[In the following essay, Walz explores Aragon's depiction of the Paris Opera Passageway in his novel Le Paysan de Paris and the socio-historical role of the Passageway in Parisian culture.]

paysan, anne (de pays). n. Homme, femme de compagne.—Par extens. Rustre, personne grossière: Un franc paysan.—Œnol. Se dit, dans la classification des vins de Bordeaux, de ceux qui occupent le dernier rang.

peasant (from pays, country). n. Countryman or country-woman.—By extension, Unsophisticated, uncouth character: A simple peasant.—Œnology. Name commonly given to the lowest order of Bordeaux wine classifications.

—Larousse du XXe siècle (1932)

Toward the end of the first half of Le Paysan de Paris—that portion dedicated to the Opera Passageway—some of the owners of the arcade's shops got a peek at what surrealist Louis Aragon had been writing about them since the summer of 1924. The commercial proprietors, Aragon recounted, were shocked by a series of articles in the literary review in which installments of his novel first appeared.¹ “The other day, there was a meeting of the arcade big shots. One of them brought along Numbers 16 and 17 of the Revue Européenne. They discussed it bitterly. Who provided this information? … They would like to meet him, this obstinate enemy, this Machiavellian character. And what would they say to him? What would bees say to the Baedeker of hives?”²

At first the shopkeepers failed to connect the author of the articles with the dadaist habitué of the arcade's Certa café. Instead, they suspected a completely innocent commercial agent, who up to that point had faithfully represented the passage's interests, of having betrayed them. Shortly thereafter, Aragon's articles were attacked in the Chaussée d'Antin, a local activist newsletter that defended the interests of the neighborhood's shopowners against the Haussmann Boulevard Realty Company. The arcade's proprietors found the financial disclosures in Aragon's articles, as well as his surreal embellishments, frightening: “Where did he get those figures? Is it possible?”³

A few pages further into his novel, Aragon confessed that he had a propensity toward effusive descriptions. He did not like the idea of a world determined by facts; he preferred the powers of chance to those of observation. The arcade's commercial terrain provided Aragon with a rich source for surrealist musings, continually turning its images and objects into something else. Walking-canes in an illuminated display first became luminous fish in the darkened ocean of the passageway, then swaying kelp, then prostitute-sirens from the Rhineland. The true name of this arcade, Aragon proclaimed, was the Passage de L'Opéra Onirique: the Arcade of Dream Divinations. Everything base was transformed into the marvelous: “The foreigner reading my little guide lifts his head, and says to himself, ‘It's here.’”⁴

The task of this [essay] is to explore the intersection of the history of the Opera Passageway and Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris. Insofar as Aragon included descriptive details about the Opera Passageway in his book, it has sometimes been used as a guide to the arcade itself.⁵ But Aragon's choice of the Opera Passageway as a central location in the novel was more strategic than documentary. Generally, the arcade's historical reputation was one of marginal commercial success and social disrepute. By the 1920s, the passageway had become an impediment to the completion of boulevard Haussmann, an urban renovation that would facilitate the flow of automobile traffic in the metropolis at the expense of the neighborhood's residents and the arcade's proprietors. In addition to being an “ur-form” of modernity and an “outmoded space,” in 1925 the Opera Passageway was a socially contested urban space. Aragon used the contemporary controversy of its imminent destruction to draw attention to his own book, a “Baedeker of hives,” designed to capsize and capture the reader's imagination with its instantaneous and continually metamorphosing visions.

THE PASSAGES DE L'OPéRA

Since 1919, the Certa café within the Opera Passageway had served as the favorite bar and unofficial office of the Paris dada movement's entourage. Located in lower Montmartre, the commercial arcade was tucked away within a building block whose double-entranced facade opened onto the northern side of the boulevard des Italiens. The labyrinthine location of the Certa kept the activities of the dada group out of view of both the bustling activity of the boulevard and the Left Bank literati. A forgotten location amid the urban landscape of early twentieth-century Paris, it was the perfect spot to feed the conspiratorial imaginations of those writers and artists who would soon proclaim the surrealist revolution.

The first half of the nineteenth century had been the heyday of covered passageways in Paris. According to the Guides Joanne (predecessor to the Guides Bleus), in the mid-nineteenth century there were more than 150 passages and galeries in Paris. The most elegant were covered passageways which served as commercial arcades, characteristically “lined with luxurious stores and splendidly illuminated by gaslight, providing a place for an evening promenade or rendezvous when it rains.”⁶ Of sixty-three covered passageways built in Paris, from the Galerie de Bois in 1786 to the Palacio de la Madeleine in 1935, two-thirds were constructed under the Restoration and the July Monarchy, including the Passages de l'Opéra in 1822.⁷ Establishments in these covered passageways included restaurants, cafés, clothing boutiques, and bookstores, such entertainments as theaters, ballrooms, and panoramas, and the purchased services of reading libraries, bathhouses, and toilets. As a social space, the arcades were renowned for a characteristic trilogy of loafers (flâneurs), pickpockets, and prostitutes. According to one guide of the era, the arcades were an “Eldorado of nonchalance.”⁸ By the time the dada group had discovered the Certa café in the early twentieth century, many passageway arcades suffered from decades of relative neglect.

In recent years, philosopher Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk has reawakened a critical interest in the arcades and their relation to surrealism.⁹ Rather than blaze a theoretical path along the lines of Benjamin-inspired studies, I have pursued a more modest historical inquiry that provides a supplemental perspective to those accounts. Among Parisian arcades, the Opera Passageway had a particular and checkered history. The arcade served as the location for Aragon's surreal musings for first half of Le Paysan de Paris, and he well may have drawn inspiration from its long-standing insolent reputation. Yet Aragon's scathing comments about the arcade's businessmen suggests that he may have cared less about the passageway itself than in exploiting its ill repute for his own purposes. A brief recapitulation of Benjamin's interest in the arcades, in relation to surrealism, will help draw out this distinction.

As presented in his well-known essay, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” the arcades were a crucial architectural form for Benjamin for a number of reasons.¹⁰ First, the arcades shared an affinity with Charles Fourier's utopian socialist vision of social harmony through architecture during an era of early industrial capitalism. Second, the concentration of consumer goods within the arcades was culturally dynamic and innovative, creating aesthetic affinities in this new era of industrial art, connecting mass merchandise displays and Grandville's fantastic caricatures, dioramas and photography. Third, the arcades, and later the boulevards during the Haussmannization of Paris, created a new social space, successively inhabited by a vacuous bourgeoisie driven by commodity fetishism (criticized by the likes of Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert), a modern urban crowd of dandies, flâneurs, and prostitutes (celebrated by Charles Baudelaire), and historically visionary Communards (championed by realist painter Gustave Courbet, revolutionary politician Auguste Blanqui, socialist theoretician Karl Marx, and iconoclastic poet Arthur Rimbaud).

To give his research into these historical realms of nineteenth-century Parisian urban culture contemporary significance in the interwar years of the twentieth century when he wrote the essay, Benjamin drew inspiration from Michelet's dictum that “Each age dreams its successor.”¹¹ According to critical theorist Susan Buck-Morss, Benjamin saw in the arcades “ur-form” ruins that anticipated the rise of spectacular commercial capitalism. Benjamin believed that a dialectical reading of a wide range of such nineteenth-century culture, discerning “modern” from “ruin,” could help to establish a critical philosophy of history for the twentieth century.¹² The significance of such an analysis lay in the ability to engage simultaneously in ideological critique and social description. This approach to cultural analysis, sorting through historical ruins to separate out capitalist contradictions from utopian socialist possibilities, is referred to as the “redemption of physical reality.”¹³

In “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” Benjamin identified surrealism as the only intellectual movement of his contemporary era to dream the future out of the ruins of outmoded, nineteenth-century cultural modernity.¹⁴ Given the surrealists' complete rejection of bourgeois ethics and values and their pursuit of new forms of consciousness, Benjamin found a “profane illumination” in surrealism. The shocking and mysterious effects provoked by surrealist experiments with chance encounters, states of intoxication, and the atmosphere of places, Benjamin emphasized, had their source in the concrete, material basis of everyday life. Benjamin hoped that such a surreal illumination could emerge directly from materialist culture itself, through a historically critical analysis of “dialectical images,”¹⁵ and he criticized the surrealists for their self-assigned role as magicians of the world.

