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Passage , n. 1. The act or process of passing, esp.: a . A movement from one place to another; transit. b. The process of elapsing. c. The process of passing from one condition or stage to another; transition. d . Obs. Death. e. The enactment into law of a legislative measure. 2. A journey, esp. one by air or water. 3. a. The right to travel on something, esp. a ship: book a passage. b. The price paid for this. 4. The right, permission, or power to come and go freely. 5. a. A path, channel, or duct through, over, or along which something may pass: the nasal passages. b. A corridor. 6. An occurrence between two persons, esp.: a. An exchange of words, arguments, or vows. b. An exchange of blows: passage at arms. 7. A segment of a literary work: a celebrated passage from Shakespeare. 8. Mus. A segment of a composition. 9. Med. An emptying of the bowels.
All that is solid melts into air... -- Karl Marx
"Fleeting," "passing," "ephemeral" -- these are adjectives frequently cited as markers of urban modernity. In Le peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire uses similar terms ("transitory," "the fugitive," "contingent") to describe what he regards as a particular type of modernity expressed in the art of everyday life (372). More specifically, he sees sketching as a metaphor for the swift pace of the changing city; the process of sketching and its subject matter (typically fashion plates -- a fickle industry indeed) are a means to understanding "the daily metamorphosis of exterior things... that demands from the artist an equal velocity of execution" (364).
Studies of the Parisian Arcade, or more aptly Passage -- the place for fashionable goods in luxury boutiques -- are entirely in keeping with Baudelaire's observations of modernity, that is, his exploration of fashion and the accelerated and unexpected variety of the quotidian's appearances and occasions. Not only is the arcade emblematic of the fast growing consumer society and utopian capitalism in the early 19th century, but it is also a space for things irreducible to capital such as gazing, strolling, and the furtive pleasures of prostitution and gambling. The Passage inscribes in the act of its naming the transitory nature of its existence, and points necessarily to its own demise. In fact, as I will attempt to show, these elements of space and movement -- shopping, gazing, strolling, and illicit activities, among many others -- participate in the demise of the Passage and the rise of the mall.
The flâneur -- dandy, artist, detective, and stroller, the favorite literary character of the passages -- has been well represented and theorized as an object of circulation within this urban space.[1] More recently women (and specifically Janet Wolff's "invisible flâneuse") have been reconsidered in light of their absence from literary representations of the 19th century city. Anne Friedberg and Meaghan Morris have tagged the flâneur/flâneuse -- the prototypical window shopper of the arcades -- as a precursor of the shopper and stroller in the modern shopping era. It should be no surprise, then, that the Arcade/Passage is still very much at the center of studies relating to postmodern consumerism and theories of everyday life and leisure. Certainly the Passage as historical location of commodity circulation and consumer fetishism is at the center of Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project], and has been amply discussed elsewhere.[2] My first objective is to shift slightly from some of this work on the Passage in consumer society, and to reflect for a moment on the nature of the Passage in relation to the concepts of space and circulation. One could ask, why examine the historical spacialities of shopping, prostitution, gambling, and strolling, sites for the flâneur/flâneuse? What can the interrogation of this space and its activities reveal about the modern social? In their recent work on shopping, women, and the cinema, Friedberg and Morris ask what and who is representative of this space? Ultimately, I want to suggest along with Morris that the Passage functions in the history of modernity as "that unique sense of place" (222), a sense of place that articulates the changing historical notions of space. However, the various designations of space cannot fully represent the position that the Passage held in the 19th century imagination and public sphere. I will combine it, therefore, with the idea of mobility and velocity, two essential features of circulation, in order to thoroughly investigate the historical problematics of place and movement in relation to the Passage.
Admittedly, in the case of the Passage, the "unique sense of place" is not seamlessly related to the 1980's shopping center or 1990's mall. The Passage is in many ways a mall raté, that is, a failed mall. Its failure is due to a number of effects and conditions of capitalism, urban planning, and technological advances. These include the Passage's slow decline into a place of ambiguous use by the mid-19th century as the result of, among other things, changing consumer tastes, and modern marketing strategies in the grands magasins, as well as the increasing mobility and speed of Parisian life. The introduction of increasingly faster modes of transportation -- horse-drawn carriages, wagons, bicycles, automobiles, buses, and subways -- led to laws governing movement and circulation in urban areas consistent with the regulation of loitering, prostitution, and street gambling. These spaces, vehicles, and velocities contributed in both uncertain and direct ways to the demise of the Passage.
From 1853 until 1869, during the Second Empire in France under the rule of Napoleon III, the Préfet de la Seine, Georges Eugène Haussmann, widened boulevards, built sidewalks, and opened public parks -- thus performing the "Haussmannization" of Paris. With these improvements that enlarged and extended public space came the roomy and open spaces of the grand magasins, or department stores. After the construction of these large department stores, the Passage -- a place that functioned as salon, boudoir, and street -- was no longer considered as homey as the salon nor as vast as the street, and its boudoir was shut down. The Passage was no longer a place that held everyday life as in a fishbowl. With the demise of the Passage, the grand magasin reinvented and reinscribed the everyday place of strolling, gazing, and shopping and held sway over the shopper and stroller alike. In other words, while the Passage or Arcade is surely the precursor to urban, vertical malls like Moscow's G.U.M., New York's A&S Plaza, or Toronto's Eaton Centre, it is also, in its eventual state of decay, a condition for the suburban mall.
The changes in space and circulation associated with the rise of modernity and urbanization contributed to a weakening or sickening of the Passage, and ultimately its death. As Benjamin argues in the Arcades Project, there were allegorical if not direct connections between the Passage and the place it occupied in both the city street and the 19th-century collective unconscious. Borrowing from his aphorism in "The Automobile Disease," one could say the early Passage, as part of an explosion of construction (80 Arcades were built between 1820 and 1840), inscribed an etiology of technological "progress," consumerism, and capitalist/colonialist expansion -- a kind of "Arcade-itis." At the same time, we might also recognize the Passage as already decaying, for we know Benjamin also saw dissolution in progress and the passage of time. Thus we could just as easily reverse the terms from above and say here is "Passageway Decay" and its etiology: the pace of the pedestrian, the bourgeois appropriation of the grand magasin as a home-away-from-home commercial space, the rapidly interconnecting world of mass transit, and laws governing circulation, prostitution, and gambling. This "diseased" condition of the Passage points toward what French Surrealist Louis Aragon designates as the "zone" of modern mythology in his novel Le paysan de Paris [Paris Peasant]. The notion that the Passage holds some key to modernity and modern mythology implies also narrative and story, which are developed into what Benjamin calls "the space of history." This once-lauded space, the Passage, a consumer's utopia, becomes a decaying cell, folded into the rapidly transforming urban organization of networks and of interconnected heterotopian sites which it can not sustain.
