A brief history of modern Parisian literature from Baudelaire to Bellanger by Dr. Lauren Quigley

Gary:
Today’s special episode is by Dr. Lauren Quigley, who returns to the show after receiving her Ph.D in French Studies at Queens University Belfast. Lauren is a researcher in Francophone literary urban studies whose interests include contemporary French poetry, mobilities, space, the intersection of form in literature and architecture, the city of Paris, and urban visual culture. Her thesis, entitled Parisian Poiesis: Architecture and the Aesthetics of Contemporary French Poetry, examined contemporary French poetry’s role in the critical examination of Paris’ urban renewal via a reading of urban and poetic form.

Paris has long-been one of the most written-about cities in human history. Furthermore, it is written of alternatively as a character, a force of nature, and countless other depictions. The classic works of Balzac and Hugo bring to life a city which is itself alive. But depictions of Paris did not end with the 19th century. In what follows, Dr. Quigley explains how more modern writers imagine Paris.

Lauren:

I’m Dr Lauren Quigley and I’m thrilled to be taking you through a brief history of modern  Parisian literature.

As the scholar Michael Sheringham once said, “To go to and fro in Parisian space is to explore oneself as well as the city.” Arguably, no city has inspired so many creative outputs than Paris, as seen throughout history from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris to more recently, the city’s right bank in Virginie Despentes’ literary phenomenon, Vernon Subutex, or the town of Cergy in Greater Paris in Annie Ernaux’s works. In this episode, I’ll attempt to trace the ways in which Paris and its ongoing urban renewal is reflected in the city’s modern literary history. Although this episode could easily have lasted five hours given the richness of the city’s literary corpus, I’ll be talking today about writers who have directly engaged with the city and the way the urban fabric has shaped their work.

Starting with an overview of Haussmannisation, this episode will trace the modern city’s impact on canonical and less canonical literary works. In Part One, we’ll examine the first ‘urban’ poet of sorts, Charles Baudelaire, and we’ll see how the urban renewal of Paris through Haussmannisation, is reflected in his works. We’ll pay particular attention to his poem, ‘Le Cygne’. Moving from Baudelaire’s feelings of alienation into a Paris that inspires the imaginary, we will briefly examine some avant-garde perspectives on the city by Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, focusing specifically on their depictions of the Eiffel tower. Then we move into Surrealist Paris through the eyes of André Breton and Louis Aragon. As we jump to Paris through the eyes of the OuLiPo ( or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) group, we’ll explore literary experimentation through the city, as seen through the work of writers such as Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau. Then, moving from experimentation to a more celebratory perspective on the city we’ll touch on the work of celebrated poet, Jacques Prévert.

We’ll then notice a shift in critical engagement with the city in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, we’ll look at the work of some poets in the 70s and 80s, as well as the genre of banlieue literature. We’ll then witness how contemporary poetry engages with urban change up to the current discourse on the Greater Paris project, Grand Paris, which is explored in the work of author and essayist Aurélien Bellanger. We’ll also look at depictions of the city that jump off the written page into the medium of French rap. Finally, we’ll look at what’s next for the city in moving forward, and touch upon what urban issues might inform future works.

So, to contextualise all of this, let’s begin by understanding the shape of central Paris as we know it today, through Haussmannisation. This is the term used to detail the total urban regeneration of Paris as carried out by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. This resulted in the construction of the Paris that we still recognise today: its boulevards, avenues, and buildings. The reconstruction of the avenue de la République, for example, took place in 1858, leading to the Place de la République, a public space which remains at the heart of protests and rallies on significant issues in French society. So, Haussmann’s reforms remain central to Paris both geographically and sociologically. The process of Haussmannisation both destroyed the city and rebuilt it from the ground up, granting Napoleon the Third’s wish of a city characterised by the glory of the French Empire, leading to the city being deemed the capital of modernity in the 19th century.

