Moving about Paris in the Early Modern Period

Joan DeJean, How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (New York: Bloomsbury,2014), pp.14-15

Foreigners were also attracted by the city's technological modernity. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the French suddenly outstripped the Dutch, until then the European leaders in city services and urban technologies. Between 1653 and 1667, Paris saw spectacular advances as the city acquired in quick succession three absolute firsts: a public mail delivery system, public transportation, and street lighting.

By 1667, it had become possible for Parisians and visitors to hop on a horse-drawn public coach at the line's terminus, the Place des Vosges, hand the fare to a uniformed attendant, and be taken to many locations across town -- and, if they were traveling after dark, the entire trajectory would have been illuminated by thousands of lanterns that burned all through the night. Innovations such as these were seen as reason enough to visit . One early guide to the city, written in the 1690s by longtime resident Sicilian Giovanni Paolo Marana, advised foreigners that street lighting "alone is worth the trip, no matter how far away you live. Everyone must come and see something that neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever dreamed of."

Foreigners also came to live in Paris for the quality of life with which the city was increasingly synonymous. Theater and opera were not unique to Paris. Dance, however, was showcased there as nowhere else. In the 1660s and 1670s, Louis XIV made it central to the mandate of several academies; he also founded the first national ballet company. In 1700, Raoul Feuillet published Choreographie ("Choreography"), the earliest attempt at creating a system of dance notation. Paris thus became the original center for innovative modern dance. And with the concentration of artists and cultural institutions found there, Paris became the capital of an empire of culture, a culture that was widely exported to other nations.

But the most widely accessible new pleasure was one that has ever since been associated with Paris, that of simply walking its streets.

With the first modern streets, the first modern bridge, and the first modern city square, Paris became the prototype for the walking city, a place where people walked not merely to get around, but by choice and for pleasure.

By the end of the seventeenth century, Paris was full of pedestrians of all stripes -- including Parisians who had rarely done much exploring on foot before, the city's aristocratic residents. One foreign observer, Joachim Chrisoph Nemeitz, noted that, except when it rained, aristocrats walked all the time, all over Paris. Foreigners were astounded to  see not only that upper­class women were often out walking but also that most of them walked not in any protective gear but in the then most fashionable footwear: delicate mules. They were able to do so because in the course of the century the practice of paving the city's streets became increasingly common. The gleaming new paving stones were widely admired by visitors to Paris. They gave its streets a modern look, and they also changed the feel of the street in a radical way. They gave pedestrians an underfoot sensation both novel and modern.

In 1777, an acute observer of European life, the Marquis de Caraccioli, credited Parisians in the seventeenth century with having rewritten the history of urban walking. In 1600, he explained, "the upper classes in Europe had no knowledge of the pleasure of walking, perhaps because they were afraid of compromising their grandeur by putting themselves on the same footing as the common people." But by the end of the seventeenth century, "Parisian ways . . . had opened their eyes, and they dared step down from their carriages; they began to use their feet." And many accounts testify to the fact that the public works of seventeenth-century Paris taught urban dwellers other basic new ways of interacting with a city as well. . . .

The experience of walking the streets made its presence felt in literature as soon as the city had begun to modernize. Shortly after the Pont Neuf and the Place Royale became part of the infrastructure, French comedies were for the first time set not in generic streets but in specific locations in Paris. Characters point out the brand-new monuments; their everyday behavior is shaped by innovative city services and urban works.

The first Parisian city writing calls attention in particular to the novel ways in which people could now negotiate Paris. Speed was shown to be a mark of the urban experience. Characters move fast, dashing through the streets in a hurry, evidently with things to do and places to be. In a 1643 comedy by Pierre Corneille, for example, in order to take in all the sights, a son so rushes his father around Paris at breakneck speed that the father complains that he is "out of breath and feeling ill."

Foreigners who lived in Paris confirmed the sense that, as it became a city of architecture and technology and of culture and luxury, Paris had also become a city of people on the move. In a guidebook designed for his fellow country­ men, a German called Parisians "more animated and energetic" than other Europeans, "as fast-paced" as their city, while the Sicilian Marana described them as "night and day in a perpetual hurry."

The original Paris city guides recognized that modern visitors, like Parisians, were on a stepped-up timetable and wanted to use their days in Paris efficiently. Brice characterized each visit as a course, not just a simple walk but, as contemporary dictionaries defined it, "the movement of someone who's walking very quickly."

A correlation has recently been posited between the pace with which its inhabitants negotiate the streets of a city and that city's creative output. This suggests that those quick-paced Parisians and tourists were in step with the city on the go, listening to its streets and their creative pulse -- that they were experiencing a sense of heightened expectations that came from living at what was widely seen as the center of the European cultural world.