I have suggested a few possible links in the chain leading to the death of the Passage. In order to navigate this place I need a map with a readable legend, provided by theories of space and circulation as well as historical accounts of Paris. I consider "place" a particular rubric under a larger, general category of space Foucault identifies as "emplacement," "extension," and "site," and geographers Cindi Katz and Neil Smith call "absolute space." For theories of circulation I rely on Christophe Studeny's recent study on velocity and laws and modes of conveyance (L'invention de la vitesse [The Invention of Speed]), while for historical information I draw largely on the work of Patrice Moncan and Christian Mahout. I also use portions of Aragon's Paris Peasant where he describes the Passage as "zone," and Benjamin's Paris, Capitale du XIXe siècle, a French translation of Das Passagen-Werk. Essential to my project, then, is the need to move topographically and historically through the Passage -- to pass through it -- in order to uncover distinctly European, if not French, 19th-century ideas of social space and circulation that anticipated the Passage's decay and the rise of the suburban mall. In the pages that follow, then, let us take a stroll, a stroll through conceptions of space and the genealogy of the Arcade, from its incipient form as the real estate venture through its development as the microcosm of consumer society, and, finally, to its state of demise.
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ON SPACE
How are we to consider space? I can say that the Passage is space of commerce, of strolling, of window shopping, but that still doesn't reveal how the fundamental concept of space is represented or inscribed culturally. The unique qualities of the Passage are due partly to the history of its origins, its aristocratic and royal "emplacement" on the eve of the French Revolution, and its subsequent "extension" of the city street. In order to understand how the Passage functions ultimately as a site in the modern urban network, it is important to particularize metaphors of space and their designations.
In Foucault's "Of Other Spaces," he describes three ways space has been defined in our Western experience. The first is "medieval space" or "the space of emplacement," which incorporates the history of "a hierarchic ensemble of places" (22). These are places that convey relatively simple binary relationships: the sacred and the profane, the protected and the exposed, the country and the city, and so forth. Foucault thus emphasizes the contradiction inherent in the notion of emplacement. because "emplacement" not only describes a place that finds its natural expression in its installation in medieval society or culture, but also assigns anything -- an object, event, or idea -- that appears out of place an "artificial" location in order to secure its place in the medieval world and imaginary. In this way even incongruous events fall into a system of local comprehension.
Local comprehension as an articulation of "emplacement" is neither open to a consideration of the natural world outside its own parameters nor to the sciences trying to make sense of the "outside" world. For it is only with the development of scientific studies, especially astronomy and its published discoveries, that the presence of the world outside the local found its way into popular consciousness. One of the consequences was that the "space of emplacement" also began to shift and open.
Foucault argues that with Galileo's "constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space," the notion of emplacement dissolves, that "a thing's place [is] no longer anything but a point in its movement" (23). In other words, emplacement (localization) becomes "extension," an extension of itself within a larger system and understanding of space -- a notion that corresponds roughly to the publication of Galileo's discoveries in the 17th century. In partial disagreement with Foucault, Neil Smith and Cindi Katz argue that too many distinctions are made with regard to metaphors of space. They further contest that Foucault, instead of describing many different senses of space, is describing a fundamentally European one. Space signifies, for Smith and Katz, not an area or enclosure, but its representation.
This representative "absolute space," as they call it, is founded in the principles of Euclidean geometry -- more precisely, in the second principle, which states that it is possible to describe a circle with any center and radius. We are thus are looking at a distinction in the meaning of space made by Smith and Katz that begins one century earlier than Foucault's. At the center of both arguments is this second principle of Euclidean geometry. Smith and Katz see "a conception of space as a field, container, a co-ordinate system of discrete and mutually exclusive locations" as the starting point for the "the premise of hegemonic social practices" and imperialist endeavors (75) . This determination of space corresponds with the onset of European social relations in the "emerging space-economy of capitalism from the 16th century onwards" (75). On the other hand, Foucault's model of space as "extension" in the 17th century roughly coincides with Galileo's re-evaluations of the Copernican model (16th century) of the first heliocentric theory of planetary movement. In all these models, spatial distinctions, both metaphoric and representational, based on scientific knowledge of the solar system are transferred to the public imagination. This transfer continues in the reproduction of those models in Western epistemology in direct relationship to social, economic, political, architectural, and artistic practices.
However, Smith and Katz do confirm Foucault's theorizing on the connection between space and power. This connection for them is "the thoroughly naturalized absolute conception of the space that grew up with capitalism... [which] expresses a very specific tyranny of power" (76). One need only to look to Bentham's panoptic architectural model to observe the "tyranny of power" as part of the creation of specific social spaces. As Foucault suggests in Discipline and Punish, any conception of regulated space is necessarily accompanied by the need to manage it through the imposition of rules, ordinances, and central governmental controls. Indeed, we must acknowledge, says Foucault, that a disciplining of the "extension" as well as the system in which it belongs and participates changes the public conception of space.
There is an important correlation to be made here between Foucault's description of "extension" and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's theory of regulation of public systems. Schivelbusch's discussion of public lighting systems, imposed in 17th-century Paris by Louis XIV, shows how the street, an extension of the private domain, was then ordered and administered "as a public place for the flow of traffic" (62). The lighting system was established for the community which, as Schivelbusch argues, believed it to represent both royal prerogative and the police, "the executors of absolutist power, control, and repression" (62). The state-owned and operated public lighting encoded round-the-clock surveillance and became "closely associated...with the repressive function of the police" (62). The disciplinary light of the street lamps thus took on a symbolic meaning of law and order and, by extension, French government troops and the army. As Schivelbusch points out, many streetlights were destroyed by the "lower orders" of the Parisian populace in the 1830 revolutionary uprisings. Ironically, this destruction coincided with the height of construction of many of the gas-lit passages in Paris, as public (albeit enclosed) bourgeois shopping passageways continued to crop up across the city. Although the connection between street lighting and police is relational, and metonymic at that, it describes in one sense how space could no longer be understood as localized, and was made to contend, as extension, within the larger system of streets and the process of urbanization.[3]
These modifications of "extension" and system occur in the modern era of developing technologies and disuniting social orders, what Benjamin calls, the "era of high capitalism." Although Smith and Katz might argue that this modification is an unnecessary distinction of "absolute space," Foucault draws on contemporary notions of the appropriation of space because he feels that "a practical desanctification of space" (23) has not yet occurred in our time, and in lieu of the complete desacralization of space, a new representation of space must be described. At this point the inadequate metaphor of "extension" dissolves into a new one, as "extension" is formally replaced by "the site." For Foucault the site is "defined by relations of proximity between points or elements" (23). Space, no longer definable as an "extension" and its system, comes to signify a more heterogeneous concept of "relations among sites" (23). Questioning these sets of relations is essential for studying kinds of places, because no place exists in a void and all places are inextricably a part of the relation of all sites.
