Wanderlust: A History of Walking (31 page)

People went to the boulevards for society. They went to the streets and alleys
for adventure, proud that they could navigate the vast network that had yet to be adequately mapped. Even before the French Revolution, some writers and walkers had cherished this idea of the city as a kind of wilderness, mysterious, dark, dangerous, and endlessly interesting. Restif de la Bretonne's
Les Nuits de Paris, ou le Spectateur Nocturne
is the classic book of prerevolutionary walks (and after the revolution it was expanded to include
Les Nuits de la Revolution;
the book was first published in 1788 and expanded in the 1790s). A peasant who became a printer, then a Parisian, then a writer, Bretonne is one of French literature's great eccentrics, little remembered now. He wrote book after book, emulating Rousseau's
Confessions
with a sixteen-volume autobiography, imitating while claiming to revile the marquis de Sade's
Justine
in his own
Anti-Justine
(sold, like Sade's works, in a pornographic bookshop in the Palais Royale's arcades), and producing dozens of novels, as well as some journalism about Paris that foreshadows the
physiologies
of the nineteenth century. The
Nuits
is unique, a collection of hundreds of anecdotes about his adventures on hundreds of nights on the streets of Paris. Each brief chapter covers a night, and the pretext of the book is that he was working as a missionary to rescue distressed maidens and bring them to his patroness, the marquise de M———, though he has many other kinds of adventure as well. The episodic quality of the book makes it recall the innumerable adventures of the Native American trickster Coyote or of the comic-strip Spiderman.

In his late-night wanderings, Bretonne meets with shop girls, blacksmiths, drunkards, servants, and of course prostitutes, spies on politicians in debate and aristocrats in adultery (notably in the Tuileries), sees crimes, fires, mobs, cross-dressers, a freshly murdered corpse. He writes of Paris in the way many others would later: as a book, a wilderness, and a sort of erogenous zone, or bedroom. The Île Saint-Louis was his favorite haunt, and from 1779 to 1789 he chiseled onto its stone walls dates of great personal significance, along with a few evocative words. Thus Paris became both the source of his adventures and a book recording them, a tale to be both written and read by walking. As Proust's famous madeleine served to recall his past, so did these inscriptions for Bretonne: “Whenever I had stopped along the the parapet [of the Île Saint-Louis] to ponder some sorrowful thought, my hand would trace the date and the thought that had just stirred me. I would walk on then, wrapped in the darkness of the night whose silence and loneliness were touched with a horror I found pleasing.” He reads the
first date he had carved: “I cannot describe the emotion I felt as I thought back to the year before. . . . A rush of memories came to me; I stood motionless, preoccupied with linking the present moment to the preceding year's, to make them one.” He relived love affairs, nights of desperation, and ruptured friendships. His Paris is a bedroom full of liaisons in the gardens and lechery on the streets (fittingly enough, Bretonne was a foot fetishist and sometimes followed women with small feet and high heels). In his Paris, the privacy of erotic life is constantly spilling forth in public, and the city is a wilderness, because its public and private spaces and experiences are so intermingled and because it is lawless, dark, and full of dangers.

In the nineteenth century, the theme of the city as wilderness would come up again and again in novels, poems, and popular literature. The city was called a “virgin forest,” its explorers were sometimes, in Benjamin's famous phrase, naturalists “botanizing on the asphalt,” but its indigenous inhabitants were often “savages.” “What are the dangers of the forest and the prairie compared with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?” wrote Baudelaire in a passage Benjamin cites. “Whether a man grasps his victim on a boulevard or stabs his quarry in unknown woods—does he not remain both here and there the most perfect of all beasts of prey?” In admiration of James Fenimore Cooper's novels of the American wilderness, Alexandre Dumas titled a novel
Mohicans du Paris;
it features the adventures of a flâneur-detective who lets a blowing scrap of paper lead him to adventures that always involve crimes; a minor novelist, Paul Feval, installed an unlikely Native American character in Paris, where he scalps four enemies in a cab; Balzac, says Benjamin, refers to “Mohicans in spencer jackets” and “Hurons in frock coats”; later in the century, loiterers and petty criminals were nicknamed “Apaches.” These terms invested the city with the allure of the exotic, turning its types into tribes, its individuals into explorers, and its streets into a wilderness. One of its explorers was George Sand, who found that “on the Paris pavement I was like a boat on ice. My delicate shoes cracked open in two days, my pattens sent me spilling, and I always forgot to lift my dress. I was muddy, tired and runny-nosed, and I watched my shoes and my clothes . . . go to rack and ruin with alarming rapidity.” She put on men's clothes, and though that act is frequently described as a subversive social one, she described it as a practical one. Her new costume gave her a freedom of movement she reveled in: “I can't convey how much my boots delighted me. . . . With those steel-tipped heels I was
solid on the sidewalk at last. I dashed back and forth across Paris and felt I was going around the world. My clothes were weatherproof too. I was out and about in all weathers, came home at all hours, was in the pits of all the theaters.”