In embellishing the city to reflect the French Empire, the new boulevards aimed to highlight novel engineering, and add more light and space to the city. By doing so, however, this drove out working class communities into the suburbs. So, while it is true that this reconstruction brought more space, light, and allowed for improved sanitation, Haussmann’s main aim was to widen these spaces to allow for an easier circulation of military troops throughout the city. In doing so, working class communities no longer felt a part of Haussmann’s Paris, which was enjoyed by an emerging new class, the bourgeoisie. To this day, class segregation through urban planning has remained a constant challenge in the city, from the construction of the ring road known as the boulevard périphérique, the segregation of working class and minority ethnic communities in the banlieue, and the issues faced with the rethinking of the metropolitan area of Paris as ‘Grand Paris’. So how do all of these urban changes impact literary responses to the city? Let’s begin in the nineteenth century by looking at the work of Charles Baudelaire, writing in the time of Paris as capital of modernity, leading to what many may deem the first of the city’s ‘urban poets’.

The (im)perfect embodiment of modernity as depicted through the poetry of Baudelaire has become a constant. Even for the poets of Paris today, the struggle between utopian ideals of the city and the struggle to engage with the spatial reality of the city compel them to write. These urban poets use tools such as structure and form to reflect the influence of their architectural surroundings – whether it be to critique the architectural experience or to mirror it. ‘Le Cygne’, one of Baudelaire’s most studied works, is a fifty-two line poem divided into two parts. It was first published in the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal, released in 1861, as an inclusion in the new Tableaux parisiens section.

Without going into too much technical detail, a simple analysis of the form and structure of Baudelaire’s poetry shows that the poem mirrors the lyric poet’s architectural surroundings. ‘Le Cygne’ is made up of thirteen quatrains of alexandrines in ABAB rhyme scheme, which is a tightly-knit structure used typically in the tradition of French poetry. Although it might seem steeped in convention, Baudelaire actually forces the reader to break the poem up into a more manageable structure, showing a real break from tradition. Following on from this break in tradition, which also reflects the newness of Haussmann’s Paris, the content of the poem is also telling of the poet’s sentiments towards the new Paris. His use of language portrays his feelings of disillusion and suffocation in the new metropolis. A particularly striking use of language is the imagery of a swan lost in the new city, terrified as it attempts to find water, just as Baudelaire cannot find comfort in Haussmann’s Paris. Interestingly, the poem is dedicated to Victor Hugo, who, at the time of writing, was in exile. As Baudelaire struggled to make sense of this new city, Hugo lamented the diversity of ‘old’ Paris – a feature clearly lacking under the process of Haussmannisation. As the scholar David Harvey says, ‘there was only one street in Paris – the Rue de Rivoli – and it was being replicated everywhere’. 

But if Paris was indeed the capital of modernity, it was only appropriate that it later hosted the greats of modernism. And if it hosted the greats of modernism, it was only appropriate that one of the city’s modern icons, the Eiffel Tower, was evoked in poetic works of the time, especially in the works of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars. Whereas, as we’ve just heard, Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’ is rooted in sentiments of alienation brought about by Paris as capital of modernity, Cendrars employs a significantly more celebratory tone through his depictions of the Eiffel Tower in the aptly-named ‘Tour’, written in 1913. This poem is an ode to the landmark. Cendrars also worked collaboratively with the artist Sonia Delaunay on a prose text, La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. The text follows a Trans-Siberian rail journey, terminating at the Tour Eiffel. Their aim was to sell enough copies of the text that they would equal the height of the tower itself (150 copies, if we’re being precise).

Apollinaire’s 1912 work ‘Zone’, on the other hand, offers up a much more ambiguous relationship with the city. The poet’s walk through the city is laced with echoes of his own personal crisis. Here, the poet depicts the Eiffel Tower as a shepherd, while the city’s bridges are sheep. This use of pastoral and urban imagery draws links with Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’, but unlike Baudelaire’s strong sentiments of alienation, the use of time and space in Apollinaire’s poem makes his relationship with the city more dream-like in nature.

