I’m currently reading the new Verso translation of Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris. It’s a beautifully imagined book, full of colourful descriptions of Parisian places. I’ll review it soon, but in the meantime, here’s what Hazan says about the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a notoriously radical Parisian locale:
The present Faubourg retains few material traces of this glorious past, and only the friends of Red Paris mentally raise their hats when they cross Rue Charles-Delescluze and remember that at the crossroads of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine and Rue de Cotte they are on the site of the barricade where the representative of the people Alphonse Baudin was killed for twenty-five francs. But even if the proximity of the Bastille Opera now disagreeably contaminates the first few metres of the Faubourg, even if Rue de Lappe, long since deserted by the Auvergnats, is no longer the haven that it once was for modern art, still the Aligre market, the fountains on the corner of Rue de Charonne and in the square in front of the Saint-Antoine hospital, the courtyards where illustrators and computer buffs, Chinese artisans and photographers, work cheek by jowl – this unique mixture maintains the quarter’s identity as plebeian and industrious. If, taking up Marcel Duchamp’s idea, we should manufacture cans of Air de Paris, it is certainly that of Faubourg Saint-Antoine with which I would fill mine. (124)
Eric Hazan will be in conversation with Iain Sinclair in London’s Institut Francais this Wednesday 3rd March. (Details here.)