by Luc Sante
The crowds were not only huge, but thoroughly mixed: the bourgeoisie and even the aristocracy came out to see. By the 1820s the boulevard had become a full-service, year-round, seven-days-a-week entertainment district, the first of its kind in Paris. The principal theaters, many of them neoclassical affairs with colonnades, stretched principally along the north side of the boulevard in a line that today would reach the center of Place de la République. (Haussmann, who nursed a particular hatred of the boulevard and its culture, not only razed all the theaters in 1862, but, like the Romans plowing salt into the ruins of Carthage, realigned the boulevard so that it would not correspond to that part of its course.) Running east from Porte Saint-Martin were the Ambigu-Comique (the only theater with an illuminated sign), the Cirque Olympique (later the Cirque Impérial), the Folies-Dramatiques, the Gaîté, the Funambules, the Délassements-Comiques, the Petit-Lazari, the Cirque d’Hiver, and the Théâtre Déjazet.* Interspersed were cafés, restaurants, shops, and a wax museum, while a tree-lined allée running down the center of the boulevard sheltered wrestlers’ huts, acrobats’ tents, shacks containing assorted freaks and dime-museum attractions, magicians’ open-air stages, lottery booths, and small shopkeepers’ displays. In motion all along the boulevard were acrobats, stilt walkers, sword swallowers, clowns, strongmen, and stongwomen. Buses—horse-drawn omnibus hippomobiles, that is—began plying the route in 1828. By some unspoken general accord, the whole carnival stopped abruptly at Rue Charlot.
Street vendors on the Boulevard du Crime, 1830s
It was called the Boulevard du Crime (a name devised by the press) not because of its omnipresent pickpockets and purse snatchers but because of its theaters’ propensity for histrionic melodrama. In 1836, for example, you could take in The Horrors of Misery, The Wretched Woman, The Widow’s Three Daughters, The Orphans of Pont Notre-Dame, The Spot of Blood, The Tissue of Horrors. There were other sorts of fads as well; Georges Cain records a week in 1830 when almost every spectacle revolved around Napoléon: Bonaparte, Artillery Lieutenant; Napoléon in Berlin, or the Gray Frock Coat; The Schoolboy of Brienne, or the Little Corporal; and Military Glory in Seven Tableaux, among others. In the first six months of 1837, to choose a random year, there were 140 plays presented in Paris, three-quarters of them on the boulevard (the remainder were staged in the theaters of the upper classes, such as the venerable Comédie-Française and the Odéon). You can get a pretty accurate idea of what the place was like from Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s great 1945 film The Children of Paradise. The crowds, the chaos, the sideshows, and the rivalries are all there, as is the Théâtre des Funambules, given over to miming because it wasn’t certified to present spectacles involving speech. (Many restrictive laws concerning theaters had returned after the revolution.) And while Arletty’s character, Garance, is an invention, her four suitors are all based on real people: the actors Baptiste Deburau (played by Jean-Louis Barrault) and Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), the criminal Pierre-François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), and Édouard, Comte de Montray (Louis Salou), inspired by the Duc de Morny.
A map of Haussmann’s Place de la République laid over a map of what it displaced: the Boulevard du Temple, a.k.a. du Crime. From Georges Cain’s Promenades dans Paris, 1906
“Hoist that rag!” Illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Aristide Bruant’s Dans la rue, vol. 1, 1889
The balcony where the poorest members of the audience sat was indeed sometimes known as the paradis, although more often the poulailler, the “chicken coop.” Just like Bowery theater audiences impatiently yelling, “Hoist that rag!” the crowds here shouted “La toile!” While watching, people ate fried potatoes, sausages, cooked apples and pears, all bought from itinerant vendors outside, and kids enjoyed dropping food and paper remains from the balcony onto the heads of those below. Those did not include the upper classes or the intelligentsia, who preferred the loges. Nerval, Gautier, Charles Nodier, the songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the actresses Mademoiselle Mars and Mademoiselle Georges (of the Comédie-Française and the Odéon, respectively), and the mezzo-soprano La Malibran were all regulars at the Funambules. As the director Nestor Roqueplan told Victor Hugo, “Fashionable people go to the theater the way whores go to church.”
