1
Capital
In Julien Duvivier’s 1937 film Pépé le Moko, set in the Algiers casbah, the two leading characters are waxing nostalgic about their native city. Gaby (Mireille Balin) was gently reared, while Pépé (Jean Gabin) is working-class.
Gaby: Do you know Paris?
Pépé: It’s my village, Rue Saint-Martin.
Gaby: The Champs-Élysées.
Pépé: The Gare du Nord.
Gaby: The Opéra, Boulevard des Capucines.
Pépé: Barbès, La Chapelle.
Gaby: Rue Montmartre.
Pépé: Boulevard Rochechouart.
Gaby: Rue Fontaine.
Both: Place Blanche!
She names places in her city, he names places in his, and then they both agree on a square that straddles the border—the site of the Moulin Rouge and the place where the honky-tonk of Pigalle locks eyes with the gentility of the Quartier de l’Europe. Gaby’s list defines the top edge of the pie slice of western Paris, a quarter of the whole at most, that then housed the gentry: the northwesterly course of Rue Montmartre that is picked up by Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and then Rue Fontaine, and then goes on to merge into Avenue de Clichy. If she had been thorough she might have mentioned the other leg, on the Left Bank: Boulevard Saint-Germain, Rue de Sèvres, Avenue de Suffren. Pépé’s list is far less comprehensive, but that’s at least in part because in 1937 there was still so much more of his city than of hers.
This book will not be much concerned with Gaby’s city. It has changed far less, for one thing. It retains the greatest concentration of money and power, and in that way common to old-money neighborhoods in many cities, it has probably preserved more of those small businesses, cafés, and such than have the more vulnerable neighborhoods elsewhere, because the rich have the power to save the things they love. That wedge of western Paris has changed primarily in that its composition now includes not just the old families and the nouveaux riches but also a significant number of foreign and often absentee property owners who invest in a Paris flat the way they might buy art and warehouse it. That attitude might almost make you think fondly of the old families, who at least are or were connected to the city’s soil and history. But then you might recall how consistently inimical the western districts have been to the rest of the city over time, how they made common cause with the Prussians against the Commune in 1871; called for the extermination of the Communards, including women and children, during the Bloody Week in May of that year; and in 1938, after the Popular Front, “acclaimed Hitler in the cinemas of the Champs-Élysées at twenty francs a seat,” while even fashionable ladies joined in shouting the slogan “Communists, get your bags; Jews, off to Jerusalem.” It is no coincidence that the Gestapo office on Rue des Saussaies and the headquarters on Rue Lauriston of its French counterpart, the Carlingue, were both situated within that triangle.
But if Gaby’s city was all demure white façades, discreet traffic, and well-mannered exchanges, Pépé’s was undeniably rougher. The marketplace of the street brought all types to the fore, and they did not necessarily speak correctly or measure their tones or clean themselves up; they might not have wished you well. And the streets themselves held as many gaping eyesores as they did the sort of charmingly weathered houses you admire in Atget’s pictures. You can read Georges Cain’s description of the Marché des Patriarches, the now long-gone flea market around the church of Saint-Médard in the Fifth Arrondissement, and judge that it reflects the author’s class bias, as an antiquarian and museum curator slumming around while looking for forgotten architectural treasures: “Tumbledown hovels sheltering miserable enterprises: resellers of nameless objects, dealers in rags, vendors of dust. A side of beef is being butchered alongside a big factory wall that looks like a prison. And everywhere the air is poisonous with sulfuric acid, kippered herring, and cauliflower.” But nearly the same tone appears thirty years later, in a description of the area near Place des Fêtes, in the Nineteenth, by Eugène Dabit, the most self-consciously proletarian of writers:
A shoelace vendor, his face ravaged, looks as if he’s wearing a mask with a fake beard and red cloth lips. At the market on Rue du Télégraphe a woman selling thyme repeats in a piercing voice, “Give work to the blind.” People drag themselves from job site to job site, picking up wood, and from street to street, picking up rags; others are trusties or nightwatchmen. On their days out, the guys from the shelters, in their rough blue uniforms, tentatively hold out their hands, hoping to pick up enough for a package of decent tobacco.
