Among the many Parisian squares which may form part of the visitor’s itinerary, the Place de la Bastille is among the least inviting – a whirligig of fairly characterless late nineteenth-century buildings, with on one side the glassy modernity of the controversial 1989 opera house. At its centre stands the 1840 Colonne de Juillet, erected in homage to those killed in the 1830 July Revolution, many of whom are buried in its base. Lacking the monumental elegance of (in very different ways) the nearby Place des Vosges or the Place de la Concorde, or the imposing perspective down the Champs-Élysées...

The two buildings that gave thequartierits names represented, unsurprisingly, the two major repositories of power in pre-modern France: the (Roman Catholic) Church and the State. The area was, as its neighbour the Marais had been until cleared by the Knights Templar in the eleventh century, for long a marshy wasteland, traversed by an old Roman road leading eastwards out of the city. It was in 1198 that the Crusades preacher Foulques de Neuilly established a residence for repentant prostitutes on the site of what is now the Hôpital Saint-Antoine, at 184 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine. This became a Cistercian...

By the late 1780s the Bastille had become so unpopular, and so costly to maintain, that plans were afoot to transfer all its inmates to Vincennes. Flysheets were circulating demanding its closure, along with attacks on thelettre de cachet. The country was deep in an economic crisis whose details were exposed in 1781 by the director-general of finances, Jacques Necker, in hisCompte rendu au roi– an act of open government which earned him great popularity but also contributed to his dismissal later that year. Brought back amid worsening financial turmoil in 1788, he helped to convene the...

The July Column which now stands in the centre of the Place de la Bastille was a long time in the planning. The foundation-stone of a column, which was to sit atop a scale model of the fortress, had been laid on 14 July 1792, but the Convention abandoned the project. Jacques-Louis David, foreshadowing the Egyptophilia of Napoleon’s elephant, built a large plaster fountain in 1793 in the form of the goddess Isis, but this was a transitory phenomenon. Not until Louis-Philippe had taken power, in 1830, was it decided to erect a monument not only to 1789 but also...

The two decades of the Second Empire were marked by a kind of revolution in Paris, but of a very different kind to the hurly-burly of the previous eighty-two years. The key figure was Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, though it might be more appropriate to refer to him as ‘Baron’, since his title may well have been self-conferred, resting on the fact that his maternal grandfather, Baron Dentzel, had no male heirs. Haussmann, an early example of the classic Frenchfonctionnaireor state employee who though unelected can wield immense influence, made his career as prefect – the appointed representative of...

The term La Belle Époque – broadly cognate with the English ‘naughty nineties’ – can be narrowly defined as spanning the period between 1896, when France emerged from a prolonged economic depression, and the outbreak of the First War in 1914. It is sometimes, if inaccurately, extended as far back as 1871, doubtless because that date inaugurated forty-three years of peaceful constitutional stability. That may seem a modest achievement to an Anglophone readership, but after the turmoil of the ‘short nineteenth century’ since the Revolution of 1789 it was something new for France, and the romantic aura with which the...

France lost more lives in the First War than any other Allied country bar Russia – almost 1 700 000 – and more than 4 000 000 French soldiers were wounded. I have not been able to find an area-by-area breakdown of these statistics, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the Faubourg suffered as much as otherquartiersif not more, given that its largely working-class population would have fought in the trenches rather than enjoying the greater security of an officer’s life. The end of the war was marked by victory celebrations on 14 July 1919, in which...

The 150th anniversary of the Revolution was commemorated, on 14 July 1939, by a march from Bastille to Nation, organized by the Communist Party, in which 50 000 took part - the last major political demonstration in the Faubourg for several years. I say ‘major’ in reference to size only, for at 3 p.m. on 27 June 1942, with the Occupation at its height, a remarkable event took place at the corner of the avenue Ledru-Rollin and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Some 200 women, mostly Communists, gathered to the strains of the Marseillaise and distributed tracts to passers-by, to...

The modernization of Paris went on apace during the presidency of de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou (1969–74). This period saw grandiose modernization projects, many though not all reviled by defenders of traditional Paris: the destruction of the main Paris market at Les Halles, replaced by an underground shopping-mall, the building of the skyscraper Tour Montparnasse, next to and overshadowing the new rail station of the same name, and, less infelicitously, the construction of the Centre Beaubourg (renamed Centre Georges Pompidou after his death and opened in 1977). ‘Beaubourg’ is a major cultural centre housing an immense public library –...

The Bastille Opéra was one of François Mitterrand’sgrands projets, also known asgrands travaux- a dozen or so highly ambitious architectural realizations which left the President’s mark on Paris in a manner sometimes described, not flatteringly, as reminiscent of the monumental schemes of the Egyptian Pharaohs. Three of these – the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Musée d’Orsay (both on the Left Bank) and the Cité des Sciences at La Villette, in the north-east of the city – had in fact been embarked upon under Giscard, though they were completed during Mitterrand’s first term. Among the others, the...

In July 1998 Philippe Denis, president of the association SOS-Paris which was founded in the late 1970s to defend the capital’s architectural heritage, stated: ‘La construction de l’Opéra-Bastille a provoqué dans le quartier un véritable séisme’¹ /‘The building of the Opéra-Bastille caused a real earthquake in thequartier.’ It unquestionably brought about the most dramatic changes in the area since the days of Haussmann, hastening and intensifying the process of yuppification that has characterized eastern Paris over the past thirty or so years.

The changes in the area over the past twenty or so years are a microcosm of those...

Flânerie is a movement through space; the archive is a deposit in time. The flâneur follows his/her passing impulse; the archivist’s avocation is a methodical and classificatory one. Flâneurs may or may not leave a trace of their own; archivists preserve and memorialize the traces of others. For Edmund White, following Walter Benjamin, ‘theflâneuris in search of experience, not knowledge’;¹ for Jacques Derrida, the archive ‘ne sera jamais la mémoire ni l’anamnèse en leur expérience spontanée, vivante et intérieure’² /‘will never be memory nor anamnesis in their spontaneous, living, interior experience’. Flânerie, to reprise a distinction famously deconstructed...