Actors at the Théâtre Français, 1840s
The theaters were exceedingly hot and airless in the summer, and generally underlit. That in itself was not a bad thing, since fewer lights meant fewer chances of fire. There were frequent fires, many of them caused by special effects (simulations of fireworks, lightning, explosions, volcanoes), and many involved fatalities. The Gaîté was once devastated when a stagehand threw lycopodium powder (a flash powder made from the dry spores of club moss plants) on a wood fire; nevertheless, it was completely rebuilt in just six months. There was active black market traffic in ticket stubs at the intermissions. The claque (those paid to applaud) was an actual, organized, hierarchical profession that insisted on experience, for all that employees tended to be recruited in local cafés from a social layer just a hair above the criminal underworld. In Balzac’s La Cousine Bette, Olympe Bijou, a teenage embroiderer newly settled in with the owner of a novelty shop, gets herself seduced by a claqueur. Her mother complains to her friend, the singer Josépha:
“He’s a loafer, like all the good-looking boys, a panderer of plays, of all things! He’s the idol of the Boulevard du Temple, where he works on all the new plays and eases the actresses onto the stage, as he says … He has relished liquor and billiards since birth. ‘That’s no profession!’ I told Olympe.”
“Alas, it is,” said Josépha.
Jean-Gaspard Deburau, known by his stage name, Baptiste, was born Jan Kaspar Dvořák in 1796 in Bohemia. He probably began as a stagehand at the Funambules, and performed there continuously from about 1819 until his death in 1846. Before he became a major star in the late 1820s, he was paid meagerly and lived in the theater’s cellar with his dog, Coquette, late of the Théâtre des Chiens Savants. He was known and universally loved for his character, Pierrot, based on the commedia dell’arte archetype that had gradually shed its roots since its seventeenth-century importation and acquired a Parisian personality. He devised the enduring costume that Barrault wears in the movie, consisting of an oversize white cotton collarless blouse and pants and a black skullcap. (There is a lovely series of photographs by Nadar of Deburau’s son Charles in that costume.) He played roles other than Pierrot, but like Chaplin’s Tramp, all his roles seem to have been infused with the same spirit. The character, however, was considerably coarser, more knowing, lecherous, vengeful, even malicious than the one attributed to him in posthumous legend, which is the one Barrault presents: tragic, long-suffering, moonstruck. That in turn seems to have been devised by his Romantic admirers, who saw what they wished to see, perhaps under the influence of Watteau’s circa 1719 painting of an incongruously sad Pierrot. Gautier, for example, described him as “pale, slender, in colorless clothes, always starved and beaten, the ancient slave, the proletarian, the pariah, the passive and bereft creature who gloomily but slyly takes in the orgies and excesses of his masters.” That Pierrot, who would have baffled and disgusted Deburau’s core following of street urchins, was the one who proved more useful for the salon, and he was perpetuated in such things as Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire.