So, you might ask, why should we care that those people or their contemporary avatars have vanished from the city? Isn’t it pleasant that Saint-Médard has been so nicely cleaned up and aired out that now it looks like the parish church in Anyville? And isn’t it at least sanitary that Place des Fêtes has been so artfully landscaped? And if it is surrounded by monolithic high-rises with all the charm of industrial air-conditioning units, doesn’t that at least mean they are designated for low-income housing? Because, after all, if the low houses that ringed the square before urban renewal claimed it had been cleaned and repaired instead of being razed, no one living there could today afford the neighborhood. There are indeed a few places in Paris where the poor can live, but the requirement is that those places be inhuman, soulless, windswept. In the past the poor were left to hustle on their own, which might mean accommodating themselves to squalor, with accompanying vermin; the bargain they are offered today assures them of well-lit, dust-free environs with up-to-date fixtures, but it relieves them of the ability to improvise, to carve out their own spaces, to conduct slap-up business in the public arena if that is what they wish to do. They are corralled and regulated in ways no nineteenth-century social engineer could have imagined.
The relative intimacy of a city, any city, of a hundred or more years ago is as hard to overstate as it is to convey. There may have been nearly as many people, but they were more highly concentrated, in neighborhoods that were as delimited and self-sufficient as country villages, and where the absence of voice- and image-bearing devices in the home caused people to spend much more of their time in the street. There were no commuters to speak of, at least before the 1920s; everyone you saw, barring the occasional tourist or trader, lived right there in town, usually in the very neighborhood in which you spotted them. Every parish had its eccentrics, its indigents, its clerics, its savants, its brawlers, its widows, its fixers, its elders, its hustlers, its busybodies. Most of them had known one another all their lives. The income spectrum may not have been excessively wide, but on the other hand, the rich were right over there, in the next street.
Before Haussmann’s reconfiguration of the center, the neighborhoods were tightly interwoven; afterward they were more separated, but the classes still met on common ground: on the squares and the boulevards. It was said that when cafés began to feature open terraces, the poor discovered what and how to eat from passing by and observing the diners as they ate. And the rich always had the opportunity to absorb the culture of the poor from their markets and entertainments. For that matter, the practice of mixité flourished for at least a century: a house of six or seven stories would feature a shop on the ground floor; the shopkeeper’s dwelling on the mezzanine level; a bourgeois family upstairs from the mezzanine, on the “noble floor”; then each succeeding story would house people of progressively lesser income. People trudged up as few flights of stairs as they could afford, and as a result, every such house was itself a microcosm of society as a whole.
This is not to imply that society was just or kindly; it was brutal, generally. Nevertheless, there was room for the full range of classes, and everyone was somehow equally involved in the common task of constituting a city. It was an ecosystem in which every aspect of the physical fabric was employed and drained and periodically revitalized, in which everything from rags and bones to ideas and fads was recycled and where nothing was disposed of until it was completely spent. So much of life was conducted in public that an entire education could be procured just by walking around, from riverbank to market to square to boulevard, from “the great poem of display” (Balzac) to the performances of the mountebanks, from the dance halls to the public executions, from the news vendors to the dandies, from the prostitutes to the bill posters, from the east to the west.
The geography and topography were critical. The city grew in concentric circles as determined by its successive walls: under Philippe-Auguste, around the turn of the thirteenth century; Charles V, in the fourteenth; the Farmers-General, just before the revolution; Adolphe Thiers, in the 1840s; and, on the footprint of the latter, the Périphérique highway, completed in 1973. With every succeeding wall, some more of the surrounding countryside and its villages were absorbed into the city; what had once been periphery was directed toward the middle. Meanwhile, the center gradually moved. It did not go all that far, maybe a couple of miles over four or five centuries, but it entailed a larger movement of fashion. That began with the Louvre when it was a royal residence, slid east to the Marais in the seventeenth century, and then moved west again, serially along Rue de Rivoli and Rue Saint-Honoré and their parallel boulevards higher up, while the center of modish residence, by that time removing itself from commerce, glided northwest toward the Plaine Monceau and then farther, to Auteuil and Passy. Much of the center was shared and then disputed; even after Haussmann’s reconfiguration, the gentry could not claim Saint-Denis or the Plateau Beaubourg or Les Halles. The rocky heights of Montmartre and Belleville and Ménilmontant were firmly of the people, as was the nebulous south: Maison-Blanche, Croulebarbe, Glacière, Butte-aux-Cailles, Grenelle, Montrouge.
