It will be helpful if I use the term ‘Old Paris’ for the part within the boulevard of Louis XIV, and ‘New Paris’ for the part outside. This New Paris is itself divided into two concentric rings. Between the boulevard of Louis XIV and the wall of the Farmers-General is the ring of the faubourgs; between the wall of the Farmers-General and the ‘boulevards of the marshals’ is the ring of the villages of the crown. But this is not just a matter of names. Whenever Paris advanced from one boundary to the next, this signaled a time of changes in technology, society and politics. The shift in stones and ditches was not the cause; it was rather as if the emergence of a new epoch led both to the obsolescence of the old walls and to transformations in the city’s life.
We can take the example of street lighting and the maintenance of order, important both in terms of entertainment and in order to ‘discipline and punish’. In the Middle Ages, only three places in Paris were permanently illuminated at night: the gate of the Châtelet tribunal, where Philippe le Bel had placed a wood-framed lantern filled with pig bladders to deter the criminal enterprises that were hatched right outside; the Tour Nesle, where a beacon marked the entry to Paris for boatmen coming up the Seine; and the lantern of the dead in the Innocents cemetery. Those heading into the dark of the city were advised to make use of an escort of armed torchmen, as one could hardly trust the protection of the watch, whether civic or royal.
At the same time as Louis XIV made Paris an open city, and launched the construction of his new avenue, he took two measures that marked the beginning of the modern age: he had nearly three thousand lanterns installed in the streets – glass cages protecting candles, hung from ropes at first-floor level – and he established the post of lieutenant-general of police, in command of a significant armed force. (It was the first of these officers, La Reynie, who emptied out the courts of miracles and embarked on the ‘great confinement’, shutting up beggars and deviants in the new prison hospitals of the Salpêtrière and 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.
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 before the thirteenth century, but they have been lost in the depths of time.
11 On the Right Bank, the wall of Phillipe Auguste began at the Louvre (its keep forming part of the wall), and followed a route corresponding to Rues Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, Montmartre, and Réamur. It then turned southeast, as far as Rue de Sévigné, and reached the Seine in the middle of the Quai des Célestins, close to Rue de l’Ave-Maria.
12 Except what was discovered when work was under way for the Grand Louvre, and incorporated into the décor of the underground shopping centre, as well as a small pile of stones from the Bastille that decorates the square at the corner of the Boulevard Henri-IV and the Quai des Célestins.
13 After the Porte Saint-Denis, the wall of Charles V turned straight towards the Louvre, following a line that today runs through the Rue d’Aboukir and the Place des Victoires. It reached the Seine close to what is now the Pont du Carrousel. On the Left Bank, which had