On the Right Bank, Old Paris forms an approximate semicircle. Its circumference is defined by the arc of the Boulevards, and its diameter by a narrow band along the Seine, between Rue de Rivoli and the quais, from the colonnade of the Louvre to the Hôtel de Ville – or, if you like, from the flamboyant Gothic of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois to the classical façade of Saint-Gervais. This band is a special case, where the successive layers, instead of resonating together like harmonics, as they do elsewhere, form a discordant and confused ensemble. This is not for want of fine buildings, picturesque details, or historic memories, but these are lost in such a heteroclite patchwork that the general sense is no longer legible. You have a hotchpotch of Haussmannian cuttings that are unfinished (Avenue Victoria) or ravaged by the feeders and entries of underground roads (Rue du Pont-Neuf, Rue des Halles), squares that have been gutted (the Place du Châtelet, still ravishing in 1860 on a Marville photograph – quite small, and almost closed around its fountain) or ‘improved’ in a ridiculous fashion (the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, the Square de la Tour Saint-Jacques), old streets massacred by renovation (Rue Bertin-Poirée) or by car traffic (Rue des Lavandières-Sainte-Opportune, where a roundabout disguised as a Zen garden draws in all the traffic from Rue Saint-Honoré). Even Haussmann, generally rather content with himself, confusedly felt there was something wrong, which he attributed to the difficulties of the terrain: ‘The difference in level across the whole quarter around the Place du Châtelet, caused by the slope to the east of the hill crowned by the Tour Saint-Jacques, and by the rise to the west of the Quai de la Mégisseries and its surroundings, required the demolition of all the houses from Rue des Lavandières to Rue des Arcis [now Saint-Martin], between the line of the quais and Rue de Rivoli’, a manner of justification that is unusual in the Mémoires of a man who called himself an ‘artist of demolition’.
Yet the worst was avoided: there was a real threat that the extension to Rue de Rivoli would start from the middle of the Louvre colonnade. ‘War on the demolishers!’ cried Hugo in La Revue des Deux Mondes on 1 March 1832: ‘The vandals have their own characteristic idea. They want to run a great, great, great road right across Paris. A road of a whole league! What magnificent devastation they could wreak! Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois would be in the way, the admirable tower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie perhaps too. But no matter! A road of a league! . . . a straight line from the Louvre to the Barrière du Trône!’ Haussmann, being a Protestant, rejected the project, fearing that the destruction of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois would be interpreted as a revenge for Saint Bartholemew’s Night, the signal for which, it is said, was given by the bells of that church.
The Grands Boulevards
‘The life of Paris, its physiognomy, was in 1500 on Rue Saint-Antoine; in 1600 on the Place Royale; in 1700 on the Pont-Neuf; in 1800 in the Palais-Royal. All these places were the Boulevards of their day! The earth was impassioned there, as the asphalt is today under the feet of the stockbrokers on the steps of Café Tortoni.’ When Balzac wrote his ‘Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris’ in 1844, it was nearly ten years since the Palais-Royal had gone out of fashion, ten years since the Paris of Manon Lescaut, Adolphe, and Henri de Marsay had disappeared, along with its Argand lamps, half-pay officers, the vogue for Cherubini and the successes of Byron, Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper. In a movement of taste that accompanied dandies, whores, journalists and gourmets in their migration to the Boulevards, a new romanticism made its appearance, that of Berlioz, Frédérick Lemaître and La Fanfarlo. But in one of the thousand and one ways that facts have of messing up the categories of art history, it so happens that the Boulevards, the great stage of Parisian Romanticism, are a long procession of neoclassical architecture – a paradox to match that which the clever Lousteau explained to Lucien de Rubempré around 1830:
