A Four-Dimensional Portrait — The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps by Eric Hazan
I find Hazan’s political framework difficult to describe, not because it is difficult to understand — he makes his case for good guys and bad guys — but because it comes from a point of view that is rooted in the French state and anti-state. The most amusing side effect of his account of the insurrections is how it illuminates the names of today’s Parisian boulevards: Auguste Blanqui, Armand Barbés, François Raspail and Alexandre Ledru-Rollin all faced each other on barricades before they became the names of boulevards difficult to cross. He simply presents the twentieth century as uninteresting, an after-the-fact period that scars and destroys the city that inhabits it. He is unashamedly anachronistic. The entire urban transport system of Paris — car, metro, bus, motorcycle, bicycle — is missed, along with the effect this has on people’s lives. Movement is entirely on foot. The world he admires seems to end in 1905 with a small coda of Surrealists. With the exception of Walter Benjamin and Heinrich Heine, all the observers of Paris he quotes are French.
It is to Hazan’s credit that his ultimate evidence for a view of a city in constant civil war between the Party of Order and the People relies primarily on the city itself.
The title of a current exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “Manet: The Invention of the Modern” is characteristic of this French sense of modernity in the past. Manet, whose paintings injected scenes of contemporary Paris into fine arts, much to the outrage of critics, and whose politics were aligned with the Commune, is one of the book’s heroes. The 2011 exhibition contains nearly every painting Hazan describes. But while gazing through the crowded gallery at the gravity and power of these paintings I still find it difficult to understand how incendiary they were in the French struggle between what should be and what is.
It is to Hazan’s credit that his ultimate evidence for a view of a city in constant civil war between the Party of Order and the People relies primarily on the city itself. He ends the “Walkways” with a “very Parisian antithesis,” a description of two of the entrances to contemporary Paris, the first on the wealthy western side, where the city’s highway ring (le périphérique) disappears into a tunnel, and the second on the poor eastern side of the city:
It would need a Hugo to make the comparison between the Porte de la Muette with its pink chestnut trees, a sumptuous embarkation for Cythera, and the Porte de Pantin, an uncrossable barrage of concrete and noise, where the le périphérique passes at eye level, with Boulevard Sérurier beneath it engulfed in a hideous cutting in which the scrawny grass of the central reservation is littered with greasy wrappers and beer cans, and where the only human beings on foot are natives of L’viv or Tiraspol trying to survive by begging at the traffic lights.
— p. 223
In this way, his feet and eyes permit the city to speak for itself.
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