The past, whatever its drawbacks, was wild. By contrast, the present is farmed. The exigencies of money and the proclivities of bureaucrats—as terrified of anomalies as of germs, chaos, dissipation, laughter, unanswerable questions—have conspired to create the conditions for stasis, to sanitize the city to the point where there will be no surprises, no hazards, no spontaneous outbreaks, no weeds. The reformers and social activists of the past, faced with the urgent task of feeding the hungry and housing the unsheltered, failed to anticipate that the poor would, in exchange, be surrendering the riches they actually possessed: their neighborhoods as well as their use of time, their scavenger economy, their cooperative defenses, their refusal to behave, their ability to drop out of sight, their key to the unclaimed, the scorned, the common property of the streets. As a consequence of these and other changes, we have forgotten what a city was. There was a flavor to the city that has now been eradicated. It had a fugitive lyricism almost impossible to recapture. The young Verlaine affords a taste:
The noise of the bars, the grit of the sidewalks,
The decaying plane trees shedding leaves in the dark,
The omnibus a hurricane of rattling iron and mud,
That screeches, badly aligned on its wheels,
And slowly rolls its green and yellow eyes,
Workers going to their club, smoking clay pipes
Under the noses of the police officers,
Dripping roofs, sweating walls, slippery pavement,
Cracked asphalt, streams filling the gutter,
That’s my road—with heaven at the end.
And sixty years later Francis Carco, a flâneur with a gift for verbal photography:
I walked as far as the Pacra concert hall, on the corner of a boulevard and a street, turned onto the boulevard, entered a bar, read the papers. Night was falling. A pharmacy spread its green and yellow lights on the asphalt. From some dive came the ragged sound of an accordion. I noticed people as they passed: a fat man in a cap, a cop, three young girls with umbrellas, a whistling kid, a family of workers, two soldiers, an old woman selling papers shouting “L’Intran!,” an Arab, a widower holding his little boy’s hand … The blueish and bright orange lights of a cinema and the pink lights and huge arrow of a Dupont-tout-est-bon sign stretched their blurry electric trails along the façades, and the street was shaken by the taxis, the streetcars, the Métro that emerges from the ground at that point. At the corner of Barbès and Rochechouart, under an arcade, itinerant singers drew a crowd some evenings. Women milled around, pretended to listen, and walked off newly partnered.
All of Paris radiated out from Les Halles, the great central marketplace that dated back to the twelfth century, when the king, Philippe-Auguste, consolidated a number of smaller markets, and which was given its final form between 1852 and 1870, when Victor Baltard built the enormous cast-iron pavilions that covered most of the array. It comprised a number of major markets—halles for meat; for saltwater and freshwater fish; for butter, eggs, and cheese; for fruits, vegetables, and herbs; for flowers. It was immense. Zola describes “a strange city, with its distinct neighborhoods, its suburbs, its villages, its paths and its roads, its squares and its intersections, all sheltered under a hangar one rainy day on some cyclopean whim.” Inside, in the early morning, the “river of greenery” gave way to the “the vivid stains of the carrots, the pure stains of the turnips … illuminating the market with the motley of their two colors,” and “the reddish-brown varnish of a basket of onions, the bleeding red of a heap of tomatoes, the yellowish effacement of a pile of cucumbers, the dark violet of a cluster of eggplants lighting up here and there, while big black radishes, arrayed like mourning cloths, left a few shadowy holes amid the vibrant joys of the awakening.”