The 1920s into the 30s saw an influx of Surrealist writers engage with Paris. Here, we’re going to move away from poetry to look at two famous works which lean more into the prose genre. There’s a shift in this period from the 19th century critical engagement with Haussmann’s Paris to a more ‘imagined city’ guided by elements of play and automatic writing. In these texts, Paris is used as a springboard for creativity, using its urban features points, such as its arcs and angles, and the spatial planning of the modern city, for literary expression. Rather than evoking the reality of living in the city, these works rather turned this on its head by using the city as a catalyst for larger, more experimental ideas in their work.

Their experience of the city is combined with Surrealist practice in order to reflect a playful image of the city in their texts. This can be seen in André Breton’s 1928 text Nadja through explorations of the Place Dauphine, and Louis Aragon’s 1926 text Le paysan de Paris in which the Buttes Chaumont park is the scene of Surrealist adventures. These texts brought about a way to celebrate Paris by reimagining its spaces and lived experiences through various styles of writing rich in imagery and the imaginary.

The interwar period of the 1920s through to the 1930s saw Paris as the host of artistic expression through as the result of sociopolitical contexts, and the Surrealist literature we’ve just discussed is only a small part of this. In the 1920s it was home to the ‘Lost Generation’ American expat writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald among others. There are many landmarks that remain in the city that are a testament to this outburst of artistic expression. I won’t digress too much here, but from a literary urban perspective much of this history can be seen today at Shakespeare and Company on the left bank, run by the American Sylvia Beach, and the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922.

The importance of place to literature in Paris was also evident in the following decade in the period of Existentialism, and in philosophical works of the period more generally: In the 1940s and 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir amongst others frequented the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, such as the Café de Flore, like many artistic and literary figures before them. These ‘intellectual cafés’ remain a popular tourist attraction to this day.

In the 50s and 60s, the Café de Flore was also frequented by key literary figures such as Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prévert, who walked the streets of the city and traced these observations in their work. Both Queneau and Prévert were associated with the Parisian Surrealists to a lesser extent, but their work is not necessarily defined by the movement in the ways in which that of Breton or Aragon were. Both writers were members of the rue du Château group of Surrealists, who met in the Montparnasse area.

Prévert’s poetry is widely renowned and often takes Paris as its subject, seen most famously in his 1951 anthology Grand Bal du printemps. For example, he uses imagery of nature as a commentary on the city’s aesthetic in ‘Chanson de la Seine’, and ‘enfants de la Haute Ville’ is a beautiful ode to everyday life in the city.

Raymond Queneau’s literature was heavily influenced by the city in texts such as Courir les rues, published in 1967. Among other observations, Queneau ponders the etymology of street name in this book. Exercices de Style sees the same story recalled in various forms 99 different times. The story takes place on a Parisian bus every time. Queneau’s most famous work, the 1959 novel Zazie dans le métro, tells the story of a young girl exploring the city via a metro strike, and is also noted for Queneau’s use of an experimental language that he termed néo-français.

The 1960s also saw the formation of the OuLiPo group in Paris, whose impact spanned centuries. The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or potential literature workshop is a group of which Raymond Queneau was a founding member alongside François Le Lionnais. Members included Hervé Le Tellier, Marcel Duchamp, and Georges Perec, among others. This group used rules of mathematics and constraints to explore and expand the limits of literature – and many of these resulting texts were influenced by the city of Paris. Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of Paris as the subject of experimental literature is Georges Perec’s 1975 book Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, or An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Here, rather than describing tourist attractions, Perec simply notes what he observes over three days at the Place Saint-Sulpice: no plot, just happenings.

Through the 70s into the 80s, literature experienced a more critical shift in its engagement with Paris. This is especially true for poetry, which, in many cases, moved back to a more concrete interaction with the city. This interaction was aligned more with Baudelaire’s relationship with Paris, as we’ve seen earlier. Like Baudelaire, these poetic works underline the poet’s relationship with urban change in Paris. Yves Martin and Dominique Grandmont’s works demonstrate this shift, which can be seen in Martin’s 1972 text, Le marcheur, and Grandmont’s 1975 text, Pages blanches. Here, we see a more melancholy approach to the environment in which the poets live.

We could attribute this poetic shift to the city’s ongoing urban renewal in the second half of the twentieth century, and the impact it has had on the poets’ work. During this period, huge changes took place in the city, such as the construction of the ring road surrounding Paris known as the boulevard périphérique – which was opened in 1973 and – fun fact – recently celebrated its 50th birthday. Other large projects included the construction of the business district of La Défense, which began in 1958. The controversial Centre Pompidou then opened in 1977. The 1950s through to the 1980s saw the mass production of tower blocks for social housing, known as a habitation à loyer modérés or HLM. The majority of these were built in the 1960s.

The construction of these HLMs was a response to the ongoing housing crisis and aimed to provide low-cost housing in new and reconstructed areas of the city. While these were built using labour from migrant workers belonging to minority ethnic groups, these same workers primarily lived in bidonvilles – or shanty towns – in squalid conditions in the suburbs. In the 1970s, this began to change, with the French government attempting to rehome those in bidonvilles into the HLMs being constructed in the suburbs of the city, otherwise known as the ‘banlieue’. The fact that so many of these low-wage workers were subsequently housed together in the HLMs, made it easy for them to be used as scapegoats: young families from minority ethnic groups, suffering high rates of poverty. In the 1970s, many became unemployed as a result of the collapse of industries and an oil crisis. As scholar Alec Hargreaves comments, ‘those afflicted by high rates of poverty and unemployment…became increasingly scapegoated by many on the political right as the alleged causes of the nation’s ills’. The social, economic, and psychological effects of the living in these housing estates then resulted in literary terms in the progressive creation of what became known decades later as ‘banlieue literature’, focusing on Paris beyond the ring road, or the boulevard périphérique. Once again, we see a shift away from poetry in this genre more towards prose. Perhaps one the most pertinent of these works was Medhi Charef’s fictional text, Le Thé au Harem d’Archi Ahmed in 1974. Written through a postcolonial lens, the story follows Madjid, a young boy who lives in the banlieue who attempts to make sense of two identities: French and Arab. This strand continued into decades later, with many well-known texts emerging as ‘banlieue’ literature, such as Faïza Guène’s 2004 text, Kiffe Kiffe demain.

Urban renewal also became a hot topic within the field of contemporary poetry in the 1990s: a subsection of the genre witnessed a turn towards a poetry that was much more engaged with urban change than in previous decades. Many urban renewal projects of the 1980s and 1990s were carried out in the east of the city, such as Bercy and the ministry of finance, the Mittérand site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Opéra de Bastille. Rather than using Paris as a backdrop, this poetry’s critique of urban form was not only reflected in its content, but in the form of the text.

This is the case in the work of poets such as Jacques Roubaud, who was also part of the OuLiPo group discussed earlier, Jacques Réda, often cited as a more modern and more critical version of a flâneur, or even the famous author, Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq is not often recognised for his work as a poet, but before writing his prose, he wrote lots of critiques of the city as part of his poetry collections. His work explores his personal disdain for business districts such as La Défense, or for giant supermarkets, or hypermarchés, as large consumerist and late-capitalist spaces. These texts help to better understand everyday life in Paris: Houellebecq’s work makes great use of the lyric form and of the alexandrine, echoing the alienation felt by Baudelaire in his own experiences of modern Paris. Roubaud’s link with Baudelaire can also be traced back to the poem, Le Cygne, that was mentioned earlier in the episode. The title of one of Roubaud’s poetic works is a play on a line from Le Cygne – La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur des humains. In other words, the Paris of old is there no more – a city’s form changes, alas, more swiftly than a human heart. Many of Jacques Réda’s works see him walking aimlessly through the city in the style of the flâneur, although some later works take a more critical approach as the poet becomes less mobile in his old age, which reflects the way he is able to navigate the city.