Foucault uses the placement and function of the mirror as the example of this kind of site and therein describes a "counter-site," also called a "heterotopian site." A mirror is a "placeless place" and is utopian in the sense that it opens up to a virtual, nonexistent space of surface. The reflection gains visibility only within that surface. At the same time, according to Foucault, the mirror derives its meaning from the reflection it produces, as if it were a space of reconstitution of the real and of all the surrounding connections that it captures. Although Foucault casts the heterotopian in terms of presence and absence, hereness and thereness, it is possible to understand the heterotopian site as an actual architectural or cultural construction. One such heterotopian site is the Passage.
By using Foucault's terms of "emplacement," "extension," and "site" I will now orient my historical narrative of the Passage. What we lack, however, are the combinatory agents that produce a map of its social space. Here, we will compound the metaphors and representations of space in the public imaginary with the actual placement and function of space in the Passage.
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ON LE PASSAGE: FROM EMPLACEMENT TO EXTENSION
So what of le Passage? In its untranslatable designation the name itself poses a particular problematic: Does it refer to architecture and art, their uses and functions, or the activity performed in such a place? "Arcade" in both French and English signifies the shape and design of the architectural structure, specifically of the passageway's entrance and exit, and the small bays along its entire length. In the arcades of the Palais-Royal and the galeries de Bois, which are the predecessors to the Passage, we can see a pattern of spatial transformation from emplacement to extension as they are perceived in 18th and 19th-century French culture.
From the vantage point of New York and a "fast" American culture regulated by the frequency and speed of the express train, it seems impossible to talk about the passages without situating it in a different economy marked by a slower pace. Construction of the first passages was accomplished in a time of growing political upheaval and economic distance between social classes; hand-made lace, silk parasols, and the leisurely stroll were bourgeois luxuries, for while it is true that most passages were built in the decade and a half after 1822, the first passage -- in the Palais-Royal -- is from the late 18th century just before the French Revolution, an entirely different era (Benjamin, "Paris, Capital" 146). The Palais-Royal in France, site of the first arcade -- I use the term arcade here to distinguish between the open circulation of the Passage and the original three-sided enclosure of the Palais-Royal arcade structure -- was really little more than a royal proposition and real-estate speculation.
Designed and built by the architect Louis (1731-c.1811) between 1781 and 1784, the site had sixty pavilions each with three arcades. [4] At this time, the Palais-Royal belonged to Louis XVI's cousin, Phillippe d'Orléans, later known as "Philippe-Egalité," a name he earned for showing his support during the French Revolution. (though he is later guillotined). In 1785, d'Orléans, decides to sell each of the arcades in the Palais-Royal in order to support his opulent lifestyle. The merchants who purchased the arcades were allowed to sell merchandise from their boutiques, but had to consent to keep the structure of the arcades forever in tact. This real estate speculation -- in French, une spéculation immobilière -- was not designed as an experiment in shopping (although we can see formally how the Passage is derived from this), but for the profit of the "cash-poor" duc d'Orléans.
A closer look at the etymology of the French expression, une spéculation immobilière, reveals a return to the notion of the spatial representation of emplacement. The word immobilière is derived from the Latin mobilis, which plainly points to the contemporary meaning of mobile as in automobile, and less evidently to the 16th-century French juridical meuble or mobilier meaning movable, as in movable goods or personal estate, including furniture. The term immobilier is, on the contrary, an expression of the immobile, fixed, and implanted quality of real estate and property. This term represents the "emplaced" origins of the Passage, fixed not only in a locale, but also put in place the royal and hierarchical prerogative through the ownership of real estate -- a meaning far different from the fleeting, passing, and ephemeral nature of modernity mentioned at the beginning of this essay.
Thus it's quite possible to imagine a residual, if not institutional, hierarchical sense of spatial emplacement in pre-Revolutionary French society, dominated by aristocratic fastidiousness and a strictly regulated and regimented way of life that permeated Parisian and Court culture. This sense of implantedness, although existing well into the epoch where space might well be described as "extension," allows for the formation of a marché-like space in a locale that is by definition the "right of way" of royalty. That is, that the members of the Court implant themselves and their real estate ventures into a locale by calling up aristocratic hierarchy and privilege as the natural order that determines a place's location or localization.
In addition to this royal prerogative, a few years following the construction of the first arcades Moncan and Mahout reveal in The 1786 Patent Registry that the architectural features of the arcade building were already regulated.
It shall be practiced in the new construction and on each side of the street, public galleries six feet in width, which extend in height from the ground level [rez-de-chaussée] to the stories above; the galleries shall be supported by columns surmounted by semi-circular archways, forming in all thirty-six bays on each side; each bay shall be secured to the walls of the boutiques by pillars and archways in the same style as the one in front. (20-21)
The plan calls for a rather narrow passageway and a precise and repetitive style. And yet this systematic regulation creates for the nascent Passage a spatial paradox of another order. In terms of design and intent, the first structures embodied a monarchical legitimacy, but one which nevertheless began to organize the Passage as an "extension" within a framework of architectural and mercantile standards. In other words, because the first arcades in Paris were created by an increasingly archaic sense of royal privilege right before the onset of the French Revolution, the Passage's initial localization is marked by, and more clearly understood through, the metaphor of "emplacement." At the same time, however, the Passage becomes a component integrally located within a system of meanings (architectural, economic, social, and cultural) of the street and commerce in the late 18th-century. In direct contradiction to the spatially designated "emplacement," the Passage can also be regarded as an "extension" of the legal rights and wealth of the monarchy. Therefore, while the Passage is a descendant of the "emplaced" aristocratic privilege, it is also a spatial reflection of the ruling monarchy and its power of purchase--an "extension" of the arm of the ruling class and law, similar to the metonymic relationship of the police and the public lighting system studied by Schivelbusch. Furthermore, the Passage is representative of a new kind of public space within the urban landscape, one in which bourgeois society participates in a nearly equivalent way with the Court. The actual space itself, the narrow covered street, becomes increasingly organized within the quickly modernizing city.
