The Invention of Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bicêtre.)
    A century later, in parallel with the building of the wall of the Farmers-General, the technical headway made in the Age of Enlightenment had its effects on street lighting: the old lanterns with their candles were replaced by oil lamps equipped with metal reflectors, with a longer range. Sartine, the lieutenant-general of the time, held that ‘the very great amount of light these give makes it impossible to believe that anything better could ever be found’. Sébastien Mercier was of a different opinion: ‘The lampposts are badly placed . . . From a distance, this reddish flame hurts the eyes; close up, it gives only little light, and below, you are in darkness.’
    It was the 1840s, the time when Thiers’s fortifications enclosed the city once again, that saw the general spread of gas lighting and the uniformed
sergents de ville
. Electric light replaced gas after the First World War, when the ‘
fortifs
’ were demolished. In the 1960s, the construction of the Boulevard Périphérique – the latest of Paris’s fortifications and not the least formidable – was accompanied by the replacement of incandescent lamps by neon lighting, the disappearance of bicycle police with their capes, known as
hirondelles
(swallows), and the proliferation of motorized patrols; the blessings of community policing were still to come.
    It would be possible, therefore, to write a history of Paris in politics and architecture, art and technology, literature and society, the chapters of which would not be centuries – a particularly inappropriate division in this case – nor again reigns and republics, but rather the expanding city precincts, which mark a discontinuous and subterranean time. In the fifteenth of his ‘Theses on the Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin remarked that ‘calendars do not measure time as clocks do’. The time of city walls resembles the time of calendars.
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    1 Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 88.
    2 Honoré de Balzac,
Ferragus
(trans. Wormeley). Perhaps Victor Hugo had this passage in mind when he described the surroundings of the Salpêtrière in
Les Misérables
: ‘It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it, then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert place where there was someone; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery’ (trans. Wilbour).
    3 Honoré de Balzac,
Old Goriot
(trans. Marriage).
    4 Louis Chevalier,
Montmartre du plaisir et du crime
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980).
    5 Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 416.
    6 Louis Sébastien Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
(1781).
    7 Yoshinobu Ashihara,
L’Ordre caché. Tokyo, la ville du XXIe siècle
(Paris: Hazan, 1994).
    8 An ordinance of 1548, for example, cited in Pierre Lavedan,
Histoire de l’urbanisme à Paris
(Paris: Association pour la publication d’une histoire de Paris, 1975), stated: ‘From now on there shall be no more construction or building in the faubourgs, by persons of any station or condition whatsoever, under penalty of confiscation of funds and building, which shall be entirely demolished.’ At the end of the eighteenth century, Mercier wrote: ‘The circumference of Paris is ten thousand yards. Several attempts have been made to define its boundaries; buildings have crossed these limits, marshes have disappeared and the countryside has retreated daily before the hammer and the set square.’
    9 Victor Hugo,
Notre-Dame de Paris
(trans. Hapgood), chapter 2 , ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris’ (1832).
    10 There were two walls