sixty-five years, wrote more than fifty volumes of petite histoire, primarily about the city during the revolution), recalled that even as he was dazzled by the swarm of traffic that he could see from the windows of the modest hotel on Rue Montmartre where he first lodged, as well as by the masses of tall houses on every side, he could not help thinking about what those houses had witnessed and contained over the decades. “Each of those casements opened onto a room where how many comedies had transpired! And how many dramas, for that matter! Their shutters had been closed in times of mourning, they had been bedecked with bunting and hung with fairy lights on occasions of victory. For the first time there came to me the vague thought that houses have a soul, composed of the joys and sorrows and labors of those they have sheltered, and that all have their history: secret, romantic, or joyful.”

  The corner of Rue de la Parcheminerie and Rue de la Harpe, circa 1910

  The occult forces in the city are always at work, indifferent to rationality, scornful of politics, resentful of urban planning, only intermittently sympathetic to the wishes of the living. They operate with a glacial slowness that renders their processes imperceptible to the mortal eye, so that the results appear uncanny. But much like the way stalagmites and stalactites grow in caves, such forces are actually the result of vastly long passages of time, of buildup and wear-down so gradual that no time-lapse camera could ever record them, but also so incrementally powerful they could never be duplicated by technology or any other human intent. Over the course of time they have worn grooves like fingerprints in the fabric of the city, so that ghostly impressions can remain even of streets and corners and culs-de-sac obliterated by bureaucrats, and they have created zones of affinity that are independent of administrative divisions and cannot always be explained by ordinary means.

  Guy Debord and his barfly friends in the early 1950s, who came to constitute the Lettrist International, were the first to attempt to chart what they called “ambience units” (unités d’ambiance), even if they were hardly the first to notice them. These units could be entire neighborhoods, could be described in a few words (for example, the Îlot Chalon, the first Chinese district in Paris, a tiny cluster hard by the Gare de Lyon now erased by urban renewal), could be determined by architecture (such as the extraordinary rotunda built by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in 1785 as part of the wall of the Farmers-General and which now sits by itself in Place de Stalingrad, shadowed by the Métro overpass), could embody a forceful rebuke to their surroundings (such as the Lettrists’ beloved and now long-gone Rue Sauvage, by all accounts an eerie blend of desolation and rus in urbe—“the most confounding nocturnal landscape in the capital,” according to their newsletter, Potlatch—that plied a parallel course between the riverbank, edged with vacant lots, and the tracks leading to the Gare d’Austerlitz). Or the units could be fleetingly subjective, identifiable only by their familiars, an effect of light and shadow or an imbalance of scale or a pattern of commerce. A map Debord annotated in 1957, covering just the first six arrondissements, shows some seventy-five of those units, a few no more than a block long. That same year, he produced the exploded maps The Naked City and Guide psychogéographique de Paris, each of which isolates kernels of blocks in the center of the city, according respectively to their function as plaques tournantes (“turntables,” in the railroad s
ense) and as “psychogeographic gradients,” with arrows of varying thicknesses showing the involuntary tendencies of pedestrians to err this way or that when pursuing the determined wandering that Debord called dérive, or “drift.”

  Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, circa 1910

  Guide psychogéographique de Paris, by Guy Debord, 1957

  Rue Mouffetard, circa 1910

  Home base for the Lettrists was the “Contrescarpe continent,” a vaguely oval complex of blocks centering on the Place de la Contrescarpe, just southeast of the Panthéon in the Fifth Arrondissement. This area, a very old working-class district that shades into the Latin Quarter, was of interest to them not only for its proximity but because of the way it seemed to direct the steps of anyone venturing in. Owing to the turnings of streets and to the way edifices seem to abruptly block passage while artfully concealing narrow channels that wind around them, so that the pedestrian changes course without really thinking about it, the district presents only one smooth route of entry (which is nevertheless mined with attractive digressions), from the north, and only one reasonable exit track, toward the south. This remains the case and can be verified by visitors. As a consequence, the zone, according to Debord, “inclines toward atheism, oblivion, and the disorientation of habitual reflexes.”