The speculative nature of the Passage's construction and commercial organization continues well after the revolutionary period and into the beginning of the 19th century. It is the capital of wealthy Parisian families that purchase auctioned real estate in Paris during the French Revolution in order to construct more passageways between their residences and the public spaces of the theater, shops, restaurants and cafés. During the Empire of Napoleon I (1804-1815) only three new passages are constructed; however, during the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830-1848), eighty more passages are designed and completed. Ultimately, then, the growing bourgeois class in France financially supports the passages. The grouping together of boutiques in one place was convenient for the bourgeoisie, who could now purchase luxury items previously available only to members of the Court. By the early 1820s, the Passage became the center of commercial activity and a public place that unified aristocratic privilege with wealthy Parisian bourgeois society.
In the 1820s and 30s when the majority of arcades were built in France they consisted of a roof of glass in an iron framework, an arched doorway (entrance) made of stone or brick that led through to another street's exitway designed with matching stone arch and decoration. The term "passage" comes closer in meaning to this space's actual use than the name arcade or galerie because in connecting two parallel streets, it affords a covered walkway in inclement weather, and, in most cases, a secure short-cut, especially at night with its gas-lit corridor between buildings. Indeed, as early as 1928, travel guides of the 19th century refer to the passages as "sheltered paths" used strictly by pedestrians going from one street to the next parallel street. Normally, the Passage had shops, boutiques, and cafés along either side of the corridor at the street level: "The stores are bright, well-stocked, but a little expensive" (qtd. in Moncan and Mahout 11). At the same time, the Passage was an ideal location for the entertainment industry, as well as for illicit activities, including brief, casual encounters such as gambling, prostitution, and petty thievery. The passages also offered a variety of other amenities: business offices, maisons et hôtels de passe [brothels and hourly rate hotels], transients' apartments, bathhouses, and eventually restrooms. The new social space created by the Passage is like a public interior for pedestrians outside of their home.
Beginning with the first arcade of the Palais-Royal, boutiques, cafés, restaurants and bookstores were established in the arcades, and dressmakers, hat shops, and shoe stores representing the height of Parisian fashion were among some of the first boutiques present.[5] Print shops, reading rooms with private libraries, foreign newspapers and political pamphlets, even editorial offices and small publishing houses could also be found there. Improved sanitation was considered an additional attraction: not only did the passages provide a mud-free walkway between streets and shops, a few had bathhouses--the first were introduced in Paris in 1765--and most had public toilets and restrooms. In fact, the celebrity of these public restrooms was such that the 1828 Guide de Paris remarked that "nothing could be so more fresh nor more elegant than this place" (qtd. in Moncan and Mahout 35)." Soon theaters and dance halls, panoramas -- precursors to our contemporary movie houses -- were introduced to other public leisure activities in the ever-expanding entertainment industry.
Although intended as a public walkway the Passage only allowed a proximity to wealth and opulence for the poor and working classes of Paris. The Passage's space and commercial function clearly aligned the bourgeoisie with the aristocratic wealth of the Restoration Court, it could not possibly articulate the growing gap between this new "democratic" financial alliance and the working poor in Paris. It was therefore inevitable that the Bourbon dynastic rule should come to an end in 1830 because its leaders were ultraroyalists who wanted to return to the ancien régime. They envisaged a return to a time before the Revolution and "liberté", and before the prosperous bourgeoisie became politically puissant. This Royalist zeal corresponded to an impossible recovery of a lost past where objects, events, and ideas fit neatly into hierarchical relationships based on birth and class, if not necessarily wealth.
When the public attractions and pleasures of the passages were well-attended, they invited another sort of purchasable pleasure of a somewhat less public nature: that of brothels, massage parlors and gambling halls. And, whereas wealthy Parisian society gathered in the Passage for shopping and pleasure-seeking, there also existed a space for a criminal underworld: small-time con men, swindlers, rogues, and of course, pickpockets. Prostitutes in the Passage had their own hierarchy. By 1805, between 600 and 800 prostitutes worked and lived in the arcades of the Palais-Royal alone.[6] In the alleys were the street-walkers, while call-girls walked inside the arcades; demimondaines or "cocottes de luxe" worked from the outdoor cafés. Prostitutes were ranked in the hierarchy according to where they worked in and around the arcades of the Palais-Royal. Benjamin refers to the top-ranking hirondelles des passages, literally "the birds (swallows) of the passages," who lived on the first and second floors "in order to easily spy [passing] clients" from their "love" nests.[7] But the Passage's public walkways provided more than a path for the "fille publique," and all sorts of women and girls from every social strata could be encountered there: "grisettes, cousettes, ouvrières et jeunes filles" [young working women, apprentice dressmakers, working-class women, and girls]. [8] In his history of the arcades, Jonathon Friedrich Geist implies that "rain showers began many adventures," ungenerously suggesting that chance meetings and adventures with any one of these women was just as likely or possible as with a prostitute. Although Moncan and Mahout argue that prostitution didn't appear in passages other than those around the Palais-Royal, the presence of prostitutes is documented (albeit somewhat elliptically) in the 1830 proscription which prohibited their appearance in the passages as well as in public gardens and on the streets.
The unregulated growth of commercialism combined with restrictions of movement bring into play the third and final component of my essay, which is circulation. If we consider the implications of laws that govern and restrict circulation and the Passage as a representative space of the historical development of economic, political, and social circulation in the 19th century, we can identify why the city's circulation went through and, ultimately, around the Passage, leading to its demise.
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CIRCULATING THROUGH AND AROUND THE PASSAGE
In this part of my argument I will position the Passage as existing within systems of circulation, from the end of the Restoration (1830-1848) under the rule of Louis-Philippe, son of Philippe-Egalité, through the short-lived Second Republic (1848-1851), the Second Empire (1852-1870), and the beginning of the Third Republic in the 1870s through 1880s. This section, although centered on circulation, shows how laws regulating both prostitution and speed limits point to the ephemeral pace of the pedestrian, and, significantly, to the beginning of the decline of the Passage. I have already identified the histories which develop the Passage's own rigid "emplacement," and its metaphoric dissolution into a public "extension" of the city street.
At the outset of the Second Empire the city begins to change more rapidly with the development of open public spaces, wide boulevards, sidewalks, and department stores. What I suggest is that the over-regulated and deteriorating Passage got strung along in the grand schemes of the Second Empire, plugged into a rapidly transforming society of networks, of perversely interconnected heterotopian sites in which the Passage could never hope to participate. Momentarily, the city's circulation lingered just long enough to hook into the Passage's failing and fragile space-use. The passageway represented the 19th-century capitalist space in a microcosm, or what a Paris guidebook by Benjamin called "a world in miniature" ("Paris, Capital" 147). The name of the Passage -- the passing place -- should not be considered simply a symptom of its demise, rather it represents how the Passage itself functioned as a transitory agent, complicit with early consumerism and urban modernization. It is a transitory phase that the city must pass through, as if the Passage itself were the space of a rite of passage.
