by Luc Sante
The Dadas at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, 1921
Contemplating the Buttes-Chaumont, Aragon writes, “Night in our cities no longer resembles the racket of dogs of the Latin twilight, nor the bat of the Middle Ages, nor that image of sorrows which is the night of the Renaissance. It’s an immense monster made of sheet metal, pierced by a thousand eyes.” The noctambule, or nightwalker, is a subset of the category of flâneurs. Restif, the speleologist of a city plunged in darkness, was the undisputed pioneer. Chance encounters are dramatic in his accounts; people emerge from the night as from out of a dense fog. Restif swims from rock to rock, searching for humans. After him, curiously, night ceases to be a subject of inquiry for a very long time, unless it is the night in the Mysteries of Paris or, for that matter, the Chants de Maldoror, a vast trench of dangers. Privat is out in the night, for example, but for him it seems to be a landscape mostly of bars, while the streets are seldom evoked, and so it is for most of his successors. Out of nowhere, the earliest night photographs appear in the late 1880s—although they were unknown until fairly recently—the work of Gabriel Loppé (1825–1913), a genre painter of mountain scenes who left behind more canvases than biographical details. He is mostly famous for his photographs of the Eiffel Tower struck by lightning, made around 1905, but his earlier pictures are like photographs of celestial bodies taken with a telescope: very long exposures that focus on commercial lighting and the objects caught or suggested relative to its glow. An illuminated Morris column sets trees in relief; the department store Belle Jardinière sets the whole Right Bank ablaze—and you remember that those are gas lamps—or the same store is seen from the opposite bank, its lights silhouetting the statue of Henri IV on the Vert-Galant.
The Mazda billboard on the boulevard, from Nadja, by André Breton, 1928
That last picture in particular makes it impossible not to think of Brassaï, who pursued similar effects in the age of electric lighting forty or more years later. The milky, fogbound glow of lights in a park sketches the outline of Marshal Michel Ney, brandishing his saber at a derisory neon HOTEL. Brassaï owned the night—to some extent he still does—and he rang all its changes. His nocturnal interiors of bars, dance halls, and whorehouses are best known; he also made documentary pictures of prostitutes on the beat and sewer workers and road repair crews, staged photos of lovers and criminals in action, and created a great variety of streetscapes that have ever since colored everyone’s expectations of the Paris night: parks, alleys, industrial sites, canals, honky-tonk streets full of signs, and his magnificent views of the Tour Saint-Jacques, a trembling Gothic skyscraper. Brassaï is so definitive that his pictures have been absorbed into the sort of tourist nostalgia imagery that precludes thought or experience—you could once buy, and perhaps still can, poster-size reproductions of his photo of car lights in the fog (circa 1934) with tiny embedded piezoelectric bulbs, a kitsch effect that actually succeeds in making the scene even more oneiric. That Brassaï profoundly understood the city game—much better than his contemporaries; his friends the Surrealists look even more like dilettantes and poetasters in comparison—is demonstrated by the absolute seamlessness of his transitions between fact and fiction. He knows, that is, that threat and corruption are actual and at the same time playacting, that the most daunting dark alley is equally a stage set, and that the flesh trade routinely blurs the line between passion and contempt.
A view of the statue of Henri IV on the Vert-Galant, with the Belle Jardinière department store behind it. Photograph by Gabriel Loppé, circa 1889
The time of Brassaï’s world ran from the années folles (the 1920s) through the Popular Front, and they blend together democratically in his pictures: bals-musette and drag balls and Folies Bergère and opium dens and streetwalkers and vegetable displays at Les Halles all one continuous tableau. The curtain came down on that world in 1940. After the war came something else. The first decade after the Liberation distilled Paris. People were lean; rations and privations were still in place; nobody had any money except a few black marketeers who rode out the purges. People made a meager living, in driblets, begging, bartering, stealing, doing odd jobs, collecting paper—of which there was a shortage for years—or metal or rags, selling each other trash at the flea markets. It was a bit like the Siege of eighty years earlier, in that the only staple in bottomless supply was wine. The frozen past came out of the attics and into the street. Those were the last years of bicycles vastly outnumbering cars, of significant numbers of horse-drawn vehicles, of numerous houseboats on the Seine, of coal-and-wine shops, of gypsy encampments in the Zone, of nearly rural pockets within the city—of styles of life that were very little removed from the time of François Villon. It was a time of historical regurgitation, when all the ghosts came out maybe for a last dance.
