Paris, Capital of the 19th Century
Benjamin, Walter
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 &...
...in my soul: the Object...
...Saturn's rings become cast-iron balconies where the planet's inhabitants can take the air of an evening...
...To increase turnover, there was always some fashionable improvement in the technique of photographing such subjects...
...Nadar made a great leap forward when he ventured to photograph the Paris sewer system...
...His salon was for him a box at the theater of the world...
...Art became the handmaiden of com-arcades into existence was the use, for the WALTER BENJAMIN first time, of iron as a construction material...
...He felt a special calling to carry The flowering realm of ornaments, The charm of landscape and of architecture, And all scenic effects Depend on perspective alone...
...Decoration is to the house as the signature to a painting...
...Haussmann called himself a "demolition artist...
...Rents shot up, driving the proletariat into the suburbs...
...The press organizes the market in spirtual values, which then starts booming...
...This was not a simple question of economics...
...Novelty is a characteristic of goods that has nothing to do with their use value...
...Playing the stockmarket replaced those games of chance that remained from feudal society...
...With neither does he feel at home...
...It favored the rule of Louis-Philippe, the rule of the private citizen in business...
...In his in WALTER BENJAMIN tenor he collected faraway places, the distant past...
...Under the Empire this new technique contributed to a Greek revival in architecture...
...Daguerre is a pupil of the dioramist Prevost, whose place of business is located in the Passage des Panoramas...
...Yet the barricades played a part in the Feburary Revolution...
...The flaneur is Everything is Allegory to me...
...There are, however, additional writings by Benjamin that have not yet been translated into English...
...In reaction to photography, painting began (the Impressionists) by stressing color, and finally (the Cubists) created a new realm where photography could not, for the time being, follow...
...Workers' song, ca...
...Behind them there were extensive trench works...
...The Paris of his poems is a sunken city, more submarine than subterranean...
...On the occasion of the Paris exposition of 1867, Victor Hugo published a manifesto entitled To the Peoples of Europe...
...This was the age of the arcades, interiors, exhibition halls, dioramas, relics of a dream world...
...covers, antimacassars, linings and cases are all contrivances in which the objects of daily use leave their traces...
...Each age envisions the age to come in its dreams...
...The expropriations Haussmann brought about led to a deceitful kind of speculation...
...That same year he announced the discovery of the daguerrotype...
...Modernity is very much stressed in his poetry...
...11...
...Here we have the origin of the detective story, the search for these traces...
...it is fashion's vital nerve, and the cult of goods is well served by it...
...But he who has lost touch with reality creates his place in the privacy of his own home...
...His life ends in madness...
...The rise of the machine provides the profound impulse that sets his thought in motion, but this is not given direct expression in his discussion of the immorality of commerce and the false morality created to serve it...
...This reactionary PARIS, CAPITAL OF THE 19TH CENTURY transformation is indicative...
...The bourgeoisie never shared this misconception...
...The journey to learn my geography...
...Such an image gives us goods —as a fetish...
...These works were a preparation for the collective literary efforts Girardin was to publish in the feuilletons of the 1830s...
...Empire is the style of revolutionary terrorism, which sees the state as an end in itself...
...It encouraged the construction of the railroads in order to improve its stock holdings...
...The Hook of One Hundred and One, The French as They See Themselves, The Devil in Paris, The Big City—all belong to this category...
...The Commune destroyed the illusion that it was the task of the proletariat to collaborate with the bourgeoisie in completing the work of 1789...
...Art nouveau, at the turn of the century, shook up the cult of the interior...
...The Philosophy of Furniture as well as his detective stories makes Poe the first physiognomist of the home...
...We can see this happening in the case of Fourier's Utopia...
...1850 THE BARRICADES DID GO UP once more during the Commune...
...This consciousness gave rise to Maxime La Camp's monumental work Paris and, in the Jeremiades d'un Haussmannise, it took the form of a biblical lament...
...The city's chthonic elements-its topographical formation, the old, abandoned bed of the Seine—have left their mark on his imagination, but what really counts in his "deathlike idyll" is the city's social substratum, a modern one...
...The result of this reflecting process is "cultural history," in which the bourgeoisie indulges its false consciousness...
...Both make abstractions out of man's social existence...
...Laugle and Vanderbusch: Louis et le Saint-Simonien (1832) T T O THE WORLD'S FAIR the pilgrims trooped was a pupil of Enfantin and publisher of the to worship the fetish goods...
