– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project1
If you cross Boulevard Beaumarchais and turn down towards Rue Amelot, you are conscious of leaving the Marais for the Bastille quartier. If you pass the statue of Danton and follow the high back wall of the École de Médecine, you know you are leaving Saint-Germain-des-Près and entering the Latin Quarter. The boundaries between the districts of Paris are often drawn with this surgical precision. Sometimes the reference points are monuments – the rotunda of La Villette, the Lion of Denfert-Rochereau, the Porte Saint-Denis; sometimes the contours of the ground – the fold of the Chaillot hill on the plain of Auteuil, the gap between the Goutte d’Or and Buttes-Chaumont that marks the roads to Germany and Flanders; sometimes again major arteries, of which the Boulevards Rochechouart and Clichy are an extreme example, forming such a firm demarcation between Montmartre and Nouvelle-Athènes that it is not so much two districts that face each other here, but more like two worlds.
Not all of Paris’s inner boundaries are lines with no thickness. To pass from one quarter to another, you sometimes have to cross neutral zones, transitional micro-quarters. These often take the form of embedded pockets: the Arsenal triangle between the Boulevards Henri-IV and Bourdon – the starting point of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, on a bench with the thermometer at 33 degrees C – with its acute angle at the Bastille, and dividing the Saint-Paul quarter from the approaches to the Gare de Lyon; Épinettes, in the space between the Avenue de Saint-Ouen and the Avenue de Clichy, which ensures smooth passage from the Batignolles to Montmartre; or again, wedged between the Sentier and the Marais, the right-angled triangle of Arts-et-Métiers, whose apex is the Porte Saint-Martin and its hypotenuse the Rue de Turbigo, marked in the direction of the city centre by the bell tower of Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs.
These boundaries may be more vague, like the region of missions and convents centred on the Rue de Sèvres, which you have to cross in order to pass from Faubourg Saint-Martin to Montparnasse, and which old taxi-drivers call the Vatican. Or those streets beyond the Luxembourg that fill the space between the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse, between Val-de-Grâce and the Grande-Chaumière, between the allegory of quinine on Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Épée and the heroic figure of Marshal Ney in front of the Closerie des Lilas. Already at the end of Ferragus, when the former head of the Devorants spends his days silently watching the boules players and sometimes lending them his cane to measure their shots, Balzac noted this
space which lies between the south entrance of the Luxembourg and the north entrance of the Observatoire – a space without a name, the neutral space of Paris. There, Paris is no longer; and there, Paris still lingers. The spot is a mingling of street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue, high-road, province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be found there, and yet the place is nothing of all that, – it is a desert.2
Like the background of certain Dadaist photomontages, composed out of jostling fragments of city photographs, the most commonplace transitions sometimes have the most surprising shocks in store. Leaving the greyness of the Gare de l’Est along the former convent wall of the Récollets, what could be more surprising than to suddenly stumble on the sparkling water of the Canal Saint-Martin, the lock of La Grange-aux-Belles with its swing bridge and walkway hidden among the chestnut trees, and behind it the pointed slate roofs of the Hôpital Saint-Louis? And at the other end of Paris, the contrast between the bustle of the Avenue d’Italie and – just behind the Gobelins factory – the shady square marking the beginning of the Glacière quarter, with the stream of the Bièvre at its far end.
Certain quarters, even some of the oldest and most clearly defined, may contain an undefined part within them. For many Parisians, the Latin Quarter ends at the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, just as in Abélard’s day. Balzac located the Pension Vauquer in Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève (now Tournefort), between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, ‘in the streets shut in between the dome of the Panthéon and the dome of the Val-de-Grâce, two conspicuous public buildings which give a yellowish tone to the landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of their leaden-hued cupolas’.3 Today, however, on the southern slope of the Montagne, the École Normale Supérieure, research institutes and student residences, the historic laboratories of Pasteur and the Curies, along with the Censier university, may well justify extending the Latin Quarter as far as the Gobelins.
Differences over boundaries can be far more serious, putting in question the very identity of the district in question. Where does Montmartre begin, when you leave the city centre heading north? History – the boundaries of the village before its annexation to Paris – agrees with common sentiment that Montmartre starts when you cross the route of the no. 2 Métro line, whose stations Barbès-Rochechouart, Anvers, Pigalle, Blanche and Clichy precisely mark the curve of the former wall of the Farmers-General. But Louis Chevalier, in his masterpiece Montmartre du plaisir et du crime, places the Montmartre boundary much lower, on the Grands Boulevards, including in his book both the Chaussée d’Antin, the Saint-Georges quarter, the Casino de Paris and the Faubourg Poissonnière.4 And quite apart from plaisir and crime, physical geography would support this dividing line, as the slopes of Montmartre begin well below the Boulevards Rochechouart and Clichy. The land starts to rise once you cross the ancient course of the Seine, a few dozen metres beyond the Grands Boulevards. Walter Benjamin, a peerless Paris pedestrian, noted how, when the flâneur has reached Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, ‘his soles remember: here is the spot where in former times the cheval de renfort – the spare horse – was harnessed to the omnibus that climbed the Rue des Martyrs towards Montmartre’.5
It might be objected that Montmartre is a special case, not just a quarter like any other, being both a district on the map of Paris and a historical–cultural myth, with a different boundary in each of these senses. But isn’t this ambiguity the very mark of quarters with a strong identity? And if such an identity is lacking, can one even talk of a quarter? Such questions lead, as we shall see, to a more general one: what, fundamentally, is a Paris quarter?
The administrative divisions – twenty arrondissements, with four quartiers in each – give the beginnings of a reply a contrario: a list of this kind, quite abstract and without any ranking, is only useful for the tax office and the police. But it is by no means certain that more subtle procedures would be able to define a basic urban unit for Paris, where the term ‘quarter’, despite its ancient roots in the language and its apparent simplicity, is far from denoting anything homogeneous and comparable. Saint-Germain-des-Près, the Plaine Monceau and the Évangile, for example, are all three of them Paris quarters – each has its history, its boundaries, its map, its architecture, its population and its activities. The first, developing over the centuries on the territory of the great abbey and grouping very ancient streets around the ‘modern’ intersection of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue de Rennes, has kept nothing of the postwar years in which it was so celebrated, and has fallen into the sterility of a museum. The second, planted out by the Pereire brothers in the mid nineteenth century – a ‘luxury quarter sprouting amid the wastelands of the old Plaine Monceau’ – is that of Nana, in her ‘Renaissance-style hôtel, with the air of a palace’. Marked by the memory of the academic ‘artistes pompiers’ who were among its original inhabitants – Meissonier, Rochegrosse, Boldini, Carrier-Belleuse – this is a typical residential quarter, and the successors of the business bourgeoisie of the Second Empire still occupy its neo-Gothic and neo-Palladian hôtels particuliers today. The Évangile, at the end of the world between the railway tracks of the Nord and the Est, is built on a bit of the former village of La Chapelle, where the contractors who carted out the Paris refuse came to dump their load. (‘Tumbrils carry off muck and filth, which is spilled into the nearby countryside: woe to any who find themselves neighbour to these infected mounds’, wrote Sébastien Mercier.6) The monstrous gasometers that lined the Rue de l’Évangile are no longer to be seen, but the Calvary photographed by Atget is still in place, and the covered market of La Chapelle