But Les Halles wasn’t just a market, it was the rus in urbe, not only connecting the city to the country but rendering the city in the light of the country, its population as varieties of fauna—it seems hardly coincidental that the market lay adjacent to the sempiternal flesh market of Rue Saint-Denis, where until not long ago the whores aligned themselves along the house fronts for blocks on end. Sherwood Anderson wrote in 1921:
The splendid horses of Paris pulling the great wheeled carts. Great hogsheads of wine, grain piled high in brown sacks. The wheels of some of the carts are as high as the door of a church. Often the great horses are hitched tandem—three, four, six, ten. The horses are not castrated. There is fire and life in them … [The] men love the great breasted stallions as do I. They are not afraid. They do not castrate. Here life is more noble than anything machinery has yet achieved.
Les Halles was a biosphere, a living embodiment of the chain of production and consumption, an exchange where commerce remained as personal and sensual as it had been before advertising and marketing were invented, a tremendous social equalizer, a place where the jobless could always find pickup work and the hungry could scrounge for discarded but acceptable food, a hub with its own culture and customs varnished by nearly a millennium of use. It wasn’t just the stomach of Paris but its soul. It was doomed by administrative decree in 1960 and demolished beginning in 1969, in favor of a wholesale-only market in distant suburban Rungis, and replaced by a hellish subterranean shopping mall that is nowadays topped by that urbanist cure-all, an espace vert.
Marco Ferreri’s 1974 film Don’t Touch the White Woman! belongs to a subgenre peculiar to that time, the farcical revisionist Western. It stars Marcello Mastroianni as a dim George A. Custer, Michel Piccoli as a mincing Buffalo Bill, and Catherine Deneuve as the titular white woman. Much of it takes place in a vast expanse of yellow that looks convincingly like the desert of the southwestern United States—until the camera draws back and you realize that it is instead the great pit dug out under the emplacement of Les Halles, the future site of the shopping mall and of the Châtelet–Les Halles RER station. Cavalry charges thunder down Rue Rambuteau, troops mass in front of the Bourse du Commerce, and then there is the poignant spectacle of hundreds of Native Americans, played by black-haired Parisians, being forced to march away from their lands along the deep flank of the pit, their Trail of Tears apparently endless even though it cannot be more than about five blocks long.
There is a perennially recurrent Parisian identification with Native Americans, dating back to the 1820s and ’30s and the furor caused by Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, cited as a primary influence by Balzac and Hugo, among others. That is perhaps what prompted Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, the nineteenth century’s consummate flâneur, and himself a mixed-race native of Guadeloupe, to mourn the decline of Belleville in the 1850s by writing, “Civilization has acted here as in North America; in moving forward it has cast out all the savages in its path.” The Belleville he regrets was the one then outside the city limits, a rustic site of outdoor drinking places, dance halls, and the apparently enchanting Île d’Amour, “where so many fleeting liaisons began.” Very soon after that, Belleville became the bastion of the city’s working class, the heart of the Commune, sufficiently militant and volatile that nervous bureaucrats split it up among four separate arrondissements. It was “an ardent plebeian capital, as indigent and leveled as an anthill,” according to the revolutionary and novelist Victor Serge, who moved there in 1909, while the British historian Richard Cobb called it the “high citadel of l’esprit parisien,” which had emigrated from its former locus in the center, in the Cité and Rue Saint-Denis, having been relocated by the vast surgical enterprises of Baron Haussmann. In addition, Belleville over time became famous for taking in immigrants and refugees: provincials from the south and middle of the country; eastern European Jews crowded out of the ancient Jewish district in the Marais; North Africans, primarily from Algeria; West Africans from Senegal, Guinea, Gabon, the Ivory Coast; and Vietnamese and Cambodians, especially ethnic Chinese from those nations. To some degree it remains so, the only part of the city to which the term melting pot could be applied.