...A decisive factor in this evolution was the discovery that the locomotive—it already existed in experimental form in the 1820s—could run only on iron rails...
...And all the while he was alienating the Parisians from their city...
...Baudelaire succumbs to Wagner's witchcraft...
...The operetta is the ironic Utopia of the unending reign of capitalism...
...Ambiguity is the dialectic made visible, the dialectic at a standstill...
...In seeking to create an illusion of change in nature, the dioramas pointed the way, beyond photography, to motion pictures and sound movies...
...They no longer felt at home there...
...These builders created girders in the image of Pompeian columns, factories in the image of habitations...
...The phantasmagoria of capitalist culture reaches its most glorious development in the world exposition of 1867...
...In the new technically oriented WALTER BENJAMIN society, the subjective coloration of painting and graphic art detracted from their value as sources of information, making the camera all the more important...
...His goal: something new...
...provided the framework that later was to be They opened up a phantasmagorical world, formed by the amusement industry...
...This illusion had prevailed during the period from 1831 to 1871, from the Lyons revolt to the Commune...
...The collector is the true occupant of the home...
...Fourier's Utopia gives new life to an ancient wish-symbol...
...While waging the class struggle from the covered position of philanthropy, the bourgeoisie was nevertheless always ready to come out in the open...
...At this time the real center of gravity of living space shifts to the place of business...
...These images also evince a definite striving to break with the outdated order, that is, the recent past...
...He is the first to make Paris a subject of lyric poetry, but not out of partiality to his home town...
...So too did painting move apart from the dioramas...
...To live somewhere is to leave traces...
...This is its bohemian period...
...Socially, too, this literature was panoramic...
...The Communist Manifesto spells the end of its political existence...
...They rally round the banner of "fart pour 1'art...
...Their original field of activity was the army, later the petite bourgeoisie, occasionally the proletariat...
...In elaborating his private environment he shut out both business and society, and thus there came into being the phantasmagorical world of the home...
...He is to art as the dandy to fashion...
...Under Napoleon III this movement developed significantly...
...Their interests had earlier been represented, less equivocally, by the French workers' delegations sent to the expostions of 1851 and 1862, at which time the delegation was 750 strong...
...Neither has overwhelmed him yet...
...They modernize it...
...The development of the forces of production shattered the last century's fantasy world even before the monuments created to house it had begun to decay...
...The phalanstere is supposed to bring back conditions under which there will be no need for morality...
...Its economic status and its political function are undefined, as is most clearly seen in the case of professional conspirators, who are usually members of the boheme...
...These tendencies direct the imagination, impelled by new developments, back to the primeval age of mankind...
...Within the four walls of his own home, he required a prop for his illusions...
...In an increasingly commercial society, the value of painting as a source of information was on the decline...
...The deifiChevalier, leading authority in this new field, cation of goods, and their aura of a life of en PARIS, CAPITAL OF THE 19TH CENTURY joyment, is the secret theme of Grandville's art...
...J. Wiertz: Oeuvres litteraries (Paris, 1870) ment...
...What was wrong with the early workers' uprisings was that they lacked a theory of revolution to show them the way...
...Prior to the in-the development of a global economy, but ternational expositions there were national not the class struggle...
...The celebration of their emancipation...
...Scheerbart's Glasarchitektur (1914) still links glass with notions of Utopia...
...In the home, traces are all the more noticeable...
...With the current tremors in the goods economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins, even before they crumble...
...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 construction dominant in architecture...
...Avenir...
...V. Baudelaire or the Streets of Paris B B AUDELAIRE'S GENIUS, feeding on melancholia, is an allegorical one...
...What he had in mind, to judge from his own paintings, was political enlightenment, which makes him the first to advocate, if not to foresee, the use of the photographed mise en scene for propaganda purposes...
...For the last time, the worker appeared, out of his class context, as a figure in an idyllic landscape...
...As the century wore on, it played an increasingly important role in the development of architecture...
...their anecdotal form corresponded to the three-dimensional foreground of the dioramas, their informational content to the painted background...
...The architectural theoretician Bottlicher 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...
...He takes sides with the asocial...
...This necessity was all the greater because it had not occurred to him to extend his commercial outlook into the social sphere...
...The arcades were a Madeleine to the Porte St...
...Its splendor, somewhat dimmed, endures until Zola, who adopts Fourier's ideas in his Travail and bids the arcades farewell in Therese Raquin...
