Walter Benjamin and the Modern Parisian Cityscape

Abstract

In the preparatory notes for his unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin comments on the emotional attachment that the French display toward their history and traditions. This attachment, it seems, runs so deep that it overrides the call to be ideologically consistent, allowing incongruities between one’s professed worldview and lived reality to go unpunished. Regardless of one’s place on the political spectrum or convictions in theological matters, Benjamin observes, the need to honor things French and to affirm French civilization trumps all else. Thus, in Convolute P—an organizational subdivision among his notes for the project—he chronicles attempts to rename Parisian streets and neighborhoods during the French Revolution. Anticlerical sentiment initially inspired forward-looking progressives to dispel with saints’ titles, causing “Rue Saint-Honoré” to morph into “Honoré,” “Saint-Roch” to become “Roch,” and “Saint-Antoine” to be known simply as “Antoine.” Ultimately, however, this revolutionary plan was scrapped, and the old names returned. “It could not take hold,” writes Benjamin, for “a hiatus had opened up that to the ear of the Frenchman was unendurable.”¹