The photographs by Willy Ronis of Belleville and Ménilmontant from the 1940s and ’50s look like the photographs of Montmartre from fifty years earlier, only more crowded: houses spilling down the hill, piled on top of one another; gardens and vacant lots and even patches of woods tucked into any available niches; streets turning into stairs and back again; bars tucked away in alleys; artisans’ workshops in tiny courtyards; lookouts from which you could see the whole city. The place was modest, a consequence of adaptation and making do; money and grand plans had never come anywhere near. One of the newest of the neighborhoods, historically, it kept faith with the spirit of the old city, and managed its limitations with maximum panache, as if it were a community of tree houses. A lot of this was regularized and normalized under urban renewal in the 1960s, and whole streets of ancient houses were razed, to be replaced by high-rise housing projects. You can still see the hammer and sickle on the entablature of the former cooperative La Bellevilloise, now a rock club, on Rue Boyer; and at the western end of that street, on Rue de Ménilmontant, observe the location of Prosper Enfantin’s Saint-Simonian cenacle, where members of the community in the 1830s wore garments that buttoned in the back, so that even dressing would be a communal enterprise.
Above Belleville was La Chapelle, “a kingdom rather than an arrondissement,” wrote Léon-Paul Fargue in the 1930s.
This kingdom, one of the richest in Paris in public baths where you wait as at the dentist’s, is dominated by the aerial line of the Métro, which crowns it like the frontlet on a harness. Toward the north, Rue d’Aubervilliers shoots off like a long jamboree, filled to bursting with shops. Vendors of pigs’ feet, of lace by the pound, of caps, of cheese, of lettuce, of slumgullions, of cooked spinach, of rooms with secondhand air that sit atop one another, astride one another, inside one another, like a nightmare construction toy.
La Chapelle and its neighbor La Villette—and other such liminal areas to the northwest, the east, and all along the south—constituted the city’s backside, the parts you weren’t really supposed to see, although you couldn’t help doing so when you entered or left: factories, gasometers, slaughterhouses, and the cheapest jerry-built housing, wedged between canals and railroad lines headed north and east out of the train stations bearing the names of those directions. Beyond them, until 1919, was the last military wall, and beyond that in turn was the no-man’s-land called the Zone. Unlike most modern cities, sprawling in all directions, Paris was defined by its edges, where it set the limits of acceptability in utilities and the people who lived around them, propelling them out with a centrifugal force that has only increased over time but was already fully visible as early as 1850:
As a result of the transformation of the old Paris, the opening of new streets, the widening of narrow ones, the high price of land, the extension of commerce and industry, with the old slums giving way each day to apartment houses, vast stores and workshops, the poor and working population finds itself, and will find itself more and more, forced out to the extremities of Paris, which means that the center is destined to be inhabited in the future only by the well-to-do.
Thus you could say that Paris now is not only a creation of today’s economic and cultural imperatives, but was also willed into being by people who have been dead for more than a century. Haussmann himself might as well have built the Bastille Opéra and the arch of La Défense. When Victor Hugo was writing The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1830, he did not have to stretch to describe its fifteenth-century setting, since it still lay all around him. When he wrote Les misérables around 1860, evoking the Paris of thirty years earlier, he was peering across a gulf—a literal one, as he had been in exile for nearly a decade, but also a vast gulf of change. When Jean Valjean and Cosette arrive in Paris from the provinces, the neighborhood where their wanderings temporarily cease,
located between Faubourg Saint-Antoine and La Râpée, is one that recent construction has transformed from top to bottom, disfiguring them according to some, transfiguring them according to others. The market gardens, the work yards, and the old buildings are gone. Today there are new broad avenues, amphitheaters, circuses, racetracks, train stations, and the prison of Mazas: progress, as you can see, and also its corrective.
