The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan Page A

constructed, with such poor materials, that its ruin in the near future is inevitable. One might even say it has already begun.
    The Beaubourg plateau, between Rue Beaubourg and Rue Saint-Martin, bounded to the north by Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare and to the south by the church of Saint-Merri, is an outcrop of Les Halles, linked tothem – across Boulevard Sébastopol – by the very old streets of Rue de Leynie and Rue Aubry-le-Boucher. In the 1950s Doisneau photographed this ‘old rubbish-tip of the Halles where lorries park, where an entire nighttime population comes out to work – and sometimes to play – in the shadows, far from the pavilions dazzling with light, like actors warming up in the corridor before going on stage’. 52 This immense paved promenade, this strange emptiness in such a dense region, was the work of Haussmann, though not finished until the 1930s. He assiduously destroyed the network of little streets – Rues Maubuée, de la Corroierie, des Vieilles-Étuves, du Poirier, du Maure – that had served as a tragic setting for almost all the insurrections of the first half of the nineteenth century. The minuscule Rue de Venise, opposite the Centre Beaubourg, is the sole remaining vestige of this group, which used to be known as the Cloître Saint-Merri, and which the
journées
of June 1832 made famous throughout Europe. Around the Centre itself, which is now part of the Parisian landscape – good architecture always ends up triumphing over whinging critics – , semipublic companies have wrought their ravages: the ‘Horloge quarter’ with its gloomy passages, bankrupt shops, wretched gadgets and suspect smells, has the same relationship to a genuine quarter as a works canteen has to a traditional Paris bistro.
Sentier
    The district marked out between Les Halles and the Grands Boulevards is underpinned and organized by Rue Montmartre, which plays the role of guardian to two successive enclaves, one on each side of Rue Réaumur. Previously, it was the Montorgueil quarter that approached Rue Montmartre via Rue Tiquetonne, Rue Bachaumont built on the site of the Passage du Saumon, and Rue Léopold-Bellan, which in the eighteenth century had the lovely name of Rue du Bout-du-Monde. Despite its new guise as a pedestrian zone, Rue Montorgueil remains lively by virtue of its market, which, even if not completely genuine, plays the same protective role as Rue Mouffetard or – increasingly less so – Rue de Buci. Further afield, between Rue Réuamur and Boulevard Montmartre, is the old press quarter, which long predates rotary printing. Lucien de Rubempré, when he ‘went out one morning with the triumphant idea of finding some colonel of such light skirmishers of the press . . . arrived in the Rue Saint-Fiacre off the Boulevard Montmartre. Before a house, occupied by the offices of a small newspaper, he stopped,and at the sight of it his heart began to throb as heavily as the pulses of a youth upon the threshold of some evil haunt.’ 53
    In the heyday of the daily press, between the end of the Second Empire and the First World War, all the major newspapers, even the less major ones, had their editorial office and printing press one above the other in the same building.
Le Petit Journal
was on the corner of Rue de Richelieu and Boulevard Montmartre, which had been the site of the famous Frascati’s. The ground floor was occupied by a bookshop and an immense bazaar, where an aquarium of exotic fish jostled with the works of Corot and Meissonier. In the Rue Montmartre, at the end of the century, you had
La Presse
,
La France
,
La Liberté
,
Le Journal des voyages
, and the Paul Dupont printworks, whose building housed
L’Univers
,
Le Jockey
,
Le Radical
and
L’Aurore
. Rue de Croissant was the site of
La Patrie
,
Le Hanneton
,
Le Père Duchesne
,
Le Siècle
,
La République
,
L’Écho de