But it was not the same medieval wilderness Bretonne had ventured into. In Baudelaire some of the same figures recur—the prostitute, the beggar, the criminal, the beautiful stranger—but he does not speak to them, and the content of their lives remains speculative to him. Window-shopping and people-watching have become indistinguishable activities; one may attempt to buy but not to know them. “Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet,” wrote Baudelaire. “The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else. . . . Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant.” Baudelaire's city is like a wilderness in another way: it is lonely.

The old Paris was cut down like a forest by Baron Haussmann, who carried out Napoleon III's vision of a splendid—and manageable—modern city. Since the 1860s it has been popular to say that Haussmann's destruction of the medieval warrens of streets and his creation of the grand boulevards was a counter-revolutionary tactic, an attempt to make the city penetrable by armies, indefensible by citizens. After all, citizens had revolted in 1789, 1830, and 1848, in part by building barricades across the narrow streets. But this does not explain the rest of Haussmann's project. The wide new avenues accommodated the flow of a vastly increased population, commerce, and on occasion troops, but below them were new sewers and waterways, eliminating some of the stench and disease of the old city—and the Bois de Boulogne was landscaped as a great public park in the English style. As a political project, it seems an attempt not to subdue but to seduce Parisians; as a development project, it displaced the poor from the center of the city to its edges and suburbs, where they remain today (the opposite of most postwar American cities—Manhattan and San Francisco are exceptions—abandoned to the poor when the middle class flocked to the suburbs). Other efforts were made to civilize the “wilderness” of the city in the nineteenth century: streetlights, house numbers, sidewalks, regularly posted street names, maps, guidebooks, increased policing, and the registration, prosecution, or both of prostitutes.

The real complaint against Haussmann seems to be twofold. The first is that in tearing down so much of the old city, he obliterated the delicate interlace of mind and architecture, the mental map walkers carried with them and the geographical correlatives to their memories and associations. In a poem about walking through one of Haussmann's construction sites near the Louvre, Baudelaire complained

Paris is changing! but nothing within my melancholy

has shifted! New palaces, scaffoldings, piles of stone

Old neighborhoods—everything has become allegory for me

and my dear memories are heavier than stones.

Baudelaire being Baudelaire, the poem ends “in the forest of my exiled soul.” And the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt wrote in their journal on November 18, 1860, “My Paris, the Paris in which I was born, the Paris of the manners of 1830 to 1848, is vanishing, both materially and morally. . . . I feel like a man merely passing through Paris, a traveller. I am foreign to that which is to come, to that which is, and a stranger to these new boulevards that go straight on, without meandering, without the adventures of perspective. . . .”

The second complaint is that with his broad, straight avenues, Haussmann turned the wilderness into a formal garden. The new boulevards continued a project begun two centuries before by André Le Nôtre, who went on to design the vast gardens of Versailles for Louis XIV. It was Le Nôtre who had designed the gardens of the Tuileries and the garden-boulevard of the Champs-Élysées extending west from the Tuileries to the Étoile, where Napoleon later placed his Arc de Triomphe. Most of these designs of Le Nôtre were outside the city walls and thus outside the economic life of the city, but the city expanded to absorb them. Thus the boulevards that Le Nôtre built for pleasure alone in the 1660s were developed for pleasure and industry by Haussmann in the 1860s (and these long axes had been widely emulated long before; Washington, D.C., is one of the cities that derives from this imperial geometry). Haussmann was as much an aesthete as Le Nôtre; he annoyed his emperor by leveling hills and taking other pains to make his streets utterly straight, opening up the long vistas that now seem so characteristic of Paris. It is a great irony that though the English garden had triumphed and gardens had become “natural”—irregular, asymmetrical, full
of serpentine rather than straight lines—a formal French garden had been hacked out of the wilds of Paris.