From his seat in Guernsey, Hugo could really only surmise how deeply those recent constructions had altered Paris. The Second Empire had more than a few points in common with our own time: the heady displacements of capital, its muscular display in architectural form, its frenetic display in mercantile form, the desperate embrace of entertainment as an analgesic, the pervasive collective distrust. A way of life was disappearing, and what was replacing it was easily grasped in its outer manifestations, much harder to pin down in its inner essence. A generalized anxiety gripped not only the bottom tiers of society, ejected from the neighborhoods that had been their family seat for centuries, but also people in the middle and even the top echelons. “I understand very well that the purebred Parisian misses all those old and noisy customs of his city, which are progressively disappearing every day,” wrote Privat d’Anglemont in the 1850s, around the same time that Baudelaire, in his poem “The Swan,” wrote, “The old Paris is no more (the form of a city / Changes faster, alas, than the heart of a mortal).” The Goncourt brothers knew their time was up as they gauged the noisy disruptions of the new middle class, who had too much money for their own good and not enough in the way of manners. Visiting the enormous new Eldorado café-concert in 1860, they experienced the vertigo that comes to all, even snobs, when they note that no place at the table has been set for them. (Although their works were joint, each brother wrote in the first-person singular.)
My Paris, where I was born, the Paris of life as it stood between 1830 and 1848, is passing away. Social life is undergoing a great evolution. I see women, children, households, families in this café. The interior is doomed. Life threatens to become public. The club for the top rank, the café for the bottom: that is where society and the crowd will end up … I have a sensation of passing through, as if I were a traveler. I am a stranger to what is coming, to what is, as I am to those new boulevards, implacably straight, that no longer exude the world of Balzac, that conjure some American Babylon of the future.
But their own Balzac had already foreseen as much: “The ruins of the bourgeoisie will be an ignoble detritus of pasteboard, plaster, and pigment,” he had written fifteen years earlier. And a decade before that, when Louis-Philippe installed Napoléon’s Egyptian trophy on the site that had held the guillotine during the revolution, Chateaubriand felt apocalyptic intimations: “The time will come when the obelisk of the desert will once again know, in that place of murder, the silence and solitude of Luxor.”
Everything is always going away, every way of life is continually subject to disappearance, all who reach their middle years have lost the landscape of their childhood, everyone given to introspection feels threatened. Everything was always better before—and in many ways it probably was, since there were, among other things, fewer people, which made for more space and less competition for scraps, gave more room to chance and to nature. Eugène Dabit wrote in 1933 that “our time is hard, without beauty. We can no longer contemplate the sky, now hidden by tall buildings. We can no longer listen in silence to the delicate call of the wind. Our trees are strangled by iron grilles, planted in the earth as if in pots, prisoners in squares as dusty as museums.” But despite various fantasies by the likes of Le Corbusier, the depredations of technocrats over the decades after Haussmann were relatively small-scale and could be regarded as anomalous—until the 1960s. That was when the trio of Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and André Malraux (the onetime novelist become minister of culture) gave their nihil obstat to ambitious young men, graduates of the top schools, who liked to imagine things on a grand scale, who liked acronyms and right angles, who wanted to make Paris into a power city keyed to the growth of modern money and the free flow of modern traffic.
It was then that the fate of Les Halles was decided, that La Défense and the road tunnels under the Right Bank were planned, that the destruction of the Montparnasse train station was approved and the city’s first skyscraper was designated to replace it, a giant upended turd purposelessly dominating the Left Bank. Those managers cleaved and sectioned Belleville-Ménilmontant; chased the natives out of the Marais and the Latin Quarter and rezoned those areas for the convenience of money; razed La Glacière; eliminated the Halle aux Vins and the wine depots at Bercy, consented to the aggressively repellent Pompidou Center, and stopped just short of putting multilane highways through the center of the city—they were playing Haussmann, only with motor vehicles and mechanized means of destruction. And their successors have continued, erecting the Bastille Opéra, which looks like a parking garage, and the chilling Mitterand library, which looks like a housing project on the moon. The story is told, furiously, knowingly, and in great detail, in Louis Chevalier’s The Assassination of Paris(1977). Summing up the toll of destruction, he notes:
Not one of these places, and so many others of which these are only a sample—theaters, streets, alleys, passageways, intersections, cafés, the quays of the Seine and those of the Saint-Martin canal […]—not one of these places, and other even more insignificant places, bewildering in their banality, failed to have its place in some great chapter of the history of literature, of performance, of art, of beauty. Not so much because beauty was created there as if it could have been created anywhere, but because it could have been created nowhere else, above all not in the places designated for its creation, where it is allegedly manufactured … no more than on the symbolic mountain where Hugo wants to make us think he sought inspiration, whereas he tells us plainly in Choses vues how he found his ideas by chance in the street.