...He seeks asylum in the crowd, of which Engels and Poe were both students before him...
...Concrete offers a new perspective on possibilities of introducing plastic forms into architecture...
...Fashion couples the living body with the inorganic, treats the living being like a corpse...
...At this time, a national holiday text in which their use value was obscured...
...Paris went through a period of intense speculation...
...This is the period of way, lit from above, are the most elegant which Balzac wrote: "Goods on display sing shops, making each arcade a city, or rather, a their poem with colored stanzas, from the world, in miniature...
...The empire is at the height of its power...
...In 1839 a fire destroys Daguerre's diorama...
...The ury, are glass-roofed, marble-paved passagemagasins de nouveaute, the etablissements ways leading through entire city blocks of that kept large stocks of goods on hand, be-buildings whose owners have united in such gan to appear at this time, forerunners of speculation...
...The city dweller, who will have many occasions during the course of the century to assert his political superiority over the countryside, is here making an attempt to bring the country into the city...
...The Communist Manifesto brought to a close the age of professional conspiracy...
...The neighborhoods of Paris began to lose their particular flavor...
...The literature of the time has its dioramic school...
...Fashion: Signor Death, Signor Death...
...Ibsen, in the Masterbuilder, sees the implications of art nouveau: the attempt of the individual to pit his inwardness alone against technology leads to his downfall...
...These images express the wishes of the collectivity, and represent an attempt both to throw off and to transfigure the imperfections of the social product, the shortcomings of the social order of production...
...A head lies on the bedside table, like a buttercup...
...All Europe Saint-Simonians' newspaper Globe...
...Photography in its early days was superior to the miniature for several reasons, one technical: the long exposure time required great concentration on the part of the sitter...
...Haussmann intended to suppress it in two ways: the width of the streets was meant to make the erection of barricades impossible, and the new avenues were to be the shortest route from the army posts to the workingclass neighborhoods...
...Iron was the first processed building material in the history of architecture...
...The flourishing state tors hurried to see them...
...The flaneur's last journey: death...
...the other social: the first photographers were members of the avant-garde and their clientele came mostly from their own ranks...
...The extension of the democratic apparatus and the granting of the franchise to new groups coincided with a period of corruption in parliament, under the leadership of Guihot...
...Art nouveau takes an interest in iron construction, in girder forms...
...It is the quintessence of false consciousness, with its tireless agent, fashion...
...Art, beginning to have doubts as to its function, ceases to be "inseparable de l'utile" (Baudelaire) and must make novelty its greatest good...
...Its theory is individualism...
...To him falls the Sisyphean task of freeing objects of their existence qua goods, by the simple fact of possessing them...
...As Spleen he destroys the Ideal (Spleen et Ideal) . But it is precisely modern history that is forever quoting primeval history, as we see from the ambiguity that is a part of the social relations and the products of this period...
...the first in 1798 on in the industrial and commercial expansion the Champ de Mars was intended "for the occurring at mid-century, they were at a loss amusement of the working classes and in in questions concerning the proletariat...
...They began to grow conscious of the inhumanity of big-city life...
...Each period of history not only dreams of the next but, dreaming, presses toward the new awakening...
...Built in the service of commerce, it becomes, in his vision, a dwelling place...
...Man's earliest experiences, stored in the collective unconscious, unite with the new to beget Utopias that leave their mark on a thousand aspects of life—on edifices built to last and on fashions that change from one day to the next...
...But it took Surrealism to free our vision of it...
...Since mid-century, photography had been helping to broaden the sphere of the consumer economy, by flooding the market with an unlimited quantity of figures, places, and events that were of no use whatever to the buyer except as pictures...
...One outgrowth of Benjamin's interest in Paris was a book entitled Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter desHochkaptalismus.—ED...
...The rebellious pathos of this group is what gives Baudelaire's poetry its strength...
...The descent to Hell is easy...
...The writings of the Fourierist natural scientist Toussenal represent a literary counterpart to Grandville's Utopia — Fashion prescribes the ritual for the worship of the fetish goods...
...Haussmann or The Barricades I worship the beautiful, the good, great things, beautiful nature, the inspiration of great art, whether to delight the ear or the eye...
...The criminals in the earliest detective novels are of neither the leisured nor the gangster class...
...The arbiter novarum rerum in art is the snob...
...But they hesitated on the threshold...