“Time works for those who place themselves outside of time. No one can be of Paris, can know that city, who has not made the acquaintance of its ghosts,” wrote Jacques Yonnet, a writer and artist who, beginning in the Occupation, accumulated encounters with the uncanny in the Maubert–Mouffetard corridor. His sole book is Rue des Maléfices (1954); the title refers to a map of the neighborhood drawn up around 1600 by students of the Irish College at the Sorbonne, in which Rue Zacharie (now Rue Xavier-Privas) is identified in English as “Witchcraft Street.” The narrative alternates between accounts of activities in wartime (forging papers; concealing Jews, Roma, and American paratroopers) and after (making ends meet, persuading Fréhel to perform one last time), with tales of curses, disappearances, revenants, and the inevitability of Fate with a capital F. What makes it so disquieting is how deeply the uncanny is embedded in the quotidian, in the meagerness of rations and the toll of drink and routine, not to mention that scenes and characters are unequivocally documented in photographs by Doisneau. Its historical and personal specificity underscores the idea that time is fluid, that the same characters have always been around, that the Middle Ages never ceased but merely moved to a back court.
Jean-Paul Clébert hung around that same orbit for a while. Born to an apparently indifferent bourgeois family—he changed his name very early, and never said what it had been—Clébert dropped out of Jesuit boarding school at sixteen and joined the Resistance. After the war and some peregrinations in Asia, he came back to Paris and spent a few years living nowhere and everywhere. He got a job, one of those peculiarly French bureaucratic undertakings, that involved measuring the area of seemingly random apartments all over the city. It was thus that he met—besides bored housewives who answered the door in négligées—a man who lived in his vestibule and raised snails in his rooms, an artist whose studio was filled with hundreds of birds at large, a man whose mania for efficiency had led him to connect his doorbell to the flushing mechanism of his toilet, not to mention the people whose collections had taken over the lion’s share of their lodgings and those who earned a respectable living from mail-order fraud.
A press item on Jean-Paul Clébert upon the publication of Paris insolite, 1952
He went on from there to live the life of a wide-ranging clochard, earning small coin by hawking L’Intran or unpacking at Les Halles or selling tourists artfully packaged “filthy postcards” that would turn out to be views of marble nudes at the Louvre. Along the way he inventoried every possible way to live for no money in the open Paris of that time: sleeping in warm weather in the Buttes-Chaumont or vacant lots or construction sites or behind the wine casks at Bercy or in nooks along the Petite-Ceinture railway, abandoned since 1934. In cold weather the problem was tougher but not irresolvable; there were various shacks and sheds in industrial parts of the city, ragpickers’ storerooms, the rescuers’ cabins (secours aux noyés) along the Seine, or, for that matter, a number of ancient but officially uninhabitable houses along Rue Xavier-Privas that had been turned into clandestine dormitories for clochards. Or, with a bit of extra contrivance, there were the houses surrounding Les Halles, “the whole neighborhood as bottomless as a vast perforated basket, each house c
oncealing in its flanks a mysterious labyrinth leading who knows where, toward underground passages, sewers, catacombs, no storefront an ordinary cul-de-sac but every one an antechamber…” Clébert’s book Paris insolite (1952; “unexpected” or “uncanny” or “fantastic” or “bizarre” Paris—insolite is a very hard word to translate adequately) is a road novel, for all that it is entirely contained within the city limits, but then, “It takes longer to traverse Paris than to cross a département.” It is also, for that matter, a road novel in which the only mode of transport is shoe leather. Weirdly, its long, jangling, cascading sentences sound very much like spontaneous bop prosody, although it was written years before Jack Kerouac found his own voice. It is also a memorial to a city that even sixty-plus years ago was disappearing quickly.
