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as a brief essay, it has been reprinted, together with all of Benjamin's
notes for the final version that he never managed to write, in two
heavy volumes titled
Das Passagenwerk.
He explained to us that this project was involving him in ex–
tensive research concerning the vast nineteenth-century economic
and demographic expansion of the French capital. The pioneer gas–
lighting of its streets had already earned it, in the days of Baudelaire,
the title of
Ville Lumiere,
which it still enjoys. Among other sources of
information , Benjamin was studying the political writings of such
revolutionary leaders as Auguste Blanqui, who developed the tactics
of building barricades and of the street-fighting that spread from
Paris in 1848 to Berlin and other European capitals, and the writings
too of those later responsible as townplanners for the many broad
thoroughfares that were built under the Emperor Napoleon the
Third, with the intention of rendering Blanqui's tactics obsolete.
Benjamin also expressed to us his great interest in other characteris–
tics of nineteenth-century Paris , such as the numerous arcaded
sidewalks and
passages
that made it possible for its citizens and
foreign tourists to window-shop pleasantly even on rainy days.
Here I interrupted Benjamin to point out that the concept of
such arcaded sidewalks and glass-roofed
passages,
similar too to Lon–
don's Burlington Arcade and Piccadilly Arcade, was derived, of
course , from the covered bazaars that Napoleon had seen in Egypt
and Syria and that earlier eighteenth-century travelers already ad–
mired in Constantinople , Aleppo, Isfahan, or elsewhere in the
Orient. Ultimately, all covered bazaars of the Islamic world were
derived from those of imperial Rome and Byzantium. Edouard
Fournier, a nineteenth-century historian of the architectural history
of Paris, had pointed out in 1853, in
Paris Demoli: Mosai'que de Ruines,
that as many as one hundred and forty-four such glass-roofed
pass–
ages
or arcades had been built in central Paris by 1827. Most of
these, by now, have been demolished in the course oflater real estate
developments. Built on Napoleon's return from his Egyptian cam–
paign, the aptly named Passage du Caire was the first of these, it
seems, to have appeared in Paris .
At the time of my Paris meeting with Benjamin, I happened to
be writing in French, in collaboration with my friend Andre Ostier,
a book entitled
Le Tour de Paris en Quatre-vingtJours
that was doomed
never to be published. It described many little-known or obsolete
aspects of the city, often including details of their history, and we
had already collected a lot of material on the history of some of these
