The Geography of Revolution

 “A Walk Through Paris – A Radical Exploration” by Eric Hazan, 2016

This is a book of history, architecture, personal memory and politics by a leftist who sees modern Paris through radical eyes.  It is a wonderful and somewhat overly detailed zig-zag path through the city, from the south to the north, crossing the Seine at the Pont Neuf, wandering through arrondissements and quartiers (neighborhoods) to see what there is, but with a knowing eye.

The French Revolution, the 1832 and 1848 revolutions, the 1871 Commune, the 1936 Popular Front strikes, the French resistance to fascism, the May-June 1968 rebellion - all mark Paris as a city of political strife, events marked in the city itself.  It was also a haunt of philosophers, surrealists, authors, poets, inventors, painters, scientists and architects.  Its streets bear the names of famous battles, revolutionaries, artists, politicians and countries.  One street is even named ‘La Rue de Lingerie’ so street naming is across the board.  

The parochialism and newness of the U.S. pale in comparison. 

LEFT BANK

For Hazan, the words of Balzac hover over the city. In the south he crosses the Périphérique ring road from Thorez’ old banlieue and starts in the 13^th Arrondissement, one of the poorest in old Paris.  It was home to the denizens of Les Miserables and also the last barricade of 1848.  It contains a hotel where Walter Benjamin stayed and a room where the prominent anarchist Blanqui was released to live.

After the Luxembourg Gardens, where Colette and Jean Valjean met, and writers and poets like Sartre, Faulkner, Rilke and Verlaine were inspired, is the Rue de l’ Odeon.  This is where Silvia Beach’s “Shakespeare & Company” bookshop was situated which saw the likes of Hemingway, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Fitzgerald and Pound. Across the street Monnier’s bookshop hosted Gide, Valery, Benjamin and others. The originals are both gone, though a new “Shakespeare & Co.” exists still on the Seine near the Ile de la Cite.  The nearby Odeon Theater served as a base for the student rebels of 1968 after they took it over, stopping a performance by Alvin Ailey’s dance troop hosted by the French culture minister.

This same area on the Rue de l’Odeon was the center of the 1792 French Revolution on the Left Bank.  This is the location of the Cordelier’s Club, which supported Marat and Danton, and housed the proletarian “Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and Citizens.”  The price to get in was a donation, women were allowed to speak and ordinary citizens and sans-culottes filled the hustings, not politicians.  The Cordelier’s first demanded the dismissal of the king, started the insurrection in August 1792 and instituted the de-Christianization program, which closed all Parisian churches.  The Cordeliers were to the left of the Jacobins, the latter group having got their name from a monastery - which perhaps figures.

In the huge left-wing anti-Government rebellion of May-June 1968, the Quartier Latin nearby was the heart of the early rebellion.  It has lost its intellectual and social content and is now a Disneyland for high-end retailers and tourists.  The workers, students, paving stones, cinemas, art and book shops were forced out, diminished or departed, pushed by private and public capitalist forces.   On one of my visits in the early 1970s, the flics still occupied corners with their Black Marias – but that was a long time ago.  No need now.

It was here on the Left Bank, on the Rue des Grands Augustins that Picasso painted his famous Guernica, about the fascist bombing of that Spanish town in the civil war.  Hazan skips visiting the Concergerie on the Ile de la Cite, where Marie Antionette was kept until her beheading, as he crosses the Seine above it on the Pont Neuf.  He also avoids the Place de La Concorde, up the river, where the guillotine did its work, and the memorial to the Martyrs of the Nazi Deportation at the southern end of Ile de la Cite.  As you can see, every radical site in Paris is not in the book, like Pere Lachaise and others.

1848 Barricade Map

RIGHT BANK 

Hazan spends a lot of time on the partial destruction of the neighborhoods and streets of Paris by Haussmann in the late 1800s, and after 1968, by conservative Gaullist presidents and mayors – all aimed at working class districts.  Belleville mostly fell to development, for instance.  As part of this is the destruction of Les Halles, an old, classic market district on the Right Bank, which was partly replaced by the Centre Pompidou, a museum of contemporary art.  The Pompidou used to be open to everyone for free, but is now full of security systems, guards and €30 charges.   Hazan speculates that the exhibits have also declined from its populist heyday due to post-modernist nonsense by Koons and Le Corbusier.