[O]ur great men are ranged in two hostile camps. The Royalists are ‘romantics’, the Liberals are ‘classics’. The divergence of taste in matters literary and divergence of political opinion coincide; and the result is a war with weapons of every sort, double-edged witticisms, subtle calumnies and nicknames à outrance, between the rising and the waning glory, and ink is shed in torrents. The odd part of it is that the Royalist-romantics are all for liberty in literature, and for repealing laws and conventions; while the Liberal-classics are for maintaining the unities, the Alexandrine, and the classical theme.94
From the Madeleine to the Bastille, there remain none of the legendary dwellings built on the ramparts at the end of the ancien régime, with their view over the city on one side and across market gardens on the other: nothing of Beaumarchais’ house and its garden designed by Belanger, where Mme de Genlis came to witness the demolition of the Bastille along with the children of the Duc d’Orléans, nothing of the Pavillon de Hanovre built for the fine suppers of the Maréchal de Richelieu – ‘the fairy pavilion’, Voltaire called it – nothing of the hôtel built by Ledoux for the Prince de Montmorency on the corner of the Chaussée-d’Antin, whose entablature bore, as a homage to Palladio, the statues of eight high officials of the Montmorency family, ‘heroic virtues that vandalism has destroyed, a deep impression that time does not wipe out’.95 On Boulevard de la Madeleine it was still possible until recently to admire the two rotundas framing the beginning of Rue Caumartin, one of the hôtel of the Duc d’Aumont, and the other of the hôtel of the Farmer-General Marin de la Haye – its roof formerly boasting a hanging garden in which, according to Hillairet, two small Chinese bridges crossed a stream that, after forming an island, supplied water to the dining rooms and baths of the building. They have just been newly ‘façadisés’, which is perhaps worse than being demolished.96
But despite the destruction, the length of the Boulevards remains a great walking catalogue of Parisian neoclassical architecture from Louis XVI to Louis-Philippe, especially on the inner side, that of the odd numbers (the southern side, if you prefer), whose owners had front seats on the promenade. Many even had terraces built that overlooked the Boulevards’ animation.97 By turns you have pure Louis XVI (Hôtel Montholon on Boulevard Poissonière, with its six colossal Ionic columns supporting the third-storey balcony), the style of the Empire and Restoration, more severe and archaeological, and that of the July monarchy, decorated and smiling, with its great apartment blocks built for investment, looking like Italian palaces, where you can smell the eclecticism that lurked behind the taste for antiquity.98
If it is hard to imagine the seductive power of the Boulevards in the time of their splendour, this is because their sequence was then one of unbroken rhythmic scansion. Despite their length, they had a continuity, something of an enclosed space, that had made for the success of the Place Royale and the Palais-Royal. They were like the succession of rooms in an immense palace, each with its décor, timetable, and habits. But from Haussmann through to Poincaré this urban intimacy was hollowed out. The Opéra Garnier and its roundabout, the junction of Boulevards Haussmann and Montmartre creating the shapeless ‘Richelieu-Drouot’ intersection, and the brutal implantation of the Place de la République where the Faubourg du Temple and the Boulevard du Crime meet, replaced these subtle caesuras with gaping empty spaces. When the father of Lucien Leuwen, that exquisite patron of the Opéra dancers, ‘strolled on the boulevard, his lackey gave him a cloak to pass in front of Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin’. What precautions would he have had to take to cross the Place de la République!
The segmentation of the Boulevards has become very sharp. Between the Madeleine and the Opéra you have the big hotels and travel agencies; from the Opéra to Richelieu-Drouot the banks. Then, until the République, a portion that, whilst rather the worse for wear, is certainly the closest in spirit to the original Boulevards. Finally, the stretch between République and Bastille is the domain of motor scooters, photography and music, which may well have its charm and its special places, but is no longer really part of the Boulevards.
As a point of inflection in time, the beginning of the Boulevards’ long downward descent, the image that comes to me is that of the death of Nana in a room of the Grand-Hôtel, on Boulevard des Capucines:
‘Come, it’s time we were off,’ said Clarisse. ‘We shan’t bring her to life again. Are you coming, Simonne?’ They all looked