When we visit a new city, tourist guides encourage us to get to know it by walking, and suggest good routes for exploring, interesting places to see, nice spots to rest and find refreshment. Walking may seem as if it’s too fundamental to human life to have a history, yet this whole way of behaving, of enjoying a city by passing through it on foot, is far from timeless. It’s part of a culture — and a set of habits — that rose up in the city that the critic Walter Benjamin called “the capital of the 19th century”, a place that, for a while, was the centre of the world, the home of everything fashionable and new.
I spend a month in Paris every year, teaching creative writing to American students, and when I’m not in the classroom, I walk around, much like any other visitor. I often stay in the same apartment, on the fringes of the Latin Quarter. I was there when France won the World Cup and the streets were filled with happy chaos. I was there during the Gilets Jaunes protests, threading my way down the Boulevard Saint-Germain past burning scooters and improvised barricades. I will be there this summer, in the run-up to the Olympics, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the city takes on this new role.
Like generations of writers before me, I like to sit on the terrasse of a café, watching the world go by and occasionally writing down my thoughts in a notebook. I’m an observer, as well as a participant in the crowd. I’m sometimes walking with a purpose (on my way to work, or dinner, or the supermarket) but just as often not, drifting through the city for the pleasure of it, to experience all its sights and sounds. This is the Parisian tradition of the “flâneur”, what the poet Charles Baudelaire called the “passionate spectator”, the quintessential city walker who looks for aesthetic pleasures in the hurly burly of urban life.
The Parisian elite has always understood the power of the crowd.
We don’t think twice about this now, and it’s no longer the preserve of opiated poets, but walking around for pleasure would have been unthinkable in earlier times. The very possibility depends on a substrate of technologies, the most fundamental of which gave Paris one of its 19th-century nicknames, the “ville lumière” or city of light. Street lighting—first gas, then electricity—transformed dangerous gloom into inviting social space. The invention of plate glass allowed shopkeepers to display goods to passers-by, rather than hiding them away. Suddenly “window shopping” emerged as a leisure activity. Railways made it possible to travel into the city and make it home again, and the automation of textile production suddenly put fashion within reach of vast numbers of people who previously had little or no control over how they looked. Suddenly the crowd was interesting to itself. It had a culture, a new way of being. The possibility of chance encounters, of faces seen once and then lost forever, of strange events, offered a tantalising combination of pleasure and danger. Was that well-dressed fellow really a gentleman, or just a con artist? If you followed that beautiful woman, where would she lead you? People who had previously lived within very circumscribed social worlds were thrown together: aristocrats and plebeians, rich and poor, the virtuous and the vicious, all jumbled up.
The Parisian elite has always understood the power of the crowd, particularly when it organises itself to overthrow authority. After the monarchy was toppled in the revolution of 1789, there were regular and bloody uprisings—in 1830, 1848, 1871... Near where I stay, a statue of the revolutionary Georges Danton rises over the entrance to the Métro station that bears his name. When he and his fellow rebels rose up against the king, they could escape the royal soldiers by vanishing into a warren of tiny streets in the Cordeliers district. So impenetrable was this area that Camille Desmoulins, another revolutionary, pronounced it “the only sanctuary where liberty has not been violated”. The streetscape worked for the crowd against the masters. There’s a daguerrotype, from the revolution of 1848, that’s the first-known image of a barricade. The very word comes from the“barriques” or barrels that the Parisians rolled out of cellars to block the way.
The authorities always feared losing control of Paris, and after the first success, revolution was always put down with a firm and bloody hand. The ultimate solution was to change the geography of the city. After the revolution of 1848, Napoleon III made himself emperor and commissioned Baron Haussmann to undertake a massive programme of public works. For the next 20 years, Paris was a huge building site. Whole neighbourhoods, including the Cordeliers, were razed to the ground, and in place of the medieval maze, wide boulevards of elegant apartment buildings emerged. They were beautiful, but they also had a military function. You could march troops and artillery right into the heart of the city. The people no longer had the upper hand.
In the 1950s and 60s, the artistic radicals who called themselves Situationists declared that beneath the paving stones of the city streets lay the beach—though the powers that be might seem to control everything, there were still utopian possibilities for those who knew how to look. They engaged in a kind of deliberately aimless walking that they called the dérive or drifting, trying to find ways to resist the organisation of space dictated by the masters.
So as I walk, I’m following a tradition, of pleasure-taking, but also refusal. The protestor throwing a stone at the riot police is sanctified by tradition just as much as the artist in the café or the tourist taking pleasure in a walkable neighbourhood. The next time I visit, Paris will be putting on its best face for its Olympic visitors. What will await them? I will be in the crowd, looking to see what I can see.