Looked at another way, though, the crucial distinction is between common reality and surreality, not between materialism and alchemy. For the surrealists, the everyday world was already classified and ordered according to previous patterns of thought, circumscribed by what Breton called the “paucity of reality” (le peu de réalité), the “least common denominator of mortals.”¹⁶ While modern Paris provided a cultural terrain for surrealist inspiration, Breton knew that the commercial and political interests transforming the urban landscape resisted and thwarted surrealism. “I know that in Paris, on the boulevards, the beautiful luminous signs are making their appearance. Those signs mean a great deal to me as I walk, but actually they represent only that which annoys me.”¹⁷ While the technological wonders of contemporary life suggested new possibilities of consciousness for Breton—“wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, wireless imagination”—poetic reconfiguration was required to achieve the transformation to surreality.

Moreover, surrealism could not be achieved solely through ironic negation; positive revaluation was required as well. In the classic debate over the distinctions between dada and surrealism, dadaist Tristan Tzara insisted upon the continual negation of all artistic values, while surrealist Breton modified his anti-art stance toward the rehabilitation of such values as beauty and love.¹⁸ In this surrealist transposition of aesthetics, the imaginative powers of the interpreter were indispensable. Surrealism, while formed out of everyday culture, was not directly expressed by it (as Breton would later argue against Georges Bataille in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”). Even in its psychic automatism, surrealism required the participation of the alchemist to achieve the metamorphosis to the marvelous. As quintessentially represented by Robert Desnos semiconsciously dictating prose from trance states, the production of surrealist texts necessarily entailed a performative dimension.¹⁹

The Opera Passageway, with its mishmash of shops and their curiously populated window displays, was not intrinsically surreal. Neither did the arcade inspire surrealists simply because it was an “outmoded space.”²⁰ The marginality of the Opera Passageway to the city's commercial and urban landscape was not a by-product of the twentieth century; its fringe status had been intrinsic to the structure since its opening a century earlier. While some sources claim that the Opera Passageway had been one of the fashionable arcades of the Restoration and the July Monarchy, other sources suggest that it suffered from commercial failure and had always been a location of social vice.²¹ Reviewing the checkered past of the arcade assists in discriminating between its inherited characteristics and those surreal manifestations conjured up by Aragon in the Passage de l'Opéra Onirique.

In 1821, Viscount Morel-Vindé was granted permission to build a double-barreled commercial arcade on family-owned property in the Chaussée d'Antin district of the second arrondissement (today the ninth). Less than twelve feet wide, the arcade's three-story galleries ran north and south, the Clock Gallery (galerie de l'Horloge) to the east and the Barometer Gallery (galerie du Baromètre) to the west. Constructed in 1822 and expanded in 1823, the sixty-one ground-floor spaces in the Opera Passageway were originally designed to take advantage of the flow of foot-traffic to the Opera, which had been relocated to the adjoining Royal Academy of Music following the assassination of the duc de Berry on the steps of the rue Richelieu Opera House on 13 September, 1820. It is doubtful, however, that the passageway ever gained much of a clientele in this regard; the Opera's main entrance was on rue Le Peletier, whereas the two galleries of the arcade opened onto the boulevard des Italiens. The only access to the Opera was at the very back of the arcade, where an extremely narrow alleyway (periodically closed by the police) connected rues Grange-Batélière and Le Peletier. Unlike many other Paris passageways, which provided connecting routes between main thoroughfares, the Opera Passageway was something of an urban backwater from the beginning. Its design was less a channel than an eddy. In contrast to the bustling activity of the boulevard des Italiens, for the Englishwoman of letters Frances Trollope in 1835, as for Aragon and Breton in 1919, the arcade primarily provided shelter from the rain.²²

The commercial enterprises of the Opera arcade were never all that impressive. Comprising second-rate boutiques, its allure was more chintz than satin. Although the 1826 Guide des Acheteurs, ou Almanach des passages de l'Opéra boasted a kind of modern glamour, most of the shops sold a mélange of odd merchandise (bimbeloterie).²³ The largest concerns of the passageway were jewelry and porcelain shops which, despite elaborate descriptions in the Guide des Acheteurs concerning the noble history of these craft professions, sold factory-manufactured ornaments, metalplated accessories, and artificial pearls.²⁴ On the whole, the Opera Passageway may have confirmed the suspicions of those contemporaries who claimed the arcades were lackluster commercial ventures.²⁵ Indeed, great commercial success seems to have eluded the arcade's merchants. Throughout the nineteenth century, its establishments frequently closed or changed ownership.²⁶ The touted attraction of the “Europorama,” offering dioramic views of European cities and an exhibition map of Jerusalem, was replaced by a children's theater in 1834, an “automatic museum” in 1845, and was followed by a series of ball, dance, and dramatic theaters, until its final incarnation as the Théâtre Moderne in 1904.²⁷ After a fire destroyed the Royal Academy of Music in 1873, the Passages de l'Opéra lost even the marginal connection to its namesake.²⁸

As a social institution, however, the reputation of the arcade was famous, if not infamous, as a key gathering-site of the Parisian demi-monde. According to Musée Carnavalet director Georges Cain, this “foul passage noir, illuminated by hazy lamps, emitting nasty smells from neighboring ovens, and equally distressing odors,” was the low-life rendezvous of Opera sycophants, bit actors, and stagehands, as well as dandies, evening adventurers, and casual prostitutes of all regimes, 1821 to 1873.²⁹ While the reputable society of king, emperor, and tout Paris attended masked balls at the opera house of the Royal Academy of Music, the expansive basement underneath the Opera Passageway served as the location of the somewhat more disreputable, licentious, and lascivious bal d'Italie (although there was significant crossover in clientele from the former to the latter). The Opera Passageway was also known as the petite bourse du soir, where financiers and politicians could conduct their unofficial business transactions without attracting the watchful eye of the police. Criminal loitering and prostitution were common features of many of the arcades, and under the July Monarchy police prefect Mangin regulated the business hours of certain arcades and cracked down on street prostitutes (filles publiques).³⁰ Among arcades, the Opera Passageway enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the only one under surveillance by direct royal ordinance, and it was noted in guidebooks for having its “indecent and ignoble alleyways” closed at night for public benefit.³¹

The story of the covered passageways during the Second Empire and Third Republic, with the Haussmannization of Parisian boulevards and the appearance of department stores such as La Samaritaine and Le Bon Marché, is usually recounted as one of decline.³² What is certain is the arcades received diminished attention in guidebooks to Paris. In Calignani's New Paris Guide for 1844, for example, the arcades were praised as convenient and successful commercial ventures: “All the taste and elegance of the Parisian shopkeepers are here displayed, and they are the grand resort of all the loungers of the town.”³³ By 1873, however, Calignani's Guide merely stated that “These are a grand resort of all the loungers of the town.”³⁴ Without the accompanying taste and elegance, presumably the status of the “loungers” diminished as well. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, passageways received scant mention in Paris guidebooks, and those few mentioned were noted only by address.³⁵

What is less clear is whether this decreased vogue for the arcades actually meant, as Edmond Beaurepaire claimed in La Chronique des rues (1900), that as commercial and urban centers the arcades were “languishing, abandoned, and left in the dust.”³⁶ As late as 1916, for example, the Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris noted that although business in the passageways had slowed considerably, nonetheless they were concentrated in some of the most vibrant neighborhoods in Paris. Foot-traffic in the nearly three kilometers of combined passageways, the commission concluded, continued to be active.³⁷ Thus, while situated in the shadow of the boulevard and department store, in many neighborhoods the arcades remained active commercial and social spaces.

The Opera Passageway displayed these ambiguities well. While the Eugène Rey bookstore was the only establishment with a commercial profile worthy of inclusion in the 1920 Bottin-Mondain, a number of the arcade's establishments had remained in business for several decades. Of the shops mentioned by Aragon in Le Paysan de Paris in 1925, the medical supply and gun shops had opened in 1877, the cane and pipe shop in 1882, the Flammarion bookstore in 1888, Vodable's tailor shop in 1891, the Eugène Rey bookstore and Vincent's barbershop in 1898, the print shop and the bathhouse in 1899, Arrigoni's restaurant and L'Événement printshop since 1905, and the Biard café and Saulnier's restaurant since 1910.³⁸ Other enterprises, such as shoe-shine stalls and prix-fixe restaurants, occupied the same spaces, although their owners changed. Some businesses, such as Arrigoni's restaurant and the Certa café, were prosperous enough that when the passageway was destroyed in 1925, they successfully moved to other locations.³⁹ While not as glamorous as Le Bon Marché or La Samaritaine, the relative longevity and modest prosperity of some of the Opera arcade's shops suggest that their characterization as “outmoded” and “ruins” requires further consideration.

Aragon's Paysan de Paris recapitulates many of the commonly known features of the Opera Passageway, and in some ways, his documentary observations are unexceptional; it is the anomalies in his descriptions that provoke greater interest. Why, for example, does Aragon rename the galerie de l'Horloge the “Thermometer,” instead of leaving it the “Clock”? Is it merely to make the names of the two galleries rhyme? Or are Barometer and Thermometer a better pair for determining the “weather” of the arcade? Or do the allusions to pressure and temperature assist the reader in making an imaginary transformation of the arcade from an inanimate structure into a living one, pulsating with blood and libido? Aragon's lacunae are equally provocative. What is the Dada cocktail, priced at four francs, that appears on the menu from the Certa café reprinted in Le Paysan de Paris? And why does that woman from the handkerchief shop keep getting locked into her own boutique, having to be rescued by her customers?⁴⁰ Whatever documentary evidence about the Opera passageway might be contained in Le Paysan de Paris, suggestive details woven into the printed pages remind the reader that the meaning of Aragon's prose lies elsewhere.

THE ODOR OF VIEUX PARIS

As art historian Molly Nesbit has stated, Le Paysan de Paris “gave off the odor of a guide to Vieux Paris” while remaining essentially a literary work of surrealism.⁴¹ At times in the book Aragon evokes a near-nostalgia for the old places of the arcade, now finally being destroyed by the last vestiges of Second Empire Haussmannization (itself something of an urban anachronism by the 1920s). But the odor of Vieux Paris was more the novel's by-product than its essence. Aragon felt little attachment for the passageway itself. He was put off by the shopkeepers' petty responses to his articles in the Revue Européenne. And despite his affectionate remarks for the owner of the Certa café, he did not frequent the establishment after it moved to the rue d'Isly. It seems unlikely that nostalgia was Aragon's primary motivation.

Insolence seems a better choice. The Opera Passageway was generally despised by preservationists and modernizers alike. In 1916 the Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris had agreed, in principle, that the arcades were worthy of historical preservation.⁴² The destruction of the Opera Passageway, however, passed unregistered in their procès-verbaux. Among urban modernizers, most would agree with Edmond Beaurepaire's turn-of-the-century assessment of the arcades that “Progress has condemned them, and frankly, it's not worth getting upset about.”⁴³ Neglected by those who ostensibly cared about such matters, and scorned by champions of urbanization, the Passages de l'Opéra fell to the pickaxe in February 1925. Within this historical context, Aragon's choice to situate his ruminations within the Opera Passageway assumes political significance. Against a naive faith in historical progress, conservative or modern, Aragon's writings about the passageway exuded an “organization of pessimism.”⁴⁴ Whatever odor Le Paysan de Paris gave off, it was designed to offend the tastes of established society.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Vieux Paris had ceased to describe a premodern social order, and had come to express a conservative sense of nostalgia evoked directly from the urban landscape itself. In the early nineteenth century, ancien Paris, Paris d'autrefois, or Vieux Paris referred to former social classes and professions, and to traditional entertainments, festivals, and parades.⁴⁵ After midcentury, however, the urban landscape of Paris was becoming increasingly detached from this social conception. “Nearly every day, the Paris prefecture gives its blessing to the renaming of streets with complete indifference to the activities of the neighborhood,” P. L. Jacob complained in Curiosités de l'histoire du vieux Paris (1858). “This practice, which shows no sign of slowing down, occurs without any respect for the people who live there.”⁴⁶ Jacob objected to the renaming of streets, precisely because it entailed a loss of memory of Paris as a lived social space.

With the Haussmannization of Paris during the Second Empire, conservateurs of “Old Paris” turned archaeological ruins into direct expressions of various golden ages, from Lutèce to the Ancien Régime, detached from either social origins or the contemporary context. This shift in the meaning of the Parisian landscape, whereby city fragments constituted a kind of nostalgic imagination, was formalized in the creation of the Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris in 1897.⁴⁷ With the founding of this commission, the modernization of Paris—entailing widespread urban transformations in the construction and distribution of water supply, electrification, and transportation—now assisted an immense preservation effort.

In preparation for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, the Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris produced a small tourist pamphlet to promote its own conservation efforts.⁴⁸ In the past, the commission lamented, the architectural and archaeological preservation of Paris had been largely a piecemeal affair. The commission boasted that, thanks to its efforts, the march of progress would actually go hand-in-hand with preserving the appearance and memory of the old city (the archaeological opportunities created by the construction of the metropolitan subway system in 1898 providing the most illustrative example). Conserving these bits and pieces of the city, the commission assured the readers of its pamphlet, amounted to no less than the spiritual glory of Paris itself:

Its museums … its monuments … its panoramic views … its incomparable river … the fantastic profiles of medieval fortresses … the palaces of the monarchy … the multiple clocks, domes, and campaniles that silhouette the horizon. Its flower gardens, and finally, the luxurious Parisian forest, so dear to the population. …

Isn't Paris the real birthplace (patrie) of these enumerated wonders, the sacred source from which the arts, sciences, and letters spring forth?⁴⁹

Since 1897, the commission bragged, it had preserved the Hôtel de Toulouse, the Palais Royal, the Arc de Triomphe, and many churches, plaques, and street names. Where demolitions were unavoidable, architectural wonders and old neighborhoods could be preserved in paintings, drawings, and photographs, and conserved in the Musée Carnavalet.

This impulse to conserve, and to create, nostalgic feelings about the Parisian landscape through buildings, material fragments, and images, goes a long way toward understanding the cultural shift in Vieux Paris from a social to an imagined urban space. A nostalgic Parisian pittoresque was overlaying and dissolving—and would eventually replace—an earlier sense of the Parisian vie populaire.⁵⁰ This nostalgia for images of nineteenth-century Parisian popular life, which no longer had actual ties to the modern city, increased as the twentieth century developed. André Warnod, prolific popular author and member of Vieux Montmartre, waxed nostalgic about bals, cafés and cabarets, the lives of popular artists and entertainers of Old Paris, and he lamented the lost art of flânerie in contemporary Paris.⁵¹ Eugène Atget's photographs of forgotten shop signs and traditional street trades (pétits métiers) were purchased by, and safely tucked away within, the Musée Carnavalet. Many guidebooks to Paris were abundantly illustrated with sketches of picturesque Parisian types. Photo-illustrated books such as Les Cent Vues de Paris, and tourist guidebooks such as Baedeker's handbook and Hachette's Guide Bleus, equated the glory of the contemporary urban landscape with sites and images of monumental Paris.⁵² Nostalgia for Vieux Paris was not necessarily opposed to modern urbanization. On the contrary, the contemporary transformation of the urban landscape made an antiquarian, imaginary past possible, preserved in museum artifacts, documents, and photographs.

But the odor of Vieux Paris that Aragon evoked in his surrealist novel was neither picturesque nor practical; it offended both antiquarians and moderns. By locating the first part of his surrealist novel in the Opera Passageway, Aragon let the imagination of his double, a crude and uncouth “peasant,” loose within a forgotten urban terrain. His peasant was not simply a naïf, he was the descendent of Restif de La Bretonne's paysan perverti, who reveled in his self-corruption.⁵³ The peasant was singular, like the heady glass of red wine he enjoyed—un sens unique. The peasant was not drawn to the commercial spectacle of Paris: He preferred the sensual favors sold by the women of Madame Jehan's massage, or the anonymous intercourse permitted through bath chamber vents, to the commercially packaged sexual fantasies advertised in the pages of La Vie Parisienne. Aragon appropriated, from the previous century, the attributes of Balzac's Les Paysans—drunken, debauched, envious, insolent, cynical, and deviously clever—and he enlisted that scorned identity in a surrealist revolution of peasant versus bourgeois. The fantasies embedded in Le Paysan de Paris were less an expression of Vieux Paris than its subversion.

In the early twentieth century, the contested urban space of the Opera Passageway made the location a political springboard for Aragon's literary diatribe. Yet he was not the only person to comment on the passing of the arcade. While neglected in official treatments of Paris, in antiquarian histories, or commercial guides, the destruction of the Opera Passageway was amply covered by Parisian newspapers. Many Parisian dailies carried articles about the destruction of the Opera Passageway in the months before the completion of boulevard Haussmann in February 1925. For the duration of the previous year, the arcade had been the only obstacle preventing the joining of boulevards Haussmann, Italiens, and Poisonnières. By writing about the arcade at the moment of its disappearance, Aragon participated in a contemporary political debate about the meaning of modern life and urbanization.

Early into Le Paysan de Paris, Aragon reproduces a number of placards posted by the arcade's disgruntled business owners as their storefronts were being demolished.⁵⁴ In the face of certain expropriation, some of the arcade's businesses held out as long as possible. Excerpts from these handbills, highlighting the fundamental injustice of being driven out of business in the name of progress, were reproduced in the newspapers as well. Le Temps quoted a bill posted on the shoe-shine's windows, “My lease runs eleven more years! I cry out, Thief! Everything must be liquidated.”⁵⁵Le Matin quoted the same cynical placard as Aragon, from the wine merchant who ended his complaint, “Long live Justice!”⁵⁶ But mostly, the proprietors were trying to salvage what they could from their doomed businesses, “Final day! Sale on everything in stock! Unbelievably low discounts!”⁵⁷ The arcade's proprietors remained businessmen to the end (hence Aragon's chastising of their small-mindedness when they discovered his articles in La Revue Européenne).

Some journalists expressed their sympathies for the fate of the arcade's merchants in commentary articles. In his “Mon Film” column for Le Journal, popular novelist and journalist Clément Vautel lamented the loss of the arcade to urban development.⁵⁸ With the vestiges of Haussmannization finally and irreversibly set into motion, a boulevard of Second Empire design was sluggishly being realized fifty-five years into the Third Republic, Vautel sarcastically remarked. In his view, commercial speculators profited the most from the boulevard's expansion, and their gains were insufficient to compensate for the losses incurred by the evicted. Vautel was particularly sad about the closing of the Rey and Flammarion bookstores. Undoubtedly, he concluded ironically, some new establishments will profit from the bookstores' displacement, “The buck will chase away the book!”⁵⁹ Other articles expressed a restrained sense of community loss in the face of inevitable urban modernization. In Le Figaro, Emile Darsy wrote nostalgically about the closing of Le Pousset bar—the last refuge of boulevardiers, veterans of European and colonial wars, and tourists from the provinces—located along the facade of the Passageway.⁶⁰Le Temps journalist Georges Montorgeuil paid tribute to Vincent's barbershop, which he claimed (exaggeratedly) had passed from father to son for a hundred years.⁶¹

Yet even for these journalists, the forward historical march of urbanization seemed inevitable. “Everything passes, even passages,” noted Le Journal.⁶² More thoroughly than other reporters, this anonymous journalist articulated the absurd place of the Passages de l'Opéra amid the contemporary Parisian landscape.

Along the boulevard, the brilliant facade [of the Opera Passageway] joined in the movement and splendor of Parisian life; so many vibrant, charming, and well-patronized boutiques—Roddy, Pousset, the Khédive, the Flammarion and Rey bookstores. Inside, it was something else entirely; shoe-shine stalls, dismal herb-shops, empty and half-closed-up bazaars. The composition of assembled shops—some stores with display cases filled with indiscernible objects, poorly illuminated and never sold, other shops of extremely fine quality, including some astounding lingerie, and a few popular hideaways—was simultaneously quite modern and extremely old.⁶³

The Opera Passageway clung to a tenuous existence during a period of rapid urbanization. It did not require an aesthete like Aragon to see fantastic juxtapositions inherent in the continued existence of the Opera Passageway. No one doubted the arcade's inevitable passing; the question was what its disappearance portended.

In this brief moment of contested meaning over the fate of the Opera Passageway, Aragon's explicit nemesis in Le Paysan de Paris was the daily, L'Intransigeant. Among Parisian newspapers, L'Intransigeant was the most enthusiastic in its support of the destruction of the Opera Passageway in order to complete boulevard Haussmann, for that would open up the flow of automobile traffic in the center of the city. In the mid-1920s, front-page newspaper coverage of la circulation, the traffic circulation problem across Paris, was second only to la vie chère of postwar inflation. In this discussion, L'Intransigeant came down fully on the side of the automobile: “The street is not a garage. It exists for the swift flow of traffic. Those who cannot follow at this speed obstruct traffic. Even if the street belongs to everyone, it is not for those who obstruct it.”⁶⁴ To facilitate the flow of automobile traffic, the newspaper suggested banning horse-drawn carts in the city altogether, moving bus stops to the sides of the street (rather than the center), consolidating bus lines, and terminating overland rail systems on the periphery of the city. Further, it advocated posting traffic signals on street corners, widening commercial streets for truck transportation, and combining electric, gas, compressed air, and water lines in common underground canals. Finally, the newspaper praised the city's Comité de la circulation for having recently adopted many of these suggestions. L'Intransigeant fully ascribed to an ethos of modern and rational urban development.

Since February 1924, when Aragon first read in the pages of L'Intransigeant that boulevard Haussmann had reached rue Laffitte, until the arcade's destruction a year later, the daily proclaimed its open hostility to the continued existence of the Opera Passageway as an obstruction to rational urban design. The newspaper charted the advancement of boulevard Haussmann from rue Tailbout to rue Laffitte, to rue Drouot, and finally to the boulevard des Italiens.⁶⁵ Over the course of that year, the Opera Passageway was frequently discussed in L'Intransigeant and always in derisive terms. In the summer of 1924, the newspaper printed a photograph of the facade of the “Passages de l'Opéra, Galerie Baromètre” and noted with disappointment that the inhabitants were refusing to leave their shops, despite the fact that this was the final building standing in the way of the completion of boulevard Haussmann.⁶⁶ In January of 1925, the newspaper carried a photograph of Vincent's barbershop, depicting two middle-aged barbers attending to customers seated along the mirror-lined walls. After the fifteenth of January, the newspaper gloated, the passageway's barber would be forced to abandon his “salon.”⁶⁷ At the end of February, L'Intransigeant published a photograph of old shop-signs being removed from the passageway's facade in order to make room for the new, glamorous signs that would soon illuminate the future boulevard Haussmann.⁶⁸ The newspaper expressed no sympathy for the residents of two hundred apartments destroyed in the course of the arcade's demolition. Instead, it complained that promised new apartment buildings had not yet been constructed and that the Chaussée d'Antin subway station had not been completed.

The newspaper's position against the Passages de l'Opéra had been made clear by Lucien Descaves early in the fall of 1924.⁶⁹ After Aragon's articles had already begun appearing in the Revue Européenne that summer, Descaves posed the question: Why all this fuss about the destruction of the Opera Passageway? The Salmon and Pont-Neuf arcades had disappeared without any great commotion, he noted. The latter had been discredited by no less than Emile Zola (in Thérèse Raquin). Besides, Descaves claimed, there were still the Panoramas and other passageways—the Passages Jouffroy, Verdeau, Vivienne, Colbert, Choiseuil, and Madeleine. “If that doesn't suffice,” he concluded, “then you're being difficult.”

Descaves's own journalism career had begun in the Opera Passageway, working for the weekly magazine L'Évenement, which had published out of the arcade for two decades. The magazine's owner, Edmond Magnier, was nice enough, Descaves opined, but he was without financial resources, poorly managed a fledgling magazine, and lacked commercial ambition. (Descaves found the same faults in the passageway's aging barbers.) Ultimately, it boiled down to the fact that the Opera Passageway had always been a commercial and urban backwater. Quoting from Alfred Delvau's 1867 Les Lions du jour, Descaves reiterated: “A passageway is a sort of jetty going through freestone, which assists pedestrians in cutting from one street to another, rather than being swept along by the flow of traffic. But what distance does the Opera Passageway diminish? What kind of shortcut is it? …” The principal defect of the Opera Passageway was that it had no rational function within the overall design of the city. Providing shelter from the rain no longer sufficed.

It is within the context of L'Intransigeant's heralding of a narrowly commercial conception of urban modernization, and the venom it displayed for the continued existence of the Opera Passageway as an impediment, that Aragon's choice to locate his surrealist musings within the arcade assumes an immediate and localized political meaning. As a direct rebuke to the newspaper, Aragon championed all the attributes of the arcade that were despised by the modernizers. Like his fellow surrealists Francis Picabia and Marcel Noll, he had rented hotel rooms let by the week or month and he frequented the arcade's brothels and public baths.⁷⁰ Like Philippe Soupault and André Breton, Aragon delighted in the campy melodramas staged in the Théâtre Moderne.⁷¹ The principal activity of the Opera Passageway was flânerie. The slothful pleasures of daydreaming, intoxication, idle conversation, and illicit sexual contact determined its entertainment value. But beyond these immediate sensual satisfactions, the Passages de l'Opéra provided a shortcut to the surrealist imagination.

THE IMAGINARY CITY

You see, dear reader, living in Paris costs less than at home.
Paris is Paradise for travelers of limited means.
All pleasures, all comforts, are possible for a modest sum.
Here, no one cares how you support your lifestyle.
In a word, it's anonymity.
You are free to do whatever you like.

—Guide de Poche 1900

Aragon cared about the decrepit Opera Passageway insofar as it inspired him to surrealist visions. Aragon's concrete experiences of wandering about the arcade were poetically transposed into writing. The meandering design of Le Paysan de Paris was designed to reproduce a corollary surreal effect upon the reader's imagination, forcing out familiar reading habits through a continually shifting textual terrain of random juxtapositions and metamorphosing visions.⁷² To accomplish this, Aragon wrote a guide to the surrealist imagination in the style of a guidebook to Paris.

To understand this design, it helps to compare Le Paysan de Paris with actual guidebooks to Paris. In the opening portion of the novel, Aragon systematically takes the reader through the Opera Passageway, noting location numbers and giving a brief characterization of each shop. He enters the “Gallery of the Thermometer” at the Eugène Rey bookstore (where one could read magazines without having to buy them), pauses briefly at no. 2 (the concierge's lodging), continues on to the cane shop (of prostitute-sirens), and so on to Le Petit Grillon café, the ladies' and men's hairdressers, and to the shop of Vodable, “The Gentleman's Tailor.” After moving down and back up that gallery, Aragon then crosses over to the Gallery of the Barometer, where his wandering leads to his two favorite spots in the arcade, the Théâtre Moderne and the Certa café. Throughout, Aragon describes his field of vision, notes unusual juxtapositions of objects filling the arcade's shops, comments upon the activities of its inhabitants, and lets his mind wander into philosophical speculations and flights of fancy. The book's documentary style is punctuated with surreal visions. It is a guidebook to surrealism.

Yet by employing this design, Aragon implicitly reminds the reader that actual guidebooks also rely upon imaginary visions, albeit in a greatly weakened form. Contemporary walking guides to Paris, such as the Guide pratique à travers le Vieux Paris, employed strolling techniques similar to Aragon's.⁷³ Readers were invited down orderly, textual promenades of Parisian neighborhoods and boulevards; the contemporary location of businesses and buildings were identified, as were the historical associations such places should evoke. A typical promenade was “Number 15, Neighborhoods of The Trinity and Our Lady of Lorette,” a tour of the ninth arrondissement that included the Opera Passageway.⁷⁴ The guide led the reader down rue Caumartin (nos. 65 to 1) and then turned right up the boulevard de la Madeleine (“the even-numbered buildings are built on the site of the former rue Basse-du-Rempart, which extended down to the city wall built by Louis XIII”). The guide next led the reader down the boulevard des Capucines, which featured the place de l'Opéra (“built between 1858 and 1864, where Charles Garnier's opera house was constructed from 1861 to 1875”). After a brief detour down the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin (“it was called rue Mirabeau in 1791”) and rue Meyerbeer (“[Léon] Gambetta resided at number 55”), the guide arrived at the boulevard des Italiens: “Number 12. Opera Passageway (1823), opens to the Morel-Vindé Hotel, previously known as the Gramont Hotel; it led to the Opera on rue Le Peletier.”⁷⁵ The walking itinerary continued for another dozen pages, among which the Opera passageway was one of the least remarkable notations.

But by now, this guide to Vieux Paris had established an imaginary affinity with surrealism; through the written text, the reader was required to imagine himself immersed in impossible simultaneities of time and space—a watered-down version of Benjamin's adage about the surreal power of words to supersede material reality: “Language takes precedence.”⁷⁶ Overly pedantic, banal, and narrowly limited in its vision, the guide nevertheless asked the reader to imagine that the sites existed in spaces simultaneously occupied by Roman Lutèce, medieval, aristocratic, revolutionary, and contemporary Paris. It invited the reader to envision features no longer there—a road now filled by rows of buildings, streets and buildings with alternate names, the Le Peletier opera house (which had burned down in 1873). As such, this guide to Vieux Paris was a catalog of impossible classifications, a morass of details about which cardinal lived here or which duchess lived there, a literary reference from the nineteenth century, the name of a café from two hundred years earlier. In its textual excess, the reality of the lived-city was displaced by the presence of words.

Some guidebooks also played to the sensual desires of their readers. The illicit pleasures Aragon enjoyed in the Opera Passageway were the subject of another genre of commercial guides. The Guide des Plaisirs à Paris, for example, instructed the French-speaking tourist in Paris on “How to have a good time, Where to have a good time, What you have to see, What you have to know, How you have to do it.”⁷⁷ In this guide to “Paris Pleasures,” tourists were given a textual promenade through the low-life entertainments of Montmartre cabarets, public balls, after-hours restaurants, and the underground dens of criminals, prostitutes, and transients.

Vastly outstripping the repertoire of the Opera Passageway, the Guide des Plaisirs à Paris provided readers with countless opportunities to purchase pleasure. If one went to L'Abbaye de Thélème after hours, this otherwise respectable restaurant was transformed into a “Rabelaisian Love Mass” from ten o'clock at night until sunrise. One could frequent Le cabaret de l'Enfer (“Hell Cabaret”), which required purchasing a ticket “Good for entry into the Hot Pot” (à la chaudière), or the macabre Le cabaret du Néant (“Obliteration Cabaret”), where the customers were called asticots de cercueil (“coffin worms”). For voyeurs, the lesbian bar Le Hanneton (“The Beetle”) was characterized by the guide as a “must-see pathological curiosity.” The guide also provided information about the dangerous and sordid realms of Paris (les dessous), low-life bars such as Le Chien-qui-fume (“The Smoking Dog”) and underground restaurants such as Le Père Coupe-Toujours (“Father Always-Cuts-the-Drinks”). Readers also learned about the nocturnal byways of Les Halles and the open-air dances located on the netherworlds of the Paris periphery (bals de barrières), but they were advised that none but the courageous should frequent them. The guidebook even had a dictionary of French slang at the back, so that the tourist could feign familiarity with local speech.

This genre of guidebook was available to the English-speaking tourist of Paris as well. Prohibition-fleeing tourists from America may have delighted in Basil Woon's The Paris That's Not in the Guidebooks, and Bruce Reynolds's Paris With the Lid Lifted and A Cocktail Continentale (“Concocted in 24 Countries, Served in 38 Sips, and a Kick Guaranteed”).⁷⁸ On a certain level, the textual appeals to unbridled sensuality found in these “pleasure guides” were no less imaginary than Aragon's book, and they certainly offered a more abundant selection. But a crucial distinction separated this genre from his “Baedeker of Hives,” articulated in a phrase found on the cover of the Guide des Plaisirs à Paris: “With this guide, one can set a budget for one's pleasures in advance.” Renseignements—information and instructions—was the overriding principle in all such “practical” guides: which attractions and monuments to see, which restaurants to frequent (and how much it would cost), prices for ground transportation, and tables of monetary exchange rates. Above all, commercial guides protected readers against the dangers of being disoriented and lost in Paris. But such a loss of bearings was precisely what the surrealists wanted their readers to experience.