A photograph by Nadar of Baptiste Deburau’s son Charles in his father’s trademark costume, 1854–55
The theater industry on the boulevard was a cold and unforgiving thing, run like a cartel. In a way that is reminiscent of much later Hollywood practice, plays tended to bear three or four writing credits, not counting the ghosts who presumably did the brunt of the actual work—you sense the hovering shadow of the executive producer. Actors fared just as badly as playwrights, locked into draconian contracts that paid them little and severely restricted their autonomy; there were numerous suicides in both camps. Frédérick Lemaître, who was probably the biggest star the boulevard e
ver produced, couldn’t pay his rent in 1825, when he was already a headliner. Lemaître, who had tried being a funambule (a wire walker) but kept falling off, found success in 1823, in a play called L’ Auberge des Adrets, in which he played a bandit named Robert Macaire. The three authors had intended Macaire as a tragic figure, but Lemaître, finding the language pompous and the melodrama lugubrious, decided to play it for laughs, enlisting the complicity of the actor in the role of Macaire’s sidekick, Bertrand. His decision was an immediate and resounding success, and it provided Lemaître with a part he would play for decades (as it did others; there were periods when the boulevard featured three or four Robert Macaire vehicles simultaneously). He kept refining the character, for example basing his wardrobe on that of a figure he spotted on the boulevard one day, a tramp who seemed to imagine himself a dandy. Robert Macaire came to embody his era, in all its cynicism, vanity, and greed—Daumier devoted more than a hundred lithographs to the figure, imagining him in almost every social role—and he was widely deplored by moralists upset at the notion of laughable robberies and clownish murders. He wasn’t much liked by the authorities, either; the police interrupted one performance in which Macaire, disguised as a ragpicker, reached into his sack and pulled out the royal crown. Even death couldn’t stop him: he stole the keys to heaven from Saint Peter and managed to elude the devil and corrupt all the angels.
Robert Macaire as a business manager. Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from Le Charivari, 1836
Tabarin and company. Illustration by Célestin Nanteuil, 1840s
Street theater had been around since the dawn of time, probably, most of it unrecorded until the seventeenth century, when Antoine Girard created his character Tabarin, with his brother Philippe playing his crony, Mondor. They were charlatans, which means that they were vendors of quack medicine, who put on a show to attract customers—that is, they were in spirit very much like the presenters of medicine shows who plied the rural United States until sometime around World War II (and their characters sound like the ancestors of Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones in minstrelsy). They were not the first to engage in this sort of entertainment, but somehow they were leagues ahead of the competition. People of all classes flocked to their makeshift stage on Place Dauphine, where they performed backed by a hurdy-gurdy and viols; Molière and La Fontaine both acknowledged Tabarin’s influence. He seems to have influenced the Punch and Judy puppet plays as well, and the name Tabarin became synonymous with a kind of street performance that is longer on wits than on production values. He was, then, the patron saint of all the shows that lined the boulevard and its central allée.
A rope dancer and a balancing pole. Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Fables de Florian, 1842
There were the clowns, who had formerly worked the fairs and who blended physical comedy with dense and rapid wordplay: Bobêche, Galimafré, Gringalet, Faribole. There were the parades, which were essentially a series of sketches worked out on a bare stage with just a couple of actors, comic and straight man, say, or city mouse and country mouse. There were diverse incarnations of the commedia dell’arte figures: Arlequin, Paillasse (Pagliacci), Polichinelle (Pulcinella), and there was the puppet Guignol, a purely French creation (circa 1796 in Lyon), who nevertheless drew from the same well. There were the funambulists, who worked on a wire, and the acrobates, who worked on a rope. Petit-Diable danced on the rope with eggs attached to his shoes, not breaking any; le beau Dupuis specialized in languorous, dreamlike dances that made audiences forget he was on a rope at all. Allegedly some grande dame became so passionate about Dupuis that she murdered him in a fit of jealousy; the matter was then suppressed.
A saltimbanque. Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Un autre monde, 1844
Nerval was particularly impressed by the girl who lifted a weight (supposedly sixty pounds) with her hair. The “fireproof Spaniard” took a bath in boiling oil. The jeune fille électrique was a Bretonne who emitted something she called an “influx,” which could move furniture from a distance. One man would break huge rocks set on the belly of his female partner, who lay on a thin mattress on an outdoor stage. There was the eight-hundred-pound woman, the living skeleton, the magician who would grind up a watch with a mortar and pestle and then miraculously reconstitute it. Then there were the attractions shrouded by canvas walls—“Approchez, approchez,” shouted the barkers—the spider who played the trumpet, the offspring of a hare and a carp. One barker would announce, “Here you can see what God himself cannot.” Once inside, the marks would find themselves alone with a mirror. “Now you see what God in his majesty cannot see,” the pitch would continue, “your equal. God, who is singular and unique, will never see his equal.” And then there were “secret museums,” although a law of 1841 cracked down on those, prohibiting public exhibitions of “anatomical representations or images of disease.” Still, in 1846, Victor Hugo went to see a tableau vivant: an English troupe, posed in various attitudes on a wooden disk that slowly revolved, clad in pink body stockings that “covered them from the feet to the neck and were so fine and transparent that you could see not only their toes, their navels, and their nipples, but even their veins and the color of the least blemish on all parts of their bodies. Below the waist, the fabric thickened and you could distinguish nothing but shapes … They were poor girls from London. They all had dirty fingernails.”
