Paris, Capital of the 19th Century

Selections from the writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), the distinguished social and literary critic, have recently become available in a volume entitled Illuminations (Harcourt, Brace & World), edited and with a lengthy biographical and critical introduction by Hannah Arendt. There are, however, additional writings by Benjamin that have not yet been translated into English. One of these appears below, translated into English for the first time, by arrangements with the Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.

It was apparently Benjamin’s ambition to write a major work on Paris as a center of European and cultural life, to be entitled Pariser Passagen. The essay that follows, written in 1927, is a kind of embryonic version of the book he did not live to complete: highly concentrated and at some points consisting of notations to be developed later. One outgrowth of Benjamin’s interest in Paris was a book entitled Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkaptalismus.—ED.

Most of the Parisian arcades were built in the decade and a half following 1822. The flourishing state of the textile industry was the primary circumstance leading to their appearance. The magasins de nouveauté, the établissements that kept large stocks of goods on hand, began to appear at this time, forerunners of our department stores. This is the period of which Balzac wrote: “Goods on display sing their poem with colored stanzas, from the Madeleine to the Porte St. Denis.” The arcades were a center for trade in luxury goods. Art became the handmaiden of commerce to create them, contemporaries never tired of exclaiming over them, foreign visitors hurried to see them. “These arcades, one of the latest inventions of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paved passageways leading through entire city blocks of buildings whose owners have united in such speculation. On either side of the passageway, lit from above, are the most elegant shops, making each arcade a city, or rather, a world, in miniature.” The arcades were a showcase for the first use of gaslight.

The second circumstance that brought the arcades into existence was the use, for the first time, of iron as a construction material. Under the Empire this new technique contributed to a Greek revival in architecture. The architectural theoretician Böttlicher was voicing the general opinion of his time when he said that “as regards artistic form under the new method, the principle of form in the Greek manner” should prevail. Empire is the style of revolutionary terrorism, which sees the state as an end in itself. Just as Napoleon failed to recognize the functional nature of the state as an instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, so the master builders of his time failed to recognize the functional nature of iron, which was to make the principle of c...