...Undo their treachery, O Republic: show your Medusa head amidst the red lightning...
...The private citizen's home is not only his universe, it is also his jewel case...
...Offenbach prescribes the rhythm of Parisian life...
...The designation comes into use in the luxury trade at this time...
...Leon Deubel: Oeuvres (Paris, 1929) ART HAS RETREATED INSIDE, into the home...
...The red belt came into being...
...The interlocking of the passions, the complicated meshing of passions mecanistes with passion cabaliste, are a primitive attempt to apply mechanical analogies in the field of psychology...
...The utilization of elements of a dream, even as one attacks it, is the model of dialectical thinking...
...The arcades, which are both house and stars, give us this image...
...Chaptal's where man entered to be entertained...
...Virgil: Aeneid WHAT IS UNIQUE about Baudelaire's poetry is the way in which the images of woman and death interpenetrate with a third image, that of the city of Paris...
...Dioramamaking was at its height at the time the arcades were being built...
...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...
...yet this very lack was what gave them the direct energy and enthusiasm to tackle the creation of a new society...
...Iron was shunned in the construction of residences, but preferred for arcades, exhibition halls, railroad stations—buildings that served a transitory purpose...
...Dialectical thinking is thus the instrument by which historical awakening occurs...
...In its highly complex organization, the phalanstere resembles a machine...
...Each age dreams of the age to come" —Michelet: Avenir...
...In a speech to the Assembly in 1864 he gave vent to his hatred for the rootless population of the big city, whose ranks continued to swell as a result of his ventures...
...David advised his pupils to draw from nature when working on the dioramas...
...The address to the assembly on the subject of In-amusement industry made this easier for him dustry opened the exhibition...
...It is time for the evening stroll...
...The latter favored financial capital...
...As early as 1831 the Journal des Debats acknowledged that "the position of every factory owner in his own factory is like that of a plantation owner among his slaves...
...Au fond de l'inconnu pour trouver du nouveau...
...Its ceremonies of self-celebration are a counterpart of the devotion to amusement that transfigures goods...
...His allegorical vision of the city is that of an alienated man, an idler, whose way of life still has a certain glamor which reconciles it for a while to the comfortless existence that is to be ours in the big city...
...Louis-Philippe or The Interior U U NDER LOUIS-PHILIPPE the private citizen enters the stage of history...
...Under the Empire, with its rigorous devotion to form, Fourier creates the colored idyll of Biedermeier...
...Leopardi: Dialogue between Fashion and Death THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITIONS CREATE the commodity universe...
...This same enthusiasm, in the end, enabled its worst elements to gain the upper hand again...
...Each age bears within itself its own end and unfolds this latent content, as Hegel recognized, with cunning...
...THE FORM DETERMINED by the new means of production remains, at the outset, under the domination of the old form (Marx) . There are in the collective unconscious images corresponding to these forms, the old interpenetrating with the new...
...The burning of Paris was a fitting end to Haussmann's work of destruction...
...At this intermediate stage, intellect still has it patrons, but it is getting to know the market, too...
...Diary of a Madman (Paris 1907) THE LAST POEM in Les Fleurs du Mal: Le Voyage, "0 mort, vieux capitaine, it est temps, levons l'ancre...
...Of course, according to its ideology, art nouveau appears to bring with it the final perfection of the interior...
...This was indirectly of significance in the founding by Marx of the International Workers Association...
...Under cover of this, the ruling class was able to make history while doing business...
...The ruling of the court of appeals, under the prompting of the bourgeois and pro-Orleans opposition, increased the financial risk of Haussmannization...
...Haussmann tried to prop up his dictatorship by declaring emergency rule in Paris...
...Marx took a protective attitude toward Fourier's extolling his "colossal vision of man" calling attention to his humor...
...Inwardness has mustered all its reserves, as is evident in the spiritualistic vocabulary of lines, in the use of the flower as symbol of naked, vegetative nature confronting an environnnent armed by technology...
...But the true significance of art nouveau is not expressed by its ideology...
...It is the source of the illusion that adheres to the images produced by the collective unconscious...
...WALTER BENJAMIN V1...
...This machine whose parts are men produces the never-never land...
...So does the prostitute, who is both salesgirl and goods in one...
...Grandville's fantasies confer on the universe the character of commodities...
...Contemporaries dubbed Haussmann's work "strategic beautification...
