by Luc Sante
A marker for Rue Neuve-[Sainte]-Geneviève (now Rue Tournefort), with the Sainte gouged out during the revolution
Ivan Chtcheglov
But then: “Now it’s finished. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built.” A year after the publication of the “Formula,” Chtcheglov suffered a mental and emotional breakdown; he remained institutionalized until his death in 1998. The Situationist project was the last hand in the Paris game, and it coincided brutally with the end game played by money and power. In the second issue of their journal, Abdelhafid Khatib’s “Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles” now appears drenched in morbid irony. “The Situationists, thanks to their current methods and to anticipated developments of those methods, feel themselves capable not only of changing the urban milieu, but of changing it almost at will,” he wrote on the cusp of 1959, little more than a year before the fate of Les Halles was decided by fiat in the Palais de l’Élysée. Two years and four issues later, Raoul Vaneigem could see what was coming:
The industrialization of private life: “Run your life like a business”—that will be the new slogan … It seems that the working class no longer exists. Large numbers of former proletarians now have access to the comforts once reserved for a small elite—you know the tune. But isn’t it rather that an increasing amount of comfort usurps their needs and creates an itch for consumer demands?
The fever dream of May ’68 dissipated quickly; the future had by then already been set. Revolution may have existed in a million minds, perhaps well-furnished minds equipped with erudite slogans, perhaps with appendant hands clutching paving stones or Molotov cocktails, but that was not enough. A nineteenth-century insurrection cut no ice with the new consumers, including those who still held Communist Party cards. Soon enough, many of the revolutionaries changed teams. Being a former soixante-huitard carried a worldly cachet not unlike claiming to have been in the Resistance; boards of directors are lousy with them.
Bulle Ogier and Pascale Ogier in Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord, 1981
The Paris game was given a final representation in Jacques Rivette’s film Le Pont du Nord (1981). Marie (Bulle Ogier) has just gotten out of prison, where she has been incarcerated for unspecified radical activities, and as a consequence she is profoundly claustrophobic, unable to enter a shop or even a phone booth. She meets Baptiste (Pascale Ogier, her daughter in real life), young, brave, and foolhardy, who rides around the city on her motor scooter, thinking of herself as an urban warrior, and who appoints herself Marie’s protector. They encounter Marie’s shifty ex-boyfriend Julien (Pierre Clémenti) and nab his briefcase. All it contains are newspaper clippings and a map of Paris overlaid with a spiral that has been cut up into segments—a labyrinth that suggests but doesn’t correspond to the spiral of the arrondissements. It is in fact the Jeu de l’Oie, an ancient game controlled by dice, the object of which is to move from the periphery to the center (square 63) while avoiding the traps set along the way. They decide to play the city, following the indications on the map. But as they repeatedly encounter traps, they never get beyond the periphery. At every turn there are construction cranes that loom like monsters. Even as they are unable to get anywhere near the center, the outer edges are being eaten away. The movie trails off, but the point has been made.
The Jeu de l’Oie in Le Pont du Nord
The game may not be over, but its rules have irrevocably changed. The small has been consumed by the big, the poor have been evicted by the rich, the drifters are behind glass in museums. Everything that was once directly lived has moved away into representation. If the game is ever to resume, it will have to take on hitherto unimagined forms. It will have much larger walls to undermine, will be able to thrive only in the cracks that form in the ordered surfaces of the future. It is to be hoped, of course, that the surface is shattered by buffoonery and overreaching rather than by war or disease, but there can be no guarantee. It may be that whatever escape routes the future offers will be shadowed by imminent extinction. Life, in any case, will flourish under threat. Utopias last five minutes, to the extent that they happen at all. There will never be a time when the wish for security does not lead to unconditional surrender. The history of Paris teaches us that beauty is a by-product of danger, that liberty is at best a consequence of neglect, that wisdom is entwined with decay. Any Paris of the future that is neither a frozen artifact nor an inhabited holding company will perforce involve fear, dirt, sloth, ruin, and accident. It will entail the continual experience of uncertainty, because the only certainty is death.
Notes
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1. Capital
“Communists, get your bags”: Vladimir Jankélévitch, Les Temps Modernes, June 1948, cited in Eric Hazan, L’invention de Paris (Éditions du Seuil, 2002), p. 303.
“Tumbledown hovels sheltering”: Georges Cain, Nouvelles promenades dans Paris (Flammarion, 1908), p. 27.
“A shoelace vendor”: Eugène Dabit, Faubourgs de Paris (Gallimard, 1933), p. 157.
“The noise of the bars”: Paul Verlaine, La bonne chanson (Alphonse Lemerre, 1869–70).
“I walked as far as the Pacra”: La rue (1930), in Romans, ed. Jean-Jacques Bedu and Gilles Freyssinet (Robert Laffont, 2004), pp. 776, 815.
“a strange city”: Émile Zola, Le ventre de Paris, in Les Rougon-Macquart (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1963), vol. 1, p. 621.
“river of greenery”: Ibid., p. 627.
“The splendid horses of Paris”: From Sherwood Anderson, Paris Notebook, 1921, excerpted in Adam Gopnik, ed., Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology (New York: Library of America, 2004), pp. 257–58.
“Civilization has acted here”: Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote (Les Éditions de Paris, 1984 [1854]), p. 186.
“an ardent plebeian capital”: Victor Serge, Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire (Éditions du Seuil, 1951), p. 29.
“high citadel of l’esprit parisien”: Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), p. 146.
“This kingdom, one of the richest”: Léon-Paul Fargue, Le piéton de Paris (Gallimard, 1993 [1939]), p. 20.
“As a result of the transformation”: Edmond Texier, De la décentralisation des Halles (1850), cited in T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 33.
“located between Faubourg Saint-Antoine”: Victor Hugo, Les misérables (Pléiade, 1951), p. 468.
“I understand very well”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote, p. 202.
“My Paris, where I was born”: Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol. 1: 1851–1861 (Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1891), p. 346.
“The ruins of the bourgeoisie”: Honoré de Balzac, Le diable à Paris: Paris et les Parisiens (1845), cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 87.
“our time is hard”: Dabit, Faubourgs de Paris, p. 47.
“Not one of these places”: Louis Chevalier, L’assassinat de Paris (Éditions Ivréa, 1997 [1977]), pp. 300–301.
“Paris, a city then so beautiful”: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, in Guy Debord, Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, 1952–1978 (Gallimard, 1994), p. 222.
“We were, more than anybody”: Ibid., pp. 278–79.
2. Ghosts
Paris contains some 3,195: Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris (Éditions de Minuit, 1963).
“Couldn’t an exciting film”: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 83.
“The crowd is his domain”: Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), p. 889.
“into the streets”: Cobb, Paris an
d Elsewhere, p. 187.
“to dawdle, to stop”: Ibid., pp. 142–43.
“Each of those casements”: G. Lenotre, Paris et ses fantômes (Grasset, 1933), p. 8.
“the most confounding”: Potlatch, no. 7, August 3, 1954 (Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1984).
“inclines toward atheism”: Guy Debord, “Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine,” in Les Lèvres Nues 6 (Brussels, September 1955): 11 (Plasma, 1978).
“There is always a certain”: Taxil Delort, in Les rues de Paris, ed. Louis Lurine (G. Kugelmann, 1844), vol. 1, p. 69.
“a particularly criminal district”: Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Hachette, 1984 [1976]), pp. 503–504.
For that matter, excavations: Jean-Louis Brau, in Guide de Paris mystérieux, ed. François Caradec and Jean-Robert Masson (Tchou, 1976), pp. 38–39.
“He bore to the right”: Francis Carco, Jésus-la-Caille (1914), in Romans (Robert Laffont, 2004) pp. 61–62.
3. Pantruche
“When I asked him”: A. J. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1944), p. 37.
These include Grenelle: Éric Hazan, L’invention de Paris (Éditions du Seuil, 2002), passim.
“you turn a corner”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote, p. 15.
