Benjamin's Paris Arcades

Paris’s most beautiful book was never written. Or, more correctly, never finished. 

Some know of certain of the city’s temporal wormholes known as les passages, or, in English, the arcades. The height of modernity at the time of their creation, following the massive real estate speculation on the heels of the Revolution (the oldest of them, Le Passage des Panoramas, dates from 1799), their days were numbered by Haussman’s rehauling the city’s streets and shopping habits starting in 1853. Situated near diligence relays these covered promenades often held newspaper kiosks where you could rent the day’s paper for an hour or more if your were not in pocket to buy it outright. Thus these hubs hummed with news as you waited for the next set of fresh horses to carry you on your journey. Or again you could gossip at your play’s intermission, for theatres were also a standard feature of the Passages. Between theatre and stable, glittering shops lined the paved mosaic floors, much closer to modern day boutiques than the post- medieval merchants still hawking wares along unpaved streets in particular parts of town. Roofed over by the latest technological advances in transparency via glass and iron, you could stroll as if under sunlight by day or under gaslit lamps by night, see and be seen while avoiding the mud of those streets made by the city’s famously rainy skies, as well as the reigning confusion, mad cabs and noise of the "capital of the nineteenth century." You could buy books or canes, dolls or daguerrotype portraits in these magasins à nouveautés, fancy-goods shops that were in fact named after the shows playing in the theatres connected to them.  Any sort of luxury commodity might be purchased in these proto-malls. Indeed on the floor above lay Paris’s famed ladies who, like the newspapers could also be rented by hour or by night, with a guide book circulating written about their specialties and tarifs. 

Once Haussmann's department stores put an end to their heydey they fell into a kind suspended animation, gathering dust and vagrants and largely forgotten by the fashionables and flâneurs who once had been their raison d'être.

In the twenties and thirties of the last century however, Surrealists in love with vestiges of an older Paris came to (re) discover them, to haunt them, with André Breton and Louis Aragon meeting in the Passage des Princes doomed to disparition in 1925. Within the following year, Paris sheltered a certain refugee from an increasingly draconian Nazi Germany which would not allow a Jewish professor to finish his work towards a professorship. Walter Benjamin lived in the French capital not far from the Passage Vivienne. 

A member of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin would have experienced these dilapidated temples to capitalist enterprise through a fascinated lens or looking glass of a neo-Marxist. His approach was a strange one.  A decade later Adorno would write to him of his project : "One could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism." The Surrealists, speaking of magic, are indeed threaded through the book, as one entry reads:

Surrealism-"wave of dreams" -new art of flânerie. New nineteenth-century past-Paris its classic locale. Here, fashion has opened the place of dialectical exchange between woman and ware. The clerk, death, tall and loutish, measures the century by the yard, serves as mannequin himself to save costs, and manages single-handedly the "liquidation" that in French is called "revolution."

This is what Benjamin commenced in 1927: a work intended to be fifty-some pages in length. By 1940 it had mutliplied near twentyfold. Long thought lost under the Occupation, in the horrors of Benjamin's tragic demise (this was, so they say, the briefcase of papers that the thinker hauled with him in a briefcase over the Pyrenees saying that it was more important than he was) his friend and Bibliothèque Nationale librarian Georges Bataille hid away the manuscript in the library where it was only found after the war and eventually published.

It's surviving unfinished state is a doorstop of over 950 for the French language semi-translation, his magnum opus, the Passagen-Werk, Arcades Project . It is a monument of paper and ink, and reads like the scattered index cards of an abandoned Borgesian doctoral dissertation - there is no guiding thread, except the Arcades themselves, only grouped themes cross referenced into more a palimpsest - or a Surrealist collage even- than a book proper.  And yet if Peter Ackroyd can claim to have written London's biography, with this tome Benjamin completed Paris's profound psychoanalysis.