Hazan describes the streets that composed the 3 barricades of the 1832 insurrection in the Marais.  This was depicted by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, and featured in stirring scenes in the play and film of the same title.  The red flag made its first appearance here, though it had been a symbol of martial law previously.  Evidently the ‘peuple’ were now making the law.  While not as significant as 1848, many still died at the barricades at the Alley of St. Merri and Rue Saint Martin, and are remembered in poetry and literature, though the Alley has partly disappeared.  The nearby Rue Saint-Denis was also the site of consistent proletarian and citizen uprisings starting in 1827, in which Blanqui was wounded as a young man, revolts which continued for years in this quarter.

He continues on to the Porte Saint Denis where the first shots of 1848 were fired by National Guard troops, killing two prostitutes on the top of a massive barricade. He mentions that there were 4,000 barricades in Paris at one point. (A map is attached, but this details fewer than that.) He walks into the northern faubourgs (suburbs) that were later incorporated into Paris, where the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est rail stations are located.  This is also the area of Montmartre and Sacre Coeur. This area retains little of political significance except for the start of the 1870 insurrection by the Commune.

On a side note, in 1972 we ourselves built street barricades in Minneapolis around the University campus.  That happened again in the occupation of the 4th Precinct’s street on the Northside after the police murder of Jamal Clark in 2015.  Small barricades were set up across the city after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 as well.  Barricades evidently never go out of style, even in our boring prairie burg.

Cordelier's Club 1791

The SOCIAL and ARCHITECTURAL TERRAIN of the CITY

Hazan describes the class divisions and gentrification – which he more correctly calls ‘embourgeoisement’ - between neighborhoods and even within them. He changes the name because the ‘gentry’ no longer exist. This happened in the Marais, which used to be a noisy, dirty proletarian warren when he lived there.  He mentions covered commercial arcades, steps, narrow streets, cul-de-sacs, jazz clubs, bookshops and pedestrian zones of the walkable Paris.  He notes the upper-class Proust refrained from the walks that so many others indulged in. Hazan’s walk intentionally avoids the grand boulevards and instead meanders in areas that he still considers working-class.  He notes some recent anti-police brutality and anti-war locations.  As I understand the Yellow Vest protests mostly took place on the grand boulevards after this book was published.

In the northern part of Paris he describes Arab, African, Chinese, Indian, Algerian and Turkish-Kurd commercial and market areas, as well as the subterranean commuter trains to the near-by Arab banlieues and the far African ones. In this area on the Rue Des Islettes and Rue de la Goutte-d’Or Zola set his famous and popular book, “L'Assommoir” (The Drinking Den) about alcoholism and poverty. Hazan’s walk then crosses the northern modernist ‘wall’ of the Peripherique belt roadway, which constricts Paris from expanding ever again.  It ends in the St. Denis PCF banlieue outside Paris proper.

Hazan can describe the architecture of almost every building he crosses, a jumble of Haussmann, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Gothic, Medieval, Norman, Belle Epoque, Neo-Classical, Beaux-Arts, Restoration, Baroque, Renaissance, ’60 ugly, modern and post-modern. As a son of a book publisher, he speaks of the haunts of some of Paris’ writers – Balzac, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Breton, Chateaubriand, Diderot, Mallarme, Nerval, Stendahl – his old gallery.  He is also partial to hospitals, as he worked for years in the medical profession.

If you are interested in the left political side of history, variations of architecture or the encompassing issue of ‘the city,’ this book is for you.

(The author will be in Paris and France in late October and part of November.)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Conspiracy” (Nizan); "L'Assommoir" (Zola); "The Committed” (Nguyen); “The Beach Beneath the Street” (Situationism); “Finks,” “Something in the Air,” “Rebel Cities” (Harvey); “Deephan,” “The French Communist Party Versus the Students,” “The Coming Insurrection” (Invisible Committee); “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “The Merry Month of May,” “Something in the Air – Apres Mai,” “How to Kill a City,” “Extreme Cities,” “Capital City,” “Detroitus.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog, August 26, 2022