What an awakening, silent but alive, happens when this city—its streets, houses, sidewalks, lampposts, trees, urinals—is no longer covered like a skin, like a crust, by that grublike swarm of humans rushing to the job machine, but at night comes back to life, swims back to the surface, washes off its filth, stands back on its feet, scratches itself, sings to break the silence, makes light to rend the darkness. It stretches, relaxes, spreads itself out before me, the solitary walker, the unknown strider, stranding me among its scattered limbs, a vast labyrinth in which I rapturously lose myself, turning every corner, leaving every boulevard at the first left, catching up with the stream once again or passing it by, hopping on one foot, whistling with a butt in the corner of my mouth.
Clébert sometimes hung out with Yonnet, Giraud, and Doisneau at Chez Fraysse on Rue de Seine, and sometimes he wandered a couple of blocks over to Rue du Four, to Chez Moineau, where a younger and even more motley crowd gathered. It’s where you would find, for example, the beautiful and mysterious Vali Myers, an artist and dancer from Australia; an enormous guy called Fred (Auguste Hommel, actually) and his smaller friend Jean-Michel Mension, both of whose clothes were sometimes covered with slogans; Jean-Claude Guilbert, who appears in Paris insolite as “the Shepherd” and who went on to act in Robert Bresson’s Mouchette and Au hasard Balthazar; Joël Berlé, an accomplished thief who ended up a soldier of fortune in the Katanga in the mid-1960s—they and their friends can be seen in pictures by the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken, whose Love on the Left Bank (1956) stitches them into a chronicle that is somewhat fictionalized, although you can’t call it romanticized, since their actual daily life stood at the very limit of romance. An emblematic image is the one of Mension, head down on a café table, next to a couple of hundred-franc notes crumpled at the bottom of a note that reads: “To go make love I seek 450 francs. All donations accepted. Don’t wake me.” They drank, fucked, begged, stole, smoked hash and kif, occasionally danced, ate and slept where and when they could; some of them also made art of some kind. Also at Chez Moineau, although much more shy of the camera, were Patrick Straram, Ivan Chtcheglov, Jean-Louis Brau, Serge Berna, Michèle Bernstein, Mohamed Dahou, Jacques Fillon, Gil J. Wolman, and Guy Debord—the members of the Lettrist International.
An illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Barabbas, by Lucien Descaves, 1914
Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, 1956.
They were “Lettrists” because they had been briefly involved with Isidore Isou, deranged and ambitious, who wanted to replicate the success of fellow Romanian Tristan Tzara with Dada, in his case, breaking poetry down to unanchored lexemes and vocables; “international” because of Dahou, who was Algerian. They lived the same way as the other Moineau regulars, but Debord devoted his enormous intellectual energy to finding a way to convert their daily existence into a program for the transformation of life, or at least the beginnings of one. He borrowed from Surrealism and Marxism, but that life of serious dissipation, seriously intended and seriously pursued, which combined pleasure, poverty, chance, sex, disputation, wandering, and the self-conscious theater of youth, stood at the core of his work for the next forty years. As Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists, he wanted “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.”