Historical accounts and literary representations of the Passage appear frequently in 19th-century novels from Balzac to Zola and throughout various 19th-century guide books of Paris, but not until the 1926 publication of Aragon's surrealist novel Paris Peasant does any text interpret the development of the Passage as a self-inscribed space of transition. Most of the earlier texts focus on the Passage in relation to representations of Parisian life (Zola's Thérèse Raquin), the circulation of Parisian pedestrians (Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris), shopping, leisure culture, and guide books for the foreign traveler. The pedestrian par excellence of the 19th century is the flâneur. The flâneur and the pace of the stroll were determining factors in explaining the attraction of Parisians to the passages, factors Benjamin often addresses in his work on 19th-century Paris, especially the Arcades Project. In Dossier A of the French version, Paris, Capitale du XIXe siècle, Benjamin writes: "The passage is nothing but the libidinous road of commerce, suitable for awakening desires....[T]he humors circulate slowly, commodities proliferate in storefronts...The flâneur sabotages shady deals [le trafic]. And neither is he a buyer. He is the commodity" ([A 3a,7],73). So essential is the circulation of the flâneur that Benjamin uncovers in the allegory of the Passage the history of modernity and Parisian consumer culture.
There are two distinct possibilities for proceeding historically with the decline of the Passage and the rise of the mall. One is to start in the 1880s with the grand magasin where people began to experience shopping as a mass, and where Benjamin declares the death of the flâneur. Another is to look at the moments of transition where the space-emplacement of the Passage dissolved into the space-extension, and, in the end, where the metaphoric "extension" dissolved into the spatial counter-site, the final resting place of the Passage. In trying to understand the impossible contradictions of its utopian history and its eventual dissolution, I will look back to those moments when Paris was experiencing the transition from a pedestrian urban space to a vehicular one, when the government made a concerted effort to regulate all forms of urban circulation through the imposition of laws and codes. This transitional phase, coincident with the rise of bourgeois power (for which the Passage is the perfect symbol), becomes the period in permanent flux in which free circulation is regarded as dangerous and unhealthy. Consequently the government promotes better forms of circulation/control in order to supervise the growing urban sprawl. The logic is that a city free of dark passages is free of vice, both revolutionary and salacious.
In a first effort to control the mixed-use space of the Passage, the Restoration regime under Charles X authorized the Paris chief of police Mangin to regulate and restrict the circulation of prostitutes in public areas in April 1830. Prior to this time, the Passage was in truth a private property and historically immune to intrusion or intervention by the police because the duc d'Orléans had refused the police entry into the Palais-Royal. This situation held for more than thirty years after the first arcade was built. In Benjamin's "Prostitution and Gaming," he cites the research of F. F. A. Béraud on these new regulations regarding the activity of prostitutes in Paris.[9] Article 1 clearly states that "it is illegal for [prostitutes] to appear at any time and under no circumstances in the Passage, public gardens, or on the streets." Article 2, however, gives prostitutes the right to their livelihood if confined to brothels marked by a light or indicated by "an old woman standing in the doorway" (Art. 7). In addition, Articles 3-5 provide limited circulation for prostitutes who do not reside in brothels to walk to their place of work. The regulations stipulate that when "dressed simply and decently" they may leave their home only "after the street lights go on" and must proceed directly to the brothel (Art. 3). They may only work in one brothel a night (Art. 4) and must "be home by 11 PM" (Art. 5). But the obvious hypocrisy of such a law -- the ease with which the society still tolerates prostitution, though not the public movement of marked prostitutes -- does not tell us much about the problems these laws cause for open circulation and commerce in the passages. Part of the attraction of the Passage for prostitute and flâneur alike is the intimate juxtaposition of illicit commerce and other mercantile and capitalist ventures. In "Prostitution and Gaming" Benjamin observes: "The love that we have for the prostitute is the apotheosis of identification with commodity" (528). [10] The salon and boudoir quality of the Passage is forfeited to the commercial necessity of the street.
There is also an interesting correlation during this period in the 1830s prior to the July Revolution between the regulation of the sewer system and the Passage. The sewer system -- an illicit pathway full of "foul" revolutionary criminals as well as fermenting excrement -- was considered dangerous because its circulation was unsupervised (Reid 20). The Passage was also considered detrimental to social mores for much the same reason; hence the move to eliminate prostitution and gambling halls in 1836. [11] While the sewers below the streets of Paris were being cleaned, renovated, and regulated to the advantage of many city residents, the restrictions placed on the illicit activities in the Passage irreversibly changed the space-use to its detriment. Controlling the pedestrian traffic in the Passage was just one in a series of modifications that set the stage for the site's decline.
Curiously, these laws of 1830 regulating the circulation of both prostitution and sewage coincide with the imposition of speed limits in Paris. Christophe Studeny points out that a year earlier, in 1829, Article 475 of the Penal Code was passed regulating the speed of carriage traffic on Paris streets. "Neither coachman nor any other person may permit their horses to gallop under any circumstances... [and] in the streets of Paris, they may drive at a trot, and only at a walk in market places and in narrow streets" (Studeny 129). At the same time that the prostitute's circulation is restricted, merchants and businessmen request the right to drive their merchandise at a trot in Paris because they considered "gaining time" essential in the accelerated sale of goods (Studeny 103, 115-116). Even with numerous requests by merchants, only omnibus companies are allowed to use the trot for human transport. Both of these laws effect the changing nature of the Passage: one regulates its inhabitants and clients, and the other the speed of traffic outside the narrow pedestrian walkway. Meanwhile, the Paris revolt in July 1830 marks the appearance of bourgeois opposition against the ruling aristocracy and coincides with the Royalist's supervision of the space of the passages in Paris. Once Louis-Philippe came to power and left the Palais-Royal for the Tuileries in 1832 -- therefore requiring vehicular transport to and from the center of town -- cabriolets and carriages became a more popular mode of conveyance. Although the first census taken in 1844-45 shows that on the highways in France "walking remains the most common mode of locomotion for short and medium distances," in the capital the speed of conveyances matched that of a developing modern urban center (Studeny 94).