From post-1990 to present, Parisians has borne witness to many urbanist controversies regarding skyscrapers: the ongoing construction of the Tour Triangle at the Porte de Versailles, and the recent completion of Jean Nouvel’s Tour Duo in the 13th arrondissement are recent examples of this. Such controversies led to the reinstation of regulations around building heights in keeping with heritage of the built environment. These regulations were originally conceived in 1977 as a result of the debate surrounding the Tour Montparnasse. However, perhaps the most significant urban change proposed in recent times is the Grand Paris project – which was not without criticism. The Métropole du Grand Paris project as proposed in 2007 by ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy involves reconceptualising Paris as an entity, Greater Paris, which encompasses the region beyond the ring road.

Literature in this period as such focuses on peripheries, on in-between spaces, and continuing critical explorations of the built environment – although unlike previously, these texts revert to prose form. A few of these texts explore the periphery of the city in a more material manner such as Jean Rolin’s 1995 book, Zone, and Philippe Vasset’s 2018 book, Un livre blanc. With regards to Grand Paris, Aurélien Bellanger’s 2017 text Le Grand Paris is a fictional account of a disgraced urbanist on the Grand Paris project who comes to understand the sociopolitical issues of eastern Paris and beyond through his work.

The cultural significance of the periphery between Paris and the banlieue remains pertinent fifty years on. Although in this episode I’ve discussed primarily written responses to the built environment, it’s important to mention here that French rap offers a really rich poetic space in which urban change affects the people who live there. This is really evident in the sense of community and pride of place which is reflected in the culture of rap from the banlieue. From the written page to the final track, the cultural impact of Paris owes a significant amount to the banlieue. This is acknowledged in rapper Médine’s track, ‘Grand Paris’. Médine and several other famous rappers present a sort of reclaiming of ‘Parisian stereotypes’ in this track. In other words, they are reaffirming that the Paris of Paris-centre is not that of the Grand Paris: rather, the suburbs enrich Parisian culture more broadly – as evidenced in the famous line ‘la banlieue influence Paname, Paname influence le monde’, or ‘the suburbs influence Paris and Paris influences the world’.

The cultural significance of this message shifts from the written verse onto the screen via the Netflix show Nouvelle Ecole, the francophone edition of the rap competition Rhythm and Flow. In the show, one contestant, Nayra, talks about the influence of the city of Saint-Denis, in the north-east of the Greater Paris-Île-de-France region. She talks passionately about how the city has shaped her creative process and how this is incorporated in the verses of her work.

So, throughout this episode, we’ve seen how urban changes in the city have affected the creative process of Paris’ writers. We saw how Haussmannisation and modernity informed the poetry of Baudelaire, and then how the city, and the Eiffel Tower in particular, was present in avant-garde works by Apollinaire and Cendrars. Then, we moved into the period of Surrealism and saw how Paris served as a backdrop for the dream-like texts of Breton and Aragon. This literary experimentation continued with the work of the OuLiPo, including Perec and Queneau. We witnessed a more critical shift towards the city’s urbanism in the second part of the twentieth century, especially with the return to poetry and the emergence of banlieue literature. Finally, we briefly explored how perspectives on Greater Paris or Grand Paris went beyond the written page via rap.

It will undoubtedly be interesting to see how these creative responses to the city and its urban changes develop in the next few years, especially as Paris prepares to host the 2024 Olympics. Alongside this, the Grand Paris project continues to develop, together with ongoing issues of redevelopment and subsequent gentrification.

Despite all this, one thing remains certain: Paris remains just as influential to writers today as it did in previous times of urban change, and no doubt the great literary tradition of writing about Paris will continue into the next century and beyond.