The Other Paris
Page 36
Seventeenth Arrondissement
sewers
sex trade; see prostitution
sheet music
shops
Siege
Signoret, Simone
silk flower trade
Simenon, Georges
Simon, Jacques
Sinclair, Upton; The Jungle
singers; cafés-concerts; popular songs; street; see also specific singers
Situationist International
Sixteenth Arrondissement
skyscrapers
slaughterhouses
slums
society; anarchists; bohemia; class; clochards; criminal; crowds; drinking; entertainers; foreign; immigrant; insurgents; Jews; lives of the poor; populaire; racism; sex trade; terminology; Zone; see also specific classes and groups
Society of the Seasons
Solidor, Suzy
Sorel, Georges
Soudy, André
soup vendors
Souvestre, Pierre
squatters
Starkie, Enid
Steinlen, Théophile; illustrations by
Stendhal
stonemasons
streets; ambience units; entertainment; flâneurs; Haussmann’s design of; lighting; names; prostitution; trades; urban planning; see also neighborhoods; specific streets
street singers
Stresser, H., photographs by
strikes, rent
Subin de Beauvais, illustration by
Sue, Eugène; The Mysteries of Paris
suffrage
Surrealists
Sylva, Berthe; “Rôdeuse de barrière”
syphilis
Tabarin
Tailhade, Laurent
tailors
tanners
tapis-franc
tattoos
taxation
teahouses
telegraph
Templars
Temple
theaters
Théâtre des Funambules
Thérésa
Thiers, Adolphe
thieves; redistributionists
Third Arrondissement
Third Republic
Thomas
three-card monte players
Threepenny Opera, The
titi
tobacco
Tombe-Issoire
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de
tourism
Tour Saint-Jacques
trades; industrial; Jewish; of poor; sex; see also specific trades
trains and train stations
transvestites
tree house bistros
Trône
Troppmann, Jean-Baptiste
troquet
tuberculosis
Tuileries
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (film)
typhus
Tzara, Tristan
unemployment
Union of Women
United Front; see also Popular Front
United States; crime; entertainment; industry; medicine shows; muckrakers; Native Americans; race relations
Universal Exposition (1900)
University of Paris
upper class
urban planning; Haussmann and; pre-Haussmann
urban renewal
urinals, public
vagrants
Vaillant, Auguste
Val d’Amour
Valéry, Paul
Valet, René
Vallès, Jules
Vallotton, Félix; illustrations by
van der Elsken, Ed; Love on the Left Bank
Vaneigem, Raoul
Van Gogh, Vincent; The Outskirts of Paris
Vanves
Varlin, Eugène
Vaucanson, Jacques de
Vaugirard
vegetables; market; sellers
Vendôme column, fall of
vendors
Verlaine, Paul
Vermersch, Eugène
Versailles
Vichy government
Vidocq, Eugène François; Memoirs
Vigo, Jean
Villon, François
Villon, Jacques
Viseur, Gus
Voilà
Voltaire
Volvic, Gilbert Chabrol de
Vouillemont, Paul, photographs by
Vuillaume, Maxime
walking; flâneurs
walls; military; tax
Warnod, André
water; canals; carriers; infected
weavers
Weill, Kurt
Wely, Jacques, drawing by
Wilde, Oscar
Willette, Adolphe, illustrations by
wine; jug
Wolman, Gil J.
women; anarchists; bohemian; Commune and; criminals; dancers; insurgents; labor; laundresses; lesbians; in prison; public letter-writers; Roma; sex trade; singers; Zone
working class; industry; Jewish; street trades
World War I
World War II
writers; anarchists; bohemia; ghostwriters; of serial novels; see also specific writers
Yonnet, Jacques; Rue des Maléfices
Zola, Émile; L’assommoir; Nana
Zone; banlieue and; barrières; crime; houses; markets; ragpickers; society; urbanization and
zoo
A Note About the Author
Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium. His other books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, and Kill All Your Darlings. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. He has contributed to The New York Review of Books since 1981 and has written for many other publications. He is a visiting professor of writing and the history of photography at Bard College and lives in Ulster County, New York. You can sign up for email updates here.
Also by Luc Sante
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York
Evidence
The Factory of Facts
Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990–2005
Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905–1930
EDITOR AND TRANSLATOR
Novels in Three Lines, by Félix Fénéon
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
1. Capital
2. Ghosts
3. Pantruche
4. Zone
5. La Canaille
6. Archipelago
7. Le Business
8. Saint Monday
9. Show People
10. Mort aux Vaches
11. Insurgents
12. The Game
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
A Note About the Author
Also by Luc Sante
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Luc Sante
Map copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following images:
Guide psychogéographique de Paris, by kind permission of Greil Marcus.
