Enchante !!! A toast to the greatest city in the world! :toast:
from truthdig:
Ruth Scurr on ParisPosted on Jul 15, 2010
By Ruth Scurr
This review originally appeared in The TLS, whose website is www.the-tls.co.uk, and is reposted with permission.In the fifteenth of his “Theses on the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin noted that “calendars do not measure time as clocks do”. Benjamin, that “peerless Paris pedestrian”, is an inspiration for Eric Hazan’s fascinating book The Invention of Paris: A history in footsteps. In his preface to the new English edition (the book was first published in French in 2002 as L’Invention de Paris), Hazan notes that to spot what has changed in Paris in the last eight years, he would need to have gone away and returned after a long absence. Instead, he has been in Paris almost continuously recently, “and so I see it changing like the wrinkles on a beloved face that one observes every day”.
Hazan was born in Paris in 1936 (his mother was born in Palestine and his Jewish father came from Egypt). He studied medicine, left France in support of the FLN during the Algerian war, and later worked as a volunteer doctor in a refugee camp outside Beirut. In 1998, he founded the radical publishing house La Fabrique. His is a cleverly structured book. Tracing the walls and administrative boundaries that have successively encircled Paris down the centuries, Hazan describes how the city grew beyond them, like a grand and beautiful tree. He defines “Old Paris” as the area within the Boulevard of Louis XIV (the tree-lined avenue the King had built in the 1670s on the circuit of the razed old city walls) and “New Paris” as the area outside. “New Paris” is divided into two concentric rings: first, the ring of the faubourgs (covering the area beyond the Boulevard of Louis XIV up to the hated Wall of the Fermiers-Généraux, which was built to enclose the city for tax purposes in the 1780s); and second, the ring of “the villages of the crown” (covering the area beyond the Wall of the Fermiers-Généraux to the Boulevards des Maréchaux, which were begun in 1920, on the site of the defensive wall Adolphe Thiers had built in the 1840s).
Today you cannot see the line of the Boulevard Louis XIV, little remains of the Wall of the Fermiers-Généraux, and the Boulevards des Maréchaux have been lapped by the alarming Boulevard Périphérique: certainly more motorway than walkway.
At the heart of old Paris, in the Right Bank quartier of Tuileries-Saint-Honoré, Hazan marks the location of the house where Robespierre lived during the Terror, at the end of the rue Saint-Honoré: “the geographical axis of political life” in the Revolution. Within the same quartier lived the abbé Sieyès, Olympe de Gouges and Bertrand Barère. The Jacobin Club, the Convention, and the Committee of Public Safety, all met close by. In 1946, the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré was renamed the Place Robespierre, “a decision reversed in 1950”, Hazan writes, “when the French bourgeoisie raised its head again”. Hazan’s radical sympathies are in evidence during his alert and erudite walks: in the Bourse quartier he notices the Hôtel de La Vrillière, designed by François Mansart, confiscated during the Revolution and turned into the Imprimerie Nationale. “Robespierre’s speeches were printed in runs of 400,000, and Marat needed three presses in the courtyard to print L’Ami du peuple.” In the Sentier quartier, Hazan commemorates the heyday of the daily press, between the end of the Second Empire and the First World War. Since then, the migration of printing works to the suburbs has left behind “only pale vestiges of this glorious age: the Figaro building on the corner of the Rue du Mail, the Tribune building, the fine caryatids of the building of La France, journal du soir, and the plaque on the Café du Croissant marking another Socialist lieu de mémoire: ‘Jaurès was assassinated here on 31 July 1914’ ”. ..............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/ruth_scurr_on_paris_20100715/
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