Therein lay the critical difference in imaginary trajectory. Commercial guidebooks organized tourists' expectations of the city, whereas the surrealist authors of Paris sought to destabilize their readers' imaginations. In the novels of Aragon, Breton, and Soupault, the experiences of wandering through Paris were given form as surrealist literature. Various explanations have been offered for how their experiences were transposed into writing. In Le Paysan de Paris, Aragon identified the libido as the unconscious force attached to his field of vision.⁷⁹ Some years later in Les Vases communicants, Breton claimed that material things themselves exercise a powerful influence upon the mind as an invitation to “come to the other side” (passer le pont), in the same way that the elements of a dream control the dreamer.⁸⁰

Contemporary critics have developed these ideas further. Literary critic Rose M. Avila has located the origin of Aragon's surrealist visions in a sublime bodily frisson, in which external reality and the poet's pleasure principle paradoxically merged into each other.⁸¹ Art critic Hal Foster claims that Aragon and Breton used the technique of the dérive, aimless wandering through the outmoded quarters of the city without forethought or plan, as a method for provoking uncanny experiences that were then recorded as surrealist texts.⁸² Literary theorist Margaret Cohen has sought an Althusserian structural corollary to the libido in the Parisian landscape itself, whereby the intersection of the totality of economic, social, political, and ideological discourses creates “the collective equivalent to the individual unconscious.”⁸³ Yet by whatever method those surrealist authors fused material reality with their imaginations, the pleasures discovered by readers of their novels were provoked by the printed word. As literary critic Peter Collier has emphasized, while strolling and the free play of desire were experiential motors for Aragon and Breton, ultimately their fantastic and impossible writings were what mattered most, “a collage of rival texts, creating a new reality transgressing the framework both of traditional text and conventional reality.”⁸⁴ Paris was an ideal setting for Le Paysan de Paris, Nadja, and Les Dernières Nuits de Paris, for the city landscape leant itself to surreal juxtapositions whose corollary written texts forced readers' minds out of everyday concerns and mental habits.

A dim awareness of the city's capacity to overwhelm the tourist was a latent dimension even in “practical guides” to Paris. In addition to organizing a vast amount of information about the city, these guidebooks provided instructions on how to safely traverse this potentially threatening environment. One such guide, Guide de Poche 1900, was written for budget-conscious French provincials (“How to get by in Paris on 4 or 5 francs a day”) coming to Paris to visit the Universal Exhibition. The first chapter of the guidebook was devoted to forewarning the reader of the certain dangers befalling the provincial tourist.⁸⁵ When arriving in the station, the guide warned, wait until the train completely stops before disembarking, for disoriented movements may result in physical injury. Once inside the station, beware of station porters who may steal your bags or demand exorbitant tips, or of seemingly friendly con-men who smile as they fleece you of wallet, purse, or suitcase (vol à l'américaine). Once outside the station, be on guard for thieving taxi drivers (maraudeurs de nuit). But above all, the guide emphasized, know where you are going in advance. The best housing arrangements are those made by parents or family acquaintances, but if you have neither, write to us at the guide and we will send you a complimentary list of recommended hotels. After a brief account of how to plan one's budget wisely, the remainder of the guidebook described famous locations and monuments of Paris and was illustrated with sketches of pittoresque Parisian street types.

With the guidance of the Guide de Poche, even provincials of limited means could avoid the certain but unknown dangers of the city. Other and more familiarly known commerical guides, like Baedeker's Guides and Hachette's Guides Bleus, were pitched to a middle-class clientele. Since the urban dangers associated with traveling on a shoestring budget were not as great a concern for the bourgeois traveler, these guidebooks focused their efforts upon “reliable information.” The guides contained everything the traveler could possibly want to know, “to employ his time, his money, and his energy so that he may derive the greatest possible amount of pleasure and instruction from his visit.”⁸⁶

Both Baedeker's and the Guides Bleus (previously Guides Joanne) had been published in multiple editions since the mid-nineteenth century.⁸⁷ Each volume opened with practical information about how to get around the city and where to find essential services such as hotels, restaurants, the post office, monetary exchange offices, theaters, music halls, concerts, sporting clubs, and foreign embassies. An historical essay on French history and art followed. The guides established itineraries for touring the city based upon the divisions of Right Bank, the Cité, and Left Bank. All of the museums in Paris were listed, with a complete inventory of all of the collections in the Louvre (which constituted a substantial portion of each guide). Typically, the guides ended with brief descriptions of Versailles, Fontainebleau, Château-Thierry, Chantilly, and St. Denis (more fully detailed in an additional Environs de Paris volume). Throughout each guidebook, multiple maps were inserted in the text, together with a detachable map book located at the end of the volume, so the reader could always cross-reference his location.

While the Guide de Poche explicitly warned its readers about an urban terrain fraught with danger, Baedeker's handbooks and the Guides Bleus implicitly guarded their patrons against direct contact with the actual city. Under the guise of being authoritatively informative, the instructions provided guidance to make it possible for the tourist to traverse Paris without anxiety. Moreover, the various editions of Baedeker's and the Guides Bleus maintained a standard format that played down actual urban transformations and helped the reader familiar with the format feel at home. A stable text stood in for a constantly changing city. As such, commercial guidebooks to Paris constituted an extremely narrow kind of modern imagination for its readers, a monumental ideology devoid of historical processes and social references.⁸⁸

The surrealist impulses in Le Paysan de Paris, Nadja, and Les Dernières Nuits de Paris, by contrast, ran in the opposite direction. The “anxious visions,” as Sidra Stich has characterized the psychological effect of surrealist art,⁸⁹ of those books challenged their readers' imaginations to achieve a level of mental complexity equal to the unconstrained urban landscape. In those surrealist novels, there was nothing precious about the city itself. If Paris had been the capital of Europe in the nineteenth century, for the surrealists it was the capitale de la douleur, painfully giving birth to the twentieth century.⁹⁰ Whether the newborn would develop a surreal consciousness was uncertain. As Philippe Soupault commented about Georgette and her brother Octave in Les Dernières Nuits de Paris, two ordinary Parisians with whom the novel's narrator earlier had been fascinated, but was now just bored:

One day, in a café—one of those cafés they love so much—I saw them listening with particular attention to a refrain spit out by a gramophone: it was the hackneyed of the hackneyed:

Paris, c'est une blonde.
Paris unique au monde.

The imbecilic words spilled themselves before them and they listened with open mouths, ravished, convinced.⁹¹

Soupault's recasting of Mistinguett's popular song, ça, c'est Paris! (“Paris is a blonde/Paris, unique in the world”) expressed the denouement of consciousness, not its liberation. As it was commercially configured, nothing about the city automatically invoked surrealism.

At the same time, Paris was at the center of the surrealist revolution in consciousness. As a continually transforming urban landscape, the city overflowed with a concentration of ready-made materials that the surrealists hoped they could poetically reconfigure for a revolutionary audience.⁹² Mass culture was the common denominator of consumer capitalism, but its meaning was not restricted to a bourgeois conception of social order or its entrepreneurial values. A prescient surrealist forebear, Baudelaire had recognized half a century earlier in “The Painter of Modern Life” that the spectacle of modern life could be detached from inherited aesthetic traditions and reformulated into instantaneous images which captured the ephemeral beauty of the present moment.⁹³ In many ways, Le Paysan de Paris was Aragon's extensive soliloquy to the same. Neither logic, philosophy, nor religion could guide an individual reliably through modern life in any meaningful way, Aragon concluded in “The Peasant's Dream” at the end of his novel. Rather, he appealed to individuals to give poetic form to their own, concrete experiences of the contemporary world.⁹⁴