“If you think you are a genius, or merely possess a superior intelligence, get in touch with the Lettrist International.” Circa 1955
Paris (as setting and landscape and self-renewing source) was central, and its proper employment an exemplary act. Hence his theory of the drift (dérive), which was “a technique of forward movement through a variety of ambiances … One or several persons, giving themselves over to the drift for a period of variable length, dispense with the usual reasons for moving about, and with their relationships, jobs, and leisure activities, in order to let themselves follow the pull of the landscape and the encounters that come from it.” Debord gave credit for the germ of the theory to Thomas De Quincey’s descriptions of his rambles in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, with his boasts of having discovered terrae incognitae and his search for an elusive “northwest passage” homeward when he’d gone too far afield. But a much more obvious source, in every way, was Clébert’s book, just as that book was surely also the source of the Lettrists’ fascination with the generally obscure and unvisited Rue Sauvage. Clébert had mapped the territory, and his drifts beggared theirs. The only two accounts of Lettrist drifts, which appear in the November 1956 issue of the Belgian Surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues, are pretty small beer. The first takes place over the course of a week and does not, until the very end, stray from one Algerian bar on Rue Xavier-Privas, while the other sees Debord and Wolman tacking resolutely north-northeast from Rue des Jardins-Paul up to the town of Denis—like the Communards, the Lettrists dispensed with canonical titles—pausing briefly to admire Ledoux’s rotunda on Place de Stalingrad and establish it as a psychogeographic “turntable.” Perhaps closer to the point is Jacques Fillon’s “Rational Description of Paris,” in the December 1955 issue of the same journal:
The center of Paris is the region of the Contrescarpe, oval in shape, which can be circumambulated in about three hours. Its northern part consists of the Montagne-Geneviève; the terrain falls in a gentle slope toward the south. The inhabitants are very poor, and generally of North African origin. There can be met emissaries of various little-known powers.
An hour’s walk toward the south brings one to the Butte-aux-Cailles, of mild and temperate climate. The inhabitants are very poor, but the layout of the streets has a labyrinthine sumptuousness.
And so on. Those stated distances are, of course, notional; like Clébert’s description of Paris as bigger than a province, they are a measure of exploratory psychogeographic time rather than of pedestrian efficiency.
Sheet music for “À la dérive,” by Germaine Lix, 1927
In 1958, Debord recast the group as the Situationist International, by which time only he and Bernstein, who were married, as well as Dahou (briefly), remained of the original grouping. Debord, who enjoyed playing commissar, had excluded everyone else, including Ivan Chtcheglov, the brilliant if wayward son of an exiled Ukrainian family, tossed for “mythomania, interpretative delirium, and lack of revolutionary consciousness.” Nevertheless, in the first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste, Debord published a text Chtcheglov had written in 1953, “Formula for a New City,” under the nom de guerre Gilles Ivain.
All cities are geological; you can’t go three steps without meeting ghosts fortified with the aura of their legends. We move through a closed landscape where the landmarks draw us unceasingly toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives allow us to catch glimpses of original spatial concepts, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical sites of folk tales or surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, small forgotten bars, mammoth caves, casino mirrors.
Chtcheglov proposes the construction of a kind of ultra-Paris. It is a utopia, sure enough—he wastes some time on a very Jetsons conception of the ideal house: rotating, mounted on rails, with a glass ceiling—but when he gets to the nub of what he wants, it turns out to be a dirty utopia. Its
primary architectural inspiration will be the paintings of de Chirico—those shifting angles, those vanishing perspectives—and more important, “the wards of this city could correspond to the various sensations encountered by chance in the modern city.” These will include neighborhoods designated as Bizarre, Happy (residential), Noble and Tragic (“for well-behaved children”), Historic (museums and schools), Useful (hospitals and equipment storage), and Sinister. This latter “would not need to contain real dangers … It would have a complicated entry, be hideously decorated (piercing whistles, alarm bells, intermittent sirens with an irregular cadence, monstrous sculptures…) and both poorly lighted at night and violently lit during the day through the extreme use of reflection … Children and adults alike would learn by exploring the Sinister ward not to fear the painful occurrences of life, but to be amused by them.” Naturally, “the principal occupation of the citizenry would be a CONTINUOUS DRIFT.” It would be a city of play, comparable to Las Vegas and Monte Carlo in its contrast with a normal city, but unlike them it would not be founded upon the sadly banal institution of the skin game.