Wanderlust: A History of Walking (47 page)

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Haussmann's project: On Haussmann I have been guided by David Pinkney,
Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), and to a lesser extent by Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Schivelbusch insists that Haussmann—“the Attila of the straight line”—was entirely utilitarian in his street designs: “It is obvious that the avenues and boulevards were designed to be efficacious army routes, but that function
was merely a Bonapartist addendum to the otherwise commercially oriented new system” (181).

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“Paris is changing!”: Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,”
The Flowers of Evil,
trans. David M. Dodge for the author.

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“My Paris, the Paris in which I was born”: Jules and Edmond Goncourt,
The Goncourt Journals,
ed. and trans. Lewis Galantiere (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), 93.

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“For the promenaders, what necessity was there”: Schivelbusch,
Railway Journey,
185 n.

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“evenings in bed I could not read more”: Benjamin, quoted in Susan Buck Morse,
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 33.

ref
“I still recall the extraordinary role”: Andre Breton quoted in the introduction to Louis Aragon,
Paris Peasant,
trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1994), viii.

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“spoke to this unknown woman”: Andre Breton,
Nadja,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 64.

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“Georgette resumed her stroll”: Philippe Soupault,
Last Nights of Paris,
trans. William Carlos Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1992), 45–46.

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“Everything is so simple when one knows all the streets”: Ibid., 64.

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“Whenever I happen to be there”: Ibid., 80.

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“famously proposes a detailed ‘interpretation' ”: Michael Sheringham, “City Space, Mental Space, Poetic Space: Paris in Breton, Benjamin and Réda,” in
Parisian Fields,
ed. Michael Sheringham (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), 89. Older metaphors of the city as a body existed, but not as a sexual body: in the nineteenth century, parks were often called the “lungs” of the city, and Richard Sennett, in
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
(London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), writes of the bodily metaphors that metaphorized Haussmann's sewers, waterways, and streets as various organs of bodily circulation, necessary for health.

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“rapt and confused”: Djuna Barnes,
Nightwood
(New York: New Directions, 1946), 59–60.

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“a man who has, with great difficulty”: Benjamin, quoted in Grunwald,
Prophets without Honor,
245.

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“No one knew the path”: Ibid., 248.

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“whereupon the border officials”: Hannah Arendt, introduction, in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 18.

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“In Paris a stranger feels at home”: Ibid., 21.

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“could set for itself the study”: Guy DeBord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in
Situationist International Anthology,
ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 5.

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“The point . . . was to encounter the unknown”: Greil Marcus, “Heading for the
Hills,”
East Bay Express,
February 19, 1999. Marcus writes about situationism far more extensively in his
Lipstick Traces
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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“practitioners of the city,” “the walking of passers-by”: Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93, 100.

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“under threat from the tyranny of bad architecture”: Jean-Christophe Bailly in Sheringham, “City Space, Mental Space, Poetic Space,”
Parisian Fields,
111.

 

Some of the material here comes from my essays “The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble in Unusual Clothing: Notes on the Streets of San Francisco” published in
Harvard Design Magazine
in 1998, and “Voices of the Streets,”
Camerawork Quarterly,
summer 1995; and my essay on Gulf War activism in
War After War
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991).

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“the ideal city for riot”: Eric Hobsbawm, “Cities and Insurrections,” in
Revolutionaries
(New York: Pantheon, 1973), 222. Elizabeth Wilson in
The Sphinx in the City
and Priscilla Parker Ferguson in
Paris as Revolution
also make astute links between the social space and revolutionary potential of a city.

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“Urban reconstruction, however”: Hobsbawm, “Cities and Insurrections,” 224.

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“I take my desires for reality”: Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn,
The Beginning of the End
(London: Verso, 1998), 26.

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“The difference between rebellion at Columbia and rebellion at the Sorbonne”: Mavis Gallant,
Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews
(New York: Random House, 1988), 3.

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the market women . . . had grown accustomed to marching: There are many conflicting versions of the market women's march. I relied on Shirley Elson Roessler's
Out of the Shadows: Women and Politics in the French Revolution, 1789–95
(New York: Peter Land, 1996) for the sequence and details of events, though I also used Michelet's history of the French Revolution (Wynnewood, Pa.: Livingston, 1972), Georges Rude's indispensable
Crowd in the French Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), Simon Schama's
Citizens
(New York: Knopf, 1989), and Christopher Hibbert's
The Days of the French Revolution
(New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1981).

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“at the discipline, pageantry, and magnitude of the almost daily processions”: Rude,
Crowd in the French Revolution,
66.

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“she delivered such a blow with her broom”: Roessler,
Out of the Shadows,
18.

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“their decorated branches amidst the gleaming iron of pikes”: Hibbert,
Days,
104.

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East Germany was next: On Germany I relied on Timothy Garton Ash,
The Magic Lantern: The Revolutions of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague
(New York: Random House, 1990), and John Borneman,
After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin
(New York: Basic Books, 1991).

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arrested just for being in the vicinity of disturbances: Borneman,
After the Wall,
23–24: “In one example . . . a demonstrator was sentenced to six months imprisonment for calling ‘No Violence' about fifteen times.”

