Reading and Walking in Paris - The incomparable Eric Hazan

Over the last several days, I've been spending much more time in the Latin Quarter of Paris than I normally do.   The Latin Quarter is still - much, though not all of it - beautiful, but its beauty has at times the character of a great museum.  This is hardly an original statement, and it's not a unique condition.  Very many cities, not only mighty world cities like Paris or New York, but smaller European cities such as Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Dublin are getting 1) museumified; 2) ever-more privatised; 3) corporatised.   All of these cities seem to have crises of liveability.   A great many of the friends I made in New York in the 1990s (and this process was well underway back then) can no longer afford to live in the city, unless they are lucky enough to have an apartment in a rent-controlled building or to have inherited or otherwise acquired property.  But the same is the case in Dublin, a city about a tenth of the size of New York or at least of the NYC-Philadelphia conurbation, the largest in America.   No young person, no young professional unless getting the most extreme income from one of the American internet multinationals which now dominate parts of Dublin (Facebook, Apple, Google, AirB&B) can afford to buy or to rent acceptable accommodation in the city.  Arts venues are getting crowded out by extreme rents - the Bernard Shaw pub on South Richmond Street is only the latest victim of a process where it's more interesting for a developer or landlord to construct yet another hotel in the city, rather than keep a vibrant music venue.  Any idea of the commons or the public good - never much protected in Ireland in the last several decades - is increasingly eroded or hollowed out in this process.   The city as the space, home, domain of its citizens to live, love, create, deliberate and make the new collectively (as against merely to work) is gradually ceasing to exist.

The reason I have been much around the Latin Quarter in recent days is because, first alone but with a peerless textual companion and comrade, and then, second, yesterday with a walking tour, I've been exploring revolutionary Paris i.e. the locales of the great Revolution of 1789.  As Eric Hazan says, it's harder and harder to find the traces of the world of Robespierre, Danton and Marat, of the sans-culottes and of the battles, debates, movements that shook France and then the world in those wild, aggressive, heady and sublime years.   The Cour du Commerce where revolutionaries met and debated is now blanketed in swathes of restaurants and other eateries.  Danton has his statue (and cinemas and cafés that bear his name), but it's all surrounded by the noise of traffic and the insistence of advertising simulacra.  The Cordeliers meeting hall is now part of a university precint.  Most piquant, or even embarrassing, for me: the house where the young Bonaparte lived, on Rue Saint-Severin, before he commanded part of the defence of the Convention, is now an 'Irish pub', that most ubiquitous, ugly and vulgar manifestation of the globalization of 'Irishness'.  It's like finding that James Connolly's birthplace in Edinburgh is now a nightclub, or anticipating what the Irish government will eventually permit on the site of Moore Street, where the final desperate firefights of the Easter Rising took place.

Paris has no better chronicler, I'd be confident to wager, of this constant and usually losing battle between a living and humane history and way of urban living, and that deadly combination of 'heritage' and privatisation described above, than Eric Hazan, an extraordinary combination of writer, publisher, activist, intellectual, historian, political thinker and sheer inspiration.   Hazan, who lived and worked the first several decades of his adult life as a cardiac surgeon, first came into my line of vision when Verso translated and published his wonderful L'Invention de Paris.  The Invention of Paris came out in 2011.  I began reading it shortly thereafter, probably in 2012 or 2013, most particularly when in Paris, and I have been a devotee of it ever since.   Paris must be one of the most written-about cities in the world, and I make no claim to having read the smallest fraction of that vast literature.  But I cannot believe that much of it can offer the same mix of relentless erudition, salty trenchancy, poetic vision, Marxist subtlety and utopian intransigence which this book does.  It is a vast repository not only of descriptions of the city, radiating outward from the ancient core, springing outwards with each of the new city walls or defensive systems, right up to the Périphérique; but also of knowledge and quotation (literary, political, historical, cartographic, phenomenological, psychological) of the city.  It is an exceptional joy to read.  Opening the book again after a few months (I now have three copies), I find myself smiling for sheer pleasure: not just because I sympathise with Hazan's politics, but for the way he mixes a deep historical knowledge of his city with the most formidable sense of the battlefield that Paris has long been and is now.   Here is a small selection, both from the man himself, and from a handful of the writers to whom he likes to refer.