The damp, intimate, claustrophobic, secretive, narrow, curving streets with their cobblestones sinuous like the scales of a snake had given way to ceremonial public space, space full of light, air, business, and reason. And if the old city had so often been compared to a forest, it may have been because it was an organic accretion of independent gestures by many creatures, rather than the implementation of a master plan made by one; it had not been designed but grown. No map had dictated that meandering organic form. And many hated the change: “For the promenaders, what necessity was there to walk from the Madeleine to the Étoile by the shortest route? On the contrary, the promenaders like to prolong their walk, which is why they walk the same alley three or four times in succession,” wrote Adolphe Thiers. Walking in the wilderness is one kind of pleasure, demanding daring, knowledge, strength—for savages, detectives, women in men's clothes; walking in a garden is a far milder one. Haussmann's boulevards made far more of the city a promenade and far more of its citizens promenaders. The arcades began their long decay as the streets bloomed with boutiques and the grand department stores were born—and during the Commune of 1871 the barricades of street revolutionaries were built across the great boulevards.

It wasn't Baudelaire who had first drawn Benjamin's attention to the arcades and to the possibility of configuring walking as a cultural act, but Benjamin's contemporaries—fellow Berliner and friend Franz Hessel and the surrealist writer Louis Aragon. He found Aragon's 1926 book
Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant)
so exhilarating that “evenings in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down. . . . And in fact the first notes of the
Passagenwerk
[or Arcades Project] come from this time. Then came the Berlin years, in which the best part of my friendship with Hessel was nourished by the Passagen-project in frequent conversations.” In his Berlin essay, Benjamin describes Hessel as one of those guides who had introduced him to the city, and Hessel himself had written about walking Berlin (and, with Benjamin, worked on a translation of Marcel Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past,
a novel that with its themes of memory, walks, chance encounters, and Parisian salons fits neatly
between the two bodies of French literature Benjamin took on). It is these twentieth-century writers and artists who best fit the descriptions of the nineteenth-century flâneur.

Aragon's
Paysan de Paris
is one of a trio of surrealist books published in the late 1920s; the other two are André Breton's
Nadja
and Philippe Soupault's
Last Nights of Paris.
All three are first-person narratives about a man wandering in Paris, give very specific place names and descriptions of places, and make prostitutes one of their main destinations. Surrealism prized dreams, the free associations of an unconscious or unself-conscious mind, startling juxtapositions, chance and coincidence, and the poetic possibilities of everyday life. Wandering around a city was an ideal way to engage with all these qualities. Breton wrote, “I still recall the extraordinary role that Aragon played in our daily strolls through Paris. The localities that we passed through in his company, even the most colourless ones, were positively transformed by a spellbinding romantic inventiveness that never faltered and that needed only a street-turning or a shop-window to inspire a fresh outpouring.”

Paris, which had been stripped of its mystery by Haussmann, had recovered it to serve once again as a kind of muse to its poets. Both
Nadja
and
Last Nights
are organized around the pursuit of an enigmatic young woman met through a chance encounter, and it is this pursuit that gives the books their narratives. Such encounters are a staple of city-walking literature: Bretonne follows women with beautiful feet; Whitman eyeballs men in Manhattan; both Nerval and Baudelaire wrote poems about a passing glimpse of a woman who could have been their great love. Breton “spoke to this unknown woman, though I must admit that I expected the worst.” Soupault's nameless narrator stalked his subject like a detective and came to know the underworld she and her associates inhabited, though this sordid realm of the ambitious, the demented, and the murderous neither explains nor fully dispels her fascination. Aragon's book, the least conventional of the three, has no narrative and is organized, like Benjamin's
One-Way Street,
around geography: it explores a few Parisian places—the first of which is the passage de l'Opéra, a shopping arcade already slated for destruction when Aragon wrote about it. (It was, tidily enough, torn down to make way for the expansion of the boulevard Haussmann.)
Paysan de Paris
demonstrated how rich a subject the city itself was for wandering, on foot and in the imagination.