“the Parisian of Faubourg Saint-Antoine”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris inconnu (Adolphe Delahaye, 1875), p. 71.
“the city is only apparently homogeneous”: Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 88.
“almost all the courtyards”: Victor Fournel, Paris nouveau et Paris futur (1868), quoted in ibid., p. 146.
“A kind of solidarity developed”: Quoted by Chevalier, Classes, p. 342.
“a sewer and the emptying point”: Quoted by Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 98.
“If from the heights”: Henri Lecouturier, Paris incompatible avec la République (1848), quoted by Chevalier, Classes, p. 279.
“There is no such thing as”: Ibid., p. 602.
“Paris belongs to France”: Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Mémoires (Victor-Havard, 1890), vol. 2, p. 177.
“Wretched houses, with scarcely”: Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris, anonymous nineteenth-century translation (London: Stanley Paul and Co., n.d.), p. 9.
“these dark, muddy, pestilential streets”: Paul L. Jacob, in Rues de Paris, vol. 1, p. 142.
“hideous, filthy, squalid misery”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote, p. 241.
“the widest part of which”: Honoré de Balzac, Une double famille, in La comédie humaine (Pléiade, 1951), vol. 1, pp. 925–26.
Not far away, around: Recollected by Victorien Sardou, in Georges Cain, Nouvelles promenades dans Paris (Flammarion, 1908), pp. 192–97.
“Bismarck finished what”: Victor Hugo, Actes et paroles: Avant l’exil, 1841–1851 (Michel Lévy, 1875), p. x.
“women in camisoles”: Georges Cain, Promenades dans Paris (Flammarion, 1907), p. 222.
“a strange spiderweb”: Ibid., pp. 268–70.
“After climbing a rotting”: Ibid., pp. 84–86.
At the start of the eighteenth: As noticed by Hazan, L’invention de Paris, p. 92.
“what historical interest”: Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere, p. 167.
“Listen: every seven years”: Jacques Yonnet, Rue des Maléfices [originally published as Enchantements sur Paris, 1954] (Phébus, 1987), p. 98.
“whenever the municipal hammer”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris inconnu, p. 62.
“The saloons of the Maubert”: Jean-Paul Clébert, Paris insolite (Denoël, 1952), pp. 184–85.
“Most of the traffic”: Elliot Paul, The Last Time I Saw Paris (New York: Random House, 1942), p. 14.
4. Zone
“Forty years ago”: Hugo, Les misérables, p. 445.
“expedient of philanthropists”: Ibid., p. 449.
“Some twenty-five hundred cubic feet”: Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, Les chantiers d’équarrissage de la ville de Paris (1832), quoted by Chevalier, Classes, p. 363.
“in such numbers”: Chevalier, Classes, p. 364.
It was documented more by painters: For these examples I am indebted to T. J. Clark, in his The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
The titular heroine: Quoted in Jean Bedel, Les puces ont cent ans (no imprint, 1985), p. 30.
“surrounded by an attentive audience”: André Warnod, Les “fortifs”: Promenades sur les anciennes fortifications et la zone (Éditions de l’Épi, 1927), unpaginated.
“I took a path that zigzagged”: Blaise Cendrars, L’homme foudroyé (Denoël/Folio, 1973 [1945]), pp. 201–202.
“fugitive personalities whose eyes”: In Carco, Romans, pp. 215, 220.
“a filthy ribbon of grass”: Clébert, Paris insolite, p. 50.
Its fame endured: A portion of the film, detailing the work cycle of the ragpickers, can be viewed at http://www.mheu.org/en/ragpickers/ragpickers-territory.aspx.
“Gone are the fortifications”: G. Van Parys and M. Vaucaire, “La chanson des fortifs.” Recorded by Fréhel. Columbia DF 2434, 1938.
“She walked toward”: Didier Daeninckx, Meurtres pour mémoire (Gallimard/Folio, 1988 [1984]), p. 24.
“now an entire population aspires”: Jean Follain, Paris (Phébus, 1978 [1935]), p. 93.