Camille Desmoulins, at the Palais-Royal, July 13, 1789, in the Café de Foy:

It was half past two, and I had gauged the mood of the people.  My anger against the despots had turned to despair.  I could not see any groups ready for an uprising, however strongly affected they were.  Three young men, standing hand in hand, struck me as inspired by a more resolute courage.  I could see that they had come to the Palais-Royal with the same intention as myself.  A number of passive citizens followed them.  'Messieurs', I said, 'here is the beginning of a civic force: one of us must take the initiative and stand on a table to harangue the people'.  'Get up, then'.  I agreed.  Rather than climbing, I was immediately hoisted up on the table.  Right away I found myself surrounded by an immense crowd.  Here is my speech, which I shall never forget: 'Citizens, there is not a moment to lose.  I have come from Versailles.  Necker has been dismissed.  His dismissal is the signal for a St Bartholomew's Night of patriots.  This evening, the Swiss and German battalions will come out of the Champ-du-Mars to massacre us.  Just one single recourse remains, to seize arms and choose a rosette by which to recognise one another'.

Gérard de Nerval, remembering the 1830s in his Petits Châteaux de Bôheme:

It was in our common lodgings in Rue du Doyenné that we came to recognise one another as brothers ...  in a corner of the old Louvre de Médicis, very close to the spot where the former Hotel de Rambouillet stood ... Good old Rogier would smile into his beard, from the top of a ladder, where he was painting on one of the three mirror frames a Neptune - who looked like himself!  Then the two swing doors opened abruptly: it was Théophile [Gautier].  We hurried to offer him a Louis XIII armchair, and he read in his turn his first verses, while Cydalise I, or Lorry, or Victorine, swung nonchalantly in blonde Sarah's hammock, stretched across the enormous salon ... What happy days!  We gave balls, suppers, costumed parties ... We were young, always gay, and often rich ... But now I come to the sad note: our palace was demolished.   I rummaged through its debris last autumn.  Even the ruins of the chapel [of the Doyenné, which was part of Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre], which so gracefully stood out against the green of the trees ... were not respected.  Around that time, I found myself, rich enough to buy back from the demolishers two lots of woodwork from the salon, painted by our friends.  I have the two Nanteuil architraves; Vattier's signed Watteau, Corot's two long panels representing Provençal landscapes; Châttilon's Red Monk, reading the Bible on the curved haunches of a naked sleeping woman; Chassériau's Bacchantes, who have tigers on a leash like dogs ... As for the Renaissance bed, the Médicis dresser, the two sideboards, the Ribera, the tapestries of the Four Elements, all that was scattered a long time ago.  'Where did you lose so many fine things?' Balzac asked me one day. - 'In misfortune', I replied, citing one of his favourite phrases.

Hazan himself, on the fate of the Place Vendôme:

The Place Vendôme, for its part, has been endowed by the architects in charge of public buildings and national palaces with an indescribable paving scattered with sheets of brushed steel, and bunker entrances to its underground carpark.  The chauffeurs dusting their limousines outside Cartier, the Ritz, or Credit Foncier wear dark suits and dark glasses, and have the appearance of bodyguards.  Whenever I pass that way, I think fondly of the National Guards, canteen-women, Gavroches, armed civilians and gunners at their posts, posing in groups for the photographer in front of the debris of the column in May 1871.

Heinrich Heine, on the Paris Bourse, in his French Affairs: Letters from Paris (1832):

I vex myself every time I enter the Bourse, the beautiful edifice of marble, built in the noblest Greek style, and consecrated to the most contemptible business - to swindling in the public funds ... Here, in the vast space of the high-arched hall, here it is that the swindlers, with all their repulsive faces and disagreeable screams, sweep here and there, like the tossing of a sea of egoistic greed, and where, amid the wild billows of human beings, the great bankers dart up, snapping and devouring like sharks, one monster preying on another ...




