The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier (review)

This is an engaging book, with something of an identity crisis — like its subject. The Place de la Bastille of the title is in fact only one component in the neighbourhood — the Faubourg Saint-Antoine — on which Keith Reader here focuses his attention. As he notes, from 14 July 1789 down to 10 May 1981, when Mitterrand’s election as President triggered a kind of Socialist Great Hope, the square has tended to be a symbolic site of popular militancy. Yet the Faubourg has been inclined to view the Place as a frontier rather than a beating heart. Walter Benjamin mentioned the 1864 writer who told of faubourg denizens claiming to be ‘going to Paris’ by crossing the Place (p. 10), and across the Boulevard Beaumarchais the Marais is a very different world. Furthermore, the quartier is bisected by an additional, internal frontier — the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which splits the more bourgeois XI^e arrondissement from the proletarian XII^e. Yet there is no reason why, as Reader seeks to show, such an historical hybrid cannot aspire to be treated as a lieu de mémoire that time and Pierre Nora have forgotten. The twin topoi of labour and revolt represent the intertwined DNA strands that form the genetic code of a neighbourhood in which, arguably more than any other, ‘the classes laborieuses have been liable to become classes dangereuses at moments of crisis’ (p. 17). The Place de la Bastille proves better on memory than on site. The topographical reference points that Reader evokes are those of the off-the-beaten-track flâneur, and they are rarely treated as entry points into the neighbourhood’s fascinating and evolving social and cultural history. (In passing, one regrets that the single map contains a howler: part of the Rue de la Roquette is misnamed the ‘Rue Saint-Sabine’ instead of Rue Saint-Sabin.) The Place de la Bastille is also better on memory than on history. Although Reader is plangently perceptive on the latter-day evolution of the quartier into a gentrified, bourgeois-bohemian stronghold, his emphasis throughout is more on how the neighbourhood was perceived and represented than on how it actually changed. The pre-1789 history of a region inhabited since the Middle Ages is given short shrift. (Bizarrely, much of the early history is angled through the bodice-ripping historical novels of former Paris Match journalist Jean Diwo.) Despite these caveats, I found it impossible not to respond positively to the warmth of Reader’s wide-ranging exploration of the Faubourg’s reputation in literary and cinematic sources. It does seem as though the numerous authors and films that he cites are often merely repeating and paraphrasing each other rather than responding to the actual built environment. But that is the price to pay for the wide-angle cultural approach adopted, which has the considerable virtue of revealing the durability of popular and establishment views of the neighbourhood. Certainly, anyone who knows this quartier will find something to cherish in this lightly confected and cheerful evocation.