“a circle of buildings”: Dabit, Faubourgs de Paris, p. 98.
“Everything is a sham”: In Robert Doisneau, La banlieue de Paris (Denoël, 1983 [1949]), p. 8.
“The landscape being generally”: The full text of the narration is available (in French) at http://www.passant-ordinaire.com/revue/44-522.asp.
5. La Canaille
“One of the most distressing”: Honoré de Balzac, La fille aux yeux d’or (Pléiade, 1952), vol. 5, p. 255.
“A swarm of ordinary folk”: In Doisneau, La banlieue de Paris, pp. 17–18.
“… all those carved stones”: Ibid., p. 18.
Louis Chevalier insisted: Louis Chevalier, Les Parisiens (Hachette, 1967), passim.
“When it comes to the people”: Hugo, Les misérables, p. 608.
“For all the book’s shortcomings: Chevalier, Classes, p. 41.
Readers thought that Rodolphe: Ibid., pp. 656–57.
“Popular culture provided”: Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, p. 205.
“It is above all collectivity”: Ibid., p. 236.
“the first Auvergnat”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote, p. 18.
“the poorest creatures”: Anon., Le journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (1427), quoted in Jean-Paul Clébert, The Gypsies (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967 [1961]), p. 61.
“Among the workers”: Maurice and Léon Bonneff, La vie tragique des travailleurs (Études et Documentation Internationales, 1984 [1908]), p. 249.
“He had been completely”: In Georges Darien, Voleurs! (Omnibus, 2005), p. 934.
By the late 1890s: Bruno Fuligni, ed., Dans les archives secrètes de la police (L’Iconoclaste, 2009), p. 240.
“lice, plague, and typhus”: André Kaspi and Antoine Marès, eds., Le Paris des étrangers (Imprimerie Nationale, 1989), p. 29.
“shot by firing squad”: Fuligni, ed., Dans les archives, p. 250.
“The undesirables must be”: Kaspi and Marès, eds., Le Paris des étrangers, p. 29.
“200,000 Algerians”: Jan Brusse, Nights in Paris (London: André Deutsch, 1958 [1954]), pp. 57–58.
“France is the only country”: Kaspi and Marès, eds., Le Paris des étrangers, p. 162.
Meanwhile, at that very same: Ibid., p. 158.
“There is deep anger”: Anderson, Paris Notebook, p. 261.
“One of the gentlemen”: Cited in Louis Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Payot, 1995 [1980]), p. 323.
A census in 1889: Kaspi and Marès, eds., Le Paris des étrangers, p. 14.
“He turned the corner”: Carco, Romans, p. 653.
6. Archipelago
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“a long series of walls”: Lucien Descaves, Philémon vieux de la vieille (Ollendorff, 1913), pp. 1–2.
“Not only did the murder rate”: In Chevalier, Classes, p. 55.
A worker was quoted: Eugène Roch, Paris malade, esquisses du jour (1832–33), cited by Chevalier, Classes, p. 53.
“… suddenly, in the middle”: Enid Starkie, Petrus Borel the Lycanthrope (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1954), pp. 57–58.
“far away, at the end”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote, p. 173.
Sophie Foucault, cousin: Le Petit Parisien, July 28, 1892.
“a sewer from which”: In Victor Hugo, L’intégrale: Romans (Éditions du Seuil, 1963), vol. 1, p. 268.
its earliest vocabulary: Alice Becker-Ho, Les princes du jargon (Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1990), passim.
The intricate social structure: Robert Giraud, Le royaume de l’argot (Denoël, 1965), pp. 252–55.
“a mud house”: Henri Sauval, Histoires et antiquités de Paris (1724; written 1670s), quoted by Élie Bertret in Rues de Paris, vol. 1, p. 241.
“innumerable quantity of houses”: Privat d’Anglemont, Paris inconnu, p. 37.
“much more to the Kingdom”: Ibid., p. 38.
“Look at mine”: In Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote, pp. 115–16.
“but even when they”: Adolphe Gronfier, Dictionnaire de la racaille (Horay, 2010), p. 294.