Even with the swifter pace of the horse-drawn vehicles in the streets of Paris, there were still a large number of Parisian pedestrians for whom the mud and muck of the roads was a problem. Although many public thoroughfares had sidewalks, the passages accommodated the pedestrian and afforded the convenience of nearly indoor shopping away from the mud and horse manure in the streets. Through the 1840s the Passage remained commercially viable and prosperous even with the construction of sidewalks, although ultimately it did not survive the gradual "Haussmannization" of Paris. The passages were dominated by the professional stroller, the flâneur. Benjamin remarks that "[a]round 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs like to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace" ("On Some motifs in Baudelaire" 197). Leisure and the pace of the flâneur provide the necessary pedestrian circulation within and through these passages, for the two enjoyed a mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationship based on the symbolic speed of the turtle. However this pace was considered an impediment to progress. Studeny quotes Parisian, Louis Huart, who states: "It seems that nowadays we live more quickly than in the past; the feverish activity that animates the Parisian no longer allows for the peaceful pace of vehicles from the previous centuries... also everybody today goes by carriage" (116).
Sealing the fate of the public walkways of the Passage was an ordinance from the Chief of Police toward the end of Louis-Philippe's regime. In 1847 this authorization proclaimed that passages built on private property would be closed to the public. As Moncan and Mahout observe: "The spirit of what had made [the passages] successful was affected. It was going to be difficult to continue under these conditions `as public spaces on private land'" (51). The open circulation within this site was now closed to the strolling, shopping public. The sewers below the streets and the boulevards outside the passages illustrate very well the interconnecting public infrastructure and regulated networks of Paris in which the Passage was struggling to be participate. These networks are closely connected to the demise of the passages. Gas lighting, for example, metonymically alludes to the underlying network of pipes and reserves implemented by the state -- an underground structure of institutional control. The same can be said for the construction of sewers and water mains and then electric lines (and later telephone lines). Laws regulating prostitution, a pedestrian activity, must also be considered part of the network of control that surrounds and includes the Passage. In The Invention of Speed, Studeny saw the downfall of the Passage as a necessary element for enabling more efficient connections among elements of the growing rapid transit systems such as trains, omnibus', and, eventually, subways.
When horse-drawn omnibuses move at a trot down the widened boulevards of Haussmann's Second Empire, the sidewalks (trottoir) are widened and create a newly habitable space for strolling. Private vehicular traffic increases from 8,804 in 1819 to 9,467 in 1853 (at the beginning of the Second Empire) to 12,893 in 1891; nearly 400 public omnibuses are also in circulation at this time, and the darkly lit Passage appears to be used primarily as temporary shelter during inclement weather. According to Studeny, the changing pace in the streets also changes the gaze of the stroller, especially those who "stroll" in an omnibus. There is not only a difference of speed, but also of vision itself, for the view from above a trotting horse is clearly more spectacular and panoramic (Studeny 207). And while the department store is amenable to window shopping at a trot, the Passage is not. As Studeny observes, "the progression of the avenues coincide with the apparition of the department stores, known for the acceleration of exchange" (201).
The mid-19th century imprinted on the city streets of Paris a new metropolis of wide boulevards, large, open public spaces, and a few brilliantly lit, glass buildings like the central Parisian market, Les Halles (constructed in 1853 and referred to by Zola as "the digesting machine, the belly of Paris"), or the Palais d'Exposition (built in 1867 and modeled after as London's Crystal Palace). [12] This opening-up and enlarging of luminous space further advanced the demise of the dim passageway. But by far the single-most "lethal" development for the fate of the Passage in the Second Empire was the grand magasin, or department store. Benjamin indicated that its invention signaled the death of the flâneur and with him, the Passage. Simultaneously, however, the entire network of interconnections and speed-intensive circulation led the Passage and the flâneur to their decline. In Just Looking, a study of shopping in 19th-century literature, Rachel Bowlby posits that large department stores becomes the new centers of consumer attractions, and further that it is women who most frequently stroll in these freshly designed spaces, not the flâneur. Even in the later works of Benjamin and Aragon, the only visibly circulating women appear to be mostly prostitutes. Yet as Morris insists in "Things To Do with Shopping Centers," the history of modernity and leisure culture must include the "pedestrian, the woman walker" (203).
Studeny claims that the Parisian department stores -- Bon Marché in 1852, Le Printemps in 1865, and the Belle Jardinère in 1866 -- all propose "the sale as a voyage" and "exalt the profusion of commodities" (201). Renovations between 1869-1887 at the Parisian Bon Marché feature a larger open, airy central space, glass-covered ceiling for natural light, and suspended walkways between floors that floated in the air like Venetian bridges over canals of shopping people. Although borrowed directly from the Passage's own glass-roofed design, this type of architecture and construction, used throughout the 1870s and 1880s, clearly contributed to the demise of the outdoor Passage and the rise of the sub/urban mall -- itself a distant cousin of the bright, expansive department store.
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PASSING IN A CHANGING CULTURE
The project of Benjamin, like Aragon before him, was to distinguish the Passage as a particular site of cultural knowledge that recognizes from the outset a real space of history. Benjamin begins his discussion of the passages in "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" with a poetic epigram from the 1828 Nouveaux tableaux de Paris. The poem expresses the beauty of the objects displayed in the windows of the boutiques. The advertisements for this merchandise is aided by the gas lighting at night as well as by inclement weather which forced people inside. At the same time, the luxury items in display cases often determine who circulates through the building. In recognition of the opulence of some of the boutiques, the epigram chosen by Benjamin begins by comparing the passages to palaces, a comparison that in many ways tags the Passage as two sites: a fantasy utopian space, and a social and public interior where the merchandise on display is a spectacle rivaling that of the flâneur himself. The everyday life that flowed through these passages, epitomized by the strolling flâneur, the pedestrian window-shopper, the loitering call-girl, or the circulating merchandise is important for both Aragon and Benjamin, because it represents a kind of dissolution of distinctions between the various elements of circulation and movement within this space. In fact, for Aragon, everyday life discloses the nature of the Passage not only as salon, boudoir, and street, but also, symbolically, modernity itself and the "fantastic" (and surrealist) manifestations of the quotidian.
Aragon compares these spaces at the height of their decline in the 1920s to "the dimly lit zones of human activity," where "a false move or a muddled syllable reveals one's inner thoughts" (Paris Peasant 20), as if the Passage itself was the revelatory Freudian slip of the entire 19th century, encompassing the evolution of modernity and the great sweep of capitalism. Similarly, Benjamin saw in the Passage an emblem of "[i]ntimations of [the dream of classless society], deposited in the unconscious of the collective [that] mingle with the new to produce the utopia that has left its traces in thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to fleeting fashions" ("Paris, Capital" 148). Both the "unconscious of the collective" and the "traces" are significant metaphors for Aragon and Benjamin because they refer to the invisible yet indelible mark left on Parisian culture and society. These marks are the imprint of circulation (e.g. consumerism, capitalism, bourgeois ideology) through the Passage and the shell of the architectural structure that remained.
