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

anyone keen on discovering the roots of the cultural misunderstandings that continue to influence Franco-American relations today. It is sobering indeed to learn that over two hundred years ago, Americans were already being taken to task for not devoting enough time to leisure... University of Arkansas Hope Christiansen READER, KEITH. The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84631-665-4. Pp. viii + 184. £25. Even though the Bastille prison was demolished shortly after 14 July 1789, countless visitors seek out its location for its role in the Revolution. Here, Reader warns that knowledge about the Bastille is no doubt incomplete and may even be erroneous. Taking the long historical view, Reader aims to provide “a simultaneous work of familiarization and defamiliarization” (18) as he invites us to question common assumptions and to deepen our knowledge of the Bastille and its area. The presence of two dissimilar structures which dominate the Place piqued Reader’s interest in the quartier. On the one hand, the 1840 Colonne de Juillet, erected in homage to the victims of the 1830 Revolution, evokes the civic unrest and street riots so common in the quartier’s history. Opposite, the 1989 Opéra is a palace of entertainment and refined culture, indicative of its current identity. The transformation of the Place de la Bastille and its neighborhood “may serve as well as any other as a prism through which changes in Paris, and hence in France as a microcosm of Europe, can be refracted” (19). Before the area was defined by the Bastille, it was known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Today this is the name of the quartier’s main street, which stretches eastward from the Place de la Bastille towards the Place de la Nation. In 1204, a Cistercian abbey was established on the site. The Bastille structure, originally a fortress built to defend eastern Paris, became a prison in 1403 and became a symbol of the brutality of the Ancien Régime. However, it was never the worst of Paris prisons and, indeed, the crowds who stormed it on 14 July 1789 were seeking ammunition , not freedom for prisoners; its seven inmates were freed as a side effect of the attack. For centuries, the area was a working-class district populated by laborers in the furniture and metalworking industries. It was known for its disposition to political protest, bawdy nightlife, sordid dance halls, and widespread prostitution. But, beginning in the nineteenth century, the social composition of the area evolved; traditional artisans were displaced by artists, antiquarians, architects, and gallery owners. By the late twentieth century, with the opening of the Opéra Bastille in 1989, the transformation was complete; the Faubourg SaintAntoine had become the Place de la Bastille, as it is known today. In addition to research in scholarly documents, this book draws on representations in artistic works—literary, pictorial, and cinematic—which portray life in the quartier or depict events which took place there. Conditions in the prison itself figure prominently in the third volume of Alexandre Dumas’s Les trois mousquetaires in a fictionalized treatment of “the man in the iron mask,” based on a mysterious prisoner whose identity was never established with certainty. The tale was retold in dozens of print and several film versions. In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, an important section is set amidst an1832 uprising in the Faubourg. Many writers—Daudet, Balzac, Simenon, and many others—portrayed scenes of 774 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 life in the quartier. Cinematic examples range from Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis (released in 1945, with action set in the 1830s) to Cédric Klapisch’s Chacun cherche son chat (1996), in which several scenes document the demolition of the quartier’s impressive church of Notre-Dame-d’Espérance. It was replaced by a glass-fronted modern building. This in-depth study of the Place de la Bastille and its surroundings is a welcome addition to the study of the cultural history of Paris. The work is made even more appealing by the literary and cinematic depictions of life in the quartier. The final chapter’s...