The anarchic spirit of the boulevard spread to carnival, which had perhaps always been uproarious but now became truly unbridled. Carnival lasted from the Feast of Saint Martin on November 11 until Ash Wednesday, which can fall anywhere from early February to early March, and its end, Mardi Gras, was the occasion for balls and parties all over the city. Nowhere was the celebration more vigorous than at the Courtille, an agglomeration of guinguettes and other places of amusement that lay just outside the Belleville gate, which was roughly on the present site of the Belleville Métro station. In 1822 a certain Cirque Moderne, the members of which had been roistering in the Courtille, decided to parade into the city on Ash Wednesday at daybreak, just when the guinguettes were closing. A huge drunken crowd spontaneously joined the parade, and more and more people thickened the flow as it made its way down to the Hôtel de Ville. Thus was created an instant tradition, the Descente de la Courtille, which lasted three or four decades and has remained proverbial even now.
Carnival, 1840s
The furor was intense, and cut across the classes. A liter of wine cost ten sous in the guinguettes then (almost nothing), so the crowd was fueled. The rich would compete with one another in bestowing champagne and oysters; the hero of this potlatch was an English peer named Lord Seymour, known to the crowd as Milord Arsouille (Lord Hoodlum), who cuts an ambiguous figure in the literature, more of a provocateur than a benefactor. People threw candy, eggs, eggshells filled with flour, entire bags of flour, cooked apples, raw fruits and vegetables. They yelled insults—at least one manual was published giving instructions on how to insult others without provoking violence. Imagine the crush, the roar, the sudden surges, the invisible eruptions that rippled the crowd from blocks away, the red-faced giddiness always on the verge of becoming something else, the odors. It couldn’t last forever, of course—it would eventually have led to riot.
The Descente de la Courtille, 1840s
The Fleshy Ox, circa 1910
A fishing float, Mi-Carême parade, 1905
Before the century was out, carnival had been channeled into ritual and commerce. Some of the ritual was ancient, such as the procession of the Boeuf Gras (the Fleshy Ox) on the Sunday preceding Ash Wednesday, which was first recorded in the thirteenth century and is probably much older. (After long lapses in the twentieth century, it was revived in 1998.) The Mi-Carême, meanwhile, had been reserved for the washerwomen since at least the eighteenth century, a day when every lavoir would elect a queen and all the employees would parade, merrily borrowing the finest accoutrements that had been left with them for cleaning. In 1891 the city intervened; a committee named a Queen o
f Queens, who was issued a crown, a robe, and a flower-bedecked carriage in which to ply the streets. In 1898 the city’s markets annexed the ceremony, cutting out the washerwomen, and within a few years the title came with sponsorships and endorsements. Until the First World War the queens looked distinctly like laboring women, strong and stout; from 1919 on they looked increasingly like beauty contestants. (The practice died out after 1939, but it, too, has recently been revived.)
Carnival parades, with their ever more extravagant floats and attractions, no longer invited participation; crowds were restricted to ogling from the sidewalk and, of course, spending their money. In carnival season the streets and squares were clogged with booths selling food and drink, games of chance, and all sorts of useless merchandise that caught the drunken eye. Carco gauged the temperature in 1914: