The Invention of Paris by Eric Hazan Page B

l’armée
and
L’Intransigeant
.
Le Soleil
was in Rue Saint-Joseph,
L’Illustration
in Rue de Richelieu,
La Rue
and
Le Cri du peuple
in Rue d’Aboukir. Some newspapers had crossed Boulevard Montmartre:
Le Temps
was in Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre,
La Marseillaise
in Rue Bergère, and
Le Figaro
at 26 Rue Drouot, in a fine neo-Gothic building. Léon Daudet recalled:
This is where I made a start in 1892 under Magnard. I signed short pointed moral tales and rather acerbic snippets as ‘a modern young man’. At the same time, Barrès, a young man himself, and as lively and fond of a joke as I was, was a contributor to this illustrious house. We were Magnard’s darlings, and he kept us in his private office while more important figures kicked their heels on the floor below, decorated with a bust of Villemessant. One day we noticed Verlaine in the cashier’s office, with his face of a retired satyr. He’d come for his money, not very much – a group of us had given him a little pension. Naturally he was drunk, and raising a fat and dirty finger in the air, he laughed and repeated with a malicious and indescribable air: ‘notwithstanding . . . however’. 54
    It is not so far back that you could not even imagine driving by car along Rue du Croissant, where lorries were constantly discharging spools of paper for the Imprimerie de la Presse. The crisis of the written press, the merger of titles, and the migration of printing works to the suburbs, have left behind only pale vestiges of this glorious age: the
Figaro
building on the corner of Rue du Mail, the
Tribune
building, the fine caryatids of the building of
La France, journal du soir
, and the plaque on the Café du Croissant recalling that ‘Jaurès was assassinated here on 31 July 1914’. Along Rues du Croissant, des Jeûneurs and Saint-Joseph, the neighbouring Sentier quarter has infiltrated into the gaps left by the press.

    The Sentier is today the only Parisian quarter whose name denotes both a territory, an economic activity that was exclusive to it until recent times – the garment trade – and a social type. The recent establishment here of ‘new technologies’ has increased property prices, but has not yet shattered the Sephardic monopoly or reduced the bottlenecks, which are the worst in Paris. Other names of quarters also used to have this ability to characterize their inhabitants. From the ancien régime to the era of
Les Misérables
, coming from the Faubourg Saint-Marcel meant, for Sébastien Mercier, belonging to ‘the poorest section of the Paris population, the most rebellious and refractory’. Through to the 1950s, coming from Belleville and even Montmartre was almost equivalent to stating one’s skin colour. These particularisms have disappeared, except for the Sentier, which remains a quarter difficult to enter, physically isolated, socially removed, little studied or visited, famous but poorly known. 55
    It is often believed that Jews who arrived in France at the end of the Algerian war took over the rag trade from East European Jews, who had arrived in successive waves between the great pogroms of the early twentieth century and the 1930s. In reality, the Sentier’s textile tradition goes back much further. In the eighteenth century, the Compagnie des Indes, which imported cotton among other things, had its premises near Rue du Sentier. Local manufacturers and dyers were unhappy with this competition, and waged a veritable ‘battle of cottons’ against it. The Marquise de Pompadour, who had been born in the quarter on Rue de Cléry, and lived at 33 Rue du Sentier when she married the farmer-general Le Normant d’Étioles, backed the promotion of local cloth by using it for her interior decoration. The development of the textile industry then led to the construction of a particular kind of building, many examples of which are still to