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“the people acted and the Party reacted”: Ash,
Magic Lantern,
83.

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“Prague . . . seemed hypnotized, caught in a magical trance”: Michael Kukral,
Prague 1989: A Study in Humanistic Geography
(Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Monographs, 1997), 110.

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“The government is telling us”: Alexander Dubček, quoted in
Time,
December 4, 1989, 21.

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“The time of massive and daily street demonstrations”: Kukral,
Prague 1989,
95.

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“Secrecy . . . was a hallmark”: Marguerite Guzman Bouvard,
Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 30.

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“Much later . . . they described their walks”: Bouvard,
Revolutionizing Motherhood,
70.

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“They tell me that, while they are marching”: Marjorie Agosin,
Circles of Madness: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
(Freedonia: White Pine Press, 1992), 43.

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“People lived in public”: Victor Hugo,
1793,
trans. Frank Lee Benedict (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988), 116.

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“The revolutionary posters were everywhere”: George Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 5.

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“Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society”: Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, quoted in
Do or Die
(Earth First! Britain's newsletter), no. 6 (1997), 4.

 

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“I used to go out walking”: James Joyce, “The Dead,”
Dubliners
(New York: Dover, 1991), 149. Anne Wallace, in her
Walking, Literature and English Culture,
pointed me to this use of the term in this text; the Oxford English Dictionary also has a nice section on the phrase.

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“You have been telling the truth”: Glen Petrie,
A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler
(New York: Viking, 1971), 105, where the other details of the Caroline Wyburgh story also appear.

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“being born a woman”: Sylvia Plath, quoted in Carol Brooks Gardner,
Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 26. Re gender and travel, see Eric J. Leed,
The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism
(New York: Basic Books, 1991), 115–16: “The ‘double standard' constructs the spatial domains of interiority (female) and exteriority (male) as domains of, respectively, sexual constraint and sexual freedom. The chastity of women is a technique of inclusion and exclusion, which decrees memberships, rights, and relations
between males as well as sanctifying the male line of descent. Women's identification with place in conditions of settlement has been regarded as ‘natural,' a result of reproductive necessities that require stability and protection by men; thus the genderization of space. . . . The antithesis between the exteriorizations of men and the interiorizations of women, the superfluity of the sperm and the parsimony of the ovum, has been mapped upon human mobility and come to be considered an element of human nature. But the immobilization of women is a historical achievement. . . . It is this territorialization that makes travel a gendering activity.”

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“who go out onto the street,” “Domestic women”: Gerda Lerner,
The Creation of Patriarchy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 134, 135–39.

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“were confined to houses”: Sennett,
Flesh and Stone,
34. Pericles and Xenophon quotes are on pages 68 and 73.

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“In Greek thought women lack”: Mark Wiggins, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in
Sexuality and Space,
ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 335.

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“The young men strolling on the streets”: Joachim Schlor,
Nights in the Big City
(London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 139.

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“shopping in Les Halles”: Petrie,
A Singular Iniquity,
160.

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“I asked what the crime was”: Ibid., 182.

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hounded into suicide: The woman was a Mrs. Percy of Aldershot: see the preface and pages 149–54 of Petrie,
A Singular Iniquity,
and Paul McHugh,
Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), 149–51.

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Lizzie Schauer in Glenna Matthews,
The Rise of Public Woman: Woman's Power and Woman's Place in the United States, 1630–1970
(New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3.

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force-feeding the prisoners: My sources were Midge Mackenzie,
Shoulder to Shoulder
(New York: Knopf, 1975), on British suffragists, and Doris Stevens,
Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote
(1920; new edition, edited by Carol O'Hare, Troutdale, Oregon: New Sage Press, 1995). Djuna Barnes volunteered to be force-fed so she could report on the process.

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“that women will not feel at ease”: B. Houston, “What's Wrong with Sexual Harassment,” quoted in June Larkin, “Sexual Terrorism on the Street,” in
Sexual Harassment: Contemporary Feminist Perspectives,
ed. Alison M. Thomas and Celia Kitzinger (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 117.

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Two-thirds of American women are afraid: Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard, eds.,
Women, Violence and Social Control
(Houndmills, England: MacMillan, 1987), 77.

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“very worried”: Eileen Green, Sandra Hebron, and Diane Woodward,
Women's Leisure, What Leisure
(Houndmills, England: MacMillan, 1990): “One of the most severe restrictions on women's leisure time activities is their fear of being out alone after dark. Many women are afraid to use public transport after dark or late at night whilst for others it's having to walk to bus stops and wait there after dark which deters them.
The findings of the second British Crime Survey state that half the women interviewed only went out after dark if accompanied, and 40 percent were ‘very worried' about being raped” (89).

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“If I wrote down every little thing”: Larkin, “Sexual Terrorism,” 120.

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“Stanton and Mott . . . began to see similarities”: Stevens,
Jailed for Freedom,
13.

ref
Edward Lawson case: Abstract of
Kolender, Chief of Police of San Diego, et al., v. Lawson,
461 U.S. 352, 103 S. Ct. 1855, 75 L. Ed. 2nd 903 (1983).