In Aragon's Paris Peasant, he laments the increasing corporate and government control over public space in the ever-expanding city, and accuses Parisian society of the 1920s -- especially the inhabitants of the Passage de l'Opéra where the narrator also lives -- of succumbing to it passively, without protest. Ironically, the Passage is targeted for demolition to make way for an extension of the Boulevard Haussmann, a clear marker of the great urban transformation called "Haussmannization" which occurred during the Second Empire. By studying the fate of the Passage de l'Opéra against a backdrop of the surrealist refusal of Cartesian logic and reason, as well as the unaccustomed experience of modern everyday life, Aragon sees the Passage as a "zone" representing a theory of modern mythology. He is concerned with the workings of collective fantasy, the inspirational phantasmagoria and poetry stemming from the everyday life within this space. Hotel, brothel, café, bar, hairdresser, handkerchief shop, massage parlor, bathhouse -- all of these sites in most other Parisian passages have already been humbled by the network of department stores and widening city streets around them. Aragon thus uses the philosophy and aesthetic of Surrealism as a lens through which to view the Passage as both source and symptom of modernity. He writes:
[The modern light of the unusual] reigns in these covered galleries which are numerous in Paris around the major thoroughfares and which have been singularly named "des passages," as if in these corridors hidden from daylight, no one is permitted to loiter more than an instant. The murky, almost subterranean light, gets a sudden brightness from the flash of a bare leg under a skirt. Imported to the capital by a prefect of the Second Empire, that great American ingenuity will soon make it impossible to maintain these human aquariums already dead in the prime of life. They are the fence for several modern myths, since it is only now, threatened with destruction, that they have effectively become sanctuaries of the cult of the ephemeral, the fantastic landscape of illicit pleasures and unlawful professions, incomprehensible in the past and which the future will never know. (21)
From this excerpt we can understand why this space serves as the barometer of culture to be read variously in the drink menu at the CERTA bar, in a woman's appliqué faux-bolero jacket, in a trip to a public bath or masseuse. The Passage simultaneously represents the quotidian and the quasi-criminal space of the margin or "fence" [réceleur]. In other words, the Passage is the clandestine repository of stolen goods, of "several modern myths" that must be teased out of the fabric of its history precisely because this space is at the moment of dissolution. This very specific place of urban culture in decline can only be recuperated and represented through the surrealist project, which, dream-like, explores the "zone" of the collective unconscious. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss refers to Benjamin's understanding and acceptance of the Surrealist notion of the everyday and the trivial. But Benjamin's study of the Arcade does not culminate in the surrealist emphasis on mythology and dream as does Aragon's; rather, the Arcades Project "is concerned with dissolving mythology into the space of history." [Benjamin 13] Here, once again, the Passage is confronted with its own dissolution and disintegration.
This state of dissolving has already come into play with each subsequent metaphor of public space: just as Foucault's early designation of space "emplacement" dissolves into "extension" and "extension" into "site," Aragon's "zone" dissolves into Benjamin's "space of history." That Benjamin's fragmented Arcades Project began with the deteriorating fragments of the Passage speaks to its place in the history and culture of modernity, and to what it reveals of the past. But more importantly, dissolution signifies the metamorphosis of the Passage and social space in the urban culture of Paris. Of the 280 passages that were built in the beginning of the 19th century, very few survived. We might therefore consider the Passage to be as ephemeral as its name indicates, the perfect reminder of the fleeting and contingent nature of modernity described by Baudelaire.
But was this state of dissolution inherent in the Passage from its very inception? For instance, where Benjamin says that the arcades "are the scene of the first gas lighting" (147), is he primarily relying on the visual "scene" to show how the arcades originally moved within the circle of advancing technological progress and industrialization? Or, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, is the lighting a metaphor for the extension of governmental authority -- especially when that lighting is part of a public system controlled by a central administration? If the passages are the first site of gas lighting, then this is but one in a string of connections. As the mirror of its culture it could only always be/become a transitional place: between total dissolution and site.
If the Passage is a site that by its very nature connects to all other sites, it must at the same time "represent, contest, and invert" them (Friedberg 255). This concept can be linked to Foucault's "placeless place" of the mirror, or to what I call a "passing place," one caught in the crux of a perpetual contradiction. The more the Passage was regulated and made to conform to the social and economic needs of Paris, the more it reflected the society around it; consequently, the more it became less like itself and the less likely it could pass as/with other developing systems of circulation: railways, sewers, boulevards, highways, omnibus schedules, supply-and-demand commercial exchange. In this way, the presence of the Passage in mid-19th-century Paris always problematized the relationship it shared with other modern innovations of velocity and regulation within the society. At the same time the Passage as site was caught up in the beginnings of an indistinct web of heterotopian possibilities. The Passage found itself on the cusp of a dissolution of emplacement -- that is, its origin was a product of monarchical prerogative and therefore of hierarchical determination -- yet it is also the most visible capitalist extension of society in post-Revolution Paris. The Passage's spatial importance, as real-estate speculation and as a new site of rudimentary commercial circulation, was, initially, wholly unconnected to disease or decay; rather, it was a marker of wealth and economic growth, part of an original system of circulation.
To reconsider the Passage in this light, as a multi-use, heterotopian site, is to already understand its interconnectedness to circulation and circuitry. The Passage's mere connection to other nodal points throughout the network of 19th century Paris isn't enough to make it like the other inchoate sites in the mid-19th century. In fact, it is completely different from the others in that it participates in the society -- has a place, a role, a function, and even reflects the "world in miniature" (as Benjamin would say) -- but is simultaneously critical of the set of mirroring relations in which it exists and to which it is linked.
Foucault's example of the cemetery as "counter-site" or "heterotopian site" indicates this unusual condition and is analogous to the state of the Passage. The cemetery, although, at one time placed within the sacred ground of the church in the center of the community, is seen as a place of disease linked to death and decay by the 19th century. Each bourgeois citizen gets his or her own individual coffin for burial and the dead are removed from the city center to the suburbs (25). Claiming that death is an illness to be kept at a distance from the living, the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery hinges on the relational proximity of the living to disease. In keeping with the figure of disease, it is at the height of decay that the Passage at once becomes a heterotopian site -- unlike the utopian figure that Benjamin claims for it with reference to its first use of iron, its first use of glass, its Fourier-like phalanx of material consumption -- and is removed from its central role in the commercial and capitalist projects of the 19th century. Not until the 1960s when only a few passages remain as historical sites does its distant cousin reappear in the outskirts of town in a vastly different form as le Centre commercial, the French version of the mall. Like the mirror of containment and reflection described by Foucault, Benjamin's Arcade, as I have said earlier, was considered a mirror of the 19th century capturing the fleeting image of rapid commodity circulation in its surface. But whereas Benjamin sees the Passage as essentially utopian and points to an obviously uncomfortable disjuncture between its utopian promise and the decay he witnesses in the 1930s, Foucault's spatial metaphor of heterotopian site is more complex. It describes the mixed use of space and function of the Passage which reflected the society's liberal circulation and free market economy while at the same time contesting the regulation of these expanding networks.