Conor

Better Fewer, But Better - Walking and Reading in Paris

I have not written anything on this blog since May, a particularly long gap.  I've had a long quiet summer of working, reading and writing, mostly good.  I am fortunate.  I've also been mulling over - very slowly, I admit - using Twitter to get this blog the audience even I reckon it deserves.  But I have not yet ventured into that Babel of miscommunication.  I need to hurry up and give it a go.

Meanwhile, this weekend, I am lucky enough to be in Paris.   It still feels warm and rather summery here (at least to an Irish flaneur like me), and I have been walking the city as I love to do.  I usually come here in midwinter, when the great flows of visitors abate somewhat, and the weather is rarely so dismal as to make exploring uncomfortable.    I stay in Montmartre, on the south side of the butte, and though my dear friends R and R are not here at the moment, I can make my way nicely.   Nearly always in my satchel I have one of Eric Hazan's marvellous books on the city.  

Yesterday  I decided to trace part of the route from south to north across the city meridian which Hazan delineates in his most recent book, A Walk Through Paris.  I would walk the relatively short distance from the Luxembourg to Les Halles, or the area where Les Halles once was, before its disgraceful destruction in the early Seventies.  I took the metro down to Cluny-La Sorbonne, and then breasted the waves of people up Boulevard St Michel.  But just as I was facing across Rue de Médicis to the outer walls or fence of the park, I noticed the little row of bookshops on the near side of the street, and I went into one.  I spent the next two hours chatting with the owner, Penelope, who runs a beautiful store, walled with books of all kinds, floor to very high ceiling, with ladders for remote access.   It turns out she is from an area of western Canada which I know well from boarding school days long ago, and we even worked out that we have some friends or at least acquaintances in common.   I bought a few books from Penelope, including a new Semiotext(e) chapbook by Francois Cusset, and Tom Nairn's and Angelo Quattrocchi's famous account and critique of May 1968 in Paris, The Beginning of the End.  I noted to her my admiration (verging, it must be said, on idolatry) of Hazan.   

So long did Penelope and her daughter and I stand talking that my feet were worn out without any walking of any route anywhere, and at around 5pm, I trundled back home on the metro.

And then this morning, as if at once to lift my spirits and frustrate me, Penelope emailed me to say that M. Hazan was in The Red Wheelbarrow (but I was not there to meet him, alas ...), and asking about histories of Ireland!   I fired off a couple of recommendations, kicking myself for having missed a real hero.

Then I ambled down Boulevard de Clichy and then on along the Batignolles to Parc Monceau.  There I sat on a bench, and finished the last 70 pages of Tariq Ali's 2017 book, The Dilemmas of Lenin, a stimulating mix of history, biography, analysis and speculation.  The later chapters, about the women of the Revolution, and about the women in Lenin's life - Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand - are moving and impressive, and I was very struck by how formidable a feminist cohort had gathered in Russia in the immediately pre-Revolutionary period, and then the far-sightedness of much Bolshevik policy on women, fertility, marriage and the equality of the sexes.

Around me, Paris survived as only Paris can.   A group of African people sang beautiful songs under the trees.  Two boxers sparred, weaving, jigging, back and forth like dancers, the crack of gloves on focus mitts audible from a good distance.   The dogs of the city - the domesticated ones - pattered or strutted by, meeting each other with taut excitement, ears forward, checking.   Park attendants discussed the new gilet jaunes protests, with me trying to listen in.  There can be few greater pleasures than good reading on a Parisian park bench on a warm September day, looking up every now and then to study the stylish, the beautiful, the ragged, and the conformist, and maybe the radical future in this great city, as they pass by.

Here is the website for The Redwheelbarrow Bookstore:

The Red Wheelbarrow

And here is Seamus Deane's brilliant review of Hazan's A Walk Through Paris, on the excellent Dublin Review of Books website:

Paris Destroyed, Paris Surviving

Conor