...All this notwithstanding, the concept of the engineer, which had emerged in the revolutionary wars, started to gain ground, and the struggle between construction and decoration, between P-cole Polytechnique and >cole des Beaux-Arts, had begun...
...In fact, Jean-Paul in his Levana is as closely related to the pedagogical Fourier as Scheerbart in his Glasarchitektur is to Fourier the Utopia-builder...
...In the latter he was accountable to reality...
...ers of Saint-Simon planned the industrializa-He had only to surrender himself to its mation of the entire world, hence latched on to nipulations, while enjoying his alienation the idea of the international exposition...
...Grandville or the International Expositions Yes, when the whole world from Paris to China, O godlike Saint-Simon, has accepted your teachings, The golden age will return in all its splendor, The rivers will run cocoa, tea, Sheep will gambol ready roasted in the fields Poached fish will swim in the Seine Spinach will grow pre-fricasseed With breadcrumbs all around The trees will bear stewed apples We will harvest vegetables by the bunch It will snow wine, rain chicken Ducks will fall from heaven A l'orange...
...This was the first use of the camera as an instrument of discovery...
...This standstill is Utopia and the dialectic in visual form is thus a dream image...
...But this group looks on the real leaders of the proletariat as its enemies...
...Enormous effort and all known artistic techniques went into creating a perfection in the imitation of nature, reproducing the changing light at different hours of the day, the rising of the moon, the roar of a waterfall...
...To this end LouisPhilippe had already introduced wooden pavements...
...In the July revolution the bourgeoisie attained the goals of the revolution of 1789 (Marx...
...Great ladiesstep out now, the less great trot along behind them...
...His only sexual communion is with a prostitute...
...The phalanstere will be a city of arcades...
...My late father had been to Paris...
...Construction takes on the role of the unconscious...
...These dreams always contain something of man's earliest beginnings depicted in terms of his earliest history, that is, in the form of a classless society...
...Baron Haussmann: Confessions of an Aging Lion P P ERSPECTIVES OF VISTAS through long rows of streets were Haussmann's urban ideal, in keeping with the 19th century's pronounced tendency to ennoble technical necessities by turning them into artistic goals...
...there, even idleness helps increase the turnover of goods: the department store is the crowning achievement of the flaneur...
...Grandville extends fash ion's empire from commonplace objects to the cosmos...
...The international exposition of 1855 included, for the first time, a special exhibit, "Photography...
...The artists, for their part, began to debate its value as an art form...
...Its apparent goal is the transfiguration of the lonely soul...
...The crowd is a veil, and looking through it the flaneur sees the familiar city as a fantastic world—landscape or interior...
...However, the societal prerequisites for its widespread use as a building material were not to be met for another hundred years...
...Grandville's pen transforms all of nature into "specialty items...
...Denis...
...They ran the entire width of the grands boulevards, often rose a story high...
...Next was the imitation of nature, which became photography...
...Haussmann's activities fit in well with Napoleonic idealism...
...This enthusiasm waxed highest in the Commune and won for the working class the support, provisional albeit, of the best elements within the bourgeoisie...
...Imagination was preparing to take on a practical application, giving us commercial art...
...For the private citizen, it represented the entire universe...
...His preciosity in the representation of inanimate objects corresponds to what Marx calls the "theological whimsy" of goods, best exemplified in "specialty items...
...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...
...One of these appears below, translated into English for the first time, by arrangements with the Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main...
...The international expositions served to glorify working class was the best customer at these the exchange value of goods, creating a conexhibitions...
...Lafargue explains gambling as representing the mysteries of the business cycle on a miniature scale...
...These arcades, of the textile industry was the primary cir-one of the latest inventions of industrial luxcumstance leading to their appearance...
...has been traveling to see some goods for The Saint-Simonians were able to predict sale," said Taine in 1855...
...IV...
...The developing forces of production had, in the 19th century, freed the forms that shape the environment from the domination of art, as in the 16th century the sciences threw off the yoke of philosophy...
...Description of Prevost's and Daguerre's dioramas...
...Karl Gutzkow: Letters from Paris (1842) BALZAC WAS THE FIRST to speak of the collapse of the bourgeoisie...
...I believe...
...Pursuing fashion to such extreme lengths, he reveals its true nature: it is in basic opposition to the organic...
...Vandervelde makes the house an expression of personality...
...The institutions of the bourgeoisie's temporal and spiritual reign were to find their apotheosis in the boulevards...
...A...