Such poetic reconfigurations could be cached nearly anywhere, even in the pages of Aragon's nemesis, L'Intransigeant. During the summer of 1924, the same time that the newspaper was gloating about the imminent demolition of the Opera Passageway, L'Intransigeant carried a series of front-page commentary articles by eminent artists and authors on the imaginary dimensions of life in contemporary Paris. In a characterization more modernist than surreal, Fernand Léger compared Paris to a gigantic movie. The spectacle of modern life, Léger suggested, is a vast electric and mechanical spectacle of rapidly multiplying images, conducted by an accelerating current, a expansive network within which humans move in rhythm.⁹⁵ In an intermittent column titled “Petits Films de Paris,” novelist Pierre Mac Orlan discovered a “new romanticism” in the shadows of Parisian nightlife. The lures of old criminal underworld haunts of the Belle Époque, Mac Orlan noted, were being superseded by the charms of modern fox-trot bars.⁹⁶ According to poet André Salmon, the city produced “unconscious poets” across the social spectrum; bank tellers who dream they are in nightclubs while on the job, chauffeurs who create collages out of magazine advertisements, and little boys who mistake the métro kiosk for a movie-ticket counter (“Excuse me please, but when does the next Charlot [Charlie Chaplin] movie begin?”).⁹⁷

Even surrealist Philippe Soupault took his turn writing for L'Intransigeant.⁹⁸ In “Our Other Daily Bread, ‘My Newspaper,’” Soupault wrote about the inestimable influence of the daily paper upon the contemporary mentality. Thanks to a single, folded piece of newsprint, produced in concert with the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter, time and space had ceased to be meaningful as categories. “Our newspaper” not only tells us about “our neighborhood,” he noted, but about what is happening in San Francisco and in Timbuktu as well. In the cold light of rationality, he emphasized, there is no reason that we have to know about some man who has just won the lottery, the sudden death of some forty-eight-year-old millionaire, or the automobile accident of Baroness X. These things interest us, Soupault asserted, simply because we have developed a taste for reading them, on a daily basis. And we have come to believe that we must read about them, on a daily basis.

Thanks to the international daily newspaper, Soupault believed his consciousness was simultaneously connected with thousands, or even millions, of other readers: “Faithful readers, we are not isolated, and we hear the heartbeat of the world itself.” The details in the press that fascinated Soupault, and that he assumed also seized the minds of sympathetic readers, fed the eccentric and insolent spirit of surrealism itself. In this way, mass culture contained both the raw materials and poetic visions ready to assist the surrealist revolution in consciousness. The urban landscape of Paris inspired poetry. Surreal gems could be unearthed from the most banal sources of print mass culture. The 1920s seemed primed for the surrealist revolution.

Notes

1. Louis Aragon, “Le Paysan de Paris,” La Revue Européenne, Part I, nos. 16-19 (June-September, 1924), and Part II, nos. 25-28 (March-June, 1925).

2. Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Livre de poche, 1966), 106-7.

3. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 107.

4. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 111.

5. Bernard Delvaille, Passages et galeries du 19e siècle, photographs by Robert Doisneau (Paris: A. C. E. Éditeur, 1981), 32-35; Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1983), 480-88; and Patrice de Moncan and Christian Mahout, Le Guide des passages de Paris (Paris: Seesam-R. C. I., 1990). As a point of practical consideration, Margaret Cohen points out that the temptation to treat Aragon's novel as a documentary source stems from a general lack of easily found sources of information about the Opera Passageway, in Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 95.

6. Adolphe Joanne, Paris illustré: Nouveau guide de l'étranger et du parisien, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librarie de L. Hachette et Cie., 1863; 1st ed. 1855), 187.

7. Bertrand Lemoine, “Index chronologique,” Les Passages couverts en France (Paris: Délégation à l'Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1989), 246-47.

8. Amédée Kermel, Le Livre des Cent et Un (1831), quoted in Moncan and Mahout, Le Guide des passages, 44.

9. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1989); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1993); and Cohen, Profane Illumination. See also Josef Fürnkas, Surrealismus als Erkenntnis: Walter Benjamin, Weimarer Einbahnstraße und Pariser Passagen (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzeler, 1988).

10. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle” in Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle: Le Livre des passages, trans. Jean Lacoste (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1989), 35-59. English translation, Walter Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 146-62.

11. “Chaque époque rêve la suivante.” Michelet, Avenir! Avenir!, quoted in Benjamin, “Paris, capitale,” 36.

12. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-64.

13. See Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 287-330; and Cohen, Profane Illumination, 17-55.

14. Benjamin, “Surrealism, The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections, trans. Jephcott, 177-92.

15. See Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, esp. 217-21.

16. Breton, “Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality,” in What is Surrealism?, trans. Rosement, 17.

17. Breton, “Introduction to the Discourse,” 19.

18. Georges Hugnet, “Dada in Paris,” in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1981), 165-96; and Nadeau, History of Surrealism, 59-68.

19. Michael Beaujour, “From Text to Performance,” in Denis Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 866-71.

20. Foster, “Outmoded Spaces,” in Convulsive Beauty, 157 f.

21. The favorable assessments of the Opera Passageway seem to be drawn primarily from Richard, Le Véritable conducteur parisien (1828); Amédée Kermel, Les Passages de Paris, in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent et Un (1831-34); and Edouard Kolloff, Schilderungen aus Paris, 2 vols. (1839), frequently cited in Geist, Arcades, and in Moncan and Mahout, Le Guide des passages. Some of the unfavorable assessments are treated in the body of my discussion.

22. Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 357.

23. Le Guide des acheteurs, ou Almanach des Passages de l'Opéra (Paris: Imprimerie de David, 1828). See also Geist, Arcades, 485. The term bimbeloterie was not used in the Guide but was recorded in city of Paris cadastre and patentes of the arcade's shops.

24. Galerie de l'Horloge, nos. 10/12 MM. Baruch and Cerf Weil (porcelaines), no. 15 M. J. F. Veyrat (orfèverie plaquée d'or et d'argent), nos. 19/21 M. Bourguignon (perles artificielles), in Le Guide des Acheteurs, 28-31.

25. Amédée Achard, “Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin,” in Louis Lurine, ed., Les Rues de Paris (Paris: G. Kugelmann, Éditeur, 1844), 39-48; Brazier, Gabriel, and Dumersan, Les Passages et les rues, ou la guerre déclarée, Vaudeville en un acte (Paris: Chez Duvernois, Librairie, 1827).

26. Archives de Paris, DQ18 331, Cadastre 1809-51 [-1870], 2me Arrondissement, Quartier de la Chaussée d'Antin. Registration of commercial establishments in the Opera Passageway was spotty from the Restoration through the Second Empire. Still, high turnover may be inferred from the lack of coincidence between the more than fifty businesses registered in the cadastre and the owners of establishments listed in the Guide des Acheteurs.

27. “Boulevard des Italiens,” in Bernard de Montgolfier, ed., Les Grandes Boulevards (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1985), 38.

28. The separation of the arcade from the Opéra was inevitable, with or without the incineration of the Royal Academy of Music; Garnier's new opera house was slated for opening in 1875.

29. Georges Cain, “Le Passage de l'Opéra,” in À travers Paris (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, n.d. [1907]), 336.

30. Moncan and Mahout, Le Guide des passages, 49-52.

31. Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris, “Séance du samedi 9 décembre 1916,” Item no. 32, “Les passages couverts,” Procès-verbaux, année 1916 (Paris: Imprimerie Municipale, 1918), 270-73.

32. Moncan and Mahout, Le Guide des passages, 54-65.

33. Calignani's New Paris Guide (Paris: A. and W. Calignani and Co., 1844), 124. The English translation is from the guide.

34. Calignani's New Paris Guide for 1873 (Paris: A. and W. Calignani and Co., 1873), 32.

35. Moncan and Mahout, Le Guide des passages, 61.

36. Edmond Beaurepaire, La Chronique des rues, series “Paris d'Hier et d'Aujourd'hui” (Paris: P. Sevin et E. Rey, Libraries, 1900), 64.

37. Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris, “Séance du samedi 9 décembre 1916,” 271.

38. Archives de Paris, DP4 1876, Cadastre, Passage de l'Opéra (1876), D9 P2 420, Faubourg-Montmartre Patentes (1905), D9 P2 530, Faubourg-Montmartre Patentes (1910).

39. Arrigoni's restaurant moved to the Passage des Princes, cf. Sommerville Story, Dining in Paris (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1927), 115. The Certa café moved to the rue d'Isly, cf. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 101.

40. The answers the these questions were later provided by Gilbert Joassart, owner of the Certa café. A Dada is a layered cocktail of port, sherry, and Madeira, invented by Aragon, Breton, and Soupault in 1919. The dame au mouchoirs was imprisoned in her shop by Aragon and Breton, who blocked her door with the heavy potted palm plants used to decorate the gallery. She remained trapped until a passerby moved the planters out of the way. Cf. Marie-Louise Coudert, “Au temps du «Certa»,” Europe, nos. 454/455 (1967), 231-37.