Of course the Passage was not a cemetery, but it was in many ways a living morgue. The disciplining of the Passage, unlike the regulations on streets, sidewalks, and department stores, dominated its space-use from the 1830s through World War I. This discussion of the rise and fall of the mall raté implicates the developing market economy, urban leisure culture, governmental regulation, and speed. In many ways, then, the Passage represented an uncomfortable, but reliable mirror of its culture, just as the shopping center does today (see Morris, Friedberg). As Friedberg argues, the mall has a past in the architectural construction of the Parisian Passage with its glass roof, boutique shopping, office, and living spaces. Yet the older site may not be so closely linked to the mall except in its necessity of failure. Like the mall, the Passage was a mixed-use heterotopian space. However, unlike the mall's large parking lots and the "nostalgic image of the town center as a clean, safe and legible place" (Friedberg 113), the Passage was small, compact, dim, open to illegal commerce (prostitution, hôtels de passe [hourly-rate hotels], gambling halls), and absolutely unable to heed the changing velocity of the sub/urban experience. When Aragon fights to preserve the Passage de L'Opéra, he is fighting, he knows, the system of growing networks. It was therefore ironic, if not cruel, that the Passage de l'Opéra was destroyed to make way for the Boulevard Haussmann. To save a passage, a place of passing, a speculative real estate project, one would have to resist the topological accretion of the city and find in it a kind of eternal permanence. As a site of a nascent Parisian commercial culture, as a site of the original consumer stroll and of a public interior eclipsed by the rapidly passing city, the name, le Passage, takes on a final allegorical note. The Passage is a site that was "passed by," by history and by the changing postmodern sub/urban culture that lie beyond its arched doorway.
NOTES
1. References to the flâneur can be found in Baudelaire's poetry, Les fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris and essays, especially in Peintre de la vie moderne; in the recent critical work of Rachel Bowlby, Anne Friedberg, Meaghan Morris, Christopher Prendergast, Janet Wolff. Theoretically, the stroller is implicit in Michel de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien 1. arts de faire, in Chapter VII on urban walking. The major source of studies on the flâneur and modernity, however, comes from Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk. I use Benjamin's Paris: Capitale du XIXe Siècle: Le livre des passages (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1993). It is translated into French by Jean Lacoste from the German edition of Das Passagen-Werk established by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982). I quote from English translations of the German edition whenever possible and mostly from "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). In other cases, I have translated from the French edition into English any short quotations myself. All other translations from various texts into English are my own unless noted otherwise.
2. For recent work see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) and Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).
3. Of metonymy and synecdoche Christopher Prendergast writes: "...the figure of displacement, namely, metonymy and synecdoche, the endless encounter of parts for wholes (this, importantly for the general problem of the possibility of knowledge of the city, necessarily retains a relation to some principle of totality...") (210).
4. Anne Friedberg observes that the first arcades of the Palais-Royal were contemporaneously constructed with Bentham's first panoptic building plans of 1791 (16). On the other hand, in City of Quartz Mike Davis argues that the panoptic model of prisons is re-used in inner-city malls, especially in Los Angeles.
5. Shoe production in Paris exceeded 8 million pairs in 1828 at the height of the construction of the passages (Moncan and Mahout 34).
6. J.F. Benzenberg, Briefe geschrieben auf einer Reise nach Paris , I, (Dortmund 1805) 261. "Palais-Royal: The second floor is usually inhabited by the `lost women' of the most distinguished class ... On the third floor and on the top floor [au paradis] , in the attics live those of an inferior class ... Perhaps 600 to 800 girls live in the Palais-Royal--but many more go there at night to walk around because that's where one finds the most men of leisure [oisifs]." In Benjamin, "Prostitution, jeu" [O 3a, 2], Paris, Capitale 515.
7. I am loosely translating from Moncan and Mahout who use terms consistent with a hierarchy of prostitutes: "Demi-castor dans les allés; castors dans les galeries de pierre; castors finis ou cocottes de luxe à la terrasse du café; hirondelle des passages installée à l'entresol ou au premier étage pour mieux gueter des clients" (43). Moncan and Mahout have themselves liberally borrowed from Benjamin's "Prostitution, jeu" [O 1a, 2], 510.
8. Benjamin refers to these types of women as the "feminine fauna of the passages" which include "prostitutes, grisettes, salesladies as old as witches...." in "Prostitution, jeu" [O 2, 4], 512.
9. The interesting history of prostitution in the passages, ironically passes through various filters to this present work: Moncan and Mahout make reference to Benjamin who is quoting the text of the laws by Chief of Police Mangin written up by F. F. Béraud in Les filles publiques de Paris et la police qui les régit, Vol. II (Paris-Leipzig, 1839) 133-135. Articles 1-5, and Article 7 are edited and quoted in Benjamin "Prostitution, Jeu" [O 5, 3], 517.
10. "Prostitution, Jeu" [O 11a,4], 528.
11. For more information on the correlation between sewers and prostitute bodies see Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991), especially Chapter 2, "Sewers and Social Order." Reid comments on the work of public health official Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet: "[i]t was the responsibility of the state to monitor and contain ignoble and illicit excretory practices within cesspools, sewers and brothels in order to prevent then from becoming sources of infection" (23). See also Alain Corbin's Le miasme et la jonquille (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982) about prostitution and the odors emanating from the sewers in Paris. Citing the work of Brouardel he writes, "the most ardent partisan of the hermetic sealing system [of the sewers] is also the fiercest defender of government regulated prostitution and brothels" (264).
12. Zola's main character, Florent, returns to Paris after seven years absence, sees Les Halles for the first time, and thinks he is dreaming: "In his weakened state of mind he fancied he beheld a series of enormous, symmetrically built palaces, light and airy as crystal.... [He was] filled with vague uneasiness by the sight of that huge and seemingly fragile vision" (8).
13. From Benjamin's Passagen-Werk (V, p.1014 [H, 17; again N1, 9]); in Buck-Morss, 261.
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