Rally in support of the United Front, copyright © Corbis.
Stills from Le Pont du Nord, with thanks to Jacques Rivette and Les Films du Losange, and special thanks to J
ake Perlin.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sante, Luc.
The other Paris / Luc Sante. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-374-29932-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4299-4458-8 (e-book)
1. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—19th century. 2. Paris (France)—Social life and customs—20th century. 3. City and town life—France—Paris—History. 4. Poor—France—Paris—History. 5. Working class—France—Paris—History. 6. Criminals—France— Paris—History. 7. Eccentrics and eccentricities—France—Paris— History. 8. Paris (France)—Social conditions. 9. Paris (France)— Description and travel. I. Title.
DC715 .S3125 2015
944’.36106—dc23
2015004988
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All translations, unless otherwise specified, are by the author.
* I don’t have to tell you that the absence of women from this list is the sadly simple result of social conditions—until very recently it was impossible for women to walk around by themselves unobserved, and it is crucial for the flâneur to be functionally invisible. Among the numerous women of the past who might have been flâneurs had they had the opportunity, perhaps the most striking is Marie d’Agoult, the novelist and republican who wrote the most observant and detailed chronicle of the revolution of 1848; it and all her other work appeared under the byline “Daniel Stern.”
* In 2003, France passed an internal security law, put through by Nicolas Sarkozy, who then held a string of cabinet positions, including the charmingly named pair “internal security and local freedom.” Solicitation was targeted, along with begging and vagrancy, and the hitherto undisguised display suddenly disappeared—although that doesn’t mean the girls aren’t still out and about.
* A quartier d’Amérique remains as an administrative division, although it is functionally and texturally indistinguishable from its neighbors, especially since urban renewal in the 1960s replaced most of the area’s distinctive features with housing projects. There was also once an outlying district called Nouvelle-Californie, which seems to have been named after the 1849 Gold Rush and is now part of the southern suburb of Malakoff.
* It is worth noting here that the block (pâté de maisons) is less the fundamental urban unit of measurement than is the îlot, literally an islet, which is a cluster of houses that may be broken up by side streets and alleys. Paris does not, after all, adhere to any sort of grid.
* “There is no such thing as society.”
* A fashionable color then was “pulverized mummy,” much abused by Géricault in particular. It is said to have really been a bitumen compound, but also said (by Blaise Cendrars) to have been a black pigment officially marketed upon the return of Napoléon’s troops from Egypt—leaving open the question of its actual composition. Cendrars furthermore notes a black tint sold to painters under the brand name Égalité, alleged to have been derived from a royal cadaver, perhaps that of Louis XV, exhumed from the crypt at Saint-Denis during the revolution. David may have employed it in his Coronation of Napoléon (1806) and Ingres in his portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832).
* Only four survived the revolution and still exist: the rotundas of La Villette and Monceau and the gates of the Trône, on Avenue de Vincennes, and d’Enfer, on Place Denfert-Rochereau.
* “Despite Everything,” “Enough for Me,” “My Happiness.”
* An early model was Alexandre Dumas père’s Château de Monte-Cristo in Le Port-Marly, north of Versailles, a lavish Renaissance-style palace with Moorish touches, with an adjacent studio in the form of a miniature Gothic castle, the whole surrounded by English gardens with follies, grottoes, and waterworks. Dumas, flush with success, initiated construction in 1844, celebrated its completion in 1847 with a banquet for six hundred, but then, debt-ridden, was forced to sell in 1848. It still stands.
* Ten years later the Cité was converted into an internment camp for Jews, who were sent from there to Auschwitz.
* During the 2005 riots in the banlieue, Nicolas Sarkozy notoriously referred to the rioters as racaille.
* The weekly newspaper L’Auvergnat de Paris began publication in 1882 and continues to exist, if in somewhat diminished form, in the twenty-first century.
* In the past decade that last figure has increased to 16.9 percent. (New York City, by contrast, is 36 percent foreign-born, about the same percentage as in 1900.)
* There were also ten thousand men in the trade.
* The island lay between two arms of the river, one covered, the other open. Singes are literally “monkeys,” but here the term means “bosses.”
* “Real ones of real ones,” as A. J. Liebling rendered it in his 1947 piece “French Without Scars”: a traditional label attesting to the authenticity of senior underworld figures; compare to “OG”: original gangster.
* This turns out to have been one of many pseudonyms employed by the shadowy if prolific Renée Dunan (1892–1936?), a feminist writer with connections to anarchism and Dada, among other things. The menu is presented as the straight goods in Véronique Willemin’s La mondaine (2009), p. 63.
* The English word, sometimes spelled biseness, has been the French argot term for prostitution since at least the late nineteenth century.
