When all roads led to Paris

Paris

Capital of the World

Patrice Higonnet

Translated from the French

by Arthur Goldhammer

The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press:

448 pp., $35

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The Making of Revolutionary Paris

David Garrioch

University of California Press: 384 pp., $34.95

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What is it about Paris? For the last two centuries it has been the single most visited city in the world. Tourists still go for the art and the food, even if they have to brave the disdain of ticket-takers and waiters. Revolutionaries on the run, artists in search of the avant-garde and writers looking for the license to explore their inner selves went looking for people like themselves and created their own enclaves filled with experimentation and constant bickering. Would worldwide communist revolution have been conceivable without the Paris that was home to Marx, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh? (Communists and independence fighters had their own reason to be wary of Parisian waiters, who are still assumed to provide a pipeline to police forces.) Would Impressionism or Cubism have become “isms” without Paris as a place to work and as a subject to paint?

Tourists will continue to visit, no doubt, but the glow is fading from the City of Light. New York has long surpassed it as the center of modern art, Hollywood and even Bollywood as the place for cinema, and revolution now seeks its headquarters in more dingy locations such as Hamburg, Jakarta or the northwest frontier of Pakistan. What better moment, then, to ask how Paris came to be, for such a long time, “capital of the world”?

The answer lies in the city’s “myths,” according to the distinguished Harvard historian Patrice Higonnet in “Paris: Capital of the World.” A myth, for Higonnet, is not inherently false; he uses the term to show that our images of a city are constructed over time in response to specific circumstances. They are true, but only for a while. The “myth” in question is Paris as the capital of modernity. Already in 1799 the Parisian writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier could boast that “this city eternally rivets the gaze of the entire world.” Paris came to stand for all the contradictions of modern life; you went there to experience more fully what modern life had to offer. Paris was imagined, by locals and foreigners alike, as the hothouse of individualism, revolution, scientific progress, urbanism, artistic innovation and cultural sophistication, but it also offered the more dangerous enticements of pornography, prostitution, alienation and, at the end of the line, crime.

Higonnet fully appreciates how the two sides of the “myth” complemented each other. In his chapter on Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, he traces the literary fixation with Paris as the center of all that mattered in modern life. In an especially suggestive chapter on Paris’ place in the North American literary imagination, he reminds us of the power of the myth of Paris for American artists and writers, white and black. He mercifully passes over the well-known expatriates to dwell on lesser known figures such as African Americans Henry Ossawa Tanner, a successful painter and teacher, and Chester Himes, whose detective stories appeared first in French.

A product of two cultures himself -- he wrote this book in French -- Higonnet is ideally placed to serve as guide to the riches of the Parisian Golden Age, which ran roughly from the French Revolution to 1945. His book is beautifully produced and worth purchasing just for the wonderful illustrations, which are, often as not, unfamiliar. Among the many full-color reproductions is a dramatic black-and-white magazine illustration from 1922 that depicts an imaginary grand avenue of skyscrapers in Paris. The city that gave birth to arcades and department stores, that identifies itself with the Metro and the Eiffel Tower and that chokes today on its adoration for the automobile stopped short at the skyscraper. Higonnet makes too little of this; the refusal of skyscrapers is key both to Paris’ long cultural prominence and its eventual eclipse.

Paris is suspended in the medium of mid-19th century urbanism. Jerked into the future by the bulldozing prefect Georges Haussmann, who in the 1850s and 1860s tore down enough of the city to make way for 200 kilometers of new streets and 34,000 new buildings, Paris went into a kind of metropolitan shock. It anticipated the future of every European city by decades, making its new grand boulevards -- and sewers -- the envy of all. But the core of the city has been virtually the same ever since. It is now a late 19th century museum piece in terms of urban architecture; its occasional nods to the need for updating are usually quirky rather than trend-setting, whether you consider the brightly colored exterior tubing of the Pompidou Museum, Pei’s Egyptoid forms in front of the Louvre or the monstrous monumentality of the French National Library (a pet project of Francois Mitterrand’s), whose only virtue is its location far from the center of the city.

Higonnet offers diverting accounts of Paris at its prime but is less convincing about the reasons for its loss of luster. He somehow blames the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s for the failure of Paris to keep up its image as the avant-garde of modernity; they never offered “a genuine myth,” only a “phantasmagoria,” a self-deluding and self-indulgent fantasy. But at least the Surrealists refused cultural nostalgia, soon to be the great sucking sinkhole of Parisian intellectual and artistic life. Higonnet says too little about the fatal attraction of nostalgia, which kept Paris in the limelight well into the 20th century but ultimately left it with no way to go forward. Cultural nostalgia became so powerful a force in Parisian life because it eventually colonized the enormous space first cleared out by the Parisian fascination with the new.

It is telling that Higonnet can only conclude by citing the moment in Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, “We’ll always have Paris.” Higonnet passes up the opportunity to explore the myth of Paris as the site of nostalgic loss. Nostalgia as cultural mode came into being with and depended upon modernity, and thus, as might be expected, it is most powerfully associated with the place that stands for modernity. Nostalgia and newness thus have an intimate relationship. Once upon a time, all that is now permeated with nostalgia -- the shine of lights in the rainy streets, the cozy corner bistro, the Metro signs, the Eiffel Tower -- were all shockingly new. Indeed, many of the most charged sites of Parisian cultural nostalgia had their origins quite literally in revolution: The first restaurants and the Louvre Museum opened their doors during the French Revolution, and the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated in 1889 for the centennial of the Revolution of 1789.

David Garrioch’s book “The Making of Revolutionary Paris” aims to explain how this explosion of innovation could be set off in a city whose ordinary people were most concerned with making ends meet. Garrioch’s highly readable account ends where Higonnet’s begins, with the French Revolution of 1789. Ironically, however, neither of them actually says much about the pivotal events. Because Higonnet focuses on the myth of Paris, he devotes little space to the bloody syncopation of revolution in the city; the thousands dead in the revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871 disappear inside the tapestry of scientific and artistic progress. The backward glance of nostalgia rarely lingers on moments of upheaval; it is a mode more attuned to the clink of wine glasses than to the booming of cannon.

Although Garrioch has little interest in the “myth” of Paris, he has his own trouble with nostalgia; he is clearly enamored of a social world in which men took their identities from their trades and families knew their policeman by his first name and centered their lives on the local parish, even if they disagreed with the church hierarchy on some issues. He finds the origin of revolution in the changes in the city in the 18th century. Many of these changes are predictable and already well documented, such as population growth and increased social mobility. But Garrioch has put them all together in a compelling portrait of “a new political landscape,” in which the old power bases crumbled to be replaced by new men and women willing to act against local interests and operate in citywide networks. His book makes this ordinary but fateful new Paris come alive, whether describing painters putting numbers on houses for the first time in 1779 or Jansenists (Roman Catholic dissidents) attacking priests in the street in 1753 after the archbishop had decreed that they could not receive the last rites. The details all come together in a marvelous synthesis that depicts a vibrant, rapidly growing city whose people were primed for a big change.

There are two different pictures of Paris in these books, one the Paris of cultural mythology, the other the Paris of its ordinary people. Anyone intrigued by the still strong pull of one of the world’s great metropolises will find both worth reading.