41. Molly Nesbit, Atget's Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 198.

42. Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris, “Séance du samedi 9 décembre 1916,” 270.

43. Beaurepaire, La Chronique des rues, 67.

44. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 62-63; and Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 190-91.

45. As shown, for example, in the works of François Victor Fournel: Enigmes des rues de Paris (Paris: E. Dentu, 1860); Tableau de vieux Paris: Les Spectacles et les artistes de rues (Paris: E. Dentu, 1863); Chroniques et legendes des rues de Paris (Paris: E. Dentu, 1864); and Les Rues de vieux Paris: Galerie populaire et pittoresque, 2nd ed. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1881).

46. P. L. Jacob, Curiosités de l'histoire du vieux Paris (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, libraire-éditeur, 1858; orig. published 1834), 6.

47. The Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris was established by the Paris Préfecture in two meetings of the municipal council, 15 November 1897 and 17 December 1897; cf. Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris, Séance du vendredi 28 janvier 1898, Procès-verbaux, année 1898 (Paris: Imprimerie Municipale, 1899), 1.

48. Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris, 1897-1900, Guide à l'Exposition Universelle (Paris: Ville de Paris, 1900).

49. Commission, Guide, 12.

50. See Nesbit, “Ombres Portées,” in Atget's Seven Albums, 154-211.

51. A representative slice of André Warnod's books about Vieux Paris during the period include Le Vieux Montmartre (Paris: Eugene Figuière, 1912); Bals, cafés et cabarets (Paris: E. Figuière, 1913); La Brocante et les petits marchés de Paris (Paris: E. Figuière et cie., 1916); Les Bals de Paris (Paris: G. Crès, 1922), Lily, modèle (Paris: L'Édition française illustrée, 1919); Les Plaisirs de la rue (Paris: Éditions française illustrée, 1920); Les Berceaux de la jeune peinture: Montmartre, Montparnasse … (Paris: A. Michel, n.d. [1925]); Les Peintres de Montmartre: Gavarni, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1928); Les Artistes du livre: Dignimont, lettre-préface de Colette (Paris: Henry Babou, 1929); Visages de Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie. [1930]); and Ancien Théâtre Montparnasse (Paris: Coutan-Lambert, 1937). After the World War II, Warnod wrote reminiscences of his years in Montmartre, as well as an embellished biography of Henri Murger, whom Warnod regarded as a bohemian brother, in La Vraie bohème de Henri Murger (Paris: Editions Paul Dupont, 1947).

52. Robert Bonfils, Les Cent vues de Paris (Paris: Librarie Larousse, 1924).

53. I.e., Restif de La Bretonne, Le Paysan perverti (1775), and La Paysanne pervertie (1784), published together as Le Paysan et la Paysanne pervertis, ou les Dangers de la ville (1787). The surrealists considered Restif a spiritual ancestor.

54. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 34-38.

55. Georges Montorgeuil, “Feu le passage de l'Opéra,” Le Temps, 3 February 1925, 4.

56. “Haussmann-Les Italiens. Au confluent de deux boulevards, deux époques sont aux prises,” Le Matin, 5 February 1925, 1.

57. Ibid.

58. Clément Vautel, “Mon Film,” Le Journal, 13 October 1924, 1.

59. In French, a play of words on livre: “La livre aura chassé le livre!”

60. Emile Darsy, “Un boulevard chasse l'autre. Hier, le ‘Pousset’ a fermé,” Le Figaro, 4 February 1925, 1. Aragon, Breton, and Soupault also frequented Le Pousset.

61. Montorgeuil, “Feu le passage de l'Opéra,” Le Temps, 3 February 1925, 4. According to Paris cadastre records, the barbershop had been in business since 1889, or for thirty-five years.

62. “Bientôt le passage de l'Opéra ne sera plus qu'un souvenir,” Le Journal, 6 February 1925, 1. The quote plays on the double-meaning of passage—a passageway and as a passage in time: “Tout passe, même les passages.”

63. Ibid.

64. “Circuler,” L'Intransigeant, 27 October 1924, 1.

65. “Anniversaire d'un coup de pioche,” L'Intransigeant, 15 February 1924, 1. See also “Le Boulevard en perce,” 19 January 1924, 1; “Vieux Refrains. Contrusions … Contrusions … C'est la pioche du démolisseur qui répond,” 6 August 1924, 1; “Paris qui se transforme,” 17 January 1925, 1; “Les rues qui marchent,” 28 January 1925, 1.

66. “Le Paris qui s'en ira,” L'Intransigeant, 8 August 1924, 1.

67. “Place au boulevard Haussmann!” L'Intransigeant, 9 January 1925, 1.

68. “La Lumière qui s'étient,” L'Intransigeant, 24 February 1925, 1.

69. Lucien Descaves, “Paris qui s'en va: Le Passé d'un passage,” L'Intransigeant, 21 September 1924, 1.

70. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 23-24.

71. Philippe Soupault, “Théâtre Moderne: Fleur-de-Péché,” Littérature, no. 14 (June 1920); and André Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 43-44.

72. Rose M. Avila, “The Function of Surrealist Myths in Louis Aragon's Paysan de Paris,” French Forum, vol. 3, no. 3 (1978), 232-39.

73. Marquis de Rochegude and Maurice Dumolin, Guide pratique à travers le Vieux Paris, nouvelle édition (Paris: Librairie ancienne Édouard Champion, éditeur, 1923).

74. Rochegude and Dumolin, Guide pratique, 271-89. The quotations and summaries that follow are all taken from this source.

75. Rochegude and Dumolin, Guide pratique, 276.

76. Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Reflections, 179.

77. Guide des Plaisirs à Paris, nouvelle édition (Paris: Édition Photographique, n.d. [1900]).

78. Basil Woon, The Paris That's Not in the Guidebooks (New York: Bretano's Publishers, 1926); Bruce Reynolds, Paris With the Lid Lifted (New York: George Sully and Co., 1927), and A Cocktail Continentale (New York: George Sully and Co., 1926).

79. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 44.

80. André Breton, Les vases communicants (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 53.

81. Avila, “The Function of Surrealist Myths,” 232-39.

82. Foster, “Outmoded Spaces,” 159 f.

83. Cohen, Profane Illumination, 34.

84. Peter Collier, “Surrealist City Narrative: Breton and Aragon,” in Eduard Timms and David Kelley, eds., Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Arts (London: Manchester University Press, 1985), 220.

85. “L'Arrivée à Paris,” in Guide de Poche 1900, 1-12.

86. Karl Baedeker, Paris and Its Environs. Handbook for Travellers, 19th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, pub., 1924), v.

87. Baedeker's guides were published continuously from 1865 on. Hachette's earlier Guides Joanne (1855) were replaced by the Guides Bleus in 1921. The summary that follows is based on a random collection of Baedeker and Hachette guides published between 1884 and 1924.

88. This argument was first developed in Roland Barthes, “The Blue Guide,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 74-77. See also Cohen, “Ghosts of Paris,” in Profane Illumination, 77 f.

89. Sidra Stich, ed., Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art, with essays by James Clifford, Tyler Stovall, and Steven Kovács (New York, Abbeville Press 1990).

90. The phrase is taken from a collection of poems by Paul Éluard, Capitale de la douleur (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1926).

91. Soupault, Last Nights, trans. William Carlos Williams, 133-34.

92. Collier, “Surrealist City Narrative,” 214.

93. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 1-42.

94. Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris, 233 f.

95. Fernand Léger, “Images Mobiles. Spectacle.” L'Intransigeant, 29 May 1924, 1.

96. Pierre Mac Orlan, “Le Fantastique de la nuit,” L'Intransigeant, 2 July 1924, 1. His series “Petits Films de Paris” ran on the front page of L'Intransigeant, 12 June to 29 August 1924.

97. André Salmon, “Poètes sans le savoir,” L'Intransigeant, 28 June 1924, 1.

98. Philippe Soupault, “L'Autre pain quotidien. «Mon journal».” L'Intransigeant, 14 June 1924, 1.