* The pioneer of the thematic bar experience was Maxime Lisbonne, who commanded the Saint-Sulpice barricade during the Commune. He came back from the penal colony in New Caledonia after the 1880 amnesty to open first an establishment called Frites Révolutionnaires and then the Café du Bagne (“of the penal colony”), which were appropriately decorated, their servers in matching garb.
* Privat, the main source for the story, claims Géricault as well, but I have not been able to confirm this.
* His 1886 sonnet “Béatitude,” about an “illuminated” drunk who before passing out blows kisses to the moon, which perhaps reciprocates, joins hands with Li Po (701–762) on one side and the American Beat poets of the 1950s on the other.
* Halévy is a cautionary example of where rueful nostalgia can lead. Despite the fact that he had been a Dreyfusard—as well as an old-fashioned liberal, an important literary editor, a friend of Proust and Georges Sorel—and that he was of Jewish descent, his misgivings about change ultimately led him to become a public apologist for Pétain and the Vichy Republic.
* The only institution to have survived is the Cirque d’Hiver, now on Rue Amelot, in a nearby neighborhood where a modest theater district subsequently took root.
* You can gauge this effect, for example, in Fréhel’s “Dans une guinguette” (1934), in which the line “il faut des compartiments de dames seules”—“you have to have train compartments for single women”—breaks after the first syllable of the fourth word, so that you initially hear “il faut des cons”—“you have to have cunts.”
* One of her lovers—she had many of both sexes—was Loïe Fuller (1862–1928; born Marie Louise Fuller in Fullersville, Illinois), who, initially a failure as a dancer after her arrival in Paris in the early 1890s, had an epiphany “inspired by the nuances dropping from the great rose windows of Notre-Dame upon her handkerchief, spread (since in her discouragement she had been weeping) upon her knees to dry” (Flanner, p. 40), which led her to experiment with colored lights.
* One of the great showbiz bios of all time, written in addictive, headlong street prose you can imagine issuing from its source as a monologue in machine-gun tempo. (I can’t vouch for its English translation.)
* And then “Mon légionnaire” (words by Raymond Asso, music by Marguerite Monnot): “He was covered with tattoos / That I never quite und
erstood. / His neck said: ‘Not seen, not caught.’ / His heart said: ‘Nobody.’ / His arm said: ‘Discuss.’”
† Someone claimed that Zola first used the term, but I’ve been unable to confirm this.
* Chevalier claimed he couldn’t find a single patronym from the island in the municipal arrest records between 1900 and 1910, although he must surely have noticed Leca—unless he, too, was really named Dupont.
* His real name was Eugène Vigo.
* The s in his name is silent, although television and radio broadcasters seemed to make a point of sounding it, perhaps to make the name appear foreign.
* When Oscar Wilde was asked to name the saddest event in his life, he replied that it was the death of Lucien de Rubempré.
* There was a precedent for this. In 1797 the Directoire sentenced sixty-five deputies to what was termed the “dry guillotine,” deporting them to Guyana.
* Contrary to a persistent belief in the Anglo-Saxon world, they are not gendarmes, that term being reserved for the rural and exurban constabulary, roughly equivalent to state troopers in the United States.
* A law of 1884 prohibited the hawking of counterfactual news reports on the street, which shut down a brief frenzy of sheets headlining such things as an explosion in the Chamber of Deputies and the suicides of Sarah Bernhardt and Louise Michel.
* And, well, it still exists, sort of. In the later 1930s its layouts got stodgier and its literary quality dropped off; after the war it became simply formulaic. In the ’70s it featured cover photos of bikini-clad models accompanied by shock-horror headlines, and in the ’80s it featured unaccompanied shock-horror headlines in four-inch letters, white on black. Now, as Nouveau Détective, it looks like a typically busy supermarket tabloid, but with pictures of victims and monsters instead of stars. It’s very big on murders of children, retailed with disconcerting anatomical specificity.
* “Liberal” in a sense not far removed from the one it now has in the United States, as opposed to its current meaning in Europe, where it signifies a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism.
* Interestingly, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a field marshal, wrote a counterguerrilla manual, The War of Streets and Houses (1849), based on the same experiences viewed from the opposite direction.
* Over the course of less than fifteen years he was the target of no fewer than ten assassination plots or attempts, their authors ranging across the entire political spectrum, from Bourbon legitimists to anarchists. In 1835, on the fifth anniversary of the revolution, Giuseppe Fieschi deployed an “infernal machine,” made from twenty-five rifle barrels that were supposed to fire a coordinated salvo. It only winged the monarch but killed eleven and wounded forty, many of them high-ranking military figures. A year later, Louis Alibaud, who had just seen a play about Fieschi (who became a staple subject at theaters and in wax museums), fired at the king with a cane in which a rifle barrel had been inserted; he missed.