...Baudelaire: Un martyre For the private citizen, there existed, for the first time, an antithesis between living space and place of work, between home and counting house...
...Rimbaud and Courbet espoused the cause of the Communards...
...Art nouveau represents the last-ditch stand of art, its ivory tower laid siege by technology...
...The water is blue, the flowers in bloom, The evening sweet to behold...
...Baudelaire: Le Cygne still on the threshold of the big city and of the bourgeoisie...
...arcades were a center for trade in luxury The second circumstance that brought the goods...
...The feuilletons were collections of sketches...
...Heralding a turnabout in the relationship between art and technology, the dioramas also give expression to a new form of semiSun, take care...
...Oh Death, old captain, the time has come, raise the anchor...
...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...
...Making decorative use of these forms, it tries to win them back to the side of art...
...On either side of the passageour department stores...
...In the dioramas, the city spreads out into a landscape, as it will later, more subtly, for the flaneur...
...Franz Bohle: Theater-Catechism out his work and stressed this point in his memoirs...
...The real aim of Haussmann's activity was to secure the city against civil war...
...from himself and from others...
...Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris (1828) M M OST OF THE PARISIAN ARCADES were merce to create them, contemporaries never built in the decade and a half fol-tired of exclaiming over them, foreign visilowing 1822...
...Nonconformists rebel at the sight of art abandoned to the market...
...Fourier sees the arcade as the architectural canon of the phalanstere...
...The showcase for the first use of gaslight...
...This explains the tension in his work between the cynical and utopian elements...
...they are members of the bourgeoisie, private citizens...
...So, too, later in the century, the chalet was to provide a model for the first railroad stations...
...This watchword will give rise to the total work of art, which attempts to seal off art from developing technology...
...He wanted to eliminate all possibility of the barricades ever rising in Paris again...
...Entire boulevards were protected by canvas sheets until completed and then unveiled like monuments...
...If the flaneur's fantastic world is a spatial one, the gambler's exists in time...
...Architecture was the first to go its own way, as engineering construction...
...The rail was the first building element made of iron, the forerunner of the girder...
...The Commune meant the destruction of the phantasmagoric world that PARIS, CAPITAL OF THE 19TH CENTURY held in check the freedom of the proletariat...
...Fetishism supplies the basis for the sex appeal of the inorganic...
...The follow-by elevating him to the level of a commodity...
...In the 19th, the law is novelty...
...Its struggle against the social rights of the proletariat began with the great revolution itself and thereafter adopted the philanthropic movement as a cover...
...I love the spring in bloom with women and roses...
...These products were all getting ready to enter the market as commodities...
...The occupant of the home leaves his traces there, too...
...these inventions were to determine the subsequent history of photography...
...Nguyen-Trong-Hiep: Paris capitale de la France (1897) 1. Fourier or the Arcades These palaces' magical columns, the objects displayed in their porticoes, show the connoisseur that industry can rival the arts...
...Daguerre or the Diorama A A FTER THE INTRODUCTION of iron as a building material, architecture and art began to go their separate ways...
...Arago addressed the assembly on the subject of photography, assigning it a place in the history of technology, prophesying its scientific applications...
...He presents nature in the same spirit that advertisements —this term too dates from the period— present their wares...
...But he only confers on them heirloom value instead of use value...
...This illusion of newness is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the illusion of the neverchanging...
...Photography led to the disappearance of miniature portrait painting...
...Le Play's Ouvriers europeens, was its major accomplishment...
...They were stronger, better secured than ever...
...In the same year Wiertz published his important article on the subject, ranking photography equal with painting as a source of philosophical enlightenment...
...Engels discusses the technique of barricade fighting...
...The department store is both landscape and in PARIS, CAPITAL OF THE 19TH CENTURY tenor...
...Paris is confirmed as the capital of luxury and of fashion...
...Interested as they were industrial exhibitions...
...he is only a collector, dreaming not only of distant or bygone worlds, but of a better one, where the things men need are in as short supply as in the world we know, but where objects are freed of the drudgery of having to be useful...
...In the 17th century, allegory was the law governing dialectic imagery...
...Literature accepted fragmentation in the feuilleton...
...He comes, with his intellect, to the marketplace, ostensibly as an observer but, in reality, in search of a buyer...
...During this period, new architectural uses were also found for glass...
...Along with the department stores there are the newspapers...
...Gambling makes time into a drug...
Vol. 17 • September 1970 • No. 5