At the other end of the political spectrum from Chevalier, something of a conservative, was Guy Debord, who ended up making common cause, having a hand in reprinting Chevalier’s book after its first publisher dumped it, and who expressed similar views in similar terms: “Paris, a city then so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there than to be rich somewhere else.” Since the early 1950s, the Lettrist International and its successor, the Situationist International, had been engaged in, among other things, reimagining the city. In 1955, for example, the Lettrist newsletter, Potlatch, featured a “Project for the Rational Beautification of the City of Paris,” which included such propositions as arranging, with ladders and footbridges, a promenade along the roofs of the city; putting switches on lampposts so that lighting decisions could be made by the public; redistributing works of art currently held in museums among local bars; and turning churches into either romantic ruins or haunted houses. By 1978, in the bitterly elegiac narration of his last film, Debord was moved to write, “We were, more than anybody, the people of change, in a changing time. The owners of society were obliged, in order to maintain their control, to desire a change that was the opposite of ours. We wanted to rebuild everything, and so did they, but in diametrically opposed ways. What they have done illustrates our project, in negative form.”
The Lettrists’ propositions were in the interest of laughter, of poetry, of ambiguity, of menace, of release, of intoxication. The plans that have been carried out are equally as radical, but they are in the interest of control and manipulation.
* * *
This book is not intended as a polemic, for which it’s much too late anyway. It might be something of a cenotaph—or catacomb, since it contains the skulls of vast numbers of people who lived and died in Paris but would be unlikely to find a home there nowadays. Instead, I mean it mostly as a reminder of what life was like in cities when they were as vivid and savage and uncontrollable as they were for many centuries, as expressed by Paris, the most sublime of the world’s great cities. Life was of course not all fun and games; the expression of every sort of behavior inevitably included a great deal that was unpleasant if not inimical and even murderous.
It was a city composed of myriad small undertakings, momentary decisions, fluctuations of enthusiasm, accommodations to fortune, which accrued and weathered and developed a patina, and were built on top of and next to and around in an endless process of layering. Even now, the layout of streets in some parts of town derives from ancient and forgotten circumstances—some course of water or farmer’s field or half-whimsical decision made in the Middle Ages or even earlier—and over time this curve and that angle, having no evident logical sense, developed, as it were, personalities. They colored the ideas and habits of those who lived on the street or used it every day, allowed for dark corners in which dark thoughts could be stored, and created off-kilter rhythms that prevented monotony. And then those subtle turns and nudges slowly and invisibly engendered all sorts of things: beauty, curiosity, ambition, skepticism, discontent.
Until not so long ago it was always possible to find a place in the city. There were cheap neighborhoods, and failing that there were places to roost, to hide away, places left unattended long enough to allow squatting and repurposing. Until not long ago, except in the most extreme circumstances, there existed the option, for those who wanted it badly enough, to thumb one’s nose at the directives of fashion and progress and authority and carve out an eccentric path of one’s own—this more so in Paris than anywhere else, because there willful eccentricity was respected if not necessarily understood. Perhaps that remains an option, but it has been driven indoors, out of the social realm, and is progressively more difficult to pursue as the controlling interests of society have become ever more adept at shape-shifting and assuming the semblance of forces once opposed to them. Nowadays “anarchy” means conformity, “rebellion” means compliance, “revolution” is the seasonal rotation of dry goods, and “freedom” is the exercise of license by the powerful. Perhaps under the circumstances it’s asking too much to continue to believe or at least hope that the stubborn and perverse human capacity for disobedience will prevail in the end, the way worms can undermine a wall, but for now that’s all we have.
Copyright © 2015 by Luc Sante
Map copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward