Photography as history: collecting, narrating, and preserving Paris, 1870-1970

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PHOTOGRAPHY AS HISTORY:
COLLECTING, NARRATING, AND PRESERVING PARIS, 1870-1970

by

Catherine E. Clark

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Catherine E. Clark
ii
Dedication

In memory of Catherine Neill
iii

Acknowledgments

No part of this dissertation would have been possible without the guidance of my
mentor, toughest critic, and strongest advocate Vanessa Schwartz. Her wide-ranging
abilities - to ask interesting questions, to turn a grant application around in an afternoon,
and to make scholarship fun – always impress me. I have benefited immensely from her
exacting evaluation of my ideas and writing, contagious enthusiasm, and friendship.
Many others have provided me with key guidance over the years. Elinor Accampo
has offered detailed feedback at every stage and become a valued friend in the process.
Phil Ethington always provides a new angle on my ideas and in doing so, makes me feel
smarter. Panivong Norindr was kind enough to join this project at a late stage and read a
draft with close attention. Richard Meyer and Nancy Troy’s keen observations and
questions helped shape my research process from very early on.
I could not have hoped for a greater group of faculty and staff to work with than
the members of USC’s History Department. From my first semester, seminars and
conversations in the halls of SOS with Richard Fox, Paul Lerner, Deb Harkness, Jack
Wills, Judith Bennett, and Peter Mancall have made me a better scholar. I always felt part
of an intellectual community invested in the growth and success of its younger members.
Bill Deverell, Karen Halttunen, Laverne Hughes, Sandra Hopwood, Brenda Johnson,
Lori Rogers, and Joe Styles provided infinite help with all logistical matters. I am
particularly grateful for their assistance during my many months abroad.
iv
The members of the Bernard Picart seminar at the Getty in 2007, especially
Margaret Jacob, Lynn Hunt, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, had a formative influence on my
interests in the history of the book and visual argumentation. Later on the leaders of a
2011 Spatial Seminar at USC, Phil Ethington and Ed Dimendberg, as well as the
seminar’s participants, Priya Jaikumar in particular, helped clarify dissertation ideas.
I’ve always had excellent teachers, and if I ended up studying the history of Paris,
Doug Wortham, Carina Yervasi, and Bruce Dorsey must know that they share in the
blame.
The University of Southern California has been more than generous in funding
my work over the last six years. Thanks are due specifically to the USC Graduate School
for a Provost’s Graduate Fellowship, a Provost’s Fellows’ Travel Grant, and a Finishing
Fellowship; to the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences for an
International Summer Fieldwork Award; to the USC History Department for the Foulke
Summer Award for Dissertation Research and Writing; and to the Visual Studies
Graduate Certificate Program for several years of Summer Research Funding. A
Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French state in 2009-2010 allowed me to spend a
year in France doing research.
The questions and comments of audience members, fellow panelists, and
respondents at Paris V, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Urban History
Association, the Art Department at Oklahoma State University, Paris en Images, and a
2011 conference about US-French research initiatives, sponsored by the French
Consulate in Los Angeles, helped move this project in new and productive directions. I
v
also owe great thanks to all of the participants in the 2012 SFHS conference in Los
Angeles, who may not realize just how much corresponding with them about logistics
made me feel connected to a global community of scholars.
In Paris, my research was made possible by the support of employees of the
Archives de Paris, the Archives nationales, the Atelier Doisneau, the Bibliothèque du
film, the Bibliothèque administrative de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Inathèque, the Institut mémoires de
l’édition contemporaine, the photo agency Magnum, the Médiathèque du Patrimoine at
the Fort de Saint-Cyr, and the Mémorial Leclerc et de la Libération de Paris – Musée
Jean Moulin. Over the course of my research and writing, I have at times risked taking
root in a chair at the Bibliothèque historique and must thank the entire staff, particularly
Liza Daum, Geneviève Morlet, and Emmanuelle Toulet for their help, but most of all
Yves Chagniot and Carole Gascard for their warm friendship. Likewise employees and
volunteers at the Musée Carnavalet made my research possible, but Catherine Tambrun
and Jean-Baptiste Woloch went above and beyond in welcoming me and in facilitating
my work. I must also thank Sylvie Gabriel, head of the Photothèque at Hachette Livres,
for her generous reception and immense assistance. Claude Arthaud, Francine Derondille,
Annette Doisneau, Marie de Thézy, Emmanuelle Toulet, and Christian Vigne all kindly
answered my questions in person, over the phone, or by email.
Scholars around the world have helped me track down sources, listened to my
developing ideas, and offered encouragement, criticism, and suggestions. Thank you to
Carl Abbott, Jim Allen, Brett Bowles, François Brunet, Donatella Calabi, Leonard Ciacci,
vi
Helen Chenut, Christian Delage, Rebecca Deroo, Sarah Farmer, André Gunthert,
Christine Haynes, Katie Hornstein, Jeff Jackson, Dominique Kalifa, Magdalena
Mazaraki, Max Page, Christophe Prochasson, Maurice Samuels, Ginette Vincendeau,
Rosemary Wakeman, and Susan Whitney. My discussions with Sophie Malexis about
photography and history stand out as highlights of recent trips to Paris.
Friends and colleagues in Paris, Los Angeles, London, Stillwater, and beyond
have provided chapter feedback, research assistance, couches to sleep on, smiling faces
during conference presentations, company during snack breaks, conversations over
apéros, and much moral support. I’m lucky to have such smart and generous people in
my life. Thank you to the members of History 620 in the Spring of ’09, my Paris writing
group, the Visual Studies writing group at USC, and all those who attended H-France get-
togethers as well as: Ondrea Ackerman, Catherine Adams, Sébastian Atunes, Naor Ben-
Yehoyada, Jenny Blumberg, Kfir Cohen, Melissa Dean, Curtis Fletcher, Elisa Foster,
Jessica Fripp, Ken Garner, Mike Godwin, Penelope Godwin, Cristina Gonzalez,
Amandine Gorse, Véronique Goupil, Saphir Grici, Chris Hallman, Sarah Hilding, Sarah
Hollenberg, Laura Kalba, Julie Kleinman, Anne Kuhbander, Jason LaBau, C. C. K.
Lancaster, Tyson Leutchter, Jacob Lewis, Ryan Linkof, Topher Lundell, Joel Maynes,
Jeff Menne, Max Menne, Owen Menne, Sarah Moroz, Mary Elizabeth O’Neil, Carolyn
Purnell, Nicole Rizzuto, Bella Honess Roe, Andrew Ross, Sarah Kate Selling, James
Skee, Rachel Schwartz, Virginia Solomon, Sam Solomon, Pete Soppelsa, Raphaelle
Steinzig, Erin Sullivan, Kris Tanton, Mary Traester, Amy Von Lintel, and Bill
Whittington. Manuela Jessel well exceeded the expectations of normal friendship by
vii
acting as my proof-reader-extraordinaire and translation consultant. If any mistakes
remain, it’s because I did not heed her sage suggestions.
This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Catherine Neill, who
possessed the finest mix of intelligence and warmth I have ever known. She gave me my
first tastes of European culture and, at key moments, encouraged me to follow my interest
in it. I only wish I could have shared with her all that I have learned in the past six years.
I could not have devoted my twenties to intellectual work without the support and love of
the rest of my family: my parents Carleen and Ed Clark, my brother and best friend Ed
and his partner Meredith. Thank you for days spent skiing and long dog walks, for good
meals and fun conversations, and for your unflagging esteem for my work. I must also
thank the Jacobsons – Julie and Kevin, Nana and Papa – for lovingly making me a part of
their family.
Brian Jacobson, this dissertation benefited from our running conversations about
writing, teaching, and research, your careful (and multiple) readings, and, most of all,
your sense of structure. Your love, support, and sense of humor make life brighter,
smarter, and more fun. I can’t wait to see where our next adventure will take us.

viii
Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Figures ix
Abstract xviii

Introduction: Paris, Photography, and History 1

Chapter 1: Between Science and Romance: 25
Photography at Paris’s Municipal Historical Institutions

Chapter 2: Photographically-Illustrated Histories of Paris: 80
A Proliferation of New Forms

Chapter 3: Paris, August 1944: 146
Photographic Histories of the Liberation of Paris

Chapter 4: Repicturing the Past in Photographs and Estampes: 211
Postwar Decline, the 1951 Bimillénaire de Paris, and Photohistories

Chapter 5: “C’était Paris en 1970:” 271
Urbanism, Amateur Photography, and Photographic History

Conclusion: Paris’s Municipal Historical Institutions Since 1970: 333
Collecting the Historical Visual Record

Bibliography 351
ix
List of Figures

1.1 Pierre Emonts, Galeries du Jardin, Musée Carnavalet, c. 1892. 40

1.2 Pierre Emonts, Musée Gallo-Romain et Age de Pierre, 40
Musée Carnavalet, c.1892.

1.3 Pierre Emonts, Salle Liesville, Musée Carnavalet, c. 1892. 41

1.4 Pierre Emonts, Grande Salle de la Révolution, 41
Musée Carnavalet, c. 1892.

1.5 Fedor Hoffbauer, Marché des Innocents vers 1855, 1875. 54

1.6 Charles Marville, Marché des Innocents, c. 1855. 54

1.7 Eugène Atget, Hôtel de Gourgues, 1912. 69

1.8 Eugène Atget, Hôtel de Gourgues, 1912. 69

1.9 Charles Lansiaux, Parisians fleeing the city, 1914. 74

1.10 Charles Lansiaux, Italian refugees arriving at the Gare de Lyon, 1914. 74

1.11 Féodor Hoffbauer, Square du Temple 1881, 78
Paris à travers les ages, 1875.

2.1 Roger Schall, Place de la Concorde, Paris de jour, 1937. 80

2.2 Roger Schall, Place de la Concorde, Paris de jour, 1937. 80

2.3 Roger Schall, Place de la Concorde, Paris de jour, 1937. 80

2.4 Architectural detail, Le Vieux Paris, vol 1, 1912. 98

2.5 Architectural detail, Le Vieux Paris, vol 3, 1914. 98

2.6 Architectural detail, Le Vieux Paris, vol 2, 1913. 98

2.7 St. Lazare Prison, Le Vieux Paris, vol 3, 1914. 98

2.8 St. Lazare Prison, Le Vieux Paris, vol 3, 1914. 98

2.9 St. Lazare Prison, Le Vieux Paris, vol 3, 1914. 98

x
2.10 Demolitions under Haussmann, Paris, Vie de Cité, 1925. 101

2.11 Hôtel Lamoignon, Pour comprendre les monuments de Paris, 1925. 105

2.12 Ruins of the Tuileries, Pour comprendre les monuments de Paris, 1925. 112

2.13 Cover of Louis Chéronnet’s A Paris vers 1900, 1932. 119

2.14 Cover of André Warnod, Visages de Paris, 1930. 122

2.15 Urban cyclists, A Paris vers 1900, 1932. 126

2.16 “At the Races,” Visages de Paris, 1930. 127

2.17 “The Past,” A Paris vers 1900, 1932. 130

2.18 “The Future,” A Paris vers 1900, 1932. 130

2.19 Bertault, “The avenue de l’Opéra, on a rainy day,” Paris, 1929. 133

2.20 Yvon, “Snowy Day,” Paris, 1929. 133

2.21 A young boy and the bustle of Les Halles, 136
Nouvelle Promenades dans Paris, 1908.

2.22 An alleyway off the Bièvre River, 136
Nouvelle Promenades dans Paris, 1908.

2.23 The cover of Moï Ver, Paris, 1931. 138

2.24 André Kertész, Montmartre, Paris vu par…, 1934. 138

3.1 Roger Schall, “Only [the Germans] have the right to take photos…,” 155
À Paris sous la botte…, 1944.

3.2 Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower, June 1940. 155

3.3 André Zucca, Métro Marbeuf-Champs-Elysées, 1943. 157

3.4 André Zucca, “En suivant la mode, mai 1942.” 157

3.5 André Zucca, Vincennes Zoo, c. 1942. 157

3.6 André Zucca, Longchamp, 1943. 157

xi
3.7 Roger Schall, “We never knew if they were just painters like their 159
too illustrious boss, or if they were drawing maps of the capital,”
À Paris sous la botte des Nazis, 1944.

3.8 Roger Schall, German soldiers visiting the Louvre, 159
À Paris sous la botte des Nazis, 1944.

3.9 LAPI, “The same day, at the corner of the rue de Maubeuge, 160
Germans stop another FFI car and execute its passengers on the spot,”
La Libération de Paris: 150 photographies, 1945.

3.10 Still from La Libération de Paris, 1944. 160

3.11 Cover of La Semaine héroïque, 1944. 165

3.12 Photo Presse-Libération, “Defense of the Préfecture de la Seine,” 165
Paris libéré, 1944.

3.13 René Zuber, “Attack on the Sénat,” 165
La Libération de Paris: 150 photographies, 1945.

3.14 “Photos L.”, Libération de Paris: journées historiques, 1944. 165

3.15 André Gandner, Photo of photographer, circa August 26, 1940. 167

3.16 André Gandner, Photo of machine gun operator, circa August 26, 1940. 167

3.17 Poster of the life of Pétain. 173

3.18 A typical Parisian at the barricades, 173
La Libération de Paris: journées historiques, 1944.

3.19 The Death of Etienne Marcel, Cadran, 1944. 176

3.20 The Levée en masse, Cadran, 1944. 176

3.21 Delacroix, “Liberty Leading the People,” Cadran, 1944. 176

3.22 The taxi drivers of the Marne, Cadran, 1944. 176

3.23 Photo Presse-Liberation, “Tradition, the people of Paris still know 178
how to raise barricades. Standing between “cellar and garden,”
La Libération de Paris journées historiques, 1944.

3.24 Building barricades, La Semaine héroïque, 1944. 178

xii
3.25 Robert Doisneau, Boys at the barricades, Paris libéré, 1944 179

3.26 Women at the barricades, Paris libéré, 1944 179

3.27 “Barricade rue du Cherche midi,” 179
La Libération vue d’un commissariat de Police, 1945.

3.28 An allied tank easily breaks through a barricade, 181
Vu pendant la libération de Paris, 1944.

3.29 German constructed anti-tank defenses on the rue Royale, 181
Paris libéré, 1944.

3.30 A map of barricades in Paris in 1944, Paris délivré, c. 1944. 181

3.31 Young people socialized at the barricades, La Libération de Paris: 150 183
photographies, 1945.

3.32 Cartoon, Le Parisien libéré, 1944 183

3.33 Robert Doisneau, Barricade, August 23, La Semaine héroïque, 1944. 183

3.34 René Zuber, Barricade, August 22, La Semaine héroïque, 1944. 183

3.35 René Zuber, Barricade, August 22, Paris délivré, c. 1944. 183

3.36 Barricade, August 21, La Semaine héroïque, 1944. 185

3.37 Pierre Roughol, Revolutionaries of all stripes, August 21, 185
À Paris sous la botte des Nazis, 1944.

3.38 Female revolutionary, August 21, La Semaine héroïque, 1944. 185

3.39 Display of captured Occupation artifacts at the Musée Carnavalet, 1944. 188

3.40 Homage to the barricades at the Musée Carnavalet, 1944. 188

3.41 “Les Crimes hitlériens” in Pau, 1946. 193

3.42 The preface to À Paris sous la botte des Nazis…, 1944. 203

3.43 The gouache flag, 1944. 206

4.1 François Kollar, Printemps decorated for the Bimillénaire, 1951. 216

4.2 “Journée des drags,” June 1951. 216
xiii
4.3 Sketch of the Festival of Britain South Bank location, 1951. 221

4.4 François Gérard, Entry of Henri IV into Paris, 1817. 231

4.5 Henri IV’s entrance into Paris, Une vie de cité, Paris, Album, 1925. 231

4.6 Period costume, Cortège de vieilles voitures pour inaugurer 232
la Quinzaine de Saint Germain des Prés, 1951.

4.7 Parasol, Cortège de vieilles voitures…, 1951. 232

4.8 Vérascope Richard, Parasol, A Paris vers 1900, 1932. 233

4.9 Quinzaine de la Chaussée d’Antin, 1951. 233

4.10 A MONTMARTRE: CAN CAN 1880, 1951. 234

4.11 A MONTMARTRE: CAN CAN 1880, 1951. 234

4.12 A MONTMARTRE: CAN CAN 1880, 1951. 235

4.13 Toulouse Lautrec poster, 1891. 235

4.14 Poster for the Bimillénaire in Montmartre, 1951. 235

4.15 Villain, Picturesque landscape view of Montmartre, 1825. 236

4.16 Poster for an exhibition about the Compagnons, 1951. 237

4.17 Saint Denis’s entrance into Paris, The Life of Saint Denis, 14
th
century. 237

4.18 Cyril, Paris tel qu’on l’aime, 1949. 239

4.19 Cyril, Paris tel qu’on l’aime, 1949. 239

4.20 Stereoscopic viewer, Paris relief, 1945. 240

4.21 Cover of Réalités, June 1951. 243

4.22 Cover of Touring, September-October 1951. 243

4.23 Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, France-Illustration, April 21, 1951. 245

4.24 Life, July 30, 1951. 245

4.25 Banks of the Seine, France-Illustration, April 21, 1951. 249
xiv
4.26 Marché aux fleurs, France-Illustration, April 21, 1951. 249

4.27 Paris policeman, Life, July 30, 1951. 251

4.28 “Elegant woman,” Réalités, June 1951. 251

4.29 Cover of Vogue, June 1951. 252

4.30 Marcel Bovis, Empty Paris, Voyage dans Paris, 1941. 258

4.31 Marcel Bovis, Arc du Carrousel, Voyage dans Paris, 1941. 258

4.32 Repicturing layout, Visages de Paris, 1943. 261

4.33 The Louvre, Histoire de Paris et des Parisiens, 1957. 264

4.34 Roman Paris, Histoire de Paris et des parisiens, 1957. 265

4.35 A pilgrimage, L’Histoire de Paris et des parisiens, 1957. 266

4.36 Montmartre, L’Histoire de Paris et des parisiens, 1957. 266

4.37 Montmartre, L’Histoire de Paris et des parisiens, 1957. 266

5.1 Contest carrés. 276

5.2 A “general perspective” and photo binder (Mireille Allegretti). 285

5.3 A typical street view (Jean-Paul Letourneur). 285

5.4 A building façade (Claude Mougin, 17878). 285

5.5 An interior courtyard (anonymous). 285

5.6 An architectural detail (Evelyne Gabriel, 23039). 285

5.7 Portrait of a concierge and child (anonymous). 286

5.8 Street view that cuts off the tops of buildings (Max Amélot). 286

5.9 Facades with tops cut off (Alain Plantier, 11306). 286

5.10 An oddly framed architectural detail (anonymous). 286

5.11 A photograph with too much information (Saint Etienne, 23162). 287

xv
5.12 A dense composition (Jean Delvolve, 10108). 287

5.13 Advertisement for Galaxie, Le Monde, 1970. 291

5.14 Gébé, Paris’s changing topography, 1970. 292

5.15 Contest ad featuring a photograph from the Archives de la Planète. 295

5.16 The pavilion Carré de Baudouin (Jean-Michel Sicard [sic],16595). 297

5.17 Vieux Paris detail (Bernard Pouzet, 19884). 298

5.18 Vieux Paris detail (Serge Bain, 12309). 298

5.19 Vieux Paris detail (Lionel Favreau, 21955). 298

5.20 An alleyway from the past (François Berton, 12276). 299

5.21 Photo similar to Atget’s photographs (J. C. Longeron, 20164). 299

5.22 Eugène Atget, the Cour des Dragons, c. 1900. 299

5.23 Detail of metro entrance (Catherine Le Pape). 299

5.24 Detail of the Marché Saint Quentin pavilions (Didier Baitreaud). 299

5.25 A letter box (D. Trinquecostes). 299

5.26 Sepia-toned print (anonymous). 300

5.27 Regard de la lanterne, with 19
th
-century backdrop (Saint Etienne, 23162). 301

5.28 Regard de la lanterne, with 20th-century backdrop (Saint Etienne, 23162). 301

5.29 Graffiti that pays homage to May ‘68 (Michel Cristescu, 12790). 302

5.30 Political graffiti (Jean-René Teichac, 24978). 302

5.31 “Trash collectors’ strike” (Anne Marie Joubert, 23199). 303

5.32 “Ils sont venus, ils sont tous là – Brel [sic]” 303
(Véronique Daumont, 14431).

5.33 “This was still Paris in 1970” (Alain Plantier, 11306). 304

5.34 “Paris: 1m2 of open space per inhabitant” (J. C. Longeron, 20164). 304
xvi
5.35 Gébé, parody of the need to build housing. 305

5.36 Remains of a building left in a shared wall (anonymous). 306

5.37 Destruction (Xavier Baptistal). 306

5.38 Paris’s fortifications (Jean Peyrin, 11390). 306

5.39 Near la Villette (Michel Amet, 17602). 307

5.40 Near the Place d’Italie (Xavier Baptistal). 307

5.41 Front de Seine (Tom Keller, 1024). 307

5.42 Towering over former villages (Philippe Besacia). 308

5.43 Dizzying towers, Front de Seine (Jean-René Teichac, 24978). 308

5.44 New construction (anonymous). 308

5.45 Gébé, Paris in 2001. 309

5.46 Modern façade, Front de Seine (Jean-René Teichac, 24978). 311

5.47 Façade of modern building, near Popincourt (J. C. Longeron, 20164). 311

5.48 Paris II and Paris I in Paris, mon coeur, 1945. 311

5.49 “Old-fashioned perspective” (Desir, 11668). 312

5.50 “Modern perspective” (Desir, 11668). 312

5.51 “Before the expulsion” (anonymous). 312

5.52 “In 1970, on a beautiful spring day, people still dry their 315
laundry in the sun,” (Catherine Driguet, 21383).

5.53 A voyeuristic view of the intimate lives of Parisians (anonymous). 315

5.54 “Homeless at rest (rue Cuvier)” (Henri Musialek, 22766). 315

5.55 “The siesta between 1 and 2pm” in the Tuileries (Julien Fion, 27724). 316

5.56 “The Tuileries in 1970 at 6:30pm, young people” (Julien Fion, 27724). 316

5.57 “An avid angle” Front de Seine (Claudine Chenevard, 16427). 316
xvii
5.58 A street sweeper in 1970 (Lionel Favreau, 21955). 317

5.59 A street sweeper in 1970 (Françoise Lefebvre, 17546). 317

5.60 Patrice Molinard, A street sweeper, Sortilèges de Paris, 1952. 317

5.61 A street sweeper in 1906, 317
Dans les rues de Paris au temps des fiacres, 1950.

5.62 On the way to school (Jean-René Teichac, 24978). 320

5.63 “Cahots!” (Naujac Andree, 12320). 320

5.64 Children playing hopscotch under the périphérique (anonymous). 321

5.65 An adventure on the périph’ (anonymous, same photographer as 5.64). 321

5.66 Robert Doisneau, children playing in the suburbs, 321
La Banlieue de Paris (1949).

5.67 Doisneau, young people along the Zone, La Banlieue de Paris (1949). 321

5.68 New cars from the Citroën plant (Charles Huchet, 15117). 323

5.69 A modern Parisian (Xavier Baptistal). 323

5.70 Hippies (Sylvain Sermanet). 324

5.71 Hare Krishnas, in front of Le Drugstore (Pierre Witkowski). 324

5.72 The first prize photograph (Bellin). 327

5.73 A 19
th
-century workshop for the 20
th
century (Jacques Choppin). 330

6.1 Michel Gondry, The Big Bang, L’Histoire de l’univers, 2008. 345

6.2 Michel Gondry, Les Halles de Paris, L’Histoire de l’univers, 2008. 345

6.3 Michel Gondry, The Pit of les Halles, L’Histoire de l’univers, 2008. 346

6.4 Michel Gondry, Le Forum des Halles, L’Histoire de l’univers, 2008. 346

6.5 Michel Gondry, The Forum des Images, L’Histoire de l’univers, 2008. 346

6.6 Kodak ad featuring the Bimillénaire, Paris Match. 348

xviii
Abstract

“Photography as History: Collecting, Narrating, and Preserving Paris, 1870-1970”
argues that photography was the first visual medium to have a major impact on historical
interpretation. Although professional historians have only recently become interested in
the power of photography to document the past – as part of history’s “visual turn” –,
photographs have compelled and entranced archivists, librarians, curators, journalists,
and amateur and popular historians since the nineteenth century. The history of their
ideas about and uses of images, and especially photographs, as historical documents in
the context of twentieth-century Parisian history sheds light on one of history’s central
methodological and paradigmatic concerns: the discipline’s status as objective “science”
versus poetic reconstruction of the past.
Despite professional historians privileging written texts as the fundamental source
of evidence in the Western tradition, at the turn of the century, archivists and amateurs
alike seriously and systematically began collecting images, and this practice remained
integral to twentieth-century municipal and popular historical practices. Images figured
prominently in municipal and private efforts to document the contemporary city.
Municipal officials, historians, and publishers also relied on them to narrate and
reconstruct Paris’s past in the displays of the city history museum, in illustrated books
and pamphlets, and in large-scale historical exhibitions. These amateur and municipal
visual historical practices demonstrate sophisticated and changing ideas about both the
theoretical and the practical relationships between images and history. Municipal and
commercial photo archives, whose contents were in part driven by the demands of
xix
amateur and municipal historians, have made the contemporary scholarly interest in the
use of photos as historical documents possible.
Photography, in particular, came to play a key role in the urban visual historical
record after mid-century. Yet rather than replacing other forms of illustration and visual
documents in twentieth-century popular and municipal visual histories of Paris,
photographs worked in complex and shifting relation to other types of pictures in order to
scientifically and objectively document as well as romantically reconstruct the past. In
doing so, they not only influenced how Parisians thought about the city’s past and how
they pictured it but also ensured that these images shaped how they lived their own lives
– especially in deeply-charged moments such as the liberation after World War II or the
festivities surrounding the city’s 2,000
th
birthday in 1951.
Based on extensive archival research in Parisian sources ranging from photo
collections, newsreels, and illustrated books to municipal and institutional archives,
municipal officials’ private papers, the records of publishers and photographers, book
reviews, and newspaper coverage of key public historical festivals, “Photography as
History” tells a previously untold material and social history of picture taking, publishing,
and collecting while considering issues of intellectual history as a contribution to the
debate about the status of the image in historiography.
1
Introduction

Paris, Photography, and History

In this time as well, photography was born,
called to revolutionize the reproduction of Paris.
-- Marcel Poëte
1

In 1910 and again in 1944 two separate commentators bemoaned the fact that
Louis Mandé Daguerre had invented photography fifty years after the French Revolution.
Wondering whether “Madame Rolland,” the “Girondist muse,” wore “a white dress with
flowers, or a solid-colored dress” to the guillotine, journalist Henri Lavergne longed for a
photograph of the scene.
2
He lamented that the scientific precision of photography had
not captured the innumerable, everyday, and seemingly inconsequential details that
eyewitnesses had not recorded. In 1944, François Mauriac, novelist, journalist, and
member of the Académie française, yearned for the emotional power that he imagined
photographs of the French Revolution would provide. He envisioned the tangible jolt he
might feel before a photograph of “the Queen with her strange bonnet, as [Jacques-Louis]
David sketched her, coming up the Rue Saint-Honoré, upright in the cart.”
3
A
photographer in the crowd would have captured “all those faces twisted with hatred, all
those mouths stretched by outrage.” Both Lavergne and Mauriac voiced the belief that the
existence of a photographic historical record would profoundly alter the study of history,

1
Marcel Poëte, Une Vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours, vol. Album (Paris: A. Picard, 1925),
xiv. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

2
Henri Lavergne, “L’Histoire de demain,” L’Aurore, August 4, 1910.

3
François Mauriac, Paris libéré (Paris: Flammarion, 1944), 5.
2
but they believed that it would do so in very different ways. The first proposed
photography as the paragon of scientific objectivity, the latter as the means of a direct
subjective and emotional connection to the past, more powerful even that the same
scene’s depiction at the hands of a great painter.
The history of collecting and using photographs as historical documents of Paris
reveals a sustained tension between ideas of the scientific or objective, artistic or poetic,
and subjective or emotional relationship between the image and the past. The changing
place of photographs within this tension gives coherence to the century-long history of
their uses in very different contexts. The photograph offers a remarkably flexible
document, which at times seemed to embody all aspects of this tension at once. While
Lavergne believed that photographs of the French Revolution would have served as
scientific proof for historians, and Mauriac imagined them as romantic gateways to the
emotions of the past, critic Claude Roy, writing in 1958, argued that photographs
embodied both possibilities: “Photography is chemistry, but it is also alchemy. It uses
mechanical processes, but it is never mechanical. It applies the laws of physics and
morality. It suspends time, but never breaks free of it.”
4

The invention of photography in the nineteenth century had a major impact on
how people thought about the past and how they wrote and depicted history. Although

4
Claude Roy, “Le Second Empire vous regarde,” Le Point: Revue artistique et littéraire, no. LII/LIV
(January 1958): 3. The use of romantic here refers to the ideas of nineteenth-century Romanticism. The
Romantics believed that material fragments of history, such as ruins, forged the viewer’s subjective and
emotional connection to the past. For more about Romanticism and history see: Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in
the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin,” in The Nineteenth-Century
Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge,
2004), 56–60.
3
professional historians have only recently become interested in the power of photography
to document the past – as part of history’s “visual turn” –, photographs have compelled
and entranced archivists, librarians, curators, journalists, and amateur and popular
historians since the nineteenth century. The history of their ideas about and uses of
pictures, and especially photographs, as historical documents in the context of twentieth-
century Parisian history sheds light on the central methodological and paradigmatic
concern to which Lavergne and Mauriac spoke: the discipline’s status as an objective
“science” versus a poetic reconstruction of the past.
Although Lavergne and Mauriac yearned for photographic documentation of
events, these events and the invention of photography had deep roots in the place in
which they occurred: Paris.
5
The modern French capital has played an integral role not
only in the history of France (as the political, cultural, and economic center of the nation
and the theater for many its major events) and the history of photography (as the
“birthplace” of photographic technologies), but also in the history of photographic
history.
6
This dissertation examines how photography changed the study and preservation

5
Several people, including Henry Fox Talbot in England and Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce in
France, simultaneously developed viable photographic technologies in the early decades of the nineteenth
century. The French government purchased Niépce and Daguerre’s invention and “gave” it to the world in
a public announcement at the French Academy of Science on January 7, 1839. This date has become the
most commonly referenced birthdate of photography. For more about the experiments and individuals
involved in the invention of photography see: Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839
to the Present, Completely rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982); Michel Frizot, ed.,
A New History of Photography (Köln: Könemann, 1998).

6
For discussions of Paris’s centrality to French history and its mythic status as the “capital of the
nineteenth century” start with: Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken
Books, 1986), 146–162; Patrice L. R. Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2002); Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris (London: Macmillan, 2002); David
4
of the history of Paris – in municipal and commercial photo archives, in the displays of
public historical exhibitions, and in published histories of the city – from 1870 to 1970.
Despite professional historians’ privileging of written texts as the fundamental
source of evidence in the Western tradition, at the turn of the twentieth century archivists
and amateurs alike seriously and systematically began collecting images: a practice that
remained integral to twentieth-century municipal and popular historical practices.
7
By the
1900s, photography had replaced other picture-making technologies as the default means
of preserving the contemporary city for historians of the future. But, historians and
archivists worried that the mechanical, and hence objective, nature of photographic
documentation would deprive new generations of historians of the emotionally resonant
connection to the past offered by engravings, paintings, or sketches, which bore the
human traces of their artist-creators. Nonetheless, like François Mauriac, subsequent
generations came to find poetic resonance in photographs of past places and events.
Rather than replace other forms of illustration and visual documents in twentieth-century
popular and municipal visual histories of Paris, photographs worked in complex and
shifting relation to them in order to scientifically and objectively document as well as
romantically reconstruct the past. In doing so, they not only influenced how Parisians
thought about the city’s past and how they pictured it but also ensured that these images

Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003); Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City
(London: Allen Lane, 2004).
7
Before the discipline’s professionalization in the late nineteenth century, historians had long relied on
images, coins, and medals as sources. As art historian Francis Haskell has shown, centuries of scholars
“have tried to recapture the past, or at least a sense of the past, by adopting the infinitely seductive course
of looking at the image that the past has left of itself.” Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the
Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 9. For an overview of how historians
since have used images as historical documents see: Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as
Historical Evidence, Picturing History (London: Reaktion, 2001).
5
shaped how they lived their own lives – especially in deeply-charged moments such as
the liberation after World War II or in commemorative festivities such as the city’s
2,000
th
birthday in 1951.

Paris, Images, and Urban Change
Every city, of course, has inspired and fostered a visual historical record, but Paris
remains unique in its iconic status among world capitals. Throughout the world, even
those who have never visited it know and recognize pictures of Paris. The Eiffel Tower,
for example, stands in for Paris itself.
8
Moreover, contemporary scholarship has
intimately associated physical, social, and cultural change in the French capital with its
visual representations.
9
Scholars have even argued that as consumer culture,

8
Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Eiffel Tower (Urban Icons),” Urban History 33, no. 1 (2006).

9
Scholars have used images as evidence of contemporaries’ understandings of physical, social, and cultural
changes. They have also argued that Parisians and visitors increasingly consumed the city itself as a visual
spectacle, in particular on the boulevards, on the moving sidewalks of the World’s Fairs, at wax museums,
and, eventually, in the cinema. Not only did the city give rise to particular visual entertainments, scholars
have argued that a particular set of urban spectators – the flâneur and the badaud – and modes of viewing
associated with them also developed there. For work that sees images as evidence of attitudes toward urban
change see: Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988); T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers, Rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ruth E. Iskin, Modern Women and
Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71) (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002); Michael Marrinan, Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800-1850
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). For arguments about how the city itself was increasingly
consumed as an image see: Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in
Fin-De-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M.
Przyblyski, eds., Making the News: Modernity & the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Anne Friedberg, “Trottoir Roulant: The Cinema and New
Mobilities of Spectatorship,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the
Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); David L. Pike,
Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005), as well as the essays in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). And for arguments about the mode of urban
6
gentrification, and alienation from the past have destroyed authentic social bonds in the
capital, Paris has become nothing but an image, a “a picture book of the past.”
10
Given
the combination of Paris’s rich visual record, its instant global iconicity, and scholars’
understanding of its history as the history of changing visual forms, modes of perception,
and the city’s reduction to a visual spectacle, it should come as no surprise that the
collection of images figured prominently in attempts to document Paris for posterity.
Key moments and events in Parisian history have routinely inspired efforts to
record and market the city in images. The World’s Fairs of 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889,
1900, 1931, and 1937 produced daguerreotypes, photographs, engravings, paintings,
films, and hand-colored postcards.
11
The flood of 1910, during which the Seine rose
twenty feet higher than normal, inspired a veritable deluge of photo, postcards, and

spectatorship that developed in Paris see: Schwartz, Spectacular Realities; Gregory Shaya, “The Flâneur,
the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, Circa 1860–1910,” The American Historical
Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, eds., The Invisible
Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, (Critical Perspectives
in Art History) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

10
Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009),
347. The idea that images have replaced authentic experiences and traditions is key to postmodern theories
of the city. In the case of Paris see: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1st paperback ed. (New
York: Zone Books, 1995); M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and
Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity;
Wakeman, The Heroic City.

11
Historians often use these images to write the history of these events, but they have also inspired a host
of amateur collectors, many of whom have scanned their collections and made them available online. For
more about the World’s Fairs and scholars’ uses of images to recount their history see: Jean-Christophe
Mabire, L’Exposition universelle de 1900 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Paris et ses expositions universelles:
architectures, 1855-1937 (Paris: Editions du Patrimoine, 2008); Patricia A. Morton, Hybrid Modernities:
Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000);
Elizabeth Emery, “Protecting the Past,” Journal of European Studies 35, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 065 –085.
Some websites that feature these images include: http://leonardpitt.com/postcard.php;
http://paris1900.lartnouveau.com/index.htm.

7
photographically-illustrated books and pamphlets.
12
Artists and photographers
documented and interpreted war and civil strife in Paris from the Prussian Siege of 1870
and the bombardments of the First World War to the 1871 Paris Commune and the strikes
and protests of May 1968.
13
This corpus of images has helped scholars answer questions
about how different groups experienced and understood specific events and eras in the
city’s history.
14
But, the histories of their collection and preservation also provide
evidence of a broader investment on the part of archivists, curators, and librarians in the
documentary value of images and tell us what role photographic images have played in
history.
Not all collections of images of Paris, however, directly address questions of the
relationship between images and history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the
Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), the Archives de Paris, and the Préfecture de
Police, for example, all acquired photographs of the city. These photographs can help
today’s researchers answer questions about Parisian history, but their collecting logics
and histories illuminate little about contemporaries’ ideas of visual history. The BNF, for

12
For more about the Paris Flood and photographic documentation of it see: Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paris
Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010); Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Envisioning Disaster in the 1910 Paris Flood,” Journal of Urban History 37,
no. 2 (March 2011): 176–207.

13
For more about pictures of the Paris Siege, the Commune, and May 1968 as well as the types of analysis
that scholars have subjected them to see: Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege
(1870-71); Jeannene M. Przyblyski,, “Moving Pictures: Photography, Narrative, and the Paris Commune of
1871,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 253–278; Audrey Leblanc, “La couleur de Mai 1968,” Études
photographiques, no. 26, Saisi dans l’action : repenser l’histoire du photojournalisme (November 2010):
68, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index3121.html.

14
For an excellent example of the photographic record’s utility for an analysis of gender and politics see:
Mary Louise Roberts, “La Photo du GI viril: genre et photojournalisme en France à la Libération,” Le
Mouvement social, no. 219–220 (September 2007): 35–56.
8
example, collected images as part the dépôt légal, the policy that required French
publishers to deposit a copy of each published text and/or image with the state.
15
Its
collections reflect the history of the publication of images. The histories of image
collecting at the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris
(BHVP), institutions purpose-built to preserve Parisian history and make it available to a
wide public, however, cast light on shifting ideas about the value of images for the
specific tasks of researching, writing, and exhibiting the French capital’s history.
Parisians became particularly invested in producing and collecting pictures of the
city during moments of great urban change. Like other major western cities, Paris
underwent massive renovations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
16
The
French capital, however, holds a unique status in this history. Although many of the same
transformations shaped cities such as Vienna, London, and New York City, only Paris
gave its name – Haussmannization – to the very process of modern urbanization.
17

Importantly, the destruction of Haussmannization went hand in hand with efforts to
preserve the past. Georges-Eugène Haussmann himself established a public museum of
Parisian history and a visual archive of the city as the necessary compliments to the major

15
For more about the dépôt légal see: Henri Lemaître, Histoire du dépôt légal: 1re partie France (Paris: A.
Picard et fils, 1910); Jacques Gana, Organisation et fonctionnement du dépôt légal audiovisuel en France
(Villeurbanne: Ecole nationale superieure des bibliothèques, 1982).

16
For more about the modernization of other Western cities see: Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna:
Politics and Culture, 1st Vintage Book ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1981); Olsen, The City as a Work
of Art; Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999).

17
For more about the Haussmannization of Paris start with: David Jordan, Transforming Paris (New York:
The Free Press, 1995); David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1958).
9
upheaval of urban renovation.
18
Had it not been possible to photograph the city before its
destruction, one wonders whether Haussmann’s radical acts could have found such ready
justification.
Although the process of preserving Paris in images, and particularly photographs,
arose during Haussmannization, it remained integral to urbanization throughout the
twentieth century. In addition to establishing a city history museum under Haussmann’s
aegis, the city hired watercolorist Fedor Hoffbauer and photographer Charles Marville to
produce the first systematic catalogue of images of Paris before, during, and after its
transformations.
19
Over the course of the next several decades photographers such as
Eugène Atget, Pierre Emonts, and Emmanuel Pottier routinely sold photos of old
buildings, streets, and architectural details to the Commission municipale du Vieux Paris,
the Musée Carnavalet, and the Bibliothèque historique.
20
Although scholarship about

18
Urban renovations in other cities inspired similar efforts. For more about city museums in other places
see: Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American
Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Page, The Creative Destruction
of Manhattan; Jordanna Bailkin, “Radical Conservations: The Problem with the London Museum,” Radical
History Review 84, no. 1 (2002): 43–76; Katherine Zelljadt, “History as Past-Time: Amateurs and Old
Berlin, 1870-1914” (Dissertation, Harvard University, 2005).

19
For more about Fedor Hoffbauer’s work for the city see: “Discours prononcés par M. Le Corbeiller, Vice
Président de la Commission et par M. le Docteur Capitan, aux obsèques de M. J.-H. Hoffbauer,” Bulletin de
la Commission municipale du Vieux Paris, December 16, 1922. For more about Marville’s start with:
Marie de Thézy, Marville: Paris (Paris: Hazan, 1994). Charles Marville’s photographs have become
somewhat of a fetish object for historians and art historians, who read in the images a desire to stop time, as
well as, by turns, a critique and an endorsement of Haussmann’s renovations. Historians and art historians
have argued that all artists who documented elements of urban change did so in ways that interpreted its
meanings: Clark, The Painting of Modern Life; Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997).

20
Of all the photographers who worked to captured fragments of old Paris, Atget has received the most
attention from scholars. The interest of the avant-garde Surrealists and the Museum of Modern Art in New
York City, as Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued, guaranteed his legacy as a known artist instead of an
unknown municipal contractor. Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992); Jean-Claude Lemagny, Sylvie Aubenas, and Pierre Borhan, Atget le pionnier (Paris: Marval, 2000);
10
photographic documentation of urban change in Paris tends to focus on the period from
1860 to 1920, the process of photographically documenting the old city before it
disappeared did not end with the death of Eugène Atget in the 1920s. Throughout the
twentieth century, the Commission municipale du Vieux Paris continued to commission
photographs of historic buildings and streets and donated them to the Musée Carnavalet.
21

Likewise, Haussmannization may have incited the first effort to systematically
photograph Paris, but the city’s transformations in the 1960s and 1970s inspired the
largest attempt to catalogue Paris photographically: the amateur photo contest, “C’était
Paris en 1970,” whose some 14,000 participants produced 70,000 black-and-white prints
and 30,000 color slides of the French capital during an equally radical era of urban
change.
22

The history of the collection and use of photographs as part of Parisian histories
thus offers up a study of photography as the history of documentation and collecting
rather than the history of representations or artistic reflections.
23
The analysis of

Clive Scott, Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007); Abigail
Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). For more about other photographers actively
documenting Paris at the time see: Archives de Paris, Paris la rue, un autre 1900: le fonds de l’Union
photographique française aux Archives de Paris (Paris: Direction des affaires culturelles, 2000).

21
Copies of these photographs continued to illustrate articles in the Commission’s bulletin.

22
Both the city of Paris and the electronics and camera store the FNAC sponsored the contest, which asked
participants to create photographs that would preserve Paris from another round of wrecking-balls and
bulldozers. The Bibliothèque historique received and still houses the contest submissions. Despite a large
publicity campaign and extensive participation, the contest was a spectacular failure. After an exhibition of
the photographs held by the FNAC and one special issue of a magazine of arts and culture the photographs
have languished uncatalogued and unstudied in the library’s basement storerooms.

23
Most histories of Parisian photography are studies of a particular artist or collective movement’s oeuvre:
Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Marie de Thézy and Claude Nori, La photographie
11
photographers’ individual pictures can help elucidate the influence of Paris’s visual
historical record on individual photographic practices. But the answers to why and how
groups of historians and historical institutions became interested in these photographs,
ensured their preservation, and made use of them to publish and exhibit the capital’s
history speak to a larger cultural investment in the documentary value of photography.
The documentation of Paris in photographs was never the work of isolated individuals,
but rather developed as a collective project, driven by the same “documentary impulse,”
or the propulsion to create exhaustive archives of one object or phenomenon, that pushed
institutions and individuals to undertake lengthy and expensive projects to document
France’s monuments or even the whole world in photographs and on film.
24
Bringing that
impulse into conversation with how historians used such photographs to recount the
history of Paris highlights the ultimate impossibility of creating exhaustive photographic
archives of the past. This history demonstrates the utopianism of positivist historical
documentation and the many practical resolutions offered in response to such dreams and

humaniste: 1930-1960, histoire d’un mouvement en France (Paris: Contrejour, 1992); Peter Edward
Hamilton, “Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Postwar Humanist Photography,” in
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997).

24
This drive produced projects and collections such as the Mission héliographique (1851) project to
document historical monuments in France and the British photographic survey project (1885-1918), as well
as Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (1908-1931) project, which sought to document the entire world in
photographs and on film. Christian Delage always cites the effort in early twentieth-century Berlin to film
its streets one-by-one. For more about these various projects see: Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the
Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Teresa
Castro, “Les Archives de la Planète: A Cinematographic Atlas,” Jumpcut: A Review of Contemporary
Media, no. 48 (Winter 2006); Teresa Castro, “Les Archives de la Planète ou les rythmes de l’Histoire,”
1895: bulletin de l’Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma 54 (2008): 57–81; Elizabeth
Edwards, “Unblushing Realism and the Threat of the Pictorial: Photographic Survey and the Production of
Evidence 1885–1918,” History of Photography 33 (February 2009): 3–17; M. Christine Boyer, “La
Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France,
1851,” in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and
James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).
12
fantasies of capturing and preserving the past as time seemed to pick up its own pace
from the nineteenth century onwards.
25

Photography and Other Image-Making Technologies
In the nineteenth century, photography played a secondary, technical role in the
study of history, just as it did in art and journalism. From the first decades following its
invention, photography’s place vis-à-vis other types of image-making technologies in
domains from art to journalism sparked intense debate. Some contemporaries, such as
poet Charles Baudelaire, scorned photography as nothing but an industrial and
mechanical technique. For Baudelaire, photography might work as a “servant of the
sciences and arts” but it would never become an art in and of itself.
26
And indeed,
photography did not immediately revolutionize art or even the reproduction of works of
art.
27
Rather, as historians and art historians have argued, photography became just one of

25
After the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, nineteenth-century Europeans felt themselves
completely disconnected from the past: Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present. As developing discourses about
the rapid changes of “modernity” suggests, they thought that the world was changing faster than ever
before: Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York:
Penguin Books, 1988); David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of
Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin, 1
st
MIT Press ed., Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986); Clark, The Painting of Modern Life.

26
Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present,
ed. Vicki Goldberg, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 125.
For more contemporaries’ ideas about photography’s relation to art see the essays in: Alan Trachtenberg,
ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980).

27
For more about the history of photography as a means of reproducing art see: Gisèle Freund,
Photography & Society (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1980). Anthony Hamber, “The Photography of the Visual
Arts, 1839–1880: Part I,” Visual Resources 5, no. 4 (1989): 289–310; Anthony Hamber, “The Photography
of the Visual Arts, 1839–1880: Part II,” Visual Resources 6, no. 1 (1989): 19–41; Robert S. Nelson, “The
Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26,
no. 3 (Spring 2000): 414–434; Stephen Bann, Art and the Early Photographic Album (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2011).
13
the many tools that artists used to capture scenes and copy other images.
28
Newspapers
and magazines similarly first published hand-copied engravings or lithographs of
photographs rather than photographic images themselves.
29
Despite twentieth-century
ideas about the privileged relationship between photography and history, the history of
visual histories of Paris reveals that photographs too first entered published histories of
the city recopied as engravings or lithographs rather than as purely photographic images.
Photography only became the default means of documenting Paris for future generations
at the turn of the century and a privileged document for the study of the past in the 1920s.
Before that, historians, curators, and critics preferred hand-drawn images – prints,
paintings, or sketches – to photographs.
Nonetheless, just as photography did in the end have an effect on artistic form and
style, in particular with relation to developments in realism and abstraction, photography
also changed how historians, critics, archivists, and curators approached the study of the
past.
30
Writing in publications intended for popular audiences in the 1910s, historians and
critics began to theorize how photography had changed the study of history.
31
For some,

28
For more about photography’s relation to other nineteenth-century image making technologies start with:
Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

29
Thierry Gervais has shown that newspapers published hand-drawn copies of photographs long before
they published photographs: Thierry Gervais, “L’Illustration photographique: naissance du spectacle de
l’information (1843-1914)” (Ph.D. Dissertation, L’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2007).

30
For more about the influence of photography on the relationship between realism and abstraction in
painting see: Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Herbert,
Impressionism; Elizabeth Wynne Easton and Clément Chéroux, Snapshot: Painters and Photography,
Bonnard to Vuillard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

31
See for example: Louis Chéronnet, A Paris ... vers 1900, Découverte du monde (Paris: Éditions des
Chroniques du jour, 1932); Louis Chéronnet, Le Petit musée de la curiosité photographique (Paris: Tel,
14
such as Henri Lavergne, photography entailed the almost scientific documentation of
previously unrecorded scenes. The passage of time, however, also made old photographs
more poignant. Of course, in 1870, Marville’s 1865 photographs of narrow streets did not
seem to transport the viewer back in time – simply not enough time had passed. By the
first decades of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century photographs seemed to offer an
uncanny and almost tangible connection to the Parisian past. Historians came to prefer
the emotional immediacy of the photograph to other types of images of the city.
And yet even after historians, critics, and curators privileged the photograph as
both an objective and emotionally evocative document, they continued to understand
photos as part of a network of relationships with other types of images of the city. A
twentieth-century archivist would never commission a new watercolor as urban
documentation, but researchers continued to use the mass of images of Paris produced in
the centuries before photography’s invention. The study of the relationship between
history and photography thus demands photography’s continued intermedial
contextualization: the existence of photographs of the past did not render all previous
images obsolete.
32
In fact, historians and curators came to theorize relationships between

1945); André Warnod, Visages de Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1930). Rather than dismissing their
ideas as the musing of amateurs, it is important to realize that many of the thinkers identified by
contemporary scholars as “theorists” of the image wrote for popular newspapers and magazines. For
example, film theorist André Bazin made a living as a film critic; Roland Barthe’s Mythologies were first
published as magazine articles; and even Susan Sontag never held a university position. The men cited here
– Chéronnet, Warnod, Mauriac, and Lavergne – prefigured many of the ideas about the relationship
between photographs and time that we attribute to these later theorists: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1981);
Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1st Anchor Books ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).

32
For example, art museums’ reliance on engravings of works of art disappeared once they acquired
photographs of them. Similarly, photographs of crime scenes made sketching them obsolete. So while there
is a growing body of scholarly literature about the role of photography within various Western cultural and
15
photographs and these older documents. Just as photographers captured scenes of Paris
that mimicked those they knew from old paintings and engravings, historians and
curators explained how photographs could evoke scenes that viewers knew from
paintings or prints. Photography’s twentieth-century intermedial relationships thus extend
beyond images whose production processes combined photographic technologies with
painting, coloring, or digital touchup to the reception of photographs as documents
deeply in conversation with non-photographic images of the Parisian past.
33

Photographic History and Historiography
Paris’s century of photographic history helps contextualize the last several
decades of interest that academic historians, as part of a “visual turn” in the humanities

state institutions, photography’s role in historical institutions is unique in that it developed alongside and in
dialogue with a continuingly relevant nonphotographic archive. For more about the role of photography in
institutions from the art museum, library, natural history museum, and university, to the police station,
laboratory, and observatory see: Anthony Hamber, “The Use of Photography by Nineteenth-Century Art
Historians,” Visual Resources 7, no. 2–3 (1990): 135–159; Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art
‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema,
Anthropology, & Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); James
Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy,
Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2008); Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Peter J. Hutchings, “Modern Forensics: Photography and Other
Suspects,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 9, no. 2 (October 1, 1997): 229–243; Costanza Caraffa,
ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011).

33
Scholars have studied how, in the twentieth century, photographic representations continued to combine
elements of handcraft. See for example: Jason E. Hill, “On the Efficacy of Artifice: PM, Radiophoto, and
the Journalistic Discourse of Photographic Objectivity,” Etudes Photographiques, no. 26 (November
2011): 50–85; Elizabeth A. Kessler, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the
Astronomical Sublime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); André Gunthert, “‘Sans
retouche’,” Études photographiques, no. 22, Histoires d’ un art moyen / Les réseaux de l’art (September
2008), http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index1004.html.

16
and social sciences, have shown for photographs as historical documents.
34
The photo
collections formed at the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique inspired
some of the first scholarship about the relationship between photography and Parisian
history.
35
They still figure prominently among the archives that scholars use to find
images of the French capital and the nation’s history. These photo archives of Paris do
not reflect the reality of the past city, as historians often use them, but rather are the
product of specific collecting policies, which determined what sort of information these
collections have archived.
36

Despite their interest in illustrating their own histories with images from the
Bibliothèque historique and the Musée Carnavalet, historians often pass right over the
pictures in other histories of Paris, dismissing them as mere illustrations of the written
text. The pictures in these books, however, like other seemingly straightforward elements

34
For a good introduction to the history of the visual turn see: James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical
Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003); Marita Sturken, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to
Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Burke, Eyewitnessing. Most historians, if they use
images at all, continue to do so in order to illustrate events or arguments that they know through other types
of sources. Ibid., 10. For major theoretical discussions of images’ uses for history see: Robert A.
Rosenstone et al., “AHR Forum: History in Images/History in Words,” American Historical Review 93, no.
5 (December 1988): 1173–1227 as well as the essays in: Jennifer Tucker, ed., “Theme Issue 48:
Photography and Historical Interpretation,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (December 2009); Bonnie
Brennen and Hanno Hardt, eds., Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1999).

35
Art historians first became interested in photographs of nineteenth-century urbanism thanks to their
preservation in the collections of the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique: Maria Morris
Hambourg, “Eugene Atget, 1857-1927: The Structure of the Work” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University, 1980); Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums.

36
Historians and theorists have increasingly explored the histories of archives as well as libraries and their
effects on the possibilities of scholarship: Sonia Combe, Archives interdites: les peurs françaises face à
l’histoire contemporaine (Paris: A. Michel, 1994); Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records,
and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 1–19; Carolyn
Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002);
Antoinette M. Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005).

17
such as footnotes and timelines, reveal basic assumptions about the nature of the
historical discipline.
37
Moreover, images, and photographs in particular, offer different
narrative possibilities than texts.
38
Writing in 1988, historian Hayden White coined a term
for photographic historiography – “historiophoty” – and called for professional historians
to extend the type of analysis that that they had already dedicated to the written word and
textual narrative strategies to images.
39
He proposed the study of photography, and by
extension film, as “a discourse in its own right and one capable of telling us things […] of
a kind that can only be told by means of visual images.”
40
Long before White coined the
term, amateur and municipal historians in Paris believed in this unique power of images
to communicate history. When François Mauriac, for example, imagined a “[photo]album
in which […] page-by-page Paris of August 10 [1792]

would tell its story for itself,” he

37
The study of footnotes and timelines, after all, has revealed historians’ basic assumptions about the
function and objectivity of evidence and the nature of time. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious
History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton,
Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). Many
scholars have written about the visual display of analytical data, although to my knowledge, none has
addressed the role of other graphs and tables in historical scholarship: Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display
of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed. (Cheshire: Graphics Press, 2001).

38
Historian Hayden White first called historians’ attention to the importance of understanding not just the
content of histories but also their narrative structures: Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Historians
have studied how images functioned in popular histories during the nineteenth century: Maurice Samuels,
“Illustrated Historiography and the Image of the Past in Nineteenth-Century France,” French Historical
Studies 26, no. 2 (2003): 253–280; Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and
Image, 1830-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Gregory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated
Histories and the American Imagination, 1840-1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
2002).

39
Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 5
(December 1, 1988): 1193.

40
Ibid. For an exploration of this idea see: Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Film and History,” in The Sage
Handbook of Film Studies, eds. James Donald and Michael Renov (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008).
18
proposed that photographic history might dispense with the need for textual historical
narratives altogether.
41

The existence of a robust amateur and municipal investment in the historical value
of photographs in twentieth-century Paris coincided with the French capital’s heyday as a
major epicenter of innovation in professional historical thought. In the nineteenth
century, innovations in historical method characterized by an attention to rigorous and
original research originated within the German university system and influenced
historical research around the world.
42
During the twentieth century, the Paris-based
Annales School played a globally leading role in innovating historical methodologies.
43

The historians who conceptualized the history of the “long durée,” the history of
“mentalités,” and even the study of memory, all did so in a city where they would have
passed photographically-illustrated histories of Paris for sale in every bookstore,
witnessed and even participated in public historical festivities such as the celebration of
the city’s 2000 year anniversary, and also attended large-scale exhibitions of pictures

41
Mauriac, Paris libéré, 5.

42
For more about the professionalization of history in the nineteenth century and the influence of the
German system on French historians see: William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of
the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Pim den Boer, History as a
Profession: The Study of History in France 1828-1914, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998).

43
For more about the history of the Annales historians and their work see: André Burguière, L’Ecole des
Annales: une histoire intellectuelle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006); Peter Burke, The French Historical
Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990); Jacques Revel
and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories French Constructions of the Past, Postwar French Thought Series (New
York: New Press, 1995).

19
dedicated to displaying the city’s history.
44
The thriving culture of “photohistory” in Paris
must be considered as part of the context for the Annales School’s understandings of the
tension between scientific analysis and romantic reconstruction in the study of the past.
45

Methodology
The impact of pictures depends entirely on the context in which they are taken,
collected, and presented. Careful analysis of the logic and forms of photographic
collections as well as photographically-illustrated books and exhibitions yields a rich
understanding of what exactly curators, librarians, publishers, and historians thought
photographs did. Sometimes archival or textual sources can enrich the analysis of this
context, speaking directly to the intentions that drove the collection, commission,
presentation, publication, and exhibition of photographs and other types of images. But
such explicit traces and direct statements remain rare. Often the presence of the picture
itself in its collected or presented form is the only document that speaks to the underlying
ideas about visual history that drove its use.

44
Some of the most important texts and ideas to come out of the Annales School include: Fernand Braudel,
La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, vol. 1, Seconde édition revue et
augmentée. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966); Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and
Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1973); Pierre Nora
and Jacques Le Goff, eds., Faire de l’histoire... (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de
mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

45
The Annales School pioneered methods on both ends of this spectrum from the statistical analysis of
historical data, which became the hallmark of social historical methods, to the close and careful
reconstruction of past worlds that characterizes the methodology of microhistory. For more about these two
methodologies see: Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen, eds., French Historians 1900-2000: New
Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). And for a discussion of
the role of the historian’s emotional and subjective attachment to the past see: Jill Lepore, “Historians Who
Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 1
(June 2001): 129–144.
20
When performed within the context of images’ uses, formal analysis of them can
address the relationship between pictures and the history that contemporaries saw in
them. Close attention to the composition of a photograph also reveals something about
the influence of the visual historical record; images are often in dialogue with other
images as much as they are with the world outside the frame. But such framing also
guided people as they acted in the world. As the subsequent chapters will show,
photographs document how other pictures shaped tangible actions.

Photography and History in Paris
Paris’s municipal investment in archiving and displaying the city’s history in
images began during its nineteenth-century renovations, and this story opens with
Haussmann’s efforts to create a public museum of Parisian history and document his own
renovations of the city in watercolors and photographs. Chapter One explores how the
mode of “poetic history” that developed at the city’s municipal historical institutions in
displays, exhibitions, and lectures used objects and other types of images, rather than
photographs, to evoke and imagine the past romantically. Charles Marville’s photographs
of Paris, for example, took a backseat to watercolors and lithographs directly copied from
them. Yet, under the leadership of Marcel Poëte, historian, director of the Bibliothèque
historique, and founder of the discipline of urbanism in France, municipal employees
accepted that photographs – not prints – would preserve the contemporary city for future
historians. They lamented the fact that the photographic nature of their present’s
21
historical record would never allow future generations the emotional connection to the
past that the artist’s hand provided.
And yet curators, librarians, and amateur historians increasingly used
contemporary photographs as objective documents of old architectural details in order to
illustrate past moments in Parisian history books. Chapter Two explores the norms of
photographic illustration in early-twentieth-century histories of Paris within the context
of the publishing industry’s general adoption of photography as a default means of
illustration. If once lithographers had replicated photographs in order to publish them in
books, now photographers produced faithful copies of engravings. In the early 1930s,
however, new ideas about how the photograph captured the past changed the types of
photos that illustrated Parisian history books. In response to the sense of disconnect from
the past created by the cultural rupture of World War I, a new generation of historians
and critics began to use old photographs as frozen moments of time, theorizing the
photograph as the best document with which to forge an emotional link to the past.
Even though photographs had replaced other types of documents as the means of
preserving contemporary Paris and even seemed capable of providing emotionally
charged connections to the past, they did not entirely replace Paris’s rich visual historical
record. This visual historical heritage, Chapter Three argues, can be understood by
focusing on an exemplary case: the actions of Parisians during and after the 1944
Liberation from the German Occupation when they restaged revolution in the streets.
Published in cheap histories and pamphlets and exhibited and collected at the Musée
Carnavalet after the war, photographs of the Liberation of Paris captured the moment,
22
while evoking a much longer history of revolution in Paris. The photographs’ ability to
inscribe the Liberation in this long history became a principle means of propagating the
postwar myth of the French people’s unity in resistance to the German Occupiers.
Parisians turned once again to non-photographic representations of the capital’s
history as they organized the largest celebration of Parisian history ever held: the months-
long Bimillénaire de Paris. The 1951 festivities, Chapter Four argues, mobilized the
city’s 2,000 year old past in order to erase memories of the last decade of internal strife
and division within French society, while the 1951 Festival of Britain celebrated an
ultramodern, almost futuristic, vision of Great Britain’s importance. As celebrations and
images produced for them copied scenes that Parisians knew through photographs and
estampes, planners and artists’ faithfulness to historical style and form over content
testifies to the continued emotional resonance Parisians found in the aesthetic styles of
old images. Contemporary photographers produced photographs that instead of
objectively documenting events of the Bimillénaire, drew on viewers’ shared knowledge
of Parisian history in order to evoke enduring historical continuity.
While the celebrations of the Bimillénaire suggest the importance that many
different types of images still played when it came to understanding the city’s past,
photography became the primary means of preserving Paris for future generations. By
1970 the explosion of amateur photography made it possible for every Parisian to
participate in historical projects to document the capital. Chapter Five presents the first
scholarly study of “C’était Paris en 1970,” France’s largest ever photo contest. The multi-
media megastore FNAC and the city organized the contest in order to create a
23
photographic record of Paris in May 1970, assigning each of the contest’s over 14,000
participants to document a 250 by 250 meter sector of the city. Demonstrating the
influence of a century of scientific documentation of history, these amateur
photographers mimicked the styles, forms, subjects, and compositions of old
photographs. These photos document how actors made images by reference to images
they had already seen – despite the intent to merely document the object through the lens
for posterity. The 100,000 resulting photographs that “C’était Paris en 1970” produced
would end up back at the Bibliothèque historique, where instead of forming the
cornerstone of the library’s photographic archive of Paris, they languished uncatalogued
and hardly consulted for forty years. Curators and historians rejected these amateur
photographs in favor of well-composed pictures by professional photographers: proof that
curators and scholars alike sought more than objective and scientific documentation in
photographic documents of Paris.
The contest forms the end point of an obsession with city photographs as
objective historical documents that developed over the century’s course. This obsession
waned in the 1970s as city officials turned their enthusiasm to the possibilities of
archiving Paris in video, launching a movement to establish a moving-image archive of
the city: the Vidéothèque de Paris. Influenced by the art market’s new embrace of
photography, employees at the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique focused
on collecting photographic prints by the Paris photographers increasingly recognized as
artists. Instead of amassing scientific documentation of the city in photographs, they
acquired photographs as documents of various artistic visions of the city. Likewise
24
university scholars working in the library and museum’s photo collection studied the
photographs of Charles Marville and Eugène Atget as the expressions of individual
interpretations of Paris and its history.
46

To cast back and recover the history of the aspiration to document the Parisian
past through photographs confronts the historical record as the construction of the very
people with an investment in narrating the past. As twenty-first-century bookstores,
television shows, documentaries, and websites belch forth hopelessly and endlessly
decontextualized images of the past –redefining the archive while also rendering history
more visual than ever –, a history of the photographic image as historical documentation
could not be timelier. Paris, the most photographed city in the world, presents an
exemplary case study for the history of the modern epistemological shifts that produced
both scientific history and the captivation of life through the image. With new media and
the “digital humanities” making images an automatic part of historical narratives, the
photograph’s power to conjure the past materially and to live side-by-side with the
present in the world outside the frame has never played a greater role in the discipline.

46
Rosalind Krauss has explained how art historians, in seeking to understand Eugène Atget’s unique vision
of photography and Parisian history, tried to decipher his system of numbering photos. They discovered
that he simply adopted the cataloguing logic of the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique:
“[MoMA] undertook to crack the code of Atget's negative numbers in order to discover an aesthetic anima.
What they found, instead, was a card catalogue.” Rosalind E. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,”
in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 147.
25
Chapter 1

Between Science and Romance:
Photography at Paris’s Municipal Historical Institutions

The City of Paris must not disdain, forget, or neglect its past.
-- Haussmann
1

The photograph is the most perfect witness, the one that does not lie, that cannot lie.
Photography is the history of the future.
-- Henri Lavergne
2

In 1925, librarian, historian, and director of the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville
de Paris Marcel Poëte declared that photography’s dominant status in the twentieth
century would change how future historians would write the history of Paris. Today
“photographic reproduction, in all its diverse forms, reigns supreme,” explained Poëte in
the introduction to his history of Paris in 600 pictures.
3
Slowing but surely, photography
was replacing other types of image-making technologies. He was not thrilled with the
tradeoff. Although photographs offered “perfect documentary precision,” Poëte
continued, their very accuracy “lacks the particular note of life offered up by the artistic
figuration of yesteryear.”
4
Poëte’s prediction speaks to a binary between images that
objectively or scientifically documented the past and those that subjectively, poetically,

1
Quote from a speech made by Haussmann to the city’s municipal council on November 28, 1860
reproduced in: Lazare-Maurice Tisserand, Histoire générale de Paris: collection de documents fondée avec
l’approbation de l’Empereur par M. le Bon Haussman, Préfet de la Seine, et publiée sous les auspices du
Conseil Municipal (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1866), 17.

2
Henri Lavergne, “L’Histoire de demain,” L’Aurore, August 4, 1910.

3
Marcel Poëte, Une Vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours, vol. Album (Paris: A. Picard, 1925),
xxi.

4
Ibid.
26
or romantically described and evoked for it the viewer. Poëte and his contemporaries
understood scientific documents to offer up evidence of hard facts of the past, such as
sequences of events or physical structures, while romantic ones, they believed,
illuminated more ineffable elements of everyday life. The twin poles of history as science
and as romantic reconstruction, this chapter argues, structured how curators and librarians
employed images and objects as historical documents in Paris’s municipal history
museum and library during the last decades of the nineteenth century. And yet,
photography’s place in this binary shifted between the 1860s, when municipal officials
first developed plans for these institutions, and the 1910s, when Poëte was formulating
his approach to visual urban history. Despite Poëte’s insistence that photographs would
never provide access to the “particular notes” of the past, over the course of this period
municipal curators and librarians as well as critics did indeed begin to conceive of
photographs not just as material traces of the physical city but also as romantic and poetic
documents of everyday life in Paris.
Paris’s historical library and museum, opened in 1875 and 1881, respectively,
built on a rich tradition of collecting a visual and material historical record. The idea of
founding a museum specifically devoted to the preservation and dissemination of Parisian
history originated under the Second Empire as part of the Baron Georges-Eugène
Haussmann’s plans to modernize the city, but the use of objects and images as historical
documents has a much longer history. Beginning in the sixteenth century, antiquarians,
historians, and others turned to coins, medals, frescos, illuminations, and paintings as
27
evidence of the period in which they were made.
5
The same centuries saw the
development of avid communities of collectors of images and objects from the city’s
past.
6
These traditions coalesced into municipal policy when Haussmann established the
Commission des travaux historiques in the 1860s.
When the city’s historical museum and library opened in the following decades,
municipal officials, curators, and librarians used paintings, engravings, reconstructed
scale models, and objects such as furniture and porcelain plates to bring the past to life
for a diverse public. They reserved photographs for the library’s study rooms. Photos
answered specific research questions about the evolution of streets, buildings, or
architectural styles, rather than evoking an entire period of the city’s history in exhibition
rooms. While later in the century, amateur historians, municipal curators and librarians,
as well as critics would come to conceive of photographs as deeply in dialogue with older
forms of representation of the city, in the last decades of the nineteenth century these
same figures understood the photograph as an isolated form of representation. While it
was too scientific to bring the past to life, it was nonetheless the best and most accurate
way to produce a copy of other evidence of city history, be it a painting or the
architectural detail of an old building. And so photographs entered the collections of the
city’s municipal historical institutions in large numbers.

5
Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).

6
For more about collectors and collections of historical objects see Haskell as well as Stéphane Gerson,
The Pride of Place: Local Memories & Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003); Tom Stammers, “The Bric-a-brac of the Old Regime: Collecting and Cultural
History in Post-Revolutionary France,” French History 22, no. 3 (2008): 295–315; Richard Wrigley, The
Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
28
The divide between scientific and romantic history also structured the terms of the
divide between professional and amateur history in this period. Modeling themselves on
the training and methods of the historical profession within German universities, a new
generation of professional historians dismissed the value of using elegant prose, material
objects, or images as means of tangibly accessing the past.
7
They sought to codify
methods for the rigorous and scientific study of the past based in analysis of documents,
not romantic description.
8
The methodology they developed contrasted with the scientific
method for studying urban history – based in large part on visual sources – developed by
Marcel Poëte: director of the BHVP, historian, and, according to scholars, the founder of
discipline of urbanism in France. For Poëte, historical analysis developed out of rich
description and reconstruction based on using pictures as primary sources. Indeed Poëte’s
reflection on the relative value of different types of images introduced his history of Paris
recounted in over 600 pictures, including miniatures, tapestry, paintings, lithographs,
engravings, and only a handful of photographs. Yet despite repeated laments about the
photograph’s cold nature, Poëte conceived of it as a curious amalgam of romantic means

7
Historians characterize the period from roughly 1870 to 1914 as the emergence of history as a profession
in France. For more about this transformation see: William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The
Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Pim den
Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France 1828-1914, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); C. O. Carbonell, Histoire et historiens: une mutation
idéologique des historiens français 1865–1885 (Toulouse: Privat, 1976); Gérard Noiriel, “Naissance du
métier d’historien,” Genèses 1, no. 1 (1990): 58–85.

8
Whether the study of history should consist of analysis or reconstruction continues to drive debates
between historians today. For more about the value of reconstruction and evocation start with discussions
of historical film and biography: Simon Schama, “Clio at the Multiplex,” New Yorker, January 19, 1998;
Miri Rubin et al., “AHR Forum: Simon Schama’s A History of Britain,” American Historical Review 114,
no. 3 (June 2009): 662–700; David Nasaw et al., “AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography,” American
Historical Review 114, no. 3 (June 2009): 573–661.
29
of access to the past and scientific documentation. Indeed, this chapter shows how the
photograph became a source for historical reconstruction and analysis.

Haussmannization and the Origins of Paris’s Municipal Historical Institutions
As part of his wholesale renovations of Paris during the Second Empire, in 1860
Haussmann proposed the establishment of a free, public, separate institution dedicated to
the preservation and display of the city’s past. Since the Middle Ages, Paris’s successive
municipal governments had sponsored various efforts to write and preserve its history,
but the Second Empire saw the first major effort to make a “material history” of Paris
accessible to a mass audience.
9
Just as Haussmann intended his renovations to bring light,
air, and water to Parisians, he also wanted to facilitate their access to their city’s history.
In 1865, Haussmann created the Commission des travaux historiques and its Service (or
logistical arm). The Commission, composed of municipal counselors and scholars, would
work to expand scholarship about Paris’s past, preserve Haussmann’s own
transformations of the city, and ensure that the city’s history would be accessible to
scholars as well as the general public in a history museum.
10
Pictures of the city would
play an important role in all of these projects. Haussmann commissioned photographic
documentation – completed by photographer Charles Marville – of the city during his

9
One of the first in the series of books about Parisian history that Haussmann established detailed the
history of the city’s various municipal historical projects: Tisserand, Histoire générale de Paris.

10
Haussmann claimed that he first decided to found the Commission back in 1860: in his introduction to
Ibid., 11. This comprehensive municipal historical program ensured the publication of historical studies
such as the series “Histoire générale de Paris” which included the multi-volume Topographie historique du
Vieux Paris, the documentation of the contemporary city in both texts and images, and the public display of
the Parisian past at a yet-unconstructed municipal history museum. Today, the Commission des travaux
historiques still oversees the publication of the series “L’histoire générale de Paris.”
30
renovations, and he intended to display artifacts, watercolors, estampes, and paintings in
the new municipal history museum. Thus Haussmann’s historical agenda ranged from
policies to ensure the contemporary city’s precise and accurate documentation to those
that would put in place its romantic evocation before the eyes of the mass public.
Plans to preserve and display Paris’s past represented one facet of the French
capital’s physical modernization begun in the 1850s under Emperor Napoléon III.
Haussmann and Napoléon III laid plans both to expand Paris by annexing its adjacent
suburbs and to renovate its center. They ordered the destruction of large swathes of the
city in order to make way for new boulevards, parks, market pavilions, train stations, and
cemeteries as well as to encourage real estate speculation that would build thousands of
units of new housing.
11
They also constructed a much-needed new sewer system and
another set of pipelines to bring clean drinking water to the city.
12
While historians and
critics have charged that Haussmann destroyed the city’s medieval neighborhoods with
no regard for their historical importance, his efforts also guaranteed that preserving,
documenting, and transmitting the city’s history became a modern municipal
imperative.
13
Modernization went hand in hand with historical preservation and

11
For more about real estate speculation during the Second Empire see: Alexia Yates, “Selling Paris: The
Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital” (Ph.D. Dissertation, The
University of Chicago, 2010).

12
For an overview of the physical and social changes wrought on nineteenth-century Paris by Haussmann
see: T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Rev. ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); David Jordan, Transforming Paris (New York: The Free
Press, 1995); David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1958).

13
Historian Jean-Pierre Bernard has described how “L'histoire générale de Paris fait partie de l’entreprise
de rénovation lancée par Haussmann, c’est en quelque sorte la justification idéologique, la couverture
morale des grands travaux du préfet de la Seine. Le reproche de détruire Paris est détourné par l’ostentation
31
documentation. Creating historical institutions to ensure that the city had a rich historical
legacy was an integral part of Haussmann’s plan to consolidate Paris’s importance as an
imperial capital.
The first task of the Commission des travaux historiques was to oversee the
publication of histories of Paris. In place of previous municipal historians’ scattered
efforts, the Commission instituted a centralized plan for a cumulative historical series.
Haussmann charged the Commission with publishing the Histoire générale de Paris, a
series of monographs and collections of documents that drew on the latest advances in
historical scientific rigor.
14
The Service des travaux historiques provided technical
support, helping in particular with the reproduction and printing of images.
15
Most of the
Commission’s publications contained illustrations, with images figuring prominently in
the later volumes of the Topographie historique du vieux Paris, a series of histories of the
city’s arrondissements.
16
Haussmann hoped that one day, Paris’s “written history,” the
studies and documents published by the Commission des travaux historiques, would

d’en préserver l’histoire, les vestiges les mieux enfouis.” Jean-Pierre A. Bernard, Les deux Paris. Les
représentations de Paris dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2001), 32.

14
Tisserand, Histoire générale de Paris, 20. Haussmann explained that unlike isolated monographs, the
series could continue to grow and change over the years. Its imperial patronage would guarantee the money
necessary for printing texts and the large numbers of engravings that these required. He also insisted that
these publications would implement all of the latest advances in scientific history. Ibid., 10. Originally, the
scholars who served on the CTH also wrote the histories that it published; Lazare-Maurice Tisserand, its
director, was one of its most active authors during the 1860s and 1870s.

15
Marcel Poëte, ed., Bulletin de la Bibliothèque et des Travaux historiques: le service de la bibliothèque et
des travaux historiques de la ville de Paris, vol. I (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1906), vi. Information about
the activities of this service (under the Third Republic) comes from documents reproduced in the annexes
of: Madeleine Dubois, “Les Origines du musée Carnavalet, la formation des collections et leur
accroissement 1870-1897” (thèse non-publiée, Paris, 1947).

16
Other books included antiquarian studies of medals and seals and histories of the city’s various guilds.
Adolphe Berty, Topographie historique du vieux Paris. Région du Louvre et des Tuileries. T. 1 (Paris:
impr. nationale, 1885), x.
32
constitute a “veritable monument” on par with the physical city he and the Municipal
Council had rebuilt.
17

Commissioning and publishing texts about Paris’s past was only part of the
Commission des travaux historiques’ duties. For while the written histories and published
primary sources that the Commission produced would be accessible to a literate audience,
Haussmann believed that the city must “create a means of instruction easily accessible to
those who do not read.”
18
It would do so through a “material history” of the city
displayed in a public museum.
19
As Charles Poisson, member of the Commission des
travaux historique and municipal councilor, described in 1867, the museum would house

17
Charles Poisson, Les Donateurs du Musée historique de la Ville de Paris, par le baron C. Poisson,
conseiller municipal, membre de la Commission et de la mis-commission des travaux historiques de la ville
de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1868), 6. Tisserand, Histoire générale de Paris, 11. Emphasis is in
the original.

18
Charles Poisson, Mémoire sur l’oeuvre historique de la Ville de Paris (Paris: Librairie Imperial, 1867),
17. Haussmann decided that “indépendamment des documents écrits, on devait réunir les documents
matériels et tangibles, afin de constituer ainsi une histoire démonstrative.” Emphasis is in the original.
There is a long history of using images as pedagogical tools for the illiterate, in particular within the
Catholic Church. For more about using objects and images in this way see: David Freedberg, The Power of
Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989);
Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

19
Other cities developed similar museums in the late nineteenth century. But whereas in other cities, such
as New York, historical museums were the pet projects of the city’s upper classes, eager to preserve their
own history and heritage, in Paris, the historical museum was a municipal project. For more about city
museums in other places see: Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation
of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Max Page, The
Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jordanna
Bailkin, “Radical Conservations: The Problem with the London Museum,” Radical History Review 84, no.
1 (2002): 43–76; Katherine Zelljadt, “History as Past-Time: Amateurs and Old Berlin, 1870-1914”
(Dissertation, Harvard University, 2005). The museum was also part of a much larger interest in historical
sites that took place in the nineteenth century throughout France. For more about this interest see: Gerson,
The Pride of Place. For more about the Musée Carnavalet see: Dubois, “Les Origines du musée
Carnavalet,” 16. (held at the Musée Carnavalet) as well as Bernard de Montgolfier, Le Musée Carnavalet,
l’histoire de Paris illustrée: un aperçu des collections (Paris: Les amis du musée Carnavalet/Albin Michel,
1986); Jean-Marc Leri, Musée Carnavalet: histoire de Paris (Paris: Fragments, 2000); Portraits d’une
capitale de Daguerre à William Klein: Collections photographiques du musée Carnavalet (Paris: Paris
Musées/Paris Audiovisuel, 1992).
33
objects and images including paintings, drawings, etchings, maps, books, manuscripts,
medals, and architectural fragments and artifacts.
20
Not only would the objects
themselves recount the city’s history, Haussmann also insisted that they be housed in “a
building that was already in and of itself a page from Parisian history.”
21
To this end, in
1866 the city purchased the Hôtel Carnavalet, a former hôtel particulier in the Marais.
Built in 1548, redesigned by the architect François Mansart, and rented by Madame de
Sévigné, a French aristocrat known for her vivid correspondence, the Hôtel Carnavalet
provided a fittingly historical setting for the museum.
22

Haussmann’s historical projects were designed to culminate in the splendor of his
own renovations of Paris. The volumes in the Topographie historique du vieux Paris
would logically end with the city’s Second Empire renovations. Similarly, the museum
would begin in the city’s distant past with displays of Roman and medieval objects and
artifacts – unearthed during recent renovation projects – as well as maps and
reconstructions of the old city.
23
Its displays would culminate with objects and artifacts
from buildings destroyed during Haussmannization, in order to teach Parisians, as

20
Poisson, Mémoire sur l’oeuvre historique de la Ville de Paris.

21
Ibid., 18.

22
The hôtel particulier was also historically significant because the architect François Mansart had
renovated its facades in the seventeenth century.

23
Poisson’s 1867 essay about the city’s municipal historical projects contains a detailed description of the
proposed museum: Poisson, Mémoire sur l’oeuvre historique de la Ville de Paris. For more about how
Haussmannization made urban archeology in Paris possible see Colin Jones’s work about “Haussmann’s
doppelganger” the archeologist Théodore Vacquer: Colin Jones, “Théodore Vacquer and the Archeology of
Modernity in Haussmann’s Paris,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2007): 157–183. For more
about archeological interest in the Medieval period during the nineteenth century see: Elizabeth Emery and
Laura Morowitz, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-De-Siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2003).

34
Poisson claimed, “in the most striking and easiest to understand form, what existed on the
site of the boulevards, the promenades and the squares, with which the municipality
[Édilité] has endowed the Parisian population.”
24
Yet, none of the descriptions of the
Musée Carnavalet that exist from the Second Empire suggest that photographs would
figure among the objects on display.
Members of the Commission des travaux historiques imagined photographs as
scientific documents rather than as pedagogical objects of display. While Haussmann was
still in power, the Commission gathered documents about contemporary urban
transformations, ensuring that future historians would find a wealth of materials with
which to study the Second Empire’s changes. Indeed, in 1865, the Commission hired
photographer Charles Marville to create visual documents of Paris’s renovations.
25
He
photographed the narrow streets of Paris’s oldest neighborhoods, the construction sites
that transformed the city, and the finished boulevards and monuments that replaced the
old city. His project was indeed one of the first conscientious efforts to create a
comprehensive photographic record of Paris.
26
But rather than heralding the advent of a

24
Poisson, Mémoire sur l’oeuvre historique de la Ville de Paris, 25–26.

25
Marie de Thézy, Marville: Paris (Paris: Hazan, 1994), 28. The precise nature of Marville’s collaboration
with municipal services in documenting Haussmannization is unknown because the 1871 Hotel de Ville
fire destroyed the administration’s archives (along with most of the documents that Commission des
travaux historiques had collected). Marville undertook several other projects documenting parks, street
furniture, and petits métiers, for municipal service between 1858 and his death around 1878. He also
worked as a photographer at the Louvre. For more about Marville, his career, and photographs see:
Jacqueline Chambord, ed., Charles Marville: photographs of Paris at the time of the Second Empire on
loan from the Musée Carnavalet, Paris (New York: French institute/Alliance française, 1981); Marie de
Thézy, Charles Marville, Paris disparu (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1994); Thézy, Marville: Paris.

26
Works that make much of Marville’s role include: Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1997); Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). The other
important photographic survey often cited by scholars is the 1851-1852 Mission héliographique, which sent
five professional photographers around France to catalogue crumbling cathedrals, bridges, and
35
purely photographic age, the Commission’s efforts to document Paris during
Haussmannization speak to just how little contemporaries privileged photographs as part
of the historical record. Although the Commission hired Marville to photograph Paris, it
also hired German-born French artist Fedor Hoffbauer to paint watercolors of the same
scenes.
27
That he should commission both Hoffbauer and Marville to record Paris’s soon-
to-be past testifies to the historical importance that Haussmann attributed to the
neighborhoods he destroyed and to his own reconstruction work. More importantly,
however, the subsequent uses of these two sets of images during the next several decades
– as Hoffbauer’s enjoyed considerable popularity while Marville’s lay largely unused –
highlight the differences that underlay the respective uses of photographs and estampes at
the city’s municipal historical museum when it finally did open in 1881.
Plans for the Musée Carnavalet continued throughout the Second Empire. The
Hôtel Carnavalet underwent renovations during the remainder of the 1860s. During this
period, the museum’s growing collection of objects was stored off-site in the Hotel de
Ville and at the Hotel Bretonvillier, on the Ile Saint-Louis.
28
When the Communards set
fire to the Hôtel de Ville in May 1871, the blaze destroyed most of these objects, as well
as the city’s collection of books and estampes housed there in the Bibliothèque

fortifications. Like Marville’s photographs, the resulting images were neither comprehensively printed nor
displayed during the nineteenth century. For more about the Mission héliographique start with: Philippe
Néagu, La Mission héliographique (Paris: direction des Musées de France, 1980); M. Christine Boyer, “La
Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France,
1851,” in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, ed. Joan M. Schwartz and
James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

27
Béatrice Bouvier, L’édition d’architecture à Paris au XIXe siècle: les maisons Bance et Morel et la
presse architecturale (Paris: Librairie Droz, 2004), 340.

28
Dubois, “Les Origines du musée Carnavalet,” 228.
36
administrative. Thus while Haussmann may have come up with the idea of a municipal
historical museum, it and a new historical library, would open under the Third Republic
thanks to the donated collections of private individuals and continued municipal support.
The continuation of the project demonstrates the wide-appeal of the idea of a publically-
accessible institution of Parisian history.
In creating the Commission des travaux historiques, Haussmann put in place a
strong program for municipal history that would grow and develop over the next 150
years. He introduced the idea that material history did not simply belong to the domain of
antiquarians who studied the history of seals or medals, but rather constituted a key
method for teaching history to a mass public. In his memoires, Haussmann would cite the
Musée Carnavalet as his crowning contribution to Parisian history. Accused by historians
of having destroyed or defaced historic Parisian neighborhoods and buildings, he
countered: “And the purchase of the Hôtel Carnavalet that I orchestrated in order to
assure its conservation and fabricate in it a Parisian historical Museum, have you
forgotten it?”
29
He believed that the creation of an institution for the material history of
Paris constituted his true historical legacy. Photography bore no privileged place in urban
documentation in the 1860s, but Haussmann’s ideas for municipal historical institutions
did prepare the way for the ideas and practices of photographic history that developed
subsequently.

29
The full quote has a slightly more vitriolic flavor: “Mais, bonnes gens, qui, du fond de vos bibliothèques,
semblez n’avoir rien vu, citez, du moins, un ancien monument, digne d’intérêt, un édifice précieux pour
l’art, curieux par ses souvenirs, que mon administration ait détruit, ou dont elle se soit occupée, sinon pour
le dégager et le mettre en aussi grande valeur, en aussi belle perspective que possible! Et l’achat de l’Hôtel
Carnavalet, que je fis faire, afin d’en assurer la conservation et d’y créer, de toutes pièces, un Musée
historique parisien, l’avez-vous donc oublié?” Haussmann, Mémoires, 1979, 810.

37
History between Romance and Science
Writing in the daily newspaper Le Gaulois in 1885, a journalist and self-
proclaimed “antiquarian” described what he saw as two opposing modes of approaching
objects from the past. One was embodied by the “historian-collector,” the second, the
“sensual [voluptueux] collector.”
30
The first inspected objects “detail by detail,
interpreting them without fuss, without commentary, in precise words, as a historian
rather than an dilettante.”
31
The other approached objects with a passionate desire,
swooning and sparkling by turns in front of objects to the point where “he needed to take
the piece in his hands, to turn it over and over, to caress it.”
32
Although the journalist
conceived of the two modes as oppositional – the first historically rigorous, the second
marked by dilettantism – they are in fact remarkably similar. Both used the object from
the past to evoke a dream-like state that professional historians were beginning to argue
had no place in professional historical analysis.
33
Yet in the 1880s critics as well as
curators and many historians still accepted that one could scientifically study the past
while also reveling in romantic dreams of it. Indeed the first collector the journalist
invoked was none other than Alfred de Liesville, the highly-respected and recently-
deceased director of the Musée Carnavalet.
34
Under his guidance, and that of another

30
Un antiquitaire, “Deux antiquitaires,” Le Gaulois, February 7, 1885.

31
Ibid.

32
Ibid.

33
For more about the turn away from history as literature or philosophy and the embrace of history as
science see: Keylor, Academy and Community.
34
The other was Edmond du Sommerard, the director of the Musée Cluny dedicated to the history of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance. The two curators died just days apart.

38
collector-historian Jules Cousin, the twin imperatives of scientific study and poetic
evocation fundamentally shaped how history was displayed, collected, and studied at
Paris’s municipal historical institutions. Photographs, however, entered their collections
as tools of scientific study, not as objects capable of soliciting historical reverie from
their beholders.
The types of relationships that private collectors maintained with historical
artifacts mattered for Paris’s municipal historical institutions’ uses of photographs in part
because of the influence private collectors Jules Cousin and Alfred de Liesville had there.
Shortly before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Cousin, then a great enthusiast
of Parisian history and librarian at the former royal library made public during the French
Revolution, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, was named head of the Hôtel de Ville
library.
35
After the 1871 fire destroyed all of the books, periodicals, estampes, and
manuscripts in his care, Cousin offered to donate his own collection of some 6,000
volumes and 6,000 estampes relating to Parisian history in order to open a new library
dedicated to the city’s history.
36
Cousin also urged the municipal council to split the

35
The library had belonged to Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte d’Artois (the future Charles X). For more
about the library in the nineteenth century see: Henry Martin, Histoire de la bibliothèque de l’Arsenal
(Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1900).

36
The municipal council voted to thank Cousin for the donation in 1872: “Conseil municipal de Paris.
Session de budget de 1872. Procès- verbaux”, no. 21 (March 9, 1872): 8–9. Cousin studied law before
becoming a librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in 1856. He began collecting books and images
related to Parisian history around this time. He was named director of the municipal library at the Hôtel de
Ville in 1870. He described that he spent the period of the Commune trying to put some order into the
collections only to have them destroyed in 1871. For more about Cousin see: Jules Cousin, “Biographie
d’un Musée et d’un homme,” La Plume, January 15, 1892; Paul Lacome, Jules Cousin 1830-1899
Souvenirs d’un ami par Paul Lacome, parisien (Paris: Librairie Henri Leclerc, 1900); Henry de Surirey de
Saint-Remy, “Jules Cousin fondateur de la Bibliothèque historique,” Bulletin de la Société des amis de la
Bibliothèque historique, 1974; Stéphanie Cantarutti, “Jules Cousin (4 mars 1830, Paris – 19 février 1899,
Paris),” Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art (Paris: Institut national de l’histoire de l’art, 2009),
http://www.inha.fr/spip.php?article2261.
39
municipal library into two separate institutions: a historical library open to the public and
an administrative one, intended for municipal administrators and employees.
37
The
Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris opened in 1875 in the Hôtel Carnavalet, with
Cousin as its director. Similarly, Alfred de Liesville’s donation of his collections relating
to the history of France’s revolutions replaced the collections of objects intended for the
Musée Carnavalet, which had been destroyed in the 1871 fire.
38
A wealthy aristocrat, de
Liesville devoted his life to purchasing engravings, ceramics, coins, medals, books, and
other assorted objects relating to the Revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848.
39
De Liesville
knew Cousin from collectors’ circles, and upon Cousin’s urging, donated his collections
to the city in 1880. In return he was named co-curator, along with Cousin, of the Musée
Carnavalet, which opened in 1881.
40

Neither Cousin nor de Liesville had trained in the professional sciences of history
and archiving at the Ecole des Chartes, as many archivists and librarians of the time did.

37
Cousin complained that municipal councilors often stole books from the library. Later commenters also
remarked that removing the historical collection from the Hôtel de Ville would protect it from any future
fires. Cousin, “Biographie d’un Musée et d’un homme,” 32. Paul Marmottan, “Le Musée Carnavalet,”
Journal des Beaux-Arts, May 1886, 8.

38
De Liesville was just one of a number of enthusiastic collectors of Revolutionary objects. He is an
example of those “lone individuals” who, “when successive regimes shunned the painful reminders of the
guillotine and civil war, […] stored and sheltered the strange alluvium of the First Republic.” Stammers,
“The Bric-a-brac of the Old Regime,” 297.

39
For more about de Liesville see: “Monsieur de Liesville et l’hôtel Carnavalet,” Le Temps, February 4,
1885.

40
The Service des travaux historiques also moved into the Musée Carnavalet, reuniting all of the city’s
historical institutions under one roof. The photographic service that was part of the original Service was not
moved, instead its materials were sold off. In the early 1890s the museum was expanded with a new wing,
and in 1898 it was expanded again when the Bibliothèque historique moved in to the adjacent Hôtel Le
Peletier-Saint-Fargeau. At this point Georges Cain was named head of the museum and Paul Le Vayer head
of the library. Dubois, “Les Origines du musée Carnavalet,” 228–229.
40
While they both had a deep appreciation for the past and contemporaries respected their
scholarship, Cousin and de Liesville came to the study of the history of Paris from a
desire to have a personal relationship with historical objects. Their interests and priorities
as collectors, including this close relationship to artifacts, shaped the institution’s
displays and collections.

Fig. 1.1: Pierre Emonts, Galeries du Jardin,
Musée Carnavalet, c. 1892 (BNF).

Fig. 1.2: Pierre Emonts, Musée Gallo-Romain
et Age de Pierre, Musée Carnavalet, c.1892
(BNF).

The aesthetic hierarchy that collectors such as Cousin and de Liesville used to
judge objects from the past played a key role in the formation of Paris’s historical
museum. Its rooms contained an assortment of objects from different eras: portraiture,
small-scale models, artifacts recovered during urban excavations, elements of historical
dress such as swords, hats, and fans, as well as an assortment of commemorative objects
including figurines, themed playing cards, and flags [figs. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, & 1.4].
41
These

41
A journalist writing in Le Gaulois described the objects one encountered upon entering the Musée
Carnavalet on the day it opened: “Sur les murs sont accrochés des tableaux représentant les diverses phases
41
disparate objects all either depicted Paris or Parisian events and actors, had been made in
Paris, or had belonged to famous Parisians. The museum’s curators rejected those things
that recounted an industrial and everyday history of the city in favor of relics from the
city’s aristocratic past, such as richly crafted and finished furniture, or famous events,
such as revolutionary kitsch. This rejection would ultimately affect how photographs
were collected there.

Fig. 1.3: Pierre Emonts, Salle Liesville at the
Musée Carnavalet, c. 1892 (BNF).

Fig. 1.4: Pierre Emonts, Grande Salle de la
Révolution at the Musée Carnavalet, c. 1892
(BNF).

As much as the museum’s collections appeared to some critics as an assortment of
historical clutter, there was a distinctly classed logic to their collection and a preference
for art over industry that became clear in assertions about how the museum would differ
from Haussmann’s original vision. Cousin and members of the municipal council charged
that Haussmann, along with curator and architectural historian Jules Gailhabaud, had

du siège de la Bastille, des faisceaux d’armes, des bonnets phrygiens, des éventails, la dernière palette du
peintre David donnée par un de ses élèves, une pendule à décades, etc.” “Le Musée de la Révolution,” Le
Gaulois, May 9, 1881, 3.
42
assembled a collection of useless objects. Their evidence was the Musée de
l’Ustensillage, a short-lived museum of quotidian objects, which opened at the end of the
Second Empire.
42
The museum assembled the objects eventually intended for the Musée
Carnavalet that illustrated the “most ordinary details” of Parisians’ lives: from fire
starters and corkscrews to candlestick holders.
43
In 1868, Charles Poisson had praised this
obvious effort to create a comprehensive catalogue of the daily lives of all classes of
Parisians.
44
Just a few years later, however, Cousin and the municipal council declared
these objects historically worthless and sold them as scrap metal.
45
In particular, Cousin
objected to the cosmopolitan nature of Gailhabaud’s collections, which he dismissed as a
“hodgepodge of Italian, Flemish, German, and even French knickknacks, [acquired]
haphazardly.”
46
But what Cousin dismissed as “bric-à-brac” and “bibelots” art critic Paul
Marmottan praised as the products of “one of the most interesting aspects of industrial art

42
The museum opened at the Maison communale du quai de Béthune. Jules Gailhabaud was also a personal
friend of Haussmann’s. Under Haussmann, he had assumed direction of the section of the Musée
Carnavalet dedicated to the history of daily life in Paris. The musée de l’Ustensillage was quite popular
under the Commune, because as art historian Peggy Rodriguez argues: “le désir d’offrir une éducation
artistique aux catégories sociales les moins cultivées trouve un écho dans les idéaux des communards.” For
more about Gailhabaud and the Musée de l’Ustensillage see: Peggy Rodriguez, “Jules Gailhabaud,”
Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art (Paris: Institut national de l’histoire de l’art, 2008),
http://www.inha.fr/spip.php?article2329. Papiers Théodore Vacquer : “rapport de Tisserand sur le musée de
la Maison municipale du quai de Béthune (22 novembre 1871)” (fol. 179), BHVP.

43
Poisson, Les Donateurs du Musée historique de la Ville de Paris, 17.

44
Ibid.

45
In 1874, the municipal council declared that the collections “non pas été faits avec le discernement
voulu.” Le Temps, September 17, 1874, 2.

46
Cousin, “Biographie d’un Musée et d’un homme,” 32.

43
from the sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth.”
47
Cousin’s dismissal of
industrial objects as so much “stuff” suggests one reason why ensuing collections would
marginalize the photograph, which in nineteenth-century Paris was more closely
associated with industry than with art.
The museum and library were designed in order to foster the personal, emotional,
and imaginative connections that collectors enjoyed with historical artifacts. Unlike
popular contemporary historical reconstructions such as dioramas or wax museums, the
museum’s displays did not fully reconstruct past events or scenes.
48
Instead, curators
intended for the Musée Carnavalet’s setting, rooms, and displays to bring the world of the
past to life in the visitor’s mind.
49
The museum’s neighborhood – the Marais, a part of
Paris that had largely escaped Haussmann’s renovations – contributed to this effect. In
1886, art critic Paul Marmottan described how even though the neighborhood “no longer
offered the picturesque spectacle of carriages, and gentlemen with capes and swords,” it

47
The same objects “dans plus d’un musée municipal de grande ville se trouvent représenté[s], attestant la
valeur de la main d’oeuvre des corporations.” Marmottan, “Le Musée Carnavalet,” 6.

48
Nonetheless, critics drew parallels between the museum and these entertainments. Art and social critic
Jules Claretie compared the museum Carnavalet, after its 1898 expansion, to “reconstructions d'intérieurs
scandinaves des temps passés: logis austères du temps de Gustave-Adolphe, avec quelque Bible ouverte et
quelque épée à garde de fer posées sur une table de chêne, salons du temps de Gustave III avec quelque
livre à relieur galante, quelque éventail à demi ouvert, traînant sur le fauteuil à tapisserie ou sur le
clavecin.” Emphasis is in the original. He admitted that then director Georges Cain had not actually
recreated displays of Parisian life, but simply that: “C’est un peu cela que M. Georges Cain a voulu faire
pour Paris.” Jules Claretie, La vie à Paris: 1880-1910, vol. 1898 (Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle,
1881), 344. For more about Scandinavian folk museums see: M. B. Sandberg, “Effigy and Narrative:
Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 320–61.

49
For more about the subjective experience of the nineteenth-century museum collection see: Stephen
Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne, 1995).

44
nonetheless still “exuded” the past.
50
Once inside the building, its rooms served as
another form of historical display. English politician, scholar, and former London-city
alderman Frederic Harrison commented that a scholar sitting in the former apartments of
Madame de Sévigné might “almost cease to believe that two hundred years have passed
since the greatest of letter writers used to sit in the same room with the same ornaments,
labouring [sic] at her daily task of love, or receiving the brilliant literary society of her
age.”
51
Such settings thus offered visitors the historical context for the objects on display,
helping to induce the historical “reverie” that collectors sought.
52

Efforts to bring the past to life at the Musée Carnavalet and Bibliothèque
historique coexisted with an impulse to scientifically document Paris. The same critics
who praised the museum’s ability to engage the visitor’s imagination also commended it
for establishing what Frederic Harrison termed a foremost global model of “scientific
history of the city.”
53
Indeed historians and critics around the globe held the Musée
Carnavalet up as a successful, scientific historical institution that their own communities

50
Marmottan, “Le Musée Carnavalet,” 4.

51
Harrison, “The Municipal Museums of Paris,” 464.

52
The museum housed a number of models including a scale-model of the Palais-Royale and one of the
models of the Bastille that Pierre François Palloy made with the prison’s stones during the Revolution.
Palloy sent these little Bastilles to museums all over France. He also created a range of other Revolutionary
memorabilia from domino sets to medals and paperweights out of the ruins of the Bastille. For more about
Palloy and his creations start with Chapter 3 “Revolutionary Symbolism under the Sign of the Bastille,
1789-1799: A Prime Example of the Self-Mystification of the French Revolution” of Hans-Jürgen
Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: a History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997). The museum acquired its first period rooms in the nineteenth century, and it
would acquire many more in the twentieth including Georges Fouquet’s art nouveau jewelry shop, designed
in 1901 by Alphonse Mucha, another turn-of-the-century room from the Café de Paris, 1925 murals from
the ballroom at the Wendel hotel, and the bedrooms of writers Proust, Anna de Noailles, and Paul
Léautaud.

53
“The Municipal Museums of Paris,” 458.
45
should emulate.
54
When they praised the museum’s displays as scientific, critics did not
reference portraiture or revolutionary artifacts. Rather, Marmottan and Harrison both
specifically praised the topography rooms, which displayed visual depictions of Paris
throughout the ages, for presenting city history based on the science of observation.
55

Critics believed that the comparison of historical images of the city formed the
basis for a scientifically rigorous history of it. Marmottan described how the museum’s
succession of views, maps, and models of Paris were “intended to so keenly strike the
eyes,” the privileged organ of Enlightenment science.
56
He mirrored the language that
Haussmann had used when he imagined the future museum’s topography rooms where
maps and pictures would “present to the eyes the growth of the City’s boundaries during

54
Harrison explained: “There are not a few things in the municipal government of Paris which no sensible
Englishman would desire to imitate in London - amongst these are the wholesale demolition of old streets,
the monotony of sundry new streets, the passion for a geometric plan, and the habit of renaming public
places every few years, if possible so as to convey an insult to Conservatives and priests. But there are
certain things in the municipal organization of Paris which are a model for the civilised [sic] world to
follow, and which must fill Londoners with wonder and envy. Amongst these are the fine historical and
artistic foundations of the city, the historical Museum and Library, the educational institutions, and the
noble Municipal Hall, now almost finally completed.” Similarly, in upstate New York, a member of the
Vassar Alumnae Historical Association described her impressions of the Musée Carnavalet after her visit
there, recommending that in America similar “civic museum[s]” should replace private and public
historical collections. And, The American published an article in 1882 commending the museum, which
esteemed that it should “serve as an encouragement to local antiquaries to follow up the history of their
towns and to carefully preserve every relic of the past which may be threatened with annihilation by the
craze for modern improvements.” Ibid., 463; “[report from the 4th annual meeting of the Vassar Alamnae
Historical Association],” The Vassar Miscellany, 1900-1899, 363; Th. C., “Parisian Literary and Art
Notes,” The American, September 23, 1882, 381.

55
Harrison described these as the “collection of pictures of Paris at various ages, maps, plans, models and
other works, showing the aspect of the city at successive epochs from the sixteenth century to the present
day.” Harrison, “The Municipal Museums of Paris,” 463.

56
Marmottan, “Le Musée Carnavalet,” 17. The idea that images physically touched the eyes and that their
scientific nature resided in their visibility evokes ideas developed during the Enlightenment about the
power of observation. For more about these ideas see the second chapter of: Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes:
The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993).
46
its different eras.”
57
Rather than relying on the vagaries of each individual’s imagination,
pictures of Paris presented a consistent and unvarying account of the past.
58
While many
of the objects on display at the Musée Carnavalet were intended to charm visitors, the
collections of the topography rooms appealed to ideas of the study of history as a
scientific process of observation.
At the Musée Carnavalet, the idea of scientific history grounded in direct and
factual observation also built on contemporary ideas about the image’s pedagogical
value. Haussmann proposed material history as an option for teaching an illiterate
audience about the French capital’s history, but many historians and educators in the
decades that followed also championed visual history for literate audiences, particularly
children. One member of the Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France
recommended that all Parisian schoolchildren visit Fedor Hoffbauer’s panorama of Vieux
Paris; for, after all “it is through the eyes that object lessons are learned the best.”
59

Building on this idea, art critic, historian, and politician Armand Dayot wrote a series of
visual history primers for French school children.
60
Illustrated history would help them

57
Poisson, Mémoire sur l’oeuvre historique de la Ville de Paris, 25.

58
Harrison described this as “an exact conception of Paris” through the ages. Harrison, “The Municipal
Museums of Paris,” 463.

59
“Compte-Rendu des séances,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France, May 12,
1885, 69.

60
These included: Armand Dayot, Napoléon raconté par l’image (Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1895); La
Révolution française: Constituante, législative, convention, directoire, d’après des peintures, sculptures,
gravures, médailles, objets du temps. (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1896); Journées révolutionnaires, 1830-1848:
d’après des peintures, sculptures, dessins, lithographies, médailles, autographes, objets du temps, 1 vols.
(Paris: E. Flammarion, 1897); Histoire contemporaine par l’image: 1789-1872 d’après les documents du
temps (Paris: Flammarion, 1900); Le Second Empire (2 décembre 1851-4 septembre 1870): d’après des
peintures, gravures, photographies, sculptures, dessins, médailles, autographes, objets du temps (Paris: E.
Flammarion, 1900); Louis XIV: illustrations d’après des peintures, sculptures, gravures, objets, etc. du
47
learn better. As Dayot’s editor Ernest Flammarion described, “turning one-by-one these
eloquent sheets, the child, whose brain is so deeply and permanently marked by the sight
of images, will without effort fix in his young memory [mémoire] the memory [souvenir]
of the [pictured] events.”
61
A material history of the city, thus, could also benefit literate
audiences.
The pedagogical and scientific value of depictions of Paris pushed curators at the
Musée Carnavalet to include artwork they otherwise deemed aesthetically worthless in
the topography rooms. The museum proudly displayed the work of talented engravers.
62

On the other hand, visitors routinely remarked on the poor aesthetic quality of the oil
paintings they found there. As Harrison wrote, the paintings lacked “any artistic merit.”
63

Curators and visitors had to look past their poor quality, reminding themselves that, as
Charles Poisson had explained in the 1860s: “a mediocre painting, from the point of view
of art, deserves sometimes to be classed as a first-rate historical document.”
64
Mediocre
paintings remained valuable because they provided a clear picture of Paris’s
transformations. Why, then, did photographs remain absent?

temps (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1909); L’Invasion, le siège, la Commune. 1870-1871: d’après des peintures,
gravures, photographies, sculptures, médailles autographes, objets du temps (Paris: E. Flammarion, nd);
La Restauration (Louis XVIII-Charles X) d’après l’image du temps (Paris: éditions de la Revue Blanche,
nd).

61
Dayot, Histoire contemporaine par l’image, 4.

62
Marmottan referred to the museum’s collection of “very sought after” engravings by Jean François
Bosio, Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Louis Sicardi (Sicard or Sicardy), Louis Léopold Boilly, Carle Vernet,
and Pierre Roch Vigneron. Marmottan, “Le Musée Carnavalet,” 15.

63
Harrison, “The Municipal Museums of Paris,” 465.

64
Poisson, Mémoire sur l’oeuvre historique de la Ville de Paris, 26.
48
Somewhat contradictorily however, the museum’s displays increasingly reflected
a desire to also teach the public artistic taste. As Jules Claretie wrote in 1898, then
museum director Georges Cain sought (successfully) to create an “artistic dwelling where
the crowd could, with its eyes, learn simultaneous lessons in history and art.”
65
By
including photographs in the topography files created for this purpose, curators
acknowledged that the photograph could help tracked urban change over the decades and
that it would play an important role as a means of reproducing images for scholarship.
But its exclusion from display rooms indicates that while the photograph might “so
keenly strike the eyes” it would not, like those in the museum’s topography room, also
strike “no less the intelligence by charming them.”
66
The industrial art of photography
had as little place in the display rooms as the everyday objects collected under the Second
Empire.
Even given curators’ and critics’ understanding of the scientific value of visual
depictions of Paris and their willingness to accept the value of aesthetically mediocre
works, the topography rooms did not contain photographs. In fact, no photographs were
displayed at the Musée Carnavalet when it opened in 1881 or throughout the rest of the
nineteenth century. By 1903, only two figured among the nearly 1,000 objects that
displayed the history of Paris since the sixteenth century.
67
Curators’ assumptions about
photography’s industrial heritage and its paradoxical imprecision help explain its curious

65
Claretie, La vie à Paris, 1898:344.

66
Marmottan, “Le Musée Carnavalet,” 17.

67
Charles Sellier and Prosper Dorbec, Guide explicatif du Musée Carnavalet ... (Paris: Librairie centrale
des beaux-arts, 1903).
49
absence. While photography could indeed capture architecture in detail, it distorted many
aspects of everyday life into blurred traces. Further explanation lies in the norms for the
use of photographs that developed behind the scenes at the museum.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the museum and library collected
photographs, which were initially destined for city study collections rather than display
cases.
68
From the beginning, the library and museum purchased and received donations of
photographs.
69
By the 1890s the library boasted an impressive collection of various
estampes, maps, and photos separated into boxes by subject matter, with separate files for
topography, history, portraits, and customs.
70
In 1898, when the library and the museum
separated, the two institutions split the topography files. The museum kept the loose files,
while the library took the images that had been bound into volumes. Both institutions
would continue to buy photographs in the form of prints and glass plates directly from
photographers until roughly the 1920s.

68
This statement echoes Molly Nesbit’s argument that Eugène Atget’s photographs in his day were
considered documents, not art, and purchased and employed for a variety of uses: Nesbit, Atget’s Seven
Albums. For more about the history of “photo study” collections see: Mauro Cozzi and Luigi Zangheri,
“The Neo-Renaissance and Photography,” in Reviving the Renaissance: The Use and Abuse of the Past in
Nineteenth-Century Italian Art and Decoration, ed. Rosanna Pavoni, trans. Adrian Belton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 95–125; Anthony Hamber, “The Use of Photography by Nineteenth-
Century Art Historians,” Visual Resources 7, no. 2–3 (1990): 135–159; Glenn Willumson, “The Getty
Research Institute: Materials for a New Photo-History,” The History of Photography 22, no. 1 (Spring
1998): 31–39.

69
Photographers included Pierre Emonts and Jules Hautecoeur billed the library for 566 photos between
1885 and December 1889. I have looked at the volumes detailing purchases and entries into the collections
of the BHVP from 1906-1950, and Liza Daum, former director of the library’s photo collection has shared
with me the results of her research into the acquisition of photographs prior to 1906. Numbers cited here
come from Daum’s unpublished research. Often photos were neither billed nor entered into the entry
registers, so it is hard to say for sure how many photos the library acquired.

70
Commission municipale du Vieux Paris: Procès-verbaux 1898 (Paris: Imprimerie municipale, 1899), 28.
50
Photography also enjoyed a healthy life as a tool for reproducing other images
and documenting the functions of the library and museum. In 1892 the museum hired
Pierre Emonts, a photographer – not an engraver or a watercolorist – to capture its
exterior, rooms, and displays.
71
Similarly, the library commonly acquired photographs of
paintings or engravings for inclusion in the topography and portrait files.
72
Photography
offered a cheap means of reproducing works from other collections. These quotidian,
prosaic uses of photography as a means of mechanical reproduction speak to how
curators, librarians, and scholars embraced photography for its efficiency as a tool for
historical study at the same time that they rejected it as means of displaying and teaching
history to a wider public.
Photographs thus remained documents of last resort for displaying Paris. No
example better highlights the relative uses of and interplay between photographs and
other types of visual representations than the history of the late nineteenth-century uses of
Fedor Hoffbauer’s watercolors and Charles Marville’s photographs of Paris before
Haussmannization. In the decades after 1860, Hoffbauer’s watercolors formed the basis
for popular public displays of Parisian history, while Marville’s photographs hibernated

71
Emonts was a professional photographer who worked for the city throughout his career. He sold images
to the Musée Carnavalet, the Archives de Paris and the BHVP. He would also become one of the official
photographers of the Commission municipale de Vieux Paris. His photographs of the Musée Carnavalet
were pasted into a large folio album and given to Félix Grélot, Secrétaire général de la Préfecture de la
Seine. Eugène Jean-Napoléon Le Senne, a passionate collector of all things relating to Parisian history,
later acquired the album. His collection, including the volume of photographs of the Carnavalet, was
donated to the Bibliothèque nationale. For more about the Le Senne collection see: Jean-Pierre Seguin, “Le
fonds Le Senne à la Bibliothèque nationale,” Le Bulletin des bibliothèques de France, no. 7 (1970): 343–
371.

72
Paul Lacome described bringing Cousin a photographic reproduction of a painting to include in the
topography file: Lacome, Jules Cousin 1830-1899, 20–21.
51
in municipal estampes collections, used as study tools for scholars but largely unknown
to the wider public.
73

Hoffbauer’s images became wildly known and celebrated. Inspired by his
watercolors from the 1860s, Hoffbauer spent the next two decades using archival
documents and images to painstakingly reconstruct images of Paris at different historical
moments. These became the basis for a series of lithographs that illustrated Paris à
travers les âges, a two-volume collective history, published between 1875 and 1882,
whose texts were written by some of the best-known scholars of Parisian history of the
day including Jules Cousin.
74
Hoffbauer also created eight large-format oil paintings of
Vieux Paris that he displayed as the “Panorama de Vieux Paris” at the Théâtre Marigny
on the Champs Elysées for two years beginning in 1885.
75
Contemporaries raved that the

73
Hoffbauer was so much better know until art historians began writing about Marville in the 1970s that an
American academic writing in the late 1980s reproduced Hoffbauer’s copy of engraver Fortuné Louis
Méaulle’s copy of Marville’s photo of the rue Glatigny, with a caption that identified it simply as
Marville’s photograph of the scene: Robert W. Brown, “Ancien Paris/Vieux Paris: Perceptions of Old Paris
in French Prints and Photographs of the Second Empire,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the
Western Society for French History 15 (1988): 265.

74
Paris à travers les âges. Aspects successifs des monuments et quartiers historiques de Paris depuis le
XIIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours... restitués... par M. F. Hoffbauer,... Texte par MM. Edouard Fournier, Paul
Lacroix, A. de Montaiglon, A. Bonnardot, Jules Cousin, Franklin, Valentin Dufour etc..., 2 vols. (Paris:
Firmin-Didot, 1875). Paris à travers les âges remained a touch-stone reference as late as 1935. In 1922, in
front of the Conseil municipal, Victor Perrot, arguing in favor of establishing an archive to preserve the city
on film referred to Hoffbauer’s Paris à travers les ages as one of the great nineteenth-century attempts to
catalogue the city, with no reference to the fact that many of Hoffbauer’s illustrations were reconstructions.
“Rapport présenté par M. Victor Perrot, au nom de la 3e sous commission, sur l’organisation des Archives
cinématographiques (comme suite au voeu émis par la Commission le 29 mai 1920 et à la délibération du
Conseil municipale du 11 mars 1921),” BMO, May 27, 1922. In 1935, a historian writing in the journal of
the Annales School, wrote that “le texte de cet ouvrage est aujourd'hui à peu près sans valeur, mais les
illustrations et les plans qui y sont joints peuvent encore être examinés avec profit.” A. Jourdan, “La ville
étudiée dans ses quartiers: autour des Halles de Paris au moyen âge,” Annales d’histoire économique et
sociale 7, no. 33 (May 31, 1935): 290.

75
In 1922, the then vice-president of the Commission municipale du Vieux Paris described the panorama:
“si attrayant, si vivant, si évocateur et dont nous ne regretterons jamais trop la ruine.” “Discours prononcés
par M. Le Corbeiller, Vice Président de la Commission et par M. le Docteur Capitan, aux obsèques de M.
52
“living voyage” offered by Hoffbauer’s paintings, each of “an admirable exactness,”
provided a better understanding of Parisian history than any existing textual account.
76

After the panorama closed, the Musée Carnavalet acquired and displayed its paintings.
77

His work made Hoffbauer, the “historian-painter,” a darling of Parisian historical circles,
and his career culminated with his 1912 nomination as a member of the Commission
municipale du Vieux Paris.
78
While Marville continued to work as a little-known
photographer for the city as well as the Louvre, Hoffbauer became a well-respected
member of the community of scholars of Paris.
Hoffbauer’s and Marville’s images were more interconnected than it would seem,
however, and the relationship between them helps illuminate both the role photographs
played in the study of Parisian history and the tensions between the romantic and the
scientific that critics came to see in the photograph itself. Not only did Hoffbauer use
Marville’s photographs as study documents, several of Hoffbauer’s illustrations for Paris

J.-H. Hoffbauer,” Bulletin de la Commission municipale du Vieux Paris, December 16, 1922, 129. For a
contemporary description of the diorama see: Fedor Hoffbauer, Livret explicatif du diorama de Paris à
travers les âges, promenades historiques et archéologiques dans les différents quartiers de l’ancien Paris,
par M. Hoffbauer... (Mesnil: typ. Firmin-Didot, n.d.).

76
“Les Oeuvres et les hommes courrier du théatre, de la littérature et des arts,” Le Correspondant, 1885,
928–929. The exhibition was also glowingly reviewed in: “Compte-Rendu des séances.”

77
According to a 1903 guide to the museum, Hoffbauer’s painting of Paris in 1588 was on display in a
“salle topographique.” Sellier and Dorbec, Guide explicatif du Musée Carnavalet ..., 76.

78
There is very little secondary literature about Hoffbauer. For a very general overview see the preface to
Fedor Hoffbauer, Pascal Payen-Appenzeller, and Cornelis Van Voorthuizen, Paris à travers les âges
(Paris: Editions place des victoires, 2007). Hoffbauer’s career and projects resemble in many ways the
work of illustrator, novelist, and caricaturist Albert Robida who designed the Vieux Paris exhibition at the
1900 Paris Exposition Universelle and wrote and illustrated a history of Paris: Albert Robida, Paris de
siècle en siècle: le coeur de Paris, splendeurs et souvenirs (Paris: A la Librairie illustrée, 1895). For the
“peintre-historien” source: “Compte-Rendu des séances,” 69.
53
à travers les âges are nearly-exact copies of Marville’s photographs.
79
His depiction of
the Marché des Innocents in 1855 before Haussmann turned it into a public square, for
example, is a copy of Marville’s photo of the same scene [fig. 1.5 & 1.6]. Hoffbauer
faithfully transcribed some details, such as the arrangement of cloth awnings, umbrellas,
and figures. But he also idealized Marville’s image and “corrected” its limitations. He
pulled the camera’s perspective back away from the central fountain in order to depict
more of the square’s activity. Hoffbauer also transformed Marville’s blurred black-and-
white figures into colorful and distinct portraits of market sellers, identifiable by their
dress and their wares on display. In one sense, Hoffbauer endowed Marville’s image with
the ability to distinctly capture motion, transforming its long-exposure into a snapshot
before its time. In another sense, Hoffbauer belied the distinction between photographs as
scientific and estampes as romantic and evocative. For what did he do but take details
hinted at and suggested by the photograph, which could only be filled in by the viewer’s
imagination and historical knowledge, and make them precise, explicit, and observable?
Hoffbauer’s transformation of Marville’s photograph suggests how aware people were of
the limitations of photographs.

79
Hoffbauer was not the only one to copy his scenes of Paris from photographs. Marcel Poëte explained in
the introduction to his history of Paris in images: “de même que les premiers livres se présentaient
timidement comme une contrefaçon des manuscrits, de même les photographies ont servi tout d’abord de
base à des gravures.” Poëte cited books whose engravings were “reproduits par le daguerréotype.” He also
recognized renditions of a certain number of photographic views in the work of Adolphe Martial Potémont
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album:xiv, xviii.
54

Fig. 1.5: Hoffbauer’s Marché des Innocents vers 1855.

Fig. 1.6: Marville’s Marché des Innocents vers 1855.

Photographs seemed to inhabit an unstable position between romantic and
scientific history at the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique. Collectors of
historical objects who relished the object’s power to conjure up the past had shaped the
historical museum and library as they opened under the Third Republic. There, they
presented objects and images in order to evoke and reconstruct the past, inducing a sort of
55
historical reverie in their visitors. Cousin and de Liesville and their successors – Lucien
Faucou, Paul Le Vayer, and Georges Cain – built on a long-standing tradition of romantic
historiography that sought to revive the past, creating a direct connection between the
historical object and the viewer’s imagination, as sparked by aesthetic pleasure.
Photography may have produced copies of other romantically evocative images, but the
photograph itself could produce no such delight. Curators and librarians also supported
the study of Paris’s past through scientific observation of evidence found in visual
representations of the city. Many photographs entered the library and museum’s image
study collections as part of this imperative. Yet even though these institutions owned
photographs, they consistently chose to display any and every other type of image first.
Just as nineteenth-century newspaper editors published engravings based on photographs,
rather than photographs themselves (despite the existence of viable technologies to
publish photographs directly), curators and librarians chose to display and publish
Hoffbauer’s illustrations rather than Marville’s photos.
80
Without the personal touch
added by the artist’s rendition, the photograph was too industrial to evoke the past.

Marcel Poëte, the BHVP, and the Photograph between Science and Romance
In the early twentieth century, photography would come to play an increasingly
important role in popular and amateur history at both of the city’s municipal historical

80
Even after it was technically possible to publish photographs, editors often continued to use engravings
made “d’après photographies” instead. For historical studies of illustration that resist technologically
determinist arguments see: Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in
Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Thierry Gervais, “L’Illustration
photographique: naissance du spectacle de l’information (1843-1914)” (Ph.D. Dissertation, L’Ecole des
hautes études en sciences sociales, 2007).

56
institutions, but in particular at the Bibliothèque historique. While the museum and
library may have physically split in 1898, the city’s selection of Marcel Poëte as head of
the Bibliothèque historique in 1906 brought about a sea change in its approach the study
of Paris’s past. Scholars have often credited Poëte with founding the modern discipline of
urbanism in France.
81
But he also made key contributions to the study of Parisian history,
and his real innovation was to recast many existing municipal historical practices in the
still relatively new language of scientific history. In particular, Poëte worked to develop a
science of using images of the city to study the past. His lectures and notes, actions at the
BHVP, and published historical writings betray the belief that images of all types could
teach and entertain audiences as well as archive, reconstruct, evoke, and make arguments
about the past. Furthermore, Poëte was the first Parisian historian, librarian, and photo
collector to articulate and attempt to navigate a tension between science and romance in
the photograph, arguing that as a mechanical form of reproduction, photographs were
more scientific than other documents while also suggesting that photographs could
romantically evoke ghosts of the past.
Under Poëte’s direction, ideas about the scientific study of history influenced
practices at the Bibliothèque historique. Unlike the founders of the Musée Carnavalet and
the Bibliothèque historique, Poëte was not a collector, but an archivist trained at the
Ecole des Chartes. He was first hired at the Bibliothèque historique in 1903 after working

81
For more about Poëte, start with Donatella Calabi’s excellent biography: Donatella Calabi, Marcel Poëte
et le Paris des années vingt: aux origines de “l’histoire des villes” (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). Poëte also
plays an important role in Molly Nesbit’s study of Atget as well as M. Christine Boyer’s study of cities,
architecture, and postmodern memory: Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums; M. Christine Boyer, The City of
Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1994).
57
as an archivist for the city of Bourges (1890-1893) and holding positions as a librarian at
the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (1894) and the municipal library in Besançon
(1894-1903).
82
Poëte’s training at the Ecole des Chartes emphasized the auxiliary
sciences of history: paleography, numismatics, epigraphy, and comparative philology.
83

Many university historians who received the same training evoked their rigorous
methodologies in order to differentiate themselves from an older model of historian who
often paid more attention to style and rhetoric than to primary sources. Poëte, on the other
hand, sought to bring the methods of scientific history to the greater public, making the
Bibliothèque historique a widely-inclusive, yet scientifically-grounded institution for the
study of Parisian history.
84

Poëte’s efforts found a ready audience among the members of numerous amateur
historical associations devoted to the history of Paris. Organized by neighborhood, these
amateur societies, including la Montaigne-St.-Geneviève, le Vieux Montmartre, and la

82
His stint at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève was unpaid. Poëte’s interest in images as historical
documents was evident before he joined the staff of the Bibliothèque historique. While in Besançon he
reorganized and expanded the library’s image collections. Calabi, Marcel Poëte et le Paris des années
vingt, 13–14.

83
The library had a tradition of hiring graduates of the Ecole des Chartes. Paul Le Vayer, who directed the
library before Poëte, also attended the school. Historian William Keylor characterizes the Ecoles des
Chartes as the premier institution of scientific history in the mid-nineteenth century. The school trained a
small numbers of students for careers in the public administration of libraries and archives. Even before
ideas about scientific history influenced reforms within the university system, students at the Ecole des
Chartes received instruction in “paleography, diplomatics, bibliography, and sources criticism,” among
other subjects. Keylor, Academy and Community, 20. For more about the school see: Yves-Marie Bercé,
Olivier Guyotjeannin, and Marc Smith, eds., L’Ecole nationale de chartes: histoire de l’école depuis 1821
(Thionville: Gérard Klopp, 1997); Lara Jennifer Moore, Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the
Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870 (Duluth: Litwin Books, 2008).

84
Keylor explains how “history writing in mid-nineteenth-century France remained an avocation of
amateurs – politicians, lawyers, journalists, clerics and other free lance littérateurs and armchair
philosophes who had neither received formal instruction in the methods of historical scholarship nor
displayed the least inclination to employ such methods in their work.” Keylor, Academy and Community, 2,
27.

58
Société historique d’Auteuil et de Passy met to listen to talks about their areas, go on
guided tours of different sites, collect documentation, and publish bulletins about their
local history.
85
They also mixed scholarship with activism. Like the association La
Société des amis des monuments parisiens (The Society of the Friends of Parisian
Monuments) founded in 1884, they used their knowledge of Parisian history to militate
for the preservation of the architectural fragments of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and
eighteenth-century Paris – “Vieux Paris” – that remained in the city. In 1906, Poëte
suggested that these diverse groups centralize their activities at the Bibliothèque
historique, using the library’s spaces to hold their regular meetings.
86
Even before that,
when Poëte began giving public lectures dedicated to Parisian history in 1903, members
of amateur historical societies formed his regular audience.
At the library and in his lectures, Poëte taught the methods of scientific history to
these amateur historians. In 1904, he reminded them that even “if history is not, properly
speaking, a science, it must at least benefit from scientific processes.”
87
He dedicated the
entire first year of his public lectures about Parisian history, held in 1903, to the method

85
For more on the history of these different groups see: Ruth Fiori, L’Invention du vieux Paris: naissance
d’une conscience patrimoniale dans la capitale (Wavre: Mardaga, 2012). Similar groups formed in Berlin
at the same time: Zelljadt, “History as Past-Time.”

86
Poëte suggested that these amateurs could become “volunteer collaborators” on various projects for the
library. Poëte, Bulletin de la Bibliothèque, I: xxii.

87
Marcel Poëte, “Les Sources de l’histoire de Paris et les historiens de Paris, leçon de réouverture du cours
d’introduction à l’histoire de Paris professé à Bibliothèque de la ville” (Editions de la Revue politique et
littéraire (Revue bleue) et de la Revue scientifique, 1906), 6, BHVP.

59
and sources for studying the French capital’s history.
88
If the Musée Carnavalet’s
displays had suggested the existence of a scientific history of the city, Poëte’s lectures
codified it. He taught the importance of establishing a bibliography as the first step in any
research project.
89
He also emphasized the necessity of distinguishing between types of
sources, ranking them – from archives to fiction – on a scale of reliability. Where they
fell depended upon their respective abilities to divulge historical facts and to evoke
certain intangible elements of the past, such as “a society’s state of mind.”
90
Objects and
images were most valuable in terms of the latter. Borrowing from the practices of
nineteenth-century collectors, Poëte explained that “it is precisely out of the sentiment
that they provoke in us that a fully live impression of the past emerges.”
91
Objects and
images, for Poëte, created an almost magical connection to the viewer’s imagination. His
insistence that such objects and images had a privileged place in modern scientific

88
The first lecture of this course, given on March 2, 1903, was published as: Marcel Poëte, Leçon
d’ouverture du cours d’introduction à l’histoire de Paris, professé à la Bibliothèque de la ville, par Marcel
Poëte (Paris: F. Pichon et Durand-Auzias, 1904). Each subsequent year treated a particular theme.

89
This notion may seem quite straightforward but the science of bibliography emerged as a careful and
logical process in the nineteenth century. Today, while American history Ph.D. students often first establish
a set of research questions, French Ph.D. students compile bibliographies of their intended subjects. Poëte
taught bibliography as “la claire notion de la méthode qui doit présider aux recherches à travers les livres.”
Ibid., 10.

90
Poëte went into detail about the nature of historical sources in the lecture cited here, but he often opened
his lectures and seminars with an abbreviated exposé of the types of historical sources. First came archival
documents or “l’élément impersonnel de l’histoire,” then published chronicles, accounts, and histories that
deliver facts “par un intermédiaire.” Poëte encouraged his students not to neglect literary sources, which in
general he categorized as less reliable but could “nous donn[er] de la société d’autrefois une idée plus juste
que celle que nous pourrions retirer de l’examen des pièces d’archives et de la lecture des chroniques.”
Poëte, “Les Sources de l’histoire de Paris,” 10.

91
Ibid., 13.

60
historical methodologies would set him apart from contemporary university historians
who privileged textual sources.
Contrary to what Poëte’s insistence on training the general public, whom
professional historians barred from their courses, might suggest, he also enjoyed strong
ties with university-based history.
92
Poëte led small technical seminars, attended by
students enrolled at the Ecole normale supérieure, the Ecole des Chartes, and the
Sorbonne.
93
Beginning in 1914, he also held the chair of Parisian and city history at the
Ecole pratique des hautes études, the section of the Sorbonne dedicated to the new
methods of scientific history. Ultimately, however, Poëte’s ideas about how to study the
city’s past – particularly as they crystalized around the study of images – divided him
from the contemporary historical profession.
Marcel Poëte and his contemporaries fundamentally disagreed about the role of
description in the study of history. Drawing on ideas that had developed at the Musée
Carnavalet and Bibliothèque historique before his tenure there, Poëte increasingly
thought that city history demanded a separate methodology based on the observation of
its present shape and images of it in the past in order to reconstruct its historical physical

92
Keylor describes the institution of a new model of historical scholarship, based on the German model, in
the first decades of the Third Republic. Professors at the Sorbonne, the Ecole normale supérieure, and the
Ecole pratique des hautes études taught this new model. As part of their reforms they barred non-students
from attending their lectures. Keylor, Academy and Community, 72.

93
The seminars were often dedicated to the same theme as the larger lecture courses, but they were limited
to a small number of students, and intended to work within the framework of the formal training students
received at their respective institutions. The library’s 1909 bulletin contains a list of the seminar’s attendees
from 1907-1908 and 1908-1909: Marcel Poëte, ed., Bulletin de la Bibliothèque et des Travaux historiques:,
vol. IV (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1909), xlii–xliv.
61
form. In 1925, he characterized city history as “essentially a science of observation.”
94
In
contrast, almost twenty years earlier historians Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles
Seignobos, whose historical methodology shaped the training students received at
France’s premiere institutions of historical study, had declared that history “is not at all,
whatever one might say of it, a science of observation.”
95
Poëte, who taught his students
that images offered the opportunity “if not to reconstruct [the past], at least to glimpse it,”
must have bristled at Langlois and Seignobos’s warning that “in history, one sees nothing
but writing on paper – and the occasional monument or the product of manufacture.”
96

Langlois and Seignobos believed that historians never had exact representations of events
at their disposal. Rather they must always work with documents of a secondary order that
necessitated analysis and interpretation not observation.
97
Poëte, on the other hand,
believed that the sum total of “occasional monument[s]” could form the basis for
historical analysis of the city.
Defying the decidedly anti-ocular vein in contemporary historical practice and
training, throughout his career Poëte privileged observation as the basis of urban history

94
Marcel Poëte, Une Vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours, I, vol. I, La Jeunesse: des origines aux
temps modernes (Paris: A. Picard, 1924), iii.

95
Ch.-V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris: Hachette, 1898), 44.
Donatella Calabi has traced an intellectual divide between Poëte and the members of the Annales School,
but this evidence suggests that the split between Poëte and much of the historical profession has much
earlier roots.

96
Poëte, Leçon d’ouverture, 15. Langlois and Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques, 185–186.

97
Langlois and Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques, 44–46. Their hostility to the past as an
observable phenomenon and characterization of observation as fundamentally opposed to analysis supports
historian Martin Jay’s argument about the anti-ocular tradition of modern French thought: Jay, Downcast
Eyes.

62
and the image’s utility to it. Influenced by the ideas of Henri Bergson, Poëte approached
the city as a living organism whose life-stages could be carefully observed.
98
Betraying
the influence of nineteenth-century ideas about scientific history as they had developed at
the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique, Poëte sought these life-stages in
pictures of them. Reconstructing the city of the past then allowed the historian to make
certain inferences about corresponding urban society, culture, or economics.
99

Observation and description led to analysis. While Poëte thus continued many of the uses
of images developed at the Musée Carnavalet and Bibliothèque historique, using images
to teach history to a mass audience, he also used them to train specialists and make
scholarly arguments.
Poëte, like his predecessors, endorsed the use of images to entertain visitors,
readers, and the audiences of his lectures. He fully admitted that, at times, images’
primary function might be to entertain – or “charm,” as critics of the Musée Carnavalet
had described – readers and viewers. Poëte proposed the inclusion of portraits of famous
Parisians in the library’s published catalogues so that “several illustrated plates come
along to rest the researcher.”
100
According to newspapers and amateur historical

98
Scholars agree that Henri Bergson influenced Poëte’s ideas about the city as a living organism. For an
explanation of this influence see: Diana Periton, “Generative History: Marcel Poëte and the City as Urban
Organism,” The Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (September 2006): 425–439; Charissa N. Terranova,
“Marcel Poëte’s Bergsonian Urbanism: Vitalism, Time, and the City,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 6
(2008): 919–943.

99
Poëte explains how this works in the introduction to Poëte, Une vie de cité, I:, La Jeunesse: des origines
aux temps modernes:.

100
Poëte, Bulletin de la Bibliothèque, I:xii.

63
societies’ publications, lantern slide projections helped draw audiences to Poëte’s public
lectures.
101

Images functioned as a primary means of educating the Parisian public. Between
1903 and 1913 the Bibliothèque historique organized a series of exhibitions about
Parisian history including “Paris during the Romantic Period,” “Paris in 1848,” and “The
Transformation of Paris under the Second Empire.” Poëte explained in 1906 that these
exhibitions, like the displays at the Musée Carnavalet, “aim[ed] […] for a lesson of
objects or for visual teaching.”
102
According to logs kept by the library, the exhibitions
drew several thousand visitors each, with the most – 6,180 – attending the 1908
exhibition about Paris during the romantic period (1822-1842), which ran from June 21 to
October 4.
103
Critics and journalists across the political spectrum urged Parisians to
attend Poëte’s exhibitions and praised him and his efforts to make good history available

101
Poëte amassed a very large collection of lantern slides (reproductions of maps, estampes, paintings, and
photographs) to illustrate his lectures and seminars. These slides currently reside in the office of Carole
Gascard, the head photo curator at the Bibliothèque historique. By 1912 alone, Poëte estimated that he had
20,000 slides. Marcel Poëte, “Letter to Victor Perrot”, February 14, 1912, Fonds Victor Perrot,
Bibliothèque du film, Cinémathèque française. Recent scholarship has investigated the role of the lantern
slide in shaping the disciplinary concerns of art history and geography as well as in the formation of place
identities. See for example: Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 414–434; Felix Driver, “On
Geography as a Visual Discipline,” Antipode 35, no. 2 (March 2003): 227–231.

102
He explained that “visual teaching” could be achieved through a combination of “un choix restreint de
pièces groupées aussi méthodiquement que possible, accompagnées chacune d’une étiquette explicative et
présentées par le moyen d’une notice synthétique distribuée gratuitement.” Poëte, Bulletin de la
Bibliothèque, IV: xxviii.

103
“Visitor statistics,” Carton 3574W 101, Archives de Paris. Reports in the library’s bulletins offer
significantly higher numbers. For example, the 1909 bulletin claimed that approximately 12,000 had visited
“Paris au temps des romantiques.” Group visits, which may have been counted separately from regular
visitor logs, maybe account for the disparity between the numbers. Or, the staff simply inflated them. Poëte,
Bulletin de la Bibliothèque, IV: xxix.

64
to the masses.
104
Even a journalist writing in the New-York Tribune deemed the 1908
exhibition “well worth a visit.”
105
Art critic Arsène Alexandre argued that Poëte’s
exhibition about Haussmann’s transformation of Paris was a must-see because it would
provide better understanding of contemporary urban renovation projects.
106

When Poëte and his staff used images to teach history to a larger public, they did
so with rigor and attention to issues of the specificity of visual representations. In part,
the exhibitions provided an opportunity to display the riches of the library’s own
collections – and so placed emphasis on the material nature of the objects and images
displayed, not just the subjects depicted. The 1907 exhibition, “Working-class life in
Paris from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries” emphasized not just what everyday life
had been like in Paris during those centuries, but the evolution of its representations in
books and illustrations. This emphasis highlights the fact that Poëte saw old pictures as
more than transparent windows onto the past. He understood them as documents not only
of what they depicted but also of the aesthetic forms those depictions took. The
exhibition’s displays offered comparative views of different aspects and figures of
popular culture, laying out successive depictions of the same aspects in illustrated books
side-by-side. Etienne Charles, one of the library’s employees, explained in the newspaper
La Libérté that the exhibition demonstrated how “[graphic] documents […] often inform

104
They praised Poëte’s enthusiasm for “vulgarisation.” Claudien Ferrier, “Le vieux Paris en images,” La
Liberté, June 19, 1908; Nicolas Houel, “Les Images de Paris au temps des romantiques,” L’Action
française, June 25, 1908. Press clippings are from the Actualités archive at the BHVP.

105
“Romantic Paris,” New-York Tribune, August 16, 1908. An English journalist promised that his fellow
nationals would find “Dicken’s Paris” in this most recent edition of the municipal library’s “modest but
curiously interesting exhibitions.” “Dicken’s Paris,” T.P.’s Weekly, July 17, 1908.

106
Arsène Alexandre, “L’hier et le demain de Paris,” Comoedia, September 15, 1910.
65
us better and more exactly about life and habits than books and […] in any case have a
power of evocation that books hardly possess.”
107
Critics praised the exhibition for
contributing to knowledge of everyday life and habits and to the greater public’s
appreciation for the possibilities of using visual sources to study Parisian history.
Unlike the Musée Carnavalet’s displays, those of the Bibliothèque historique
showed a distinct attention to what types of images they used, relying heavily on
photographs as the most reliable documents. Critics routinely remarked on the vast
quantity of photos and daguerreotypes that Poëte included in his exhibitions. In fact,
unlike his predecessors, Poëte chose to include photographs instead of estampes
whenever possible. For example, in his 1910 exhibition about the Second Empire’s
renovations of Paris, Poëte relied on lesser-known photographs taken by Marville and
Richebourg instead of Hoffbauer’s well-respected reconstructions.
108
His use of
photographs demonstrates an emerging interest in them as eyewitnesses to history, and
critics routinely remarked upon the value of their inclusion. In particular, a photograph of
an 1845 daguerreotype depicting King Louis-Philippe and displayed in “Paris in 1848”
delighted journalists. One remarked that artists often flattered their subjects, but the
camera had “ruthlessly absorbed the image of the citizen king; it captured him

107
Etienne Charles, “Paris à Saint-Fargeau,” La Liberté, June 4, 1907.

108
Poëte never mentioned Hoffbauer’s reconstructions (nor Robida’s equally popular works) in his notes,
published books, or exhibitions.

66
faithfully.”
109
Poëte, his staff, and contemporary critics seemed to reach consensus about
the value of photographic documentation of the past.
Under Poëte’s direction, the library’s collecting policies also increasingly
emphasized the photograph’s utility as a study document for scholars. Although Poëte
made much of his reorganization of the library’s services when he took over its direction
in 1906, he did not radically alter the types of objects that the library collected.
110
He
inherited an already rich collection of photographs, many of which dated from well
before the library’s separate establishment in 1898. Poëte did, however, make certain
changes to the collections, starting with cataloguing the photographs by subject matter in
order to facilitate scholars’ use of them. And he suggested that Paris’s municipal
historical institutions should collect photographs as documents of contemporary life for
future historians.
In some ways, photographs entered the collections of the Biblithèque historique
much as they had at the Musée Carnavalet, because they were the default means of

109
“La Photographie de Louis-Philippe,” L’Eclair, July 22, 1909. The newspaper even published a copy of
the photo in question so that its readers could see the “air de dignité, - un soupçon bourgeoise” of the
“Bourgeois Monarch.”

110
When Poëte launched his reforms in 1906, he made much of the fact that the library would collect a
variety of sources for the study of Parisian history from books, periodicals, and manuscripts to maps,
estampes, photographs, and assorted ephemera such as menus, playbills, and “tous ces riens appelés à
devenir des documents historiques au même titre qu’un vénérable parchemin.” Poëte, Bulletin de la
Bibliothèque, I:xiv. But these efforts simply built upon existing collections of newspaper clippings,
estampes, and photographs as well as books. Alfred de Liesville, after all, had already remarked upon the
birth of “a whole new ‘archaeology’” in the nineteenth century, “one that would treat the ‘newspapers,
memoirs, songs, images, caricatures, coins’ of the modern world as seriously as it studied the fragments
and vestiges of antiquity.” R. de Liesville, Histoire numismatique de la Révolution de 1848, ou description
raisonné des médailles, monnaies, jetons, repoussées etc. relatifs aux affaires de la France (Paris, 1877),
pp. vii–viii. Poëte did not, as Molly Nesbit has claimed, start the topography file there in 1898, five years
before his arrival. Nor did he instigate photo collecting upon his actual arrival date in 1903, as Calabi has
credited him with doing. Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 65; Calabi, Marcel Poëte et le Paris des années
vingt, 92.
67
reproducing other images. Poëte’s lantern slides were none other than photographs of a
variety of types of documents, including other photo. Photographic reproductions allowed
the library to acquire copies of certain rare documents. Poëte also hoped to protect the
fragile originals the library did own by making photographic reproductions of them
available to researchers. He must have been inspired in this vein by the reprints of
Marville’s negatives that photographer Pierre Emonts had done for the library around
1900.
111
Emonts had made prints that the public could consult freely without worrying
about damaging Marville’s fragile glass plates. Photographs also allowed reproductions
of the library’s documents to circulate all over the world. Throughout the first decades of
the twentieth century, journalists, individuals, and representatives of historical societies
wrote to the library requesting copies of documents, maps, and estampes in its
holdings.
112
The library already relied so heavily on photographic reproductions in 1906
that Poëte proposed the construction of a darkroom in its basement.
113
Such uses of

111
The existence of these reprints also testifies to the increasing popularity and use of Marville’s
photographs among researchers. The library would not have reprinted them if no one consulted them. Marie
de Thézy, “Les Photographies anciennes et modernes,” in Bulletin de la bibliothèque et des travaux
historiques: XI Les collections photographiques de la Bibliothèque historique (Paris: Mairie de Paris,
1986), 10. A. Séeberger printed the negatives again in 1978. The tradition of making copies available to a
wide audience continues today. In 2011 the library placed binders containing duplicates of photographs on
the shelves of its reading room, and it is slowly making its photo collections available online.

112
These letters are from publications such as L’Auto and historical associations including la Société
archéologique, historique, & artistique du vieux papier. “Correspondence”, n.d., 3574W 51, Archives de
Paris. At the same time that the BHVP used photographs to disseminate images, others became increasingly
interested in the possibilities of photography for storing and disseminating books and manuscripts: Robert
Goldschmidt and Paul Otlet, Sur une forme nouvelle du livre: le livre microphotographique (Bruxelles:
Institut international de bibliographie, 1906).

113
Conveniently, one of the library’s “gardiens surveillants” was also a photographer. Poëte, Bulletin de la
Bibliothèque, I:xvi–xvii.

68
photography suggest its solid place as an important scientific tool for the study and
dissemination of history.
But the photograph had become much more than a document for reproducing
documents; it also played an important role at the Bibliothèque historique as a document
of Paris and its past. Marcel Poëte and Edmond Beaurepaire, who oversaw the photo
collection, continued to purchase photographs of old streets, buildings, and architectural
details, much as his predecessors had done.
114
In 1907, Poëte also obtained director of the
Musée Carnavalet Georges Cain’s agreement to send the library a copy of each
photograph deposited at the museum by the Commission municipale du vieux Paris.
115

With these purchases and donations, the Bibliothèque historique accumulated a vast
photographic archive of the traces of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century
Paris. These “remaining traces of the past,” as Poëte explained, allowed for the “direct
observation” of previous eras that lay at the heart of rigorous urban historical inquiry.
116

Photographs of staircase railings and building entries thus served as documents of the
objects depicted, which in turn, spoke to the eras of their construction [fig. 1.7 & 1.8].
The photograph’s ability to render exact copies of objects caused Poëte to laud it in 1908
as the “the veritable document in the rigorous sense of the word!”
117
Scholars have
argued that Poëte’s appreciate of photography’s role as a scientific means of

114
The entry registries show that the library purchased photos from photographers and collectors.

115
Cain confirmed this promise in Georges Cain, “Letter to Marcel Poëte”, November 4, 1907, 3574W 51,
Archives de Paris.

116
Poëte, Une vie de cité, I:, La Jeunesse: des origines aux temps modernes:vi.

117
Marcel Poëte, “Papiers Poëte, VOL 144”, n.d., 368, BHVP.

69
documentation caused him to collect photos of architectural details at the expense of
images of everyday life in the early twentieth century.
118
But while photographs certainly
fit into scientific ideas of documentation at the Bibliothèque, Poëte also collected and
embraced them as romantic and evocative documents of life in the city.

Fig. 1.7: Eugène Atget, Hôtel de Gourgues,
1912 (BHVP).

Fig. 1.8: Eugène Atget, Hôtel de Gourgues,
1912 (BHVP).

Poëte recognized the limitations of old photographs to act as documents of
everyday life. During the same 1908 lecture, Poëte complained that although the
photograph was “the document par excellence” it was also often “a document of cold
appearance […] that needs to be brought to life: it gives the setting of the scene, but it is a
scene where the great drama of life does not play out.”
119
Poëte explained that only
engravings or drawings could bring certain aspects of the past to life. They provided a

118
Molly Nesbit has charged that Poëte ignored aspects of everyday life in Atget’s photographs and
rejected any artistic interpretation of them, seeking only, precise, clear details that would allow for what she
terms “nonvisual analysis” of artifacts from the past. Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 68. Most historians in
turn assume that library only collected these types of documents.

119
Poëte, “Papiers Poëte, vol 144,” 368.

70
“better […] image of Paris, at least our Paris, the one that we make for ourselves.”
120

Poëte’s explanation of the limitations of photographs did not stem from a categorical
understanding of photography as industrial and thus incapable of accessing the viewer’s
imagination. In this case, he simply responded to the inability of the photographs in
question – which date from the 1840s – to capture human activity and motion.
Poëte was convinced that photographs – not engravings or lithographs – would
function as documents of contemporary everyday life for future historians. Throughout
his tenure, the Bibliothèque historique also collected photographs as documents of
twentieth-century Paris. After the disastrous winter of 1910 during which the city
experienced record flooding, the library purchased thousands of photo, both prints and
postcards, of the city under water.
121
Journalist Henri Lavergne, writing shortly
thereafter, commended Poëte’s purchase, evidence of his realization that “the
photographic document […] today belongs to history.”
122
Thanks to Poëte’s purchase,
Lavergne declared: “we can say that our successors, nephews, great-nephews, and great-
great-nephews will be all the more knowledgeable about the life that Parisians led in the
lamentable year 1910.”
123
Lavergne worried that photographs, unlike engravings, would

120
Ibid.

121
Historian Jeffrey Jackson has written extensively about the Paris flood of 1910 as well as the
photographs of it, using, in large part, the photographic collections of the Bibliothèque historique: Jeffrey
H. Jackson, Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); “Envisioning Disaster in the 1910 Paris Flood,” Journal of Urban History 37,
no. 2 (March 2011): 176–207.

122
Lavergne, “L’Histoire de demain.” What is curious about Lavergne’s description of Poëte’s acquisition
is that he credits this as the first purchase of Poëte’s “musée de photographies.” He disregards the existence
of large numbers of photographs already in the collections of the Bibliothèque historique.

123
Ibid.
71
fade with time, but if they lasted, he imagined that they would revolutionize the study of
history, rendering other types of historical sources – bronzes, marble statuary, and even
written accounts – obsolete. And yet, he complained, too few people and institutions
realized the importance of collecting contemporary photos. This lack of foresight would
deprive future historians of valuable documents. A number of contemporary projects to
preserve the uniquely modern historical record echoed Lavergne’s concerns.
Indeed Poëte supported one such ambitious project to document Paris on film. In
1912, he promised municipal councilor Victor Perrot his help to create a cinematic
archive of Paris and its past.
124
Perrot’s project responded to the complete absence of
contemporary film preservation efforts. Neither the film studios nor the Bibliothèque
nationale, the great bastion of the “dépôt légal,” developed in order to preserve copies of
all materials published in France, preserved copies of French films.
125
Perrot joined a
series of French officials who, since the end of the nineteenth century, had declared this
oversight a travesty and sought to create a film archive.
126
That these efforts should

124
Poëte reminded Perrot “vous savez combien je me rallie à cette idée” in a 1912 letter: Poëte, “Letter to
Victor Perrot.”

125
Storing film in those days was not only expensive, but dangerous. Before the wide-scale implementation
of safety-stock (by the 1950s), film was printed on nitrate stock, which was highly flammable and caused a
series of disastrous theater and exhibition space fires. The most famous in France was the 1897 fire at the
Bazar de la Charité in Paris. For more about the history of the dépôt légal see: Henri Lemaître, Histoire du
dépôt légal: 1re partie France (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1910); Jacques Gana, Organisation et
fonctionnement du dépot légal audiovisuel en France (Villeurbanne: Ecole nationale superieure des
bibliothèques, 1982) as well as the discussion of how Disdéri’s cartes-de-visite came to be archived in
Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985). For more about film fires in France see: Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town:
French Cinema, 1896-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 17–18; Venita Datta, Heroes
and Legends of Fin-de-Siècle France: Gender, Politics, and National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).

126
In a report to the Municipal Council in 1921, Perrot outlined the history of this project: “Rapport sur la
conservation des films cinématographiques intéressant l’histoire de Paris et du département de la Seine
72
concentrate on archiving not just anything, but specifically the history of Paris, speaks to
the existence of a strong documentary impulse trained on the history of the capital. After
Poëte invited Perrot to the library in 1912, the Société des amis de la bibliothèque
historique rallied to the idea, and Poëte proposed that the library house the cinema
archives.
127
The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 disrupted the project, but Poëte
reassured Perrot in 1918 of his continued support.
128
While the Cinémathèque de la Ville
de Paris eventually did open in 1926 it did so as a different institution, geared more
towards cinematic pedagogy than the preservation of history.
129
Its realization as a
historical archive of Paris, stored at the Bibliothèque historique had stalled, largely due to
concerns about the safety of storing so much film stock in the center of Paris.
130

présenté, au nom de la 3e Sous-Commission, par M. Victor Perrot,” Le Courrier cinématographique,
February 8, 1921.

127
Poëte, “Letter to Victor Perrot”; “Rapport sur la conservation des films cinématographiques intéressant
l’histoire de Paris et du département de la Seine présenté, au nom de la 3e Sous-Commission, par M. Victor
Perrot.”

128
Marcel Poëte, “Letter to Victor Perrot”, June 3, 1918, Fonds Victor Perrot, Bibliothèque du film,
Cinémathèque française.

129
For more about the eventual establishment of the Cinémathèque de la Ville de Paris see: Béatrice De
Pastre, “Une archive dédiée à la pédagogie du cinéma,” 1895: bulletin de l’Association française de
recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, no. 41 (October 2003): 177–186; Béatrice De Pastre-Robert, “Enfer,
amnésie, rédemption: une histoire du fonds de la cinémathèque scolaire Robert-Lynen,” in Cinéma
pédagogique et scientifique: à la redécouverte des archives, ed. Béatrice De Pastre-Robert, Monique
Dubost, and Françoise Massit-Folléa (Lyon: ENS éd., 2004), 45–58; Béatrice De Pastre, “Créer des
archives cinématographiques à Paris. L’oubli du père ou les héritiers parisiens de Boleslas Matuszewski,”
in Ecrits cinématographiques (Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2006),
67–85.

130
Indeed in 1918 Poëte asked Perrot: “D’autre part, y a t il des modes spéciaux de conservation à adopter,
ou suffit-il de les conserver chacun dans sa boite métallique, dans des rayonnages de bibliothèque? N’y a t
il aucun danger d’incendie?” Poëte, “Letter to Victor Perrot.” For a discussion of the complications of
stockpiling film in Paris see Chapter 4 of: Brian R. Jacobson, “Studios Before the System: Architecture,
Technology, and Early Cinema” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2011).
73
While waiting to find a solution to the problem of archiving Paris on film, Poëte
continued to collect photographs documenting the contemporary city. During the First
World War, the library purchased a series of over 1,000 photos from photographer
Charles Lansiaux.
131
The photographs included two general categories: a series
documenting industry along the city’s northern canals and, as identified in the library’s
registers, a series of “aspects” et “scenes of life” in “contemporary Paris.” These photos
document a variety of wartime scenes including the influx of barges on the canal, French
families seeing young men off at train stations, the posters that disseminated news around
the city, the arrival of refugees at train stations, the looting of German-owned businesses,
Parisians fleeing to the relative safety of the provinces, and the closing of Paris’s gates in
preparation for a possible siege [figs 1.9 & 1.10]. Lansiaux’s photographs, especially
those taken in 1914 that express the excitement of war, do seem capable of sparking the
emotional reaction in the viewer that Poëte believed lay at the heart of the image’s power
as a historical document. Along with the Paris flood photographs, they prove Poëte’s
interest in documenting everyday life in Paris.

131
Numbers and purchase dates are from the registre d’entrées de la Bibliothèque historique. In 1919-1920,
Lansiaux would complete a series of photos of the city’s soon-to-be-destroyed fortified walls for the
Commission muncipale de Vieux Paris.
74

Fig. 1.9: Charles Lansiaux, Parisians fleeing the
city, 1914 (BHVP)

Fig. 1.10: Charles Lansiaux, Italian refugees
arriving at the Gare de Lyon, 1914 (BHVP)

The purchase of Lansiaux’s World War I photographs also challenges the
distinction that Poëte himself made throughout his career between estampes and
photographs. In 1908, Poëte reminded his audience at the Bibliothèque historique that
“artists or authors show us the city as they saw it within themselves.”
132
In 1925, he
complained that photographs lacked this “particular note.”
133
But the Lansiaux
photographs belie Poëte’s assertion that the industrial and scientific process of
photography dispensed with the author’s interpretation. As curators at the Bibliothèque
historique noted in the 1980s, Lansiaux staged many of his photographs. They show the
same people, presumably Lansiaux’s friends and acquaintances engaged in a variety of
wartime activities.
134
How could these photographs offer “purely material [evidence]” of
the city, when Lansiaux placed and instructed their subjects in order to capture scenes

132
Poëte, “Papiers Poëte, vol 144,” 361.

133
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album:xxi.

134
Catherine Floc’lhay, “Un fonds récemment inventorié: La collection Lansiaux sur la guerre 1914-1918,”
in Bulletin de la bibliothéque et des travaux historiques: XI Les collections photographiques de la
Bibliothèque historique (Paris: Mairie de Paris, 1986), 32–33.
75
that he understood as representative of the current era?
135
As much as Poëte embraced the
idea that photographs would become the privileged historical documents of the future, he
only reluctantly embraced the photograph’s double role as both a material and direct
artifact of the past and a visual and artistic representation.
The foundations for Marcel Poëte’s ideas about the image’s place in historical
method and research took root early in his career. While in 1903 he ranked the image as
the least reliable type of source, in 1925 he authored a history of Paris in images –
recounting over 2000 years of history with and from visual representations of the city and
its people. But as much as Poëte frequently turned to estampes as documents of the city
of the past, he embraced photographs as documents of the city of his day. His embrace of
modern image-making technologies drove him not only to collect photographs, but also
to translate his ideas about the historical evolution of Paris onto film.
136
Thus while Poëte
may not have initiated photo collecting at the library, he did expand it by implementing
the idea that photography could not only create an archive of architectural traces of the
past, but could also create a historical record of the present.

****
In the same 1910 article that commended Marcel Poëte for purchasing 4,000
photographs of the recent Paris flood, journalist Henri Lavergne declared the photograph:

135
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album:xviii.

136
Poëte made one film about Paris in 1935 and planned another that was never actually made. His film is
viewable at the Forum des Images in Paris: Etienne de Lallier, Pour mieux comprendre Paris, 35mm noir et
blanc sonore, 1935.
76
“the most perfect witness, the one that does not lie, that cannot lie.”
137
With this
statement he encapsulated the idea that photographs provided mechanical and objective
traces of the things they depicted including other documents and estampes as well as
buildings and city streets. While the photograph’s use as a document of what it showed
shaped the first decades of its employment as a historical document, historians, curators,
and critics would increasingly turn to photographs as documents of what they evoked in
the viewer’s mind.
Beginning in the 1920s, historians, curators, and critics came to understood
photographs as evocative historical documents in their own right. Marcel Poëte, in his
1925 history of Paris in images declared that photographs embodied “perfect precision,”
while also suggesting how even precise photographs of architecture could bring people of
the past to life. Poëte offered a romantic description of what he saw when he looked at
Charles Marville and Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg’s Second Empire photographs:
the streets seem hoary with age, offering corners conducive to open-air chats and
seem to harmonize themselves to the rhythm of an old city that keeps slow time:
among the hodgepodge of dwellings, artistic jewels brightly sparkle here and
there; then, the deep grave of the past is dug, the ground heaves up, in the midst of
demolition, slices of houses rise up like skeletons.
138

He describes photographs populated by ghosts and skeletons, traces into which the reader
could project life. Photographs finally had joined estampes and paintings in allowing
Poëte to imagine Paris as it used to be. And yet even before this point, photography’s

137
Lavergne, “L’Histoire de demain.”

138
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album:xx.
77
profound influence on other image-making technologies had ensured that it already
shaped how Poëte and others saw the Parisian past in images.
By the time Poëte wrote, photography had become essential to the production of
all types of historical pictures. Because of its precise and industrial nature, photography
seemed to many contemporaries to operate in a register apart. Its precision and ability to
capture a scene in a single instant, however, had already ensured that photos played a
fundamental role in the creation of the types of hand-drawn images that contemporaries
believed to spark the historical imagination. Late nineteenth-century Parisians may not
have consumed large numbers of photographs in exhibitions or books about the history of
Paris, but they did look at copies of these images made by artists such as Fortuné Luis
Méaulle and Fedor Hoffbauer. Moreover, the aesthetic style of photographs influenced
how artists rendered scenes of contemporary Paris. Although Hoffbauer invented rich
colors for his scenes of the Parisian past, as for example in his copy of Charles Marville’s
1855 photograph of the Marché des Innocents [fig. 1.5], he executed almost ever view of
contemporary Paris in faded sepia tones [fig. 1.11]. By eschewing the vibrant colors he
had added to views of the past, Hoffbauer seemed to borrow the camera’s documentary
authority for his own images. Even before photographs appeared on the walls and in the
display cases of Paris’s historical museum, then, they had changed how Parisians
conceived of history and its visual documentation.
78

Fig. 1.11: The washed out colors of views of contemporary Paris.
Féodor Hoffbauer, Square du Temple 1881, Paris à travers les ages.

In the decades that followed, even though historians started to prefer photographs
to other types of documents depicting the same places and scenes, the Bibliothèque
historique and the Musée Carnavalet slowly stopped collecting them. This change in
collecting practices does not, however, indicate the end of curators, archivists, and
historians’ investment in the value of photographs as historical documents.
139
Rather, it
indicates the exact opposite: photographs of Paris had become so common in published
sources that libraries and archives no longer had to purchase prints directly from
photographers. The library’s acquisition of photographic prints tapered off in the 1920s
because photographically-illustrated books offered a cheap and easy means of acquiring

139
Scholars have charged that the Bibliothèque historique stopped collecting photographs because Poëte’s
interests shifted from the specific study of Parisian history to broader ideas and methods of urbanism and
urban planning: Calabi, Marcel Poëte et le Paris des années vingt; Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 71. Even
as this happened – and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris became the Institut d’histoire, de
géographie et d’économie urbaines de la Ville de Paris – Poëte continued to include a line for the
acquisition of photographs in his yearly budget: Documents relating to the budget of the Bibliothèque
historique contained in “Projets de budgets et feuilles de compte: 1899-1909, 1910-1939”, n.d., 3574W
8&9, Archives de Paris.

79
pictures of the city.
140
As curators and librarians purchased illustrated books, publishers’
ideas about the function and purpose of photographs for history came to shape the content
of the collections at the Bibliothèque historique and the Musée Carnavalet.
In the first decades of the twentieth century photography became the dominant
form of illustration in published histories of Paris, realizing Henri Lavergne’s prediction
that “photography [would be] the history of the future.”
141
Their production speaks to the
influence of the publishing industry not only on the collections of the Bibliothèque
historique and the Musée Carnavalet but also to the ideas of their employees, who
authored many of these volumes. These books demonstrate a fundamental shift in the
relationship between photographs and estampes: instead of estampes reproducing
photographs, photographs now reproduced copies of estampes. Combining views of the
contemporary city with old snapshots, a new generation of authors, publishers, and critics
began to find not only objective documentation of the city but also subjective connections
to the past in photographs.

140
Head photo curator at the Musée Carnavalet Françoise Reynaud credits the increasing numbers of
illustrated publications that researchers had at their disposal and the development of new photographic
archives, such as photo agencies, with making municipal photo archives obsolete. Françoise Reynaud, “Le
musée Carnavalet et la photographie,” in Portraits d’une capitale de Daguerre à William Klein:
Collections photographiques du musée Carnavalet (Paris: Paris Musées/Paris Audiovisuel, 1992), 12.

141
Lavergne, “L’Histoire de demain.”

80
Chapter 2

Photographically-Illustrated Histories of Paris:
A Proliferation of New Forms

Our fathers who only had miniatures or paintings, just ‘works of art,’ to
reconstruct the past did not know the photographic or cinematographic
document’s painful intensity. The sheer number of them, their relentlessness,
changes the quality of our dreams, terrifies our mind.
--Louis Chéronnet
1

Fig. 2.1: Roger Schall,
la place de la Concorde,
Paris de jour, 1937.
Fig. 2.2: Roger Schall,
la place de la Concorde,
Paris de jour, 1937.
Fig. 2.3: Roger Schall,
la place de la Concorde,
Paris de jour, 1937.

In his preface to the 1937 photo book Paris de Jour, Jean Cocteau mocks much of
what those who love Paris and Parisian history hold dear. Tongue-in-cheek, he describes
Paris as “naïve and simple” and “so familiar it is annoying, built on a human scale which
draws its creative resources from a considerable pile of manure.”
23
Cocteau contests the

1
Louis Chéronnet, A Paris ... vers 1900, Découverte du monde (Paris: Éditions des Chroniques du jour,
1932), 9.

2
Even foreigners, Cocteau contends, “make fun of Vieux Paris.” Roger Schall and Jean Cocteau, Paris de
jour: soixante-deux photographies de Schall (Paris: Editions “Arts et Métiers Graphiques,” 1937), np.

81
city’s reputed splendor, claiming Paris is beautiful only early in the morning or late at
night. These words preface a series of photographs of “Paris by day,” taken by press
photographer Roger Schall. Schall’s pictures also play with the city’s reputation and
monuments, such as the Place de la Concorde, where in Cocteau’s words, “this manure
pile blossoms.”
4
One image shows the square cropped to a hardly recognizable sidewalk
and line of lampposts [fig. 2.1]. In another, a pair of horse statues (rear-end to the viewer)
disrupts the famous façade of the Hotel Crillon [fig. 2.2]. And in a third, Schall has
decapitated the square’s central obelisk in order to frame its wobbly reflection in the wet
pavement below [fig. 2.3]. Cocteau’s words and Schall’s photographs parody a set of
assumptions about Paris, especially its picturesque monuments, and the seemingly
obvious value of preserving its past. Cocteau and Schall played with the very conventions
of picturing Paris that had, in part, developed within four decades of similar
photographically-illustrated books about the city. In the first decades of the twentieth
century, photographs left archives and study collections en masse to come into public
focus in the pages of a profusion of books published about Parisian history.
This chapter analyzes photographically-illustrated histories – or photohistories –
as a genre, tracing how they developed and changed over the course of the twentieth
century’s first decades. Photohistories contain photographs as well as texts that narrate
Parisian life and history. Until now, historians have used this genre unselfconsciously,
and art historians have almost entirely ignored it. Historians often turn to photohistories

3
Ibid.

4
Ibid.

82
of Paris as primary or secondary sources, but they cite the books’ texts without
acknowledging their illustrations.
5
More interested in reconstructing individual oeuvres,
art historians generally pass over photohistories in favor of artists’ photo books, “book[s]
– with or without text – where the work’s primary message is carried by photographs,”
such as Brassaï’s 1933 Paris de Nuit and André Kertész’s 1934 Paris vu par André
Kertész.
6
The history of collecting and producing photographic documentation of Paris in
the twentieth century, however, would be incomplete without an analysis of
photographically-illustrated histories. Because of the changing market for photographs in
France, the acquisition of photohistories and photo books replaced the collection of prints
at Paris’s municipal historical archives. The illustrations in these books thus became the
images of the city archived for future historians.
This chapter argues that the relationship between photographs and other types of
pictures in twentieth-century photohistories reversed the nineteenth-century norm of
lithographers and engravers copying photographs. Thanks to photogravure, half-tone, and
photolithography processes, which made the printing of photographs possible, now
photographers reproduced estampes for publication. In turn, amateur and municipal

5
In a 2006 article, historian Charles Rearick uses a long list of illustrated books about Paris’s history
including André Warnod’s Visages de Paris and Louis Chéronnet’s A Paris vers 1900, which will be
discussed in detail here. However, he never mentions that they contain illustrations. Charles Rearick, “La
mémoire des Grands Boulevards du XIXe siècle,” Romantisme 36, no. 134 (2006): 79–90.

6
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol. 1 (London: Phaidon, 2004), 6. Historian of
photography Shelley Rice has characterized the history of the photo book as “‘a secret history embedded in
the well-known chronologies of photographic history.’” Ibid. Rice citation from: Andrew Roth, ed., The
Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (New York: PPP Editions in
association with Roth Horowitz, 2001), 3. For more about photographically-illustrated books see: Carol M.
Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1998); Lucien Goldschmidt and Weston J. Naef, The Truthful Lens: a Survey of the Photographically
Illustrated Book, 1844-1914 (New York: The Grolier Club, 1980).

83
historians as well as publishers increasingly used photographs as transparent copies of
material artifacts and other types of pictures.
7
Surprisingly, this possibility, rather than
the idea that photographs captured the past better than other types of documents, drove
the proliferation of photographically-illustrated books about Paris before the 1920s.
8
The
choice and layout of photographs in such books speak to historians, editors, and critics’
continued understanding of the photo as an objective, material trace of what it pictured
and their estimation of physical traces such as architectural ornamentation, building
façades, or street layouts – not photographs – as the best documents of the past.
The possibilities and constraints of photographs as well as the norms that
publishers developed for their use also came to shape what histories of Paris could be
told. The creation of publisher-specific photo archives, for example, privileged the
collection and use of new photographs. These archives privileged elements of the city
that could still be photographed over those that had long disappeared. As a result, what
remained in the city became history as places long since destroyed evaporated into
unpicturable irrelevance.

7
It would have been and still is nearly impossible to search for a photograph in the BHVP’s catalogue by
date taken. Photographs are catalogued by geographic location. They appear in a separate catalogue by
photographer. In a few instances (the world wars, major state visits), events also receive a catalogue
heading, but there is no catalogue by date.

8
These ideas fit into a long genealogy of considerations of the ontological relationship of photographs and
past time, from discussions of spirit photography to Roland Barthes’ writings on photography and its
relationship to death: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1981); Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern
Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Fugitive
Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–
71; Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006).

84
The relationship between photographs, artifacts, and estampes shifted again in the
late 1920s when historians, critics, and editors embraced ideas about the material and
historical specificity of the photo. Influenced by changes in the photographic profession
and the illustrated press as well as popular ideas about history, a new generation of
amateur and popular historians read photographs as the most romantic and evocative of
all historical documents because they represented frozen moments of lost time. Nostalgic
for Paris before the First World War, these historians turned to photos as snapshots of this
lost era.
9
The photograph itself, not what it pictured, became a historical document. The
work of contemporary photojournalists who increasingly sold photographs that looked
more like snapshots than architectural views, also inspired these non-university
historians, who also worked as journalists.
10
While a previous generation had understood
the artist’s hand as necessary for evoking a true understanding of life in the past, this new
generation saw the photograph as the most romantic and poetic historical document,
whose evocative power stemmed from its direct and material access to past time.

Municipal Historical Institutions in the Pages of Illustrated Books
A confluence of factors – improvements in photographic printing technologies,
the importance placed on images at Paris’s municipal historical institutions, and changing

9
Literary and visual scholar W.J.T. Mitchell has argued that “The strong, ‘agonistic’ form of the
photographic essay tends, as we have seen, to be as concerned with the nature of photography, writing and
the relation of the two, as with its represented subject matter (tenant farming, New York tenements, migrant
workers, etc.).” In this case, such books are very often concerned with the relationship between
photography and history. W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 301–302.

10
For more about the development of a style of photojournalism that documented the everyday see: Michel
Frizot and Cédric de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine, trans. Ruth Sharman (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2009).

85
beliefs in the importance of Paris’s past – drove the increasing production of
photographically-illustrated books at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the turn
of the century, photographic illustration in books and the press had exploded thanks to
new photomechanical reproduction processes. Inventors and photographers had
experimented with the mechanical reproduction of photographs for printed materials
since the invention of photography. Viable techniques, grouped under the term
photogravure, existed since the 1850s.
11
French newspapers and magazines, however, did
not integrate photographic illustrations until after the development of the dot-matrix
technique and half-tone process in the 1870s and 1880s.
12
These processes made it
possible to transfer photographic images onto flat metal plates and translate the
photograph’s grey-tones into printable dots of black ink.
13
By 1900, most large book
publishers had purchased photogravure presses.
14
While wood-block prints would
continue to illustrate literature into the 1930s, photogravure (without halftone) became
the norm for “travel, archeology, architecture, and popular science and technology

11
For a short, very clear explanation of the different types of photogravure processes see: Michel Frizot,
“Photogravure,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Köln: Könemann, 1998), 228. For a
larger discussion of the invention of different reproduction processes during the 1800s see: Sylvie Aubenas,
“The Photograph in Print: Multiplication and Stability of the Image,” in A New History of Photography, ed.
Michel Frizot (Köln: Könemann, 1998), 225–231.

12
For more about the development of these processes and their integration into the French press see: Pierre
Albert and Gilles Feyel, “Photography and the Media: Changes in the Illustrated Press,” in A New History
of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Köln: Könemann, 1998), 359–369; Thierry Gervais, “L’Illustration
photographique: naissance du spectacle de l’information (1843-1914)” (Ph.D. Dissertation, L’Ecole des
hautes études en sciences sociales, 2007), 135–159.

13
For more about the development of photo-mechanical processes for illustration in books and the press
see: Daniel Renoult, “Les Nouvelles possibilités techniques: le triomphe de la mécanique,” in Histoire de
l’édition française: Le livre concurrencé 1900-1950, ed. Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, 2e ed.
(Paris: Fayard, 1991), 43–52; Frizot and de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine, 288–299.

14
Renoult, “Les Nouvelles possibilités techniques,” 38.

86
books.”
15
The 1910 perfection of rotogravure, which translated the flat plates of
photogravure onto rotating cylinders, allowed for the more efficient reproduction of
better quality images. French newspapers bought rotogravure presses throughout the
1910s, and by 1918 most bookmakers had done so as well.
16
Book publishers would
continue to prefer photogravure (héliogravure) over the newer half-tone process into the
1940s, because the older process, which used variations in ink thickness to produce black
and grey tones, offered better quality images.
17

By 1905, photographic processes had largely infiltrated book illustration. A
review essay about photographically-illustrated books in La Revue des deux mondes in
that year declared:
The current fashion is photography, which with its rapidity of execution
and variety of manner, lends itself to the character of contemporary illustration,
[and] responds to tastes for instant generalized information, which the agitated
and dispersed life of our era demands.
18

Such statements denied any technological determinism in the development of
photographic illustration. Photography was not simply more efficient. It more closely
corresponded to the needs and desires of contemporary society in the early twentieth
century. The scope of books reviewed in the essay, from travel literature and natural
histories to art and architecture books, city and national histories, biographies and novels,
indicates that publishers deemed “the talent of almost perfect imitation” useful for nearly

15
Ibid.

16
Ibid., 39.

17
Ibid., 41. Offset would take over after the war.

18
J. Bertrand, “Les Livres d’Etrennes,” Revue des deux mondes 75, no. XXX (November 1905): 933.

87
any subject matter.
19
The prevalence of photomechanical techniques, however, did not
mean that these illustrations were only photographic. These techniques were used to
reproduce all sorts of visual objects including paintings, engravings, and tapestries.
The possibility of photomechanical illustration allowed curators and librarians
from the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique as well as Vieux Paris
amateurs to reach a larger audience or to disseminate their “collections” between the
pages of books. Many photographically-illustrated histories of Paris from the early part of
the century drew on and replicated the ways that these institutions and groups used
images. In particular they combined the use of historical estampes with practices that
privileged the physical city as the best document of its past. Marcel Poëte, Georges Cain,
and Edmond Beaurepaire, to name only a few authors, all wrote illustrated books or
articles about Paris that used the collections of estampes and photographs held by the
Musée Carnavalet, the Bibliothèque historique, and a vast network of private collectors.
When Cain, Poëte, and others authored these books, they did so with the
awareness that illustrated histories of Paris had, of course, been published for centuries.
Photomechanical processes may have made the genre easier to produce, but they did not
invent it. Marcel Poëte lectured about the importance of such illustrated books for the
study of the city’s history. He dated the very first illustrated history of the city to 1588,
when wood block prints by Jean Rabel accompanied an edition of Gilles Corrozet’s Les

19
Ibid. Art historians have studied how photographic illustration affected their discipline. For more about
photography’s influence see: Gisèle Freund, Photography & Society (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1980). See
also the argument that wood-block printing solidified the art historical canon in the nineteenth century: A.
Von Lintel, “Surveying the Field: The Popular Origins of Art History in Nineteenth-century Britain and
France” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Art History, University of Southern California, 2010).

88
Antiquitez de Paris.
20
The book’s prints depicted the churches, abbeys, and statues that
constituted Corrozet’s principal sources.
21
Poëte explained how these prints proved the
scientific rigor of his method.
22
They show the statues with hands and forearms broken
off, in the state that Corrozet would have seen them, proving that he had, in fact,
consulted the artifacts, not imagined or idealized them. In a similar manner, illustrated
histories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to reproduce objects and
iconography from the historical period under study, primarily portraits, coins, or
clothing.
23

In the early nineteenth century, a new genre of illustrated histories emerged that
employed retrospectively-imagined reconstructions of historical events, much in the style
of dramatic history painting, which presented staged depictions of historical anecdotes
and acts.
24
Alongside these cheap publications for an increasingly wide readership,

20
Marcel Poëte, “Les Sources de l’histoire de Paris et les historiens de Paris, leçon de réouverture du cours
d’introduction à l’histoire de Paris professé à Bibliothèque de la ville” (Editions de la Revue politique et
littéraire (Revue bleue) et de la Revue scientifique, 1906), 19, BHVP.

21
“Representez par figures ainsi qu’ils se voyent encores a presét es Eglises ou ils sót inhumez” reads the
Frontispiece. I looked at the BNF’s copy published in 1586. The first part of the text, which contains
decorated letters, cul-de-lampes and a frontispiece illustration, was published in 1586. The section that
contains Rabel’s prints was printed separately, in 1588. This volume, owned by the King, bound the two
together.

22
Poëte, “Les Sources de l’histoire de Paris,” 19.

23
This is how literary scholar Maurice Samuels describes illustrated histories during the Ancien Régime, or
pre-Revolutionary France. Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in
Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 66. For more about the historians who
wrote these books see: Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

24
Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830-1870 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000); Gregory M. Pfitzer, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American
Imagination, 1840-1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Samuels, The
Spectacular Past. Of course, books alone did not bring the past to life. History was a very popular subject
of painting in the nineteenth century from the allegorical reconstructions of painters such as David, to the

89
historians produced expensive volumes that reproduced engravings and views of the city,
continuing the tradition of reproducing historical artifacts as illustrations. Books such as
art historian Armand Dayot’s illustrated histories served as instructional manuals for
children, who, as contemporaries believed, remembered history best when they learned it
from pictures.
25
Other artists including Albert Robida and Fedor Hoffbauer’s histories of
Paris combined erudite texts with lavish illustrations.
26
In the early twentieth century,
photographic illustration stepped into existing modes of illustrating the city’s past from
this tradition of history books as well as exhibitions, image collecting, and preservation
activities at the institutions devoted to preserving Paris’s history.
Head curator of the Musée Carnavalet George Cain’s books used primarily non-
photographic images from the museum’s collections (as well as others) to illustrate
walking tours through the city similar to those given by amateur historical associations at
the turn of the century.
27
Cain, like the numerous members of Paris’s official and amateur
historical associations, considered the city “the living document” of its past.
28
In Coins de
Paris (1905), Cain literally asked the reader to follow him through the contemporary city

spectacular stagings of history in snapshots and anecdotal moments in the style of academic painters
including Jean-Léon Gérôme. For more about history painting in nineteenth-century France see: Todd
Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798-1836 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998); Beth S. Wright, Painting and History During the French Restoration:
Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

25
Armand Dayot, Histoire contemporaine par l’image: 1789-1872 d’après les documents du temps (Paris:
Flammarion, 1900).

26
Fedor Hoffbauer, Paris à travers les ages (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1875); Albert Robida, Paris
de siècle en siècle: le coeur de Paris, splendeurs et souvenirs (Paris: A la Librairie illustrée, 1895).

27
For more about these societies and their walking tours see: Ruth Fiori, “La construction d’une conscience
patrimoniale parisienne à la fin du XIXe siècle: acteurs, pratiques et représentations 1884-1914” (thèse
pour le doctorat, histoire de l’art Université de Paris I-Sorbonne, 2009), 89–97, 184–194.

28
Georges Cain, Coins de Paris (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1905), 52.

90
with commands such as “let’s cross” and “let’s stop.”
29
With the reader in tow, however,
Cain moves quickly from the contemporary city to its past. In front of Notre-Dame, for
example, he describes the cathedral and the buildings of the hospital l’Hôtel-Dieu that
once stood there. As he explains, he knows these buildings from historical images:
this old place of debauchery, of which Meryon left us such impressive etchings,
and before which, as children, we stopped in fright, following with our eyes the
enormous rats that lived and walked about there in full daylight, eating
accumulated garbage.
30

In these books, estampes provide visual depictions of the buildings that Cain describes,
and they are often the sources from which Cain has drawn his historical descriptions.
31

As the title page to Coins de Paris advertised, Cain’s images were literally “documentary
illustrations.”
32
Cain’s Nouvelles promenades dans Paris (1908) contains reproductions
of engravings, etchings, drawings and paintings from the Musée Carnavalet. It is as if the
book combines a walking tour of the city with a visit to the museum’s exhibition rooms
and its cabinet des estampes. A 1912 New York Times review of Cain’s Le Long des rues
lauded him for simultaneously navigating the archive and the city, the past and the
present, working as:

29
“Let’s cross the square in front of Notre Dame, where once upon a time the Hotel-Dieu and its
surrounding buildings stood.” Ibid., 75. “And now let’s stop at the Place des Vosges, on the other side of
the Place de la Bastille.” Ibid., 227.

30
“This debauched place” refers to the Tower of Found Children (where parents could abandon unwanted
infants) and the low banks of the Seine in front of what is now the Parvis de Notre Dame. Cain, Coins de
Paris, 75.

31
This book, as Cain described it, was a partial re-edition of his 1904, Croquis de Vieux Paris, which had
been printed in a very limited edition with illustrations by Beltrand. The 1904 version would have been an
expensive collector’s item. The 1905 version offered more affordable access to Cain’s text.

32
Cain, Coins de Paris, title page.

91
a delver into old archives, a peeper into mansions, now ruinous and dirty, where
noblemen and noblewomen of the past gathered and gossiped; an explorer of
fearsome and narrow ways where mediaeval [sic] bravos lay in wait for their prey
and sank their poniards into him just as he hove in sight.
33

Cain was able to do so because the illustrated guide-book sought to bring together both
an archival and a contemporary observer’s experience of knowing the city’s past.
34

For Marcel Poëte, the illustrated book provided a way of bringing his ideas to a
wider audience. His illustrated books mimicked the forms of his illustrated lectures. Poëte
projected images to accompany his lectures about Paris and its past, using estampes,
artifacts, objects, as well as the occasional photograph as gateways into the past. In the
album for Paris, une vie de cité, Poëte used estampes, maps, and photographs to animate
the city’s transformations, its changes in style and size. In Poëte’s estimation, estampes,
maps, and photographs succinctly captured the transition from small settlement on the Ile
de la Cité to modern metropolis that lay at the heart of his conception of Parisian history.
He believed that images were “the exact reflection of life.”
35
But for Poëte, these images
worked best in conjunction with words. His album contained essays that directly
addressed the pictures he included, explaining what they pictured and what the object
signified for the history of Paris. Words here served to describe and animate the pictures.

33
“Hidden Paris That Casual Visitors Never Discover,” The New York Times, July 28, 1912.

34
Georges Cain’s writings appear to have been quite popular in his day. By the mid 1910s, Coins de Paris
had sold more than 11,000 copies, Promenades dans Paris (1906) more than 22,000, Nouvelles
Promenades dans Paris (1908) more than 14,000 and Les Pierres de Paris (1910) more than 8,000. Le long
des rues (1912) had also sold more than 7,000 copies, A Travers Paris (1909) more than 10,000 copies, and
Environs de Paris (both series) had sold more than 13,000 copies. This information comes from the list of
the author’s previous publications in Georges Cain, A Travers Paris (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1909). Its
copyright is 1909, but it must have been printed sometime after 1913, when the second series of Environs
de Paris was published.

35
Marcel Poëte, Une Vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours, vol. Album (Paris: A. Picard, 1925),
xxi.

92
Poëte also published architectural histories of Paris with the publisher Nilsson in the
1920s, in which the text does not directly refer to the photographs, in a form most likely
chosen by the publisher.
36

Illustrated and particularly photographically-illustrated books would also
complement the historical practices of amateurs interested in “Vieux Paris.” These
individuals fascinated by Paris’s history formed a host of historical societies at the turn of
the century. They gathered at the Bibliothèque historique and often carried out their
research in its collections. By 1913 such organizations were so ubiquitous that one
commentator asked at the founding of Le Centre, a historical association for the 1
st
and
2
nd
arrondissements, how the inhabitants of such a [historic] neighborhood had waited so
long to form an association.”
37

In large part, Vieux Paris amateurs’ explorations of the city’s past were carried
out in its streets. In the preface to publisher and Vieux Paris amateur Charles Eggimann’s
photographically-illustrated series, Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures, the
popular historian of Paris G. Lenôtre described his fellow history buffs as a veritable
army of colonial pillagers:
Thus, just as the explorers do for Assyrian palaces or the Kmers of Cambodia,
enthusiastic investigators travel all over Paris, penetrate into the courtyards of its
oldest buildings, brave concierges, climb staircases, tour the building, noting all
that makes it unique; a door knocker, wood-paneling, a sculpted door or window

36
Marcel Poëte, Paris: les Thermes et les Arènes; le Palais et Notre-Dame; Anciennes Eglises, Les Cités
d’art (Paris: Nilsson, 1925); Marcel Poëte, Paris: Palais et Hôtels, Places et Avenues, Nouvelles Eglises,
Les Cités d’art (Paris: Nilsson, 1925); Marcel Poëte, Paris: L’Art à Paris à travers les âges, Les Cités d’art
(Paris: Nilsson, 1924).

37
Jules Guiffrey, “Le Centre de Paris,” Le Centre de Paris: Bulletin trimestriel de la société historique et
archéologique des 1er et 2e arrondissements de Paris, 1913, 6.

93
frame, a painted ceiling, a Bacchus head at a cellar entrance, a wrought-iron
balcony, a wooden banister, a trumeau mirror.
38

They noted these details on paper, of course, but also on glass plates, accumulating
photographic documentation about the city in order to preserve elements slated for
destruction and as a way of mapping out the contours of historic Paris.
39

New, cheaper and lighter photographic equipment made Vieux Paris amateurs’
photographic excursions into the city possible. In 1886, developments in photographic
processes made very short exposure times possible. The idea of “l’instantanée,” or the
snapshot, appeared in France.
40
George Eastman would apply this technology, combined
with sheets of flexible plastic to replace heavy glass plates, in his 1888 Kodak. Although
eventually the name would become synonymous with Eastman’s whole company, it
began as a camera whose publicity campaign promised: “you press the button, we do the
rest.” The strip of film could be advanced through the camera. Once the whole strip had

38
G. Lenôtre, ed., Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures, vol. 1 (Paris: Ch. Eggimann, 1912), np.
Art historian Molly Nesbit has characterized them less glamorously: “they only looked to see where the
historical players had tread; if they could, they would have looked for finger prints.” Molly Nesbit, Atget’s
Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 62. Lenôtre took great pride in his persistent and
wide-ranging hunt for the past’s traces. According to his daughter, he liked to brag that he was “the most
kicked-out man in France.” G. Lenôtre, Notes et souvenirs: recueillis et présentés par sa fille, Thérese
Lenôtre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1940), 67.

39
Their members, like those of the association La Société des amis des monuments parisiens (The Society
of the Friends of Parisian Monuments) founded in 1884, became militants to save the architectural
fragments of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century Paris – “Vieux Paris” – that remained in the
city. For more on the history of these different groups see: Fiori, “La construction d’une conscience
patrimoniale.” Similar groups formed in Berlin in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For more
about these various societies see: Katherine Zelljadt, “History as Past-Time: Amateurs and Old Berlin,
1870-1914” (Dissertation, Harvard University, 2005). Molly Nesbit notes that these amateur societies did
not seem to create their own photo archives but rather used the individual collections of their members.
Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 65.

40
Albert Londe, La Photographie instantanée, théorie et pratique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1886). For more
about the beginnings of snapshot photography in France see: André Gunthert, “La Conquête de
l’instantané. Archéologie de l’imaginaire photographique en France, 1841-1895” (thèse de doctorat
d’histoire de l’art, sous la direction de Hubert Damisch, EHESS, 1999).

94
been exposed, the amateur photographer sent the camera back to Eastman for processing,
thus freeing the photographer from the difficulties, expense, and dangers of using
developing chemicals.
41
Although the Kodak made photography accessible to the masses,
professionals would not adopt lighter, more portable cameras until the twentieth century.
Architectural photographers, however, would continue to use heavy, unwieldy cameras,
mounted on tripods, well through the end of the twentieth century.
42

Photography became pivotal for the “Vieux Paris” movement. The Commission
Municipale du Vieux Paris, the official council founded in 1898 by the city to study
questions of urban destruction and preservation, had an iconography section. It had
originally proposed collecting photographs, paintings, and drawings of buildings slated
for destruction as well as picturesque views. Photography, however, quickly became their
default method of documenting the city.
43
Professional photographers were easy to find:
many wrote to the Commission offering their services.
44
Other types of images presented

41
For more about the history of the Kodak and amateur photography see: Colin Ford and National Museum
of Photography, Film, and Television (Great Britain), You Press the Button We Do the Rest: The Birth of
Snapshot Photography (London: Nishen, 1988); Clément Chéroux, “Une généalogie des formes récréatives
en photographie (1890-1940)” (Thèse de doctorat en histoire de l’art, Université Paris I, 2004).

42
In fact, architectural photographers are still more likely to use tripods and large format cameras in the
twenty-first century.

43
After the initial years of the Commission, it only rarely purchased anything but photographs. Although
many Vieux Paris amateurs dabbled in photography, the Commission municipale de Vieux Paris did not
collect amateur photographs. It commissioned photographs from professional photographers. The
Commission did, however, sponsor a yearly contest for amateur photographers. The themes of the three
contexts it ran in 1903 were the banks of the Seine, the flower market, and architecture, sculpture and
decoration before the seventeenth century. The latter forbid photographs of churches, museums, or national
buildings, placing an emphasis thus not only on amateur photographers but also on lesser-known places in
the city. Commission municipale du Vieux Paris: Procès-verbaux 1903 (Paris: Imprimerie municipale,
1903). These photos entered the Musée Carnavalet’s collections.

44
For example, the photographer Barry wrote to the Commission in 1898 asking to become its official
photographer. Art historian Molly Nesbit cites Barry, Berthat frères, Emonts, Godefroy, Gossin, and the

95
practical problems. One member of the commission argued as early as 1898 that full size
oil paintings, for example, were simply too large to store.
45
But photography’s nature as
mechanical reproduction also drove this preference. From the very beginning of the
twentieth century, Vieux Paris amateurs privileged the photograph over other types of
images because they saw it as a transparent re-presentation of the city itself, which they
considered a living historical document.
Photohistories thus allowed Vieux Paris amateurs to reconstruct their forays into
the city in search of its past. Publisher Charles Eggimann, who was an avid amateur
historian of Paris, used his own collection of photographs, taken by many different
photographers, in Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures. Not only did the book
make use of the photographs taken over the course of many walks through the city, but
also these photographs inspired the book. As G. Lenôtre describes in its preface: “the idea
and project of the present publication were born from [this collection].”
46
The texts were
brought in to compliment the photographs and guide the reader through them.
47
Each
essay dealt with a popular Vieux Paris site including landmarks and monuments such as
the Tour St. Jacques, Romanesque churches, and defunct convents, as well as whole
neighborhoods such as Montmartre. Because they clustered around sites that Vieux Paris

Union Photographique Française as the Commission’s frequently commissioned photographers. Nesbit,
Atget’s Seven Albums, 63.

45
Commission municipale du Vieux Paris: Procès-verbaux 1898 (Paris: Imprimerie municipale, 1899), 35.

46
Lenôtre, Le Vieux Paris, 1:np.

47
In his preface Lenôtre states “[it is] the studies which illustrate so many artistic photographic
reproductions.” He describes that Eggimann had collected a stunning group of “documents about the
architecture and decoration of old houses in Paris, [a] collection so well selected, so picturesque, and so
varied that flipping through its folders, the most learned of Paris partisans are overwhelmed and taken
aback.” Ibid.

96
amateurs liked to visit, such books would have supplemented, rather than replaced
individual amateurs’ collections of photographs of Paris.
Illustrated histories of Paris that mapped out the traces of the city’s past also
functioned as guides for amateur photographers. In his 1908 Nouvelles promenades dans
Paris, Georges Cain directly responded to what he described as a frequent question from
readers: “how does one create one’s own collection of Parisian scenes, without
reproducing the tired clichés that clutter every card and stationary shop window [vitrines
de tous les papetiers]?”
48
Cain explained that amateur photographers must carefully
choose when and where they take their photos. They must account for changes in season,
weather, and light, searching for the right combination of the three in order to “find a
picturesque view point, a lively foreground which will valorize the scene as it recedes to
the horizon.”
49
The photograph’s subject mattered as well. Cain recommends that his
reader focus not on “modern life and society” but on the sites and places of the past that
might disappear.
50
He advises photographers to consult old illustrated books, looking for
elements that might remain in the city and then photograph them.
51
These instructions to

48
Cain claimed that readers also asked: “At what times and in what conditions is it best to work?” Georges
Cain, Nouvelles promenades dans Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1908), 389. By papers cluttering shop
windows, Cain must be referring to postcards, which readers thought offered tired clichés of Paris. For
more about Paris as pictured in postcards at the turn-of-the-century see: Naomi Schor, “‘Cartes Postales’:
Representing Paris 1900,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 188–244.

49
Cain, Nouvelles promenades dans Paris, 390.

50
Ibid., 391.

51
Cain uses the example of the Jardin des Plantes. He suggests that the amateur consult P. Bernard and L.
Couailhac, Le Jardin des Plantes, description complète, historique et pittoresque du Muséum d’Histoire
naturelle, de la Ménagerie, des Serres, des Galeries de Minéralogie et d’Anatomie et de la Vallée suisse
(Paris: Curmer, 1842).

97
the amateur of Vieux Paris suggest that photographically and non-photographically
illustrated books about Paris guided how amateur photographers captured the city.
Photographically-illustrated books created by Vieux Paris amateurs demonstrate
in their choice, cropping, and layout of photographs that these individuals did not
recognize a difference between the city and a photograph of it. For them, the city
contained tangible traces of its past. In a letter written during his first years in Paris, G.
Lenôtre described how this worked:
Every old residence keeps something of those who lived in it… The cries of the
tortured souls who haunt them work their charm and attract us without our
knowing. An old stone that has seen things, that a certain dress once brushed, and
on which paused eyes now forever shut, creates an intense emotion that a new
cinderblock will never create, even if it looks exactly the same
52

The photographs in Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures, edited by Lenôtre and
published by Charles Eggimann between 1912 and 1913, attempt to give the reader direct
access to these stones. In order to do so, Eggimann had the photographs touched up in
such a way as to erase their frames.
53
When the photographs in question depicted objects,
such as a gargoyle gutter spout [fig. 2.4], a tympanum [fig. 2.5], and a wrought-iron
balcony and doorknocker [fig. 2.6], this erasure made it so that the object itself, not a

52
Emphasis is in the original. The daughter of G. Lenôtre, who real name was Théodore Gosselin, wrote a
biography of her father after his death. She drew on her own memories and his correspondence, returned to
her after his death. She quotes this particular letter without citing its recipient’s name. Lenôtre, Notes et
souvenirs, 46. Pierre Champion, chartiste, politician and popular historian, testified to the same ability to
see the past in its fragments: “inscriptions, [and] stones allow us to imagine the Parisian.” Pierre Champion,
L’Avènement de Paris: la vie de Paris au Moyen âge, Notre vieux Paris (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1933), 12.

53
Although many of the usual names in the Vieux Paris community including BHVP employees Edmond
Beaurepaire, Robert Burnand, Etienne Clouzot and Gabriel Henriot as well as Georges Cain wrote essays
for these volumes, the photo layout was unlike anything these men did elsewhere. This indicates that
Eggimann, not the authors, was responsible for the book’s layout. These volumes exemplify the
collaborative ties that bound interdependent collectors, publishers, archivists and librarians in publications
throughout the early twentieth century.

98
photograph of it stood before the viewer. Photographs in the journal of the Commission
municipale du Vieux Paris were often similarly cropped. Erasing the photograph’s edge,
which the photographically-illustrated publication made possible, seems to erase the
mediating machine altogether. They were used as doubles for objects, not framed photos.

Fig. 2.4: Gargoyles,
Le Vieux Paris, vol 1.
Fig. 2.5: Tympanum,
Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles
demeures, vol 3.

Fig. 2.6: Balcony and
doorknocker, Le Vieux
Paris: souvenirs et
vieilles demeures, vol 2.

Fig. 2.7: The St. Lazare Prison.
Le Vieux Paris, vol 3.
Fig. 2.8: Prison entrance,
Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et
vieilles demeures, vol 3.
Fig. 2.9: A cell,
Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et
vieilles demeures, vol 3.

99
Publishers and historians seemed to think that these layouts offered a more direct
path into the physical city, which itself best evoked the past. This belief becomes
apparent in Georges Cain’s essay about the St. Lazare prison, which opens Le Vieux
Paris’s third volume. He characterized this essay as a “flânerie.”
54
The photos facilitate
the reader’s participation in this stroll. The essay opens with a shot of the building’s
courtyard, whose left and top edges have been cropped to smooth, straight lines [fig. 2.7].
Thanks to the re-toucher’s brush, its right edge blurs into the page, while its bottom edge
extends jaggedly down the side. The photograph seems almost three-dimensional,
extending toward the reader and inviting her to follow the small nuns who retreat into one
of the building’s open doorways. This effect appears again in a shot of one of the prison’s
entrances [fig. 2.8]. In this photo, the foreground reaches toward the reader, and the
picket fence that extends out from the doorway has been isolated and left in the image.
On the picture’s left side, the doorway’s overhanging roof extends past the image in a
similar manner. These elements funnel the reader into the doorway. The image above it
of a large dormitory assumes that the reader has entered the building and moved into its
rooms.
55
Finally, the reader finds herself drawn into a prison cell [fig. 2.9]. Its tiled floor
extends out from the photograph’s frame. Its right edge bulges outward to include a
worker’s smock or a coat hanging on a hook, while a chamber pot, stool, and bed with

54
Georges Cain, “Saint-Lazare,” in Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures, ed. G. Lenôtre, vol. 3
(Paris: Ch. Eggimann, 1914), 8.

55
Nineteenth-century readers might not have connected an outside and an inside shot as depicting the same
place. By 1912, however, thanks to the cinema, viewers had come to understand the links between such
images. For more about how audiences and viewers learned how series of images functioned together to
build narratives see: Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “Moving Pictures: Photography, Narrative, and the Paris
Commune of 1871,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R.
Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 253–278.

100
blanket await the visitor. Instead of leading the viewer through a door or into a hallway,
the photo dead-ends at the locked cell door with its shuttered and barred window. Such
layouts transformed photographs into the very spaces they depicted. The “art of layout,”
according to a graphic designer writing in 1931, allowed for “the mingling of real life and
imaginary life, of present and past.”
56
The composition and layout of the photo worked to
reinforce the notion that the photo provided the best document of the city: it captured
details in a way that seemed objective, because the photographer’s role could be ignored.
In general, illustrated histories of Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century
used photographs as transparent windows onto the city. Marcel Poëte believed that
historical estampes offered up evidence of “historical artistic renderings.”
57
Cain would
seem to have agreed, for he thought that historical images should teach the public
aesthetic taste along with history.
58
Neither, however, thought of photographs as
containing the trace – aesthetic or otherwise – of their makers. Poëte simply characterized
the photograph (in his introduction to the 1925 image album of Paris, une vie de cité) as
offering up, unlike the drawn or engraved document, “perfect documentary precision.”
59

56
A. Tolmer, Mise En Page: The Theory and Practise of Lay-Out (London: The Studio Ltd, 1931), np.

57
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album: xxi.

58
Journalist and director of the Théâtre Français Jules Claretie described the Musée Carnavalet under
Cain’s direction as a place where “historical memories rub elbows with works of art” Jules Claretie, La vie
à Paris : 1880-1910. 1898 (Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1881), 345. In his books, Cain
consistently attends not to the style of the image, but what it shows. When he does refer to the illustrations
in his books, he references what monument, building or street it pictures, and it is the city itself that he
describes as picturesque.

59
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album: xxi. Poëte identifies images by type, but does not name photographers,
although he always attributes engravings or drawings to their artists.

101
The photograph offered a perfect document with which to better understand the city, its
documentation and ultimate preservation.
In the album of Marcel Poëte’s history of Paris, Paris, une vie de cité,
photographs function in a similar manner. Although Poëte’s collecting activities at the
library indicate that he did indeed understand photography as a means of documenting
the contemporary city, he did not use nineteenth-century photographs (taken by Marville
or otherwise) as documents of the Restoration and July Monarchy, the Revolution of
1848, or the Second Empire, the periods during which they were taken.
60
Engravings,
drawings, and lithographs depicting streets, monuments, and scenes of everyday life
recount Paris of these eras. Photographs serve as
documents of a much more distant past in sections about
the Revolution and the First Empire, the Renaissance,
and Antiquity. Poëte, for example, captioned a
photograph that depicts the 1871 demolition of the Arc
de Nazareth as an illustration of the structure’s
construction [fig. 2.10]. In general, Poëte used
nineteenth-century or contemporary photographs simply
to substitute for objects of which no hand illustrations
existed. As photographic illustration became the industry norm, Poëte and others
increasingly used photographs as documents of all historical eras.

60
While Poëte would, according to contemporary exhibition reviews use photographs as documents of
Paris before and during Haussmannization – he, like his contemporaries, never did in his published
histories of Paris.

Fig. 2.10: Photograph of
demolitions under Haussmann
used by Marcel Poëte in Paris,
Vie de Cité, 1925.

102
The Role of Publishers in Photohistory Production
As much as ideas held by historians and curators shaped the use of photographs in
illustrated histories, from the 1920s on publishers increasingly played an important role
in defining photography’s role in books about Paris. In response to public demand, they
dictated the use of photographic illustrations in their books. Publishers developed
quotidian relationships with photo agencies, and as their use of photographs exploded,
they established in-house photo archives. Because the content of photo agency and
publishers’ archives was skewed towards contemporary photography, books about Paris
used contemporary photos of the city – instead of its nineteenth-century photographic
record – as illustrations of Paris’s past. These books, in turn, not only shaped the content
of municipal institutions’ collections, but their illustrations also had a distinct impact on
how future historians of Paris would conceive of the city’s past.
When Poëte and Cain did use more photographs as illustrations, they did so at the
request of their publishers. Cain predominantly chose estampes to illustrate the books he
published with Flammarion because he drew his images from the Carnavalet collection,
which was rich in those types of images. He also believed that the advantage of history
told through images was that it provided the viewer with an aesthetic education and so
felt he had a responsibility to use art, not photographs. In the rare cases when he only
used photographs as illustrations, for example in his essay in Charles Eggimann’s Vieux
Paris, publishers had chosen the illustrations. Similarly, Marcel Poëte preferred
estampes. In his notes about Parisian iconography, references to photographs appear only

103
rarely.
61
Although he acknowledged that the photograph would document the city in the
future, Poëte preferred documents that bore the trace of the artist. The album of Paris,
une vie de cité, whose images Poëte himself chose and captioned, for example,
overwhelmingly reproduced estampes. Poëte did, however, publish three books about
Paris in the mid-1920s with only photographic illustrations. In these three volumes, L’Art
à Paris à travers les ages (1924), Les Thermes et les arènes; le Palais et Notre-Dame;
anciennes églises (1925), Palais et hôtels, places et avenues, nouvelles églises (1925),
Poëte explores the evolution of architecture and urban planning in Paris. The volumes,
which belonged to publisher Nilsson’s series “Les Cités d’art,” used photographs from
the photo archives of the Monuments historiques and the Bibliothèque historique to
depict the buildings and streets in question.
62
Not only do the other books in this series,
including Robert Hénard’s 1925 Rouen and Giulio Lorenzetti’s 1925 Venise almost
exclusively use photographic illustrations, the illustrations for Rouen also came from the

61
Poëte left extensive archives that contain notes and drafts of his work. The notes about sources and
iconography are on little scraps of paper (which have been pasted in large folio books). In the iterations of
his iconography notes, Poëte only very rarely mentions a photograph. Such notes about images appear, for
example, in: Marcel Poëte, “Papiers Poëte Bibliographie, dépillement d’auteurs contemporains, notes et
idées générales sur Paris XVI-XVIIIe siècles, Vol 123”, n.d., BHVP; Marcel Poëte, “Papiers Poëte, VOL
144”, n.d., BHVP; Marcel Poëte, “Papiers Poëte, Urbanisme à Paris aux XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIIIe siècles
(suite) 122”, n.d.

62
Most of the photographs in these three books are credited to Neurdein. The Neurdein brothers had what
art historian Molly Nesbit describes as a “monopoly” on photographic reproductions at the Monuments
historiques in the early twentieth century. Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 23. The website of the
Mediathèque du patrimoine, which manages the photo archive of the Monuments historiques, indicates that
the Neurdeins held the exclusive right to reproduce photographs held by the Monuments historiques and
also added some 1000 photographs to the archive between 1898 and 1914. “http://www.mediatheque-
patrimoine.culture.gouv.fr/fr/biographies/neurdein.html” Sometimes this archive is also called the Archives
photographiques d’art et d’histoire. The photographs from the Bibliothèque are credited “Cl. Archives
Photographiques – Paris.”

104
same archives as those in Poëte’s volumes.
63
The fact that these six books made use of
the same photo archives implies that the decision to use photographs must have lain with
the publisher, not the individual authors.
64
The increasing presence of photographs in the
illustrated press since the century’s start as well as the popularity of wood-block prints
and engravings in the nineteenth century changed the book market, forcing publishers to
include more and more photographic illustrations in books.
65
Librarians and historians at
Paris’s municipal historical institutions as well as other authors were thus caught up in an
industry-wide publisher push towards photographic illustration.
By the 1920s, photographs increasingly served as the default means to illustrate
books about Paris. Guidebooks to Paris and its region ceased to include engravings and
woodcuts of monuments.
66
Some dropped the views of monuments altogether, keeping
only maps and architectural plans as illustrations. Others replaced the engravings with
photographs. Hachette’s series of guidebooks, “Pour connaître Paris,” which put texts by
Vieux Paris enthusiasts into small guidebook formats, contained many photographs

63
In Rouen, photographs are credited to Levy and Neurdein, Cl. Archives photographiques – Paris, and
Photo Giraudon. Levy and Neurdein was Neurdein brothers’ firm after World War I. The photographs in
Venise are credited to “Photo Alinari.”

64
Armand Dayot, an art historian and directeur des Beaux Arts during the Third Republic, edited this
series. He also authored a series of books which taught French history through images, and, like Marcel
Poëte, worked to diffuse art history to a broad audience: Dayot, Histoire contemporaine par l’image.

65
Pierre Lafitte, for example, brought a graphic sensibility honed in the publication of illustrated magazines
to the books that he also published. Jean-Luc Buard, “Les Paradoxes des Publications Lafitte,” Le
Rocambole: Bulletin des Amis du roman populaire, no. 10 (Spring 2000): 9. Hachette began including
increasing numbers of illustrations during the Second Empire when, as historian of the book Jean-Yves
Mollier writes: “the modernization of printing technologies and the triumph of photography made it
necessary to give the image a more important place in book production.” Jean-Yves Mollier, Louis
Hachette (1800-1864) le fondateur d’un empire (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 426.

66
See the shift between: P. Joanne, Paris-Diamant (Paris: Hachette, 1881); Adolphe Joanne, Paris illustré
en 1870 guide de l’étranger et du Parisien, 3e ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1870); Paul Joanne, Environs de Paris
(Paris: Hachette, 1907).

105
alongside estampes.
67
Photographs had also become the default medium for the
illustration of architectural histories. When Hachette published Pour comprendre les
monuments de la France, a 1918 guide to French architectural history by Jean-Auguste
Brutail, its illustrations consisted of a large number of
drawings. By 1925, another book in the same series,
Georges Huisman’s Pour comprendre les monuments
de Paris, almost exclusively used contemporary
photographs of the city.
68
In this volume, small square
photographs appear inserted into the text on nearly
every page [fig. 2.11]. Just as the monuments stand in
for the history of Paris, the photographs stand in for the
monuments.
69
Huisman trained at the Ecole des
Chartes, where students learned about images, not just
textual documents.
70
Both he and his editor would have been intimately familiar with
different types of illustrations, yet they agreed on photographs for this book. Similarly,

67
See for example: Georges Huisman, De Saint-Martin-des-champs aux halles, Pour connaitre Paris (Paris:
Hachette, 1925); G. Lacour-Gayet, Saint-Germain-des-Prés et la Coupole, Pour connaitre Paris (Paris:
Hachette, 1924); Léon Gosset, Jardins et promenades de Paris, Pour connaître Paris (Paris: Hachette,
1929); Marcel Poëte, La Formation de Paris, Pour connaitre Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1926).

68
Scholars have devoted much effort to exploring the relationship between the study of photography and
architecture, especially in the nineteenth century. For more about the topic see: Cervin Robinson and Joel
Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present
(New York: Architectural League of New York, 1987).

69
Huisman explained “to understand Paris’s monuments is to explain with the help of architecture, the
political, social and moral evolution of our country’s capital.” Georges Huisman, Pour comprendre les
monuments de Paris, 1st ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1925), iv.

70
Huisman was a high-ranking government official for most of his life. In the 1930s he was named General
Director of the Beaux Arts, and in 1939, he co-founded the Cannes Film Festival. For more about Huisman

Fig. 2.11: The Hôtel Lamoignon,
which today houses the
Bibliothèque historique, Pour
Comprendre les monuments de
Paris, 1925.

106
the Grenoble-based publisher Arthaud only used photographs for its 1920s series “Les
Beaux pays,” about different notable cities and regions. Its volume Paris, by historian
and art critic Pierre Gauthiez, used photographs to lead readers on a historical tour of the
city, beginning with its origins on the Ile de la Cité and ending with Parisian celebrations
of the French victory in World War I.
71
Gauthiez’s text resembles Cain’s historical walks
through the city. He describes events and people and yet couples them exclusively with
photographs, because Arthaud hired photographers to take pictures of the city, not
researchers to find estampes in historical archives.
72

Ease of access and cost-efficiency pushed publishers to use photographs instead
of other types of historical images as illustrations in books about Paris. At the turn of the
century, Hachette established its own photo archive, whose images could be used across
its large range of publications. The 600 photographs in Huisman’s Pour comprendre les
monuments de Paris, for example, are nearly exclusively credited to the publisher. By
1925, Hachette had already amassed an enormous photo archive, which today holds over
700,000 images.
73
An iconographic service, consisting of photographers and researchers,

see the biography written by his son: Marcelle Huisman, J’ai un bel avenir derrière moi: une biographie de
Georges Huisman (Paris: Éd. du Platane, 1994). Pour comprendre les monuments de Paris enjoyed large
popularity, going through three revised editions, the last published in 1949. Its low price – in 1925 it cost
only 20 francs - may help account for its popularity.

71
Pierre Gauthiez, Paris, Les Beaux pays (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1928).

72
In a conversation with Claude Arthaud, the daughter of B. Arthaud, who ran the company in the 1920s,
she told me that her father relied on a handful of photographers to produce his books’ illustrations. Claude
Arthaud, “Phone Interview”, July 18, 2011.

73
Hachette today conserves two types of photographs: those taken by the photographers who worked for
the publishing house and copies purchased from individual photographers, and later, photo agencies. The
house also contained dark rooms and lab space, so that the operation occurred entirely in-house. When
editors published the photographs taken by Hachette’s in-house photographers, they were credited to the
archive and not the photographer who took them. Because no documentation exists about the constitution

107
expanded and made use of the archive until the 1980s.
74
Publisher Charles Eggimann also
had a large photo collection about Vieux Paris, but Hachette’s encompassed a vast range
of subjects from architecture, art, and interior design to pictures used to illustrated books
and articles about foreign countries as well as France’s regions and colonies.
75
Other
publishers would outsource the material that Hachette amassed internally, turning to
photo agencies to find illustrations.
76

Photo agencies had first appeared in Paris around the turn of the century, but
came to dominate the illustration market by the late 1920s.
77
They facilitated the sale and
purchase of photographs for the daily and weekly press and other illustrated publications
by acting as middlemen between photographers and publishers. In the process they

of the photo archive (aside from the occasional letter or photographer’s carte de visite stuck in an envelope)
it is nearly impossible to know who worked for Hachette during these years. The approximately 700,000
photographs, postcards, and drawings still conserved and used at Hachette, are the best documentation of
the photo service’s operations. Information from visit to Photothèque Hachette at 43, quai de Grenelle,
Paris and conversation with Sylvie Gabriel, who runs the photothèque: July 7, 2011. Thanks to Molly
Nesbit, however, we do know that Atget was among the photographers who sold their work to Hachette.
For the publishing houses to which Atget sold see the annexes of Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums.

74
In the 1980s, as photographers developed a keener sense of their rights, they stopped being willing to
leave copies of their photographs with the publisher.

75
As in photo agencies and municipal historical institutions Hachette’s photographs where, and still are,
conserved in a series of envelopes organized according to subject. Unlike municipal historical institutions,
the collection is enriched by the fact that photographs often contain the tile and page number of their
subsequent uses. Information from visit to Photothèque Hachette at 43, quai de Grenelle, Paris and
conversation with Sylvie Gabriel, who runs the photothèque: July 7, 2011.

76
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hachette’s collection would function like other photo agencies, welcoming
researchers from other institutions and selling them copies of photographs for reproduction. Ibid.

77
The first agencies in Paris were Branger (1890s), Meurisse (1904), Rol (1905), and Trampus (1905).
Other specialized photographers and studios including Henri Manuel, Chevojon, Giraudon and Marc Vaux,
Scïoni and Dorvyne, Séeberger, Diaz and Walery, Harcourt, Lorelle, d’Ora and Lipnitzki all established
themselves in the 1910s. In the 1920s, the big foreign photo agencies Keystone and Wide World arrived in
Paris. Photo agencies would continue to open throughout the century. For more about them see: Frizot and
de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine, 13–15, 304.

108
established a new generation of photo archives.
78
The most current photographs could be
sold to illustrate the news, used as pictures of moments in which they were taken; as time
passed, publishers repurposed them as generic or historical illustrations.
The centralization of sources made it easier for authors and publishers to use one
of these archives to find illustrations rather than cobble together collections of images
from different municipal historical institutions, individual photographers, and private
collections. These twentieth-century photo archives for rent, which served the press and
illustrated publishing, captured so much more than the topographic fragments of its past
preserved in nineteenth-century photo archives. They would become archives of
everyday life.
79

The increased publication of photographs of Paris in books affected how the
major early collectors - the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique - preserved
and documented the city’s history. Since the nineteenth century these institutions had
collected illustrated histories alongside loose and bound estampes and photographs.
During the 1920s, however, precisely when photographically-illustrated books were
becoming increasingly the norm in the publishing world, the Bibliothèque and the Musée
Carnavalet stopped collecting photographic prints. But they did not stop collecting
photographs altogether. They bought photographically-illustrated books instead. Whereas

78
For more about the development of photo agencies in France see: Thomas Michael Gunther and Marie de
Thézy, Alliance Photo: Agence photographique 1934-1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); Francoise Denoyelle,
La lumière de Paris. Tome 2: les usages de la photographie, 1919-1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997).

79
Parallels exist between these agencies and archives and Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la planète,” a project
to document the world in photographs and on film. For more about the latter see: Paula Amad, Counter-
Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010); Teresa Castro, “Les Archives de la Planète ou les rythmes de l’Histoire,” 1895: bulletin de
l’Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma 54 (2008): 57–81.

109
in the 1910s, photographers such as Atget and Charles Lansiaux charged the library 2 to
2.5 francs per print, by the 1920s, the library could purchase as many as 600 pictures in a
photographically-illustrated book for as little as 20 francs.
80
Illustrated histories cost less
than an equivalent number of photographic prints. These books were then catalogued
separately under the classification “ICONO,” short for iconography, distinguishing them
for researchers in search of pictures of the city.
81
This shift away from municipal photo
archives towards those established by publishers and photo agencies helps explain why
historians and publishers rarely used nineteenth-century photographs of the city as
historical illustrations during the twentieth century. It was simply easier for publishers to
use their in-house archives than to procure copies of images housed in municipal photo
archives. Publishers and photo agencies purchased pictures from photojournalists and
documentary photographers who took them in the contemporary city. Illustrated books
became a new archive of Paris.
Hachette also turned to books as a resource for finding images. Its iconographic
service kept copies of illustrated books that Hachette published for reference purposes.
Annotations in the books indicate whether the illustrations in these books belonged to
Hachette and note where they are stored. These books remain on the shelves of the
photothèque today. Books about Paris, including the series “Pour connaître Paris,”
Georges Huisman’s Pour comprendre les monuments de Paris, and Léon Gosset’s Tout

80
Pour comprendre les monuments de Paris, published in 1925, contained 600 photographs and cost 20
francs.

81
In general, books were catalogued according to size and entry number. ICONO books were shelved and
numbered separately from the others. This system remained in place until the spring of 2010, when ICONO
books were integrated into the others.

110
Paris par l’image, figure prominently and show signs of heavy use. Within Paris’s
municipal historical institutions and publisher’s photo archives, then illustrated books
functioned as extensions of photo archives.
The growing predominance of photographic illustrations in books about Paris
changed how Parisians remembered and thought of the city’s past. Georges Cain
remembered “impressive etchings” by Charles Meryon from his nineteenth-century
childhood.
82
In Coins de Paris he describes, as cited earlier, how looking at these
etchings “as children, we stopped in fright, following with our eyes the enormous rats
that lived and walked about there in full daylight, eating accumulated garbage.”
83
As
authors and editors used photographs of the contemporary city to illustrate their books
about Paris, photos of hôtels particuliers in the Marais, the rue de Rivoli or the Place
Vendome would supplant historical images of the early nineteenth-century city. The
photographically-illustrated books readily available for purchase throughout the twentieth
century would shape the historical consciousness of future historians of Paris. In 1967,
popular art historian and historian of Paris Yvan Christ described how Louis Chéronnet’s
1945 photohistory, Paris tel qu’il fût, had had a distinct influence on how he thought
about photography and history. Moreover, Christ claimed that he was not alone:
I fully believe that I was not the only member of my generation to have been
forever shaped by [Achille Carlier’s photographically-illustrated archeological
journal Pierres de France] and [Louis Chéronnet’s Paris tel qu’il fût] which gave

82
Cain, Coins de Paris, 75.

83
Ibid. Charles Meryon lived from 1821-1868. Publisher Frederick Wedmore published Meryon’s etchings
of Paris in book format (in English) in 1879. Born in 1856, Cain likely first encountered Meryon’s work as
loose prints.

111
early photography eminent value – at once scientific and poetic, scholarly and
sentimental.
84

Christ did not just think that old photographs shaped how he thought about the past. He
claimed that these pictures became, citing Chéronnet, “‘the [very] archive of our
memory.’”
85
Most importantly, Christ spoke to the mixture of science and romance in the
photograph, which could simultaneously operate as objective and subjective
documentation of the past.
During the decades from 1920 to 1960, these books also shaped urban planners’
ideas about the importance of preserving the city’s past. These planners modernized the
city while also preserving its historical heritage and form.
86
That they would do so should
come as no surprise. Planners in the 1920s and 1930s were, after all, the first generation
of urbanists trained at Marcel Poëte’s Institut d’histoire, de géographie, et d’economie
urbaine de la Ville de Paris, the former Bibliothèque historique. There, thanks to the use
of images in lectures and seminars these planners had learned to “imagin[e] Paris as a
timeless web of vernacular streetscapes, historic buildings, and monumental stage sets.”
87

But French planners’ ideas about Paris’s past would not only have been shaped by images
shown within the context of the lectures. As students at the institute, they had at their

84
Yvan Christ, Les Métamorphoses de Paris, cent paysages parisiens photographiés autrefois par Atget,
Bayard, Bisson, Daguerre... [etc] et aujourd’hui par Janine Guillot et Charles Ciccione (Paris: Balland,
1967), xiv.

85
Christ cites Louis Chéronnet in: Ibid.

86
Urban historian Rosemary Wakeman has described how they “attempt[ed] to balance scientific urban
planning with the historical and natural forms of the city.” Rosemary Wakeman, “Nostalgic Modernism
and the Invention of Paris in the Twentieth Century,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 1 (2004): 117.

87
Ibid.

112
disposal the library’s collections, which included an increasing number of
photographically-illustrated books that preserved Paris’s camera-ready past.
Because photo agencies and publishers put together their archives by purchasing
pictures from currently active photographers, the historical landscape they would create
with photographs privileged what was photographable in the city at that moment of the
sale to the agencies. For example, Huisman’s text in Pour Comprendre les monuments de
Paris describes the Tuileries palace, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, just
west of the Louvre. Communards sacked and burned the palace in 1871, and the city
demolished what remained in 1883. Multiple photographs of the Tuileries prior to the fire
exist. The photographic record also contains pictures of the
ruins of prominent architectural features prior to
demolition.
88
Yet the photograph that Pour comprendre les
monuments de Paris uses to illustrate the Tuileries depicts
one of the few decorative doorways left standing in the
Tuileries gardens [fig. 2.12]. What was photographable in
the contemporary city was given precedence over the city’s
historical photographic record. The predominance of
photographic illustration in books about Paris’s history in
the 1920s worked to shift the historical consciousness away from an image record stored
in archives and museums and towards an understanding of the past as photographed at the

88
For photographs of the Tuileries before 1871 see: Yvan Christ, Le Louvre et les Tuileries: histoire
architecturale d’un double palais (Paris: Editions Tel, 1949). And for photographs of it after its destruction
see: Gérald Dittmar, Iconographie de la Commune de Paris de 1871 (Paris: Dittmar, 2005).

Fig. 2.12: Pour Comprendre
les monuments de Paris,
1925.

113
moment of publication and as the agency archives were established. Such photographic
practices reduced the past from a rich imagined and reconstructed world to the sum of its
physical remains in the present.
While changing technologies alone did not determine the use of photographs in
histories of Paris, publishers’ prerogatives did play an important role in shaping the forms
of photographic histories. Publishers’ collections established in the 1920s would continue
to illustrate books throughout the rest of the century, which in turn entered municipal
historical institutions. The production of photohistories became almost cyclical, as
publishers used the illustrations of their previous books as an archive of possible
illustrations for future ones. This meant that publishers, in addition to municipal historical
institutions, had an effect on contemporary historical imaginations, for the resulting
emphasis on the contemporary photographic record meant that Parisians forgot about
much of the city’s unphotographable past. As one advocate for historical preservation
lamented in 1941, “the Bastille, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the Tournelles, the Tuileries have
disappeared into the fog of the past.”
89
Certainly Parisians forgot these places because
they no longer existed, but their absence from photohistories also helped erase them from
peoples’ historical imaginaries.

Theorizing the Photograph’s Relationship to the Past
At the same time that publishers’ practices increasingly shaped photographic
narratives of Parisian history, so too did changing ideas about the photograph as a

89
Georges Pillement, Destruction de Paris (Paris: Grasset, 1941), 11.

114
historical document. Interestingly enough, before the 1920s, ideas about how
photographs captured past time did not shape photohistories. Authors, librarians, and
archivists did assume that the camera captured architectural details and thus pictured the
physical city better than other types of image-making technologies, but they neither
theorized its ability to freeze time nor displayed much interest in dating photographs. As
photographer Claude de Santeuil complained in the 1920s:
In France – only in France – in the milieu when one calls the public at large, the
idea still reigns that photography is an essentially mechanical and impersonal
process, and that the only secret to an interesting print is the camera, and its
operator’s social rank.
90

The idea that machines (the more expensive the better) produced photographs went hand
in hand with the idea that the photograph captured objects, not instants. In other words, as
de Santeul continued “[the photographic print] is only, in the end, the geometric
projection of an object on a plane.”
91
In the 1930s, photohistories increasingly credited
photographers for their work, indicating a rejection of photographs as the mechanical
reflection of reality. Likewise in the same decade a new generation of journalists and
amateur historians, affiliated neither with the city’s municipal historical associations nor
with the Commission municipale de Vieux Paris, first put together photographic histories
of Paris that not only paid attention to the conditions of production of the photograph but
also theorized a privileged relationship between photographs and the past.
92
They did so

90
C. de Santeul, “A Propos de photographie,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie (August
1924): 180. De Santeul gave lectures and published books about photography and its uses.

91
Ibid.

92
As scholars of media history explain, media do not change instantly or absolutely. These forms of
photographic histories developed in the 1930s, but older modes that used photographs to present old

115
in response to urban change and the sense of cultural rupture engendered by World War I
as well as the illustrated press’s growing interest in the particular characteristics and
possibilities of photographic illustration.
Although at the century’s beginning maintaining a connection to the past meant
simply preserving old neighborhoods from urban renovations, by the 1920s and 1930s
this very possibility was called into question. World War I had disrupted Parisians’
connection to their past at the same time that it upended cultural, social, and economic
life in France. It made Europeans question the values and meaning of their society and
the existence of “civilization” itself.
93
The war had an effect on aesthetic forms, as artists
and writers tried to make sense of their unprecedented experiences.
94
The global financial
crisis of the 1930s only compounded the feeling of rupture and distance from the past that

buildings and streets would continue to be produced throughout the century. Instead of replacing older
ways of using photographs, these new modes simply developed in parallel. As David Thornburn and Henry
Jenkins have argued: “media change [is] an accretive, gradual process, challenging the idea that new
technologies displace older systems with decisive suddenness.” David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins,
“Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of
Transition, ed. David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 2.

93
Mary Louise Roberts argues that debates about the nature of civilization and the reorganization of French
society after the war crystallized around issues of women and gender: Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization
Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927, Women in Culture and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The literature about the rupture of the Great War is vast, for
a start see: Modrus Eksteins, The Rights of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
(Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1989); Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory, the illustrated ed.
(New York: Sterling, 2009); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture
(New York: Atheneum, 1991).

94
Literary scholar Paul Fussel has argued that the war changed English literature. Novelists, poets, and
amateurs developed new literary forms and conventions in order to represent the unprecedented experience
of modern warfare. Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory. The art of the German expressionists also
worked through the unprecedented horrors of World War I, for more see: Denis Crockett, German Post-
Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder, 1918–1924 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1999).

116
Europeans felt throughout the 1920s.
95
To Parisians in the early 1930s, all ties to Paris of
only thirty years before must have seemed broken. Historian Roxanne Panchasi has even
theorized that the enormous feelings of historical, cultural, and human loss after the First
World War helped create “a kind of cultural ‘premourning,’ a nostalgic longing for
French values and cultural phenomena that had not yet disappeared.”
96

The growing sense of distance from historical time coincided with important
physical changes within the city. Traffic patterns changed as the automobile increasingly
invaded Paris.
97
Between 1919 and 1930, the city destroyed its system of fortifications.
The capital reached its demographic peak in the mid 1930s, while its surrounding suburbs
seemed to grow unchecked. Critics likened them to urban “tentacles.”
98
Marcel Poëte
noted that the physical changes created by increased automobile traffic and industrial
expansion occurred alongside “a shift in values.”
99
Immigration, for instance, fueled
Parisian growth and intensified the inter-war perception of rapid change.
100
The presence
of immigrants inspired an increasingly xenophobic discourse among French journalists

95
For more about the political and financial crisis of interwar France start with: Julian Jackson, The Politics
of Depression in France, 1932-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

96
Roxanne Panchasi, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2009), 5. Emphasis is in the original.

97
For more about Paris and the automobile see: Mathieu Flonneau, Paris et l’automobile: un siècle de
passions (Paris: Hachette, 2005).

98
In 1931, Paris reached its peak intra-muros population: 2,829,753 people. Evelyne Cohen, Paris dans
l’imaginaire national dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 78. The most
radical population growth occurred in the area that surrounded Paris. “Grand Paris” grew from 1 million
people in 1835 to between 6 and 7 million in 1936. Critics dubbed this growth “tentaculaire.” It is these
areas of Paris that continue to grow today. The city’s intra-muros population has declined by nearly half
since 1931. Ibid., 75.

99
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album: 526.

100
Cohen, Paris dans l’imaginaire national dans l’entre-deux-guerres, 97.

117
and intellectuals. The French capital had always attracted foreigners, but commentators in
the 1930s such as journalist André Warnod believed that these new immigrants were
different: “Paris has not known how to assimilate the blacks who have invaded it with
their jazz and dances, Eastern European Jews and their spirit of destruction, or the
Americans with their banks.”
101
Outside influences also seemed to call the very future of
the city itself into question.
102

In fact the Great War seemed to have transformed the fabric of urban life in Paris.
Marcel Poëte compared the Great War to the French Revolution, noting: “the war marks,
in all regards, a turning point in urban evolution.”
103
For others the war represented a
veritable fissure. André Warnod claimed that the war had changed the pace of life: “we
are going fast, we are living faster.”
104
The city seemed to change faster too. Somehow

101
André Warnod, Visages de Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1930), 323. Warnod refers to African
Americans such as Josephine Baker, as well as the influx of Eastern Europeans fleeing unstable political
situations. For more about African Americans in France see: Tyler Edward Stovall, Paris Noir: African
Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French:
Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). For more about
immigration to France see: Vicki Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-
1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Clifford D. Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Origins of
Modern Immigration Control Between the Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). In general
historians study the Americanization of France (and Europe) in the post-World War II era.

102
Evelyn Cohen has argued that Paris itself, what it was and what it would be was called into question in
the interwar period. She explains that during these years “people asked themselves what was the best path
for Paris to take, in order to conserve the richness of its past while also opening itself up to the demands
and issues of the modern world.” Cohen, Paris dans l’imaginaire national dans l’entre-deux-guerres, 12–
13. In 1925, Le Corbusier proposed his Plan Voisin, which called for the destruction of the city’s center and
its replacement with highways and skyscrapers. Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 51–54.

103
Poëte, Une Vie de cité, Album: 524.

104
Warnod, Visages de Paris, 332. Warnod’s judgment echoed the writings of commentators on the
changing pace of modern life such as German sociologist Georg Simmel’s analysis of modernity in his
1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The
Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New

118
overlooking Haussmann’s transformations, Warnod describes how before the war Paris
was “a city where the past remained alive, but which harmoniously welcomed new eras
and evolved slowly.”
105
Unfortunately, he wrote, “the war has brutally broken the
harmonious rhythm of its evolution.”
106
Art critic, collector, and amateur historian Louis
Chéronnet similarly described the war as a terrible blow to French society: “in 1914, one
tremendous ax blow divided the first third of the century into equal parts: depriving one
of its flowering, the other of its roots.”
107
This break called into question the nature of the
city. As Warnod complained, “since the last war, we are less sure of our Paris.” And it
also changed Parisians’ conceptions of their relationship to its past.
108

Like the French Revolution, World War I produced an acute sense that a way of
life had been tragically lost.
109
Chéronnet, in his 1932 photo-history of Belle Epoque
Paris, A Paris vers 1900, argued that the War had created an almost pathological need to
feel connected to the past, or what he termed “a tragedy of the century, a torture of the

York: Routledge, 2004), 51–55.Originally published as Georg Simmel, “Die Grossstädte Und Das
Geistesleben,” Jahrbuch Des Gehestiftung Zu Dresden, no. 9 (1903): 185–206.

105
Warnod, Visages de Paris, 224.

106
Ibid., 324.

107
Chéronnet, A Paris ... vers 1900, 7.

108
Warnod, Visages de Paris, 323.

109
Historian Peter Fritzche has argued that around 1800 Europeans’ relationship to the past changed.
Instead of acting as a guide to the future, the past became something lost forever. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded
in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
French historian Charles Rearick situates the development of nostalgia for the Belle Epoque (which
supplanted nostalgia for the Romantic period) in the trauma of World War I, interwar crises, and World
War II. His argument focuses on how the boulevard became the crystallized “lieu de mémoire” of the Belle
Epoque. Rearick, “La mémoire des Grands Boulevards du XIXe siècle”; Charles Rearick, Paris Dreams,
Paris Memories (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011). Historian Colin Jones has also argued that
World War I caused an obsession with Paris’s Belle Epoque, Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City
(London: Allen Lane, 2004), 384.

119
past, a need to bind oneself to past eras, to no longer be alone in time.”
110
The war had
thwarted his desire for time to function like a Ferris wheel, moving, but always returning
to the same place. A photograph of the Ferris wheel, or Grand roue de Paris, built for the
1900 Paris Exposition, graced his book’s cover, embodying this old notion of time in a
newfangled technology [fig. 2.13]. It also
symbolized the era’s ephemerality, for the Grand
roue had been taken down just after the First World
War. The break of the war was particularly brutal
and violent for Chéronnet’s generation, born around
1900. He and his peers thought that they had grown
up to live in a vastly different world from the one
promised to them in their youth.
111
Not everyone
agreed with Chéronnet. Author and critic Pierre
Lièvre who reviewed Chéronnet’s book about Paris 1900 mocked him for naïvely
thinking that time or the relationship to the past had changed at all. Lièvre argued that
looking back on 1900 from 1930 was no different from gazing at the past from any 30-
year perspective: “thirty years creates the same gulf between two dates, and 1930 is no
further removed from 1900 than 1800 was from 1770.”
112
This critic undermines his own

110
Chéronnet, A Paris ... vers 1900, 7.

111
Kate Cambor’s recent popular biography of Jeanne Hugo, Léon Daudet, and Jean-Baptiste Charcot does
an excellent job of describing the disillusionment of this generation: Kate Cambor, Gilded Youth: Three
Lives in France’s Belle Époque, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

112
Pierre Lièvre, “A PARIS VERS 1900, par Louis Chéronnet (Editions des Chroniques du Jour),” La
Nouvelle revue française 20, no. 228 (September 1932): 445–447.

Fig 2.13: Ferris wheel on the cover
of Louis Chéronnet’s A Paris vers
1900, 1932.

120
argument here by comparing 1930 to 1800, when in the wake of revolution, many French
people did feel that the world had irrevocably changed.
The rupture of historical time felt after the French Revolution had caused the
French to try to forge an attachment to the past. Historians such as Michelet as well as the
Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, who the French greatly admired, tried to create these
links in texts. But such attempts also took visual form in nineteenth-century history
painting as well as in popular cultural forms.
113
These paintings tried to create a
connection to the past by picturing its artifacts and relics, actions, and thoughts. Critics
and historians of 1930 were motivated by the same desires to connect to the now-lost
past. They, however, did not need to recreate that past visually. The world of 1900
remained tangibly present for them in period photographs.
Inter-war illustrated Paris histories would conceive of, and use, these photographs
as snapshots of the past for the first time. As Jean de Castellane, president of the Conseil
municipal de Paris wrote in the preface to André Warnod’s 1930 Visages de Paris,
“before these scenes of pre-war Paris […] before this forever-gone setting, the impression
of nostalgia grasps us.”
114
Visages de Paris relied on photographs to create this nostalgia,
for as Warnod himself explained: “as soon as possible, we have privileged photographs
above all other types of documents. A snapshot is for us, provided that it is not altered, a

113
This is the argument of Beth Wright’s Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned
by the Past. Wright describes how historical paintings “promised their audiences direct access to earlier
times, an unmediated experience of the past. This feigned lack of mediation, of clarification, was achieved
through meticulous illusionistic concrete components that denied the intervention of the artist’s brush, and
compositions that appeared to ‘be’ instead [sic] proclaiming their birth from the artist’s brain.” Wright,
Painting and History During the French Restoration, 5. What she describes is a formal technique that in
some ways mirrors the rhetoric that surrounded the mechanical, transparent ability of the camera to capture
actions.

114
Warnod, Visages de Paris, ii.

121
privileged document because the lens is cruelly unblinking and impartial.”
115
He agreed
with Marcel Poëte that the photograph was more objective than other images, and used it
as Poëte imagined future historians would, as a vivid picture of the city during a past
moment. Photographs, not just any documents, preserved these scenes. For Chéronnet,
this fact mattered:
Our fathers who only had miniatures or paintings, just ‘works of art’, to
reconstruct the past did not know the photographic or cinematographic
document’s painful intensity. The sheer number of them, their relentlessness,
changes the quality of our dreams, terrifies our mind.
116

Photographs were not just more objective; they were more emotionally resonant.
117

Chéronnet’s belief in the special relationship of photography and cinematography with
regards to the past grew out of his general theory of the specificity and importance of the
photograph that he developed as an art critic and collector. Throughout the 1930s and
1940s, Chéronnet advocated for the establishment of a museum of photography to unite
photographs scattered in archives, museums, and private collections.
118
Such a museum
would organize photos chronologically, allowing researchers to trace the technical and
aesthetic evolution of the medium and its different uses in advertising, postcards, and
book illustration. Researchers could also search for photos by year or era. Chéronnet

115
Ibid., vi. The book’s first photograph shows the rubble of the barricades after the Revolution of 1848.

116
Chéronnet, A Paris ... vers 1900, 9.

117
Again, not everyone agreed about this. The reviewer of Chéronnet’s book who dismissed him for
thinking World War I had marked a rupture with the past also claimed: “exhumed documents from a still
recent past have the same effect on our sensibilities.” He denies the photograph’s medium specificity by
lumping it together with all documents from the past. Lièvre, “A PARIS VERS 1900,” 445.

118
Louis Chéronnet, “[introduction],” Photographie, 1934 1933, np; Louis Chéronnet, Le Petit musée de la
curiosité photographique (Paris: Tel, 1945).

122
imagined an archival logic that privileged the photographs themselves, not the subjects
depicted in them.

Fig. 2.14: The cover of André Warnod, Visages de Paris, 1930.

A preference for photographs over other types of images also motivated their use
as pictures of past time. The cover of Visages de Paris embodies this preference. It
reproduces a plate of the Plan de Turgot, which depicts the Louvre, the Tuileries and the
Seine [fig. 2.14]. In the middle of the cover and as if from behind it, bursts forth an aerial
photograph of the Place de l’Etoile and Arc de Triomphe. The edges of the map appear
jagged where the photograph and Arc has ripped through them. It is as if the
photograph’s objectivity can literally tear through any previous representations of the
city. And the juxtaposition of the Arc de Triomphe onto a map that does not depict its
future location emphasizes the rejection of the way in which photographs had, until now,
largely been used as documents of physical spaces. Warnod’s cover provides a visual
metaphor for a new generation’s ideas about photographs’ relationship to the past. It also

123
depicts a graphic sensibility borrowed from photomontage and the illustrated press, in
which pictures in series or overlaid on top of one another told stories differently than
individual images.
119

Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, attention to the specificity of photography
and its possibilities for illustration developed in France providing the context for this shift
in the historical value of the photograph. In 1930, the magazine Arts et métiers
graphiques began publishing Photographie, an annual compendium of the best photos
that had appeared in print the previous year. In the introduction to the 1931 volume,
Surrealist author Philippe Soupault reminded his readers:
a photograph is first and foremost a document and […] one must view it as such.
It can be a motif used in the service of painting or even literature, but, on the other
hand, one should isolate it neither from its subject nor from its usefulness.
120

Photography captivated those interested in graphic design not as an original art form, as it
would come to be accepted in France in the 1980s, but as a document and a means of
illustration. A similar conviction drove the use of photographs in the photo magazine Vu,
founded in 1928. Founder Lucien Vogel, an amateur photographer, hired young and
innovative photographers and incorporated avant-garde photography and photomontage

119
For more about how the turn-of-the-century illustrated press developed a similar graphic sensibility see:
Gervais, “L’Illustration photographique.”

120
Philippe Soupault, “Etat de la photographie,” Photographie, 1931, np. Emphasis is in the original.
André Breton came up with the idea of “automatic writing” with Soupault. The two also collaborated on a
book of poetry Les Champs magnétiques. In making this statement Soupault likely gave voice to some of
the ambivalence that underpinned Surrealists’ thinking about photography. Breton himself expressed
doubts about the photograph, complaining, for example that the photographic illustrations in Nadja had
stolen the aura from places they depict. For more about Breton and Surrealist photography start with:
Rosalind E. Krauss, L’amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, D.C: Corcoran Gallery of
Art, 1985).

124
techniques in his publication.
121
Amidst articles about world events, fashion, culture, and
sports, others about photomechanical processes and the role of the photo agency
instructed Vu’s readers about photography and photographic illustration.
122
In multi-page
photographically-illustrated articles as well as rubrics such as “Everything in Images,”
“Seen in the World,” and “Photographic Echoes,” photographs became the basis for
experimentations in storytelling.
A new generation of historians of Paris, including André Warnod and Louis
Chéronnet, brought a sensibility developed in the milieu of journalism and the
photographic press, not municipal historical institutions, to Parisian history. Chéronnet
nonetheless had familial connections to the Vieux Paris milieu. His father had owned a
bookstore specializing in Vieux Paris, and his great-grandfather, Dominique Jean-
François Chéronnet wrote the first history of Montmartre.
123
Louis Chéronnet remained
interested in the history of Paris but made a living writing articles and art criticism for
Photographies, L’Art vivant, Art et décoration, Le Crapouillet, Beaux Arts, and Vu during

121
For more about Vu see Frizot and de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine. German photo magazines,
including Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung of the 1920s influenced Vogel.

122
While Thierry Gervais has shown that the style of Vu emerged much earlier in the illustrated press, Vu
seemed more self-conscious about its look. It printed articles that discussed how it put together stories:
“Laurel et Hardy travaillent pour ‘Vu’,” Vu, November 27, 1935. In the United States, the photo magazine
PM Daily paid similar attention to how photographs reproduced the news: Jason E. Hill, “On the Efficacy
of Artifice: PM, Radiophoto, and the Journalistic Discourse of Photographic Objectivity,” Etudes
Photographiques, no. 26 (November 2011): 50–85.

123
Louis Chéronnet’s father owned a bookstore, rue des Grands Augustins specializing in Vieux Paris
books and objects, mentioned in: Procès-Verbaux de la Commission du Vieux Paris (June 25, 1921): 131.
D.-J.-F Chéronnet, Histoire de Montmartre, état physique de la butte, ses chroniques, son abbaye, sa
chapelle du martyre, sa paroisse, son église et son calvaire, Clignancourt (Paris: Breteau et Pichery, 1843).

125
the interwar period.
124
Born in 1885, Warnod was slightly older than Chéronnet.
125
He
trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Later, he turned to the press in order to make a
living. He drew cartoons, wrote art criticism, and combined the two in illustrated books
about Paris.
126
Warnod remained friends with some of Paris’s best-known artists and
intellectuals. Given these contacts, it is not surprising that Warnod’s Visages de Paris
would contain photographs by Germaine Krull, a regular contributor to Vu.
127

Photojournalism and historiography developed deep intermedial connections in
the 1920s and 1930s. Critics such as Warnod and Chéronnet transferred story-telling
skills honed in the press to historical narratives.
128
Moreover, illustrated histories and
books about Paris included photographs, taken by photographers including Brassaï,
André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Roger Schall, and André Zucca, produced in order to sell
to the illustrated press. These press photos entered Paris’s municipal historical institutions
as historical documents for future generations. The illustrated press thus shaped

124
Chéronnet’s articles in Vu included: “Dans mon beau château,” Vu, November 1, 1933; “Eden de
banlieue,” Vu, July 18, 1934; “Monsieur fromage,” Vu, January 23, 1935; “De plus haut de Notre-Dame,”
Vu, October 2, 1935; “Mirages de l’infra-rouge,” Vu, October 14, 1936.

125
For more about André Warnod see the catalogue of an exhibition about his life held in 1985 at the
Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris as well as his two-volume illustrated memoirs: Hommage à André
Warnod 1885-1960: MAM/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris: Paris Musées, 1985); André
Warnod, Fils de Montmartre, souvenirs (Paris: A. Fayard, 1955); André Warnod, Drôle d’époque,
souvenirs (Paris: A. Fayard, 1960).

126
Warnod fought during World War I and was captured by the Germans: André Warnod, Prisonnier de
guerre, notes et croquis rapportés d’Allemagne (Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1915).

127
Warnod’s previous books contained his own illustrations. In 1930, the magazine published a two-page
excerpt, with photos, of Warnod’s Visages de Paris: André Warnod, “Visages de Paris (extrait),” Vu,
October 8, 1930.

128
Scholars of this era tend not to study Roger Schall and André Zucca, because they did not belong to the
avant-garde. But they took similar documentary city photos, published in newspapers and photo books.

126
photographically-conscious ideas of history and the photographic record of the
contemporary city.
In fact, when Warnod and Chéronnet published photographs as historical
documents of the past, they used images that looked like those of contemporary
photojournalism. Reviewers also noticed this similarity. One reviewer described
Warnod’s historical tableaux as “a series of retrospective reportages” which “awaken the
past, present it to us living, seething, colorful.”
129
Photographs presented the past as daily
news. Warnod included photographs that
captured current events such as the 1885 “boeuf
gras,” or carnival celebration, Victor Hugo’s
funeral procession from the same year, the 1910
flood, and the 1918 victory parades. This was the
history of Paris as the history of what had
already been photographed, which now included
daily life and events, not just monuments.
Similarly, Chéronnet’s A Paris vers 1900
featured images familiar from society, arts, and
fashion journalism. They depicted women’s dresses, jewelry, and hats, interior design,
theater productions, the arts, and posters. Both books included photographic evidence of
Parisian fads and fashions, such as the wide-scale adoption of the bicycle [fig. 2.15].
These books even betray an interest in the faits divers of the press, the sensational or

129
“A travers le passé,” Le Jardin des lettres, no. 3 (January 1931): 10.

Fig. 2.15: Urban cyclists,
A Paris vers 1900.

127
horrific stories of crime and scandal. Chéronnet includes a photograph of Madame
Steinheil, one of the most prominent femmes fatales of the Belle Epoque, while Warnod
tells tales of murder, deception, and betrayal.
130
These photos not only shared subjects
with press and snapshot photography; they also echoed formal characteristics such as the
blurry focus and hurried compositions of hasty snapshots [fig. 2.16].

Fig. 2.16: “At the Races,” Visages de Paris, 1930.

The photos in Chéronnet and Warnod’s books are snapshots of everyday life, not
detailed architectural views of Paris. Georges Huisman, who reviewed Visages de Paris
in La Quinzaine de la critique, likened reading it to flipping through “a family photo
album.”
131
These photographic illustrations pioneered the inclusion of snapshots in
history books. In doing so, they added photos to an older type of anecdotal and everyday

130
Madame Steinheil was French President Felix Faure’s mistress. Faure died in her arms in 1899. Adolphe
Steinheil and his mother-in-law were murdered under mysterious conditions in 1908. The French police
arrested and questioned Marguerite Steinheil in connection with the crime. Warnod also includes an
account of the Steinheils. For more about Madame Steinheil and her case see: Frédéric Delacourt, L’Affaire
Steinheil (Paris: De Vecchi, 2006); Benjamin F. Martin, The Hypocrisy of Justice in the Belle Epoque
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).

131
Georges Huisman, “VISAGES DE PARIS, par André Warnod,” La Quinzaine critique des livres et des
revues 2, no. 24 (December 25, 1930): 818.

128
account of Paris written by chroniclers since the nineteenth century.
132
These books had
contained drawings and caricatures. Georges Cain and Marcel Poëte had carried this
genre into the early twentieth century, adding reproductions of engravings and
architectural photographs. In Warnod and Chéronnet’s books, photographs of everyday
life replaced these previous forms.
Chéronnet and Warnod used photographs that they also considered artifacts. The
photographs in their books reproduced popular forms of turn-of-the-century photography.
Huisman was right to characterize Warnod’s books as a family photo album, for both
Warnod and Chéronnet reprinted photographs collected by ordinary people in addition to
photo archives.
133
Chéronnet’s A Paris vers 1900 included reproductions of photos sold
as stereoscopic slides by Vérascope Richard.
134
Chéronnet described elsewhere how this
collection and the archives of the press in general “hold riches of unexpected images that
step out of Time like miraculous spirits.”
135
He recognized the photographs, not just their
subjects, as artifacts of the past. Chéronnet used photographs taken by well-known
portrait photographers Nadar, Lucien Walery, and Léopold Reutlinger, whose clients

132
For more about panoramic literature as a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century genre see: Margaret
Cohen, “Panoramic Literature and the Invention of Everyday Genres,” in Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
227–252; Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

133
Chéronnet also used a handful of photographs from the BHVP’s photo archive. Credited to Charles
Frémont, they depict Montmartre theaters the Moulin Rouge and the Cigale, carriages decorated for the
Festival of Flowers, cyclists in city parks, and three popular street scenes.

134
Vérascope Richard also produced stereoscopic viewing machines. The Vérascope Richard collection
was purchased by Hachette in 1974 and is preserved in its photothèque. For more about Vérascope Richard
see: Jacques Périn, Jules Richard et la magie du relief, 3 vols. (Mialet: Cyclope, 1993); Jules Richard, Le
Vérascope et les homéoscopes (Paris: J. Richard, 1900).

135
Chéronnet, “[introduction],” np.

129
included actresses, politicians, and members of high society.
136
Portraits of celebrities,
such as Sarah Bernhardt, would have circulated in smaller formats and in printed form
throughout the Belle Epoque.
137
A Paris vers 1900 also included photographs by
Maurice-Louis Branger, well known for his portraits and street scenes in the 1920s.
138

Warnod drew his photographs from many of the same sources as Chéronnet, including
the Cubist painter and illustrator André Dignimont’s personal collection, the collection of
the Société française de la photographie, and the archives of portrait photographers
including Nadar.
139
He also used photographs from the Monuments historiques, printed
by the Neurdein brothers.
140
These period images bear a sort of triple historicity: they
depict the period, they are artifacts of the period, and they are the photographs that people
consumed during the period, which thus helped construct their own worldviews.
Rather than using photographs to picture how the physical city had changed, this
approach drew on a notion of urban history as the history of the city’s people and their
changing habits. The juxtaposition of a pair of photographs in Chéronnet’s A Paris vers

136
The Monuments historiques preserved Nadar’s glass plates. For more about the archives of the
Monuments historiques see: Jean-Jacques Poulet-Allamagny and Philippe Néagu, “Archives
photographiques de Monuments historiques: Anthologie d’un patrimoine photographique : 1847-1926,”
Monuments historiques, c1980.

137
Zola’s La Curée contains a wonderful scene in which two young Parisians flip through an album of such
cards depicting famous contemporaries. For more about the popularity of the photographic carte de visite
see: Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985).

138
The BNF has a collection of Branger’s photographs at the Cabinet des Estampes et de la photographie.

139
Warnod and Dignimont were friends. Warnod wrote the only study about Dignimont’s work: André
Warnod, Dignimont (Paris: H. Babou, 1929).

140
These books used the archives of the Monuments historiques far more than the Bibliothèque historique
and Musée Carnavalet combined. They almost exclusively used the Musée Carnavalet for estampes rather
than photographs. In the 1920s, publishers used the Neurdein photographs more than any others.

130
1900, depicting a large horse-drawn carriage and an automobile and labeled the “past”
and the “future,” argues that human experience was changing at a rapid rate [figs. 2.17 &
2.18]. Both photographs depict the Place de la Concorde.
141
The consistency of their
backgrounds emphasizes the coexistence of different historical times in turn-of-the-
century Paris. Photographs of buildings or streets emphasize historical continuity. The
photographs of ephemeral elements – events, fashion, and everyday life – used by
Chéronnet and Warnod highlighted the isolation of the present instead of emphasizing a
connection to the past. Paris in 1900 no longer remained just hidden in the outline of a
doorway or lamppost; it only existed in an inaccessible photographic dreamscape.

Fig. 2.17: “The Past,” A Paris vers 1900. Fig. 2.18: “The Future,” A Paris vers 1900.

While in 1905 a literature review of illustrated publications could marvel at the
very existence and growth of contemporary photographically-illustrated publishing, by
1932, such reviews focused on how well illustrated books about Paris used photographs.
A full-page review essay in the March 1932 issue of the literary review, Le Jardin des
lettres, praised a group of recent illustrated histories of Paris as excellent “as much from

141
André Warnod worked as a young journalist in Paris before the war. He described the city then as a
place where autobuses and automobiles still shared the road with carriages. Warnod, Visages de Paris, 224.

131
the point of view of their text as their illustrations.”
142
The anonymous reviewer
acknowledged that historical illustrations needed to be held to the same standards as other
archival sources when he praised one book’s authors for using a broad assortment of
national archives and libraries to find their plentiful images.
143
His description of these
books, however, betrayed a belief that photography was distinct from other types of
images. He described another history as “the first successful effort to offer aerial views of
a big city in its entirety.”
144
This comment ignores the centuries-old tradition of aerial
views of the city, from the 1739 Turgot plan to Nadar’s experiments with hot air balloon
photography from the 1850s.
145
Such ignorance, willful or not, reflected the assumption
that only the photograph could offer a true aerial view of Paris. This critic joined the
authors of photographically-illustrated books and their captions in paying attention to the
historical and material specificity of photographs.
Photographs’ captions increasingly paid attention to the photograph’s moment of
capture by crediting its author and date. The attribution of photographs in illustrated
books about Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century is very uneven. Unlike
estampes, which often bore their makers’ names, photographs were more likely to bear

142
“Paris,” Le Jardin des lettres, March 1932, 5. It cites: Lucien Dubeche and Pierre d’Espezel, Histoire de
Paris (Paris: Payot, 1926); Raymond Escholier, Paris, n.d.; Gauthiez, Paris; Louis Hourticq, Paris vu du
ciel (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1930); Huisman, Pour comprendre les monuments de Paris; Marcel Poëte, Une
Vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours, vol. III, La Spiritualité de la cité classique, les origines de la
cité moderne (XVIe-XVIIe siècles) (Paris: A. Picard, 1931); Warnod, Visages de Paris.

143
Ibid.

144
The book in question was Louis Hourticq’s Paris vu du ciel. “Paris,” 5.

145
Another reviewer of the same book described it as “the process of the makers of the ‘Turgot plan’
updated for today’s fashions.” Pierre Berthelot, “Monographies régionales et monumentales,” Gazette des
beaux-arts, December 1, 1932, 259.

132
the name of the archive in which they were found than the photographer who took them.
In the press, in the 1920s and 1930s, it remained common to credit photo agencies, not
photographers.
146
Similarly, Hachette’s books credited archives, generally its own, not
photographers. In the pages of Visages de Paris and A Paris vers 1900, however,
Chéronnet and Warnod included photographers’ names when they knew them.
147

Photohistories, in the years and decades that followed, would increasingly credit
photographers, marking a developing awareness of the photograph as an authored work.
The attention to the conditions of production of the photograph also manifested
itself in captions that noted when and where the pictures were taken. Engravings and
other views of the city commonly bore captions that indicated the image’s vantage point.
Photographs were often captioned in the same way. In Pierre Gauthiez’s Paris, for
example, the photographs’ captions often indicate the image’s vantage point: Notre Dame
was “seen from [the church of] Saint-Séverin” and the Invalides and its grounds are “seen
from the roof of the Grand-Palais.”
148
In this way, the use of photographs mimicked the
use of other types of city illustrations. However, this book in particular also contains
photographs whose captions acknowledged the temporality of the photograph and the
city. A plunging view of the avenue de l’Opéra bears the caption “the avenue de l’Opéra,

146
Frizot and de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine, 15.

147
The Berne Convention in 1886 first established international recognition of photographers’ rights to
their images. In France, however, copyright was established during the French Revolution: “the landmark
law on author's rights was enacted in 1793; it governed droits d’auteur until its revision in 1957. In 1985 it
was revised again.” Molly Nesbit, “What Was an Author?,” Yale French Studies, no. 73 (January 1, 1987):
230. For more about the history of photographers’ copyright see: Georges Chabaud, Le Droit d’auteur des
artistes et des fabricants, législation, jurisprudence, projets de réforme (Paris: M. Rivière, 1908); Nesbit,
“What Was an Author?”; Ysolde Gendreau, Axel Nordemann, and Rainer Oesch, eds., Copyright and
Photographs: An International Survey (London: Kluwer Law International, 1999).

148
Gauthiez, Paris, 32, 180.

133
on a rainy day,” while another of the Place de la Concorde shows a “snowy day” [figs.
2.19 & 2.20].
149
Such captions emphasize that the city itself is in a constant state of flux:
the photograph only captures a moment of it. Another photograph of a market stall full of
flowers bears the caption “the Madeleine flower market (January 1928).”
150
The inclusion
of the date indicates the stirrings of an interest in photographs of the city as photographs
– slices of time or moments captured with a camera – and not just better quality, cheaper
generic images.

Fig. 2.19: Bertault, “The avenue de
l’Opéra, on a rainy day,”
Paris, 1929.

Fig. 2.20: Yvon, “Snowy Day,” Paris, 1929.
Thanks to their ability to capture everyday life, photographs would, as Marcel
Poëte foresaw, become the preferred historical document for picturing the twentieth-
century past. But Marcel Poëte would never use old photographs as snapshots of past
time. Rather it would take a new generation of historians and critics, trained in reading

149
Ibid., 157, 176.

150
Ibid., 43.

134
photographs as evidence of the everyday by the contemporary illustrated press, to
actually use photos as documents of the everyday in previous times. Not only would
these new ways of reading photographs open up re-interpretations of old pictures, they
would also change critics and historians’ understandings of contemporary photographs of
Paris as historical documents of the future. They would increasingly understand, imagine,
and consume photo books as photohistories.

Photo Books as Historical Documents of the Future and the Shift to the Everyday
In the 1920s and 1930s, photojournalism influenced not only the use of old
photographs to tell the city’s history in photohistories, but also what photographs would
document the city for future generations. At the same time that new ways of using photos
as historical illustrations developed in the 1920s and 1930s, a new genre of
photographically-illustrated books about Paris emerged that would become historical
documents of their era. These books combined the work of well-known authors and
photojournalists. Instead of trading in views of Paris’s great monuments, 1930s photo
books tended to “present Paris as a collection of building fragments and personally
observed individuals.”
151
Fragmentary perspectives stemmed, in part, from the practices
of Vieux Paris amateurs who sought photographs of historical details. But, these

151
Art historian Kim Sichel has argued that early twentieth-century photo books of Paris no longer contain
“topographic records of the great monuments.” Rather they “present Paris as a collection of building
fragments and personally observed individuals. Despite their seeming randomness, they reorder the city
dynamically by the formal structure of their images as well as by their full-length narratives, progressing
one step further than the short magazine essays with their collage-like layouts and unusual compositions. In
many ways, they are comparable to Surrealist novels recording aleatory paths through the city, or the
flaneur’s progression through the streets.” Kim D. Sichel, “Paris Vu par André Kertész: An Urban Diary,”
History of Photography (Summer 1992): 105. This characterization somewhat unfairly recasts
photographic exploration of the city as avant-garde.

135
changing photographic norms also evolved alongside new ideas about how the
photograph captured the past. Louis Chéronnet and André Warnod’s books fit into
changing notions of history (an increased interest in the “everyday”) as well as increased
interest in photographs of the mundane, the prosaic, and the individual. In part, these
photographs helped to alleviate the sense of distance from the past, by showing how
fragments of the past lived on in the context of everyday life.
Even turn-of-the-century Vieux Paris aficionados had taken nostalgic photographs
of everyday scenes. Georges Cain’s guide to photographing Paris featured photos of les
Halles during its morning bustle, a group of men, women, and children in an alleyway
near the Bièvre, and a young boy posed on the steps of the rue Cloche-Perce [figs. 2.21 &
2.22].
152
More than just unavoidable parts of the historical streetscape, people could also
embody historical continuity. Cain included instructions, including camera
recommendations, for catching people unawares. In part, photographers simply had to
compose and capture scenes rapidly. Cain warned: “the crowd quickly gathers around the
camera operator, picturesque pedestrians become curious idlers and one only gathers
frozen images of individuals, turning their wide-eyes towards the same point.”
153
Taking
good street photographs meant staging “reality.” Amateur photographs sought out
“picturesque pedestrians” well before such figures became hallmarks of 1920s and 1930s
documentary photography.

152
These photographs look more like slum photography projects undertaken in cities such as New York and
London than photographs of Vieux Paris.

153
Cain, Nouvelles promenades dans Paris, 396.

136

Fig. 2.21: A young boy and the bustle of Les Halles, Nouvelle Promenades dans Paris, 1908.

Fig. 2.22: An alleyway off the Bièvre River, Nouvelle Promenades dans Paris, 1908.

The emergent documentary and journalistic photography of the 1920s and 1930s
illustrated a new generation of “Paris” books that replaced traditional monumental views
with insiders’ views of the city. Germaine Krull’s 100x Paris (1929) mixed photos of
traffic jams, movie palaces, and traffic cops with photos of monuments.
154
In 1931,

154
For more about these photo books see: Kim D. Sichel, “Photographs of Paris, 1928-1934: Brassai,
Andre Kertesz, Germaine Krull and Man Ray. (volumes I and Ii) (france)” (PH.D., YALE UNIVERSITY;
0265, 1986); Sichel, “Paris vu par André Kertész: An Urban Diary”; Kim Sichel, Avantgarde als
Abenteuer: Leben und Werk der Photographin Germaine Krull (München: Schirmer-Mosel, 1999); Parr
and Badger, The Photobook: A History, 1:.

137
Lithuanian-born and Bauhaus-trained painter turned photographer Moï Ver published
Paris, whose collage-inspired layouts juxtaposed past and present, privilege and poverty.
The montage that graced the cover – factory smokestacks superimposed on the columns
of the Pantheon – made Paris seem a bustling capital of modernity [fig. 2.23].
155
The
photos in Brassaï’s 1933 Paris de nuit presented the city’s sometimes seedy nocturnal
entertainments. André Kertesz’s Paris vu par… (1934), with its photos of prosaic street
scenes and lone pedestrians showed a less glamorous side of the city. Kertész’s pictures
of the Eiffel Tower foregrounded by train tracks or the Sacré Coeur framed by decrepit
buildings also conversed with traditional representations of monuments [fig. 2.24]. Roger
Schall’s photographs in Paris de jour (1937) presented the city’s familiar monuments in
playful and mocking fragments [figs 2.1, 2.2, & 2.3]. René-Jacque’s photos in Francis
Carco’s Envoûtement de Paris (1938) similarly showed a more intimate side of the city:
its back courtyards, empty quays, quiet streets, and sleeping homeless. Many of these
books compiled photos of the city originally sold to the illustrated press. Their insistence
on the city’s prosaic present, not the buildings of its past, can be read as a rejection of
conventional illustrated histories of the city and as a reaction against the burden of
nostalgia for Paris 1900.

155
Martin Parr talks about Moï Vers’ book in this regard: Parr and Badger, The Photobook: A History, 1:.

138

Fig. 2.23: The cover of Moï Ver’s 1931
Paris, which combines smokestacks
with the columns of the Pantheon or the
Madeline.

Fig. 2.24: Montmartre seen through a shabby building-
scape in André Kertész’s 1934 Paris vu par…

Increasingly, commentators and critics recognized that these images had historical
significance and that the publication of books about Paris was, in effect, the constitution
of a new archive of the city. French journalist and literary critic Emile Henriot described
Brassaï’s photographs in Paris de Nuit as containing “all of the contradictory elements of
our city, its modernities and its vestiges, its palpitations, its franticness, its sleepy
provincials, its medieval romanticism, its growth, its warts, even its phantoms mixed with
living realities.”
156
Henriot recognized the same ghosts that haunted Vieux Paris
photographs of streets and buildings. Published in book form, Brassaï’s photographs
would become historical documents for future generations. As Henriot wrote:
One readily imagines one of our grandsons later taking his turn flipping through
this collection of precise images and being moved by its poetry. It’s the reality of
the most quotidian things that has always made up the strange charm of the
past.
157

156
Emile Henriot, “Photos de Paris,” Le Temps, January 30, 1933.

157
Ibid.

139
He imagined Paris de nuit becoming not an art book, but a poetic history book.
158
For the
next generation, Henriot explains, the “new surroundings where we live will seem the
setting of a dream.”
159
As he concludes: “photographers of 1933, it’s for the year 2000
that you are working.”
160
It turns out that the drive to archive Paris for future generations
neither ended with Marville nor died with Atget. It did not end with the demise of photo
collecting at municipal photo archives either. It simply changed venues. This history
reveals the functional relationship that developed at the beginning of the twentieth
century between the commercial production and publication of photographs of Paris and
the strong archival impulse to document the past and the present in pictures that scholars
have almost exclusively associated with municipal and not-for-profit archives and
projects.

***
The development of new norms of photographic illustration in books of all stripes
affected photography’s place in a hierarchy of historical images. Photography became the
means of reproduction through which other types of images entered the written page.
Until the early 1930s, authors and publishers had used the photograph as if it provided
direct access to the objects that it pictured. Publishers privileged photos over other types
of illustrations, and their preference drove the increased inclusion of photographs in

158
For the idea of poetic history see: Simon Schama, “Clio at the Multiplex,” New Yorker, January 19,
1998.

159
Henriot, “Photos de Paris.”

160
Ibid.

140
books about any number of subjects, including the French capital. They also created a
new generation of photo archives that illustrated books about the city. In these books, the
photograph, on the one hand, continued to function as it had decades earlier, as a
transparent and objective representation of architectural elements, estampes, or paintings.
But in the late 1920s and 1930s, publishers, historians, and critics also increasingly
embraced photos as a means to preserve past time that would created an emotional
connection between the contemporary viewer and the past moment, frozen in the
photograph. Historians, editors, and critics stopped thinking about photographs as the
least emotionally resonant document of the past and embraced them as the most.
Importantly, this transformation occurred within illustrated histories of the city,
helping to spread new ideas and theories about the relationship between the past, present,
and the image through the world. Turn-of-the-century photo archives, museum
exhibitions, and lectures could only reach the viewers who came to them;
photographically-illustrated books would bring Paris – and its past and present – to the
world, winding up in foreign libraries, personal collections, and even the research
divisions of Hollywood film studios.
161
Illustrated books facilitated the global circulation

161
In the 1920s Benjamin wrote that “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations,
which would be out of reach for the original itself.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 220. Benjamin refers to art here, but this comment applies to cities as
well. For more about how cities circulate as pictures and visual icons see the essays in: Philip J. Ethington
and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., “Urban Icons: Special Issue,” Urban History 33, no. 1 (2006). As for the
presence of photographically-illustrated books about Paris in film studio research divisions, the copies of
Warnod’s Visages de Paris and Gauthiez’s Paris owned by the University of Southern California were
donated by Paramount Picture’s Research Division. Paramount acquired the books in 1932 and 1951,
respectively. Filmmakers likely used these books, alongside photographs by photographers such as the
Séeberger brothers, to rebuild Paris in the studio and choose shooting locations. Paramount’s Paris films
included Love Me Tonight (1932), I Met Him in Paris (1937), Midnight (1939), Sabrina (1954), and Funny
Face (1957).

141
of images used romantically to picture Paris’s lost past and photographs whose popularity
demonstrated a sort of “pre-nostalgia” for contemporary everyday life. Collected in
archives and libraries, these books created palliative myths about the city’s historic
greatness. Photographs also became a preferred tool of those who sought to reconstruct
the strangeness of the past.
As part of the 1939 celebrations of photography’s centenary, the French poet Paul
Valéry directly addressed the tension between objective documentation and subjective
reconstruction in history and photography. Speaking to members of the Société françasie
de photographie about the influence of photography on the humanistic scholarship,
Valéry divided historians according to their understanding of history’s relation to
objectivity:
For some, History is summed up in image albums, in operatic storylines, in
spectacles and in generally decisive situations. Among these scenes that our
minds create and receive, there are some that offer us fairytale worlds, beautiful
or incredible theatrical effects, which at times we interpret as symbols or poetic
transpositions of real events. For others, more abstractly interested in History, it is
a register of human experiences that one must consult like one does a
meteorological handbook, with the same concern to discover in the past some
indication of the future.
162

One group understood history as subjective reconstruction. For the other, historical
scholarship entailed positivism and the search for events and facts. The former embraced
photographs as tools for reconstructing the foreign drama of the past. The later used them
in order to establish the facts of events or scenes. In describing this divide, Valéry

162
The Société française de photographie commissioned the speech from Valéry. Etudes photographiques
published an annotated version of this speech in 2001: Paul Valéry, “Discours du centenaire de la
photographie,” Etudes photographiques, no. 10 (November 2001). Annotations by Amélie Lavin further
explain Valéry’s rejection of positivism and proposition that history was closely related to literature. I am
grateful to François Brunet for bringing this speech to my attention.

142
addressed much of what separated amateur and professional history. Strangely enough,
however, the decades that first saw amateur and popular historians’ uses of the
photograph to marvel at lost eras also saw professional historians turn to images as tools
of scientific analysis.
While university historians still used and taught Charles Seignobos and Charles-
Victor Langlois’s methodology in the 1920s and 1930s, a new school of French history
was developing that would turn to images as a means of analyzing and organizing
information.
163
The Annales School, named after the journal Annales d’histoire
économique et sociale founded in 1929 by historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre,
incorporated social science methodologies into the study of the past. Its methodologies
would come to dominate French history after the Second World War. Historians of the
Annales School would largely agree with Seignobos and Langlois’ dismissal of images as
romantic sources for reconstructing the past. But they did repeatedly subject evidence, in
particular demographic or economic data, to visual display and analysis in charts, maps,
and graphs.
164
This new history, which would influence the development of social history
in the United States, combined scientific data with rich description of past worlds. As

163
For more about the development of the Annales School see: Peter Burke, The French Historical
Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990); André
Burguière, L’Ecole des Annales: une histoire intellectuelle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006); Jacques Revel and
Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories French Constructions of the Past, Postwar French Thought Series (New York:
New Press, 1995).

164
The second edition of Fernand Braudel’s history of the Mediterranean, for example contains hundreds of
illustrations that he had to leave out of the first edition, published just after the war. The work devotes only
passing attention to images of the sea. Instead the illustrations are hand-drawn charts, maps, and graphs that
helped Braudel analyze the study’s masses of data. Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde
méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, vol. 1, Seconde édition revue et augmentée. (Paris: Librairie
Armand Colin, 1966). For more about the visual display of data see: Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display
of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed. (Cheshire: Graphics Press, 2001).

143
Fernand Braudel reminded readers of his classic study of Mediterranean history,
“fortunately or unfortunately, our profession does not have the enviable flexibility of
fiction.”
165

Despite Annales historians’ efforts to study the past objectively and scientifically,
they never completely abandoned the importance of a subjective connection to it.
Braudel, in particular, thought that the effectiveness of his massive study of trade data
and crop yields, births, deaths, and marriages in the Mediterranean basin depended on the
reader’s ability to bring the past to life in his mind. The introduction to his book
instructed:
The reader who will want to approach this book as I would have him, will kindly
bring his own memories, his visions of the interior seas, and, in turn, color my
text with them, will help me recreate this vast presence, which I strove to do as
best I could….
166

Certainly Fernand Braudel did not rely on photographs to create an emotional connection
to nineteenth-century ports, as Louis Chéronnet did with pictures of Parisian streets, but
he acknowledged the importance of the past’s sentimental grip on the student of history.
“I believe that the sea,” Braudel continued, “such as one can see it and love it, remains
the grandest possible document of its past life.”
167
Braudel’s poetic endorsement of the
sea – not the archive – as the best document of its history suggests that perhaps amateur
and professional historians’ conceptions of the past did not differ as much as university-

165
Fernand Braudel, “Préface de la première édition,” in La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à
l’époque de Philippe II, vol. 1, Seconde édition revue et augmentée. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966),
13.

166
Ibid.

167
Ibid.

144
affiliated historians would have liked. The historian who finds history in the waters of the
Mediterranean is not so far removed from the historian whose dreams are haunted by the
photographic past. Rather than the unique musings of one historian, Braudel’s romantic
notions of the past represent in fact a key component of the Annales approach as
pioneered by Marc Bloch: the desire to combine scientific analysis with the descriptive
resurrection of the past in all of its strangeness.
168

As time seemed to move faster in the twentieth century, illustrated books became
a means of reliving the glories of an increasingly recent past. If the traumas of World
War I had pushed Parisians to seek a connection to prewar Paris in photographs of it, the
traumas of World War II with France’s spectacular and rapid defeat in 1940, the
establishment of a right-wing state, which undid the principles and liberties of the
Republic, and the four-year long German occupation of Paris magnified this effect. In
1940, historian Marc Bloch, founder of the Annales School and specialist in the long
rhythms of feudal and rural France, turned the tools of historical analysis to the
immediate recent past.
169
His attempt to make sense of France’s “strange defeat” in the
months that followed mixed personal recollection with objective contextualization within
the nation’s history. Bloch’s often-cited study, published after the war, represents just one
of a flood of publications about it that not only documented its events but attempted to
give it moral and spiritual meaning within French history. Photographs, in particular,

168
Bloch laid out the impossibilities of confining history to scientific analysis or descriptive narrative in the
first chapter of his reflections on historical methodology and craft: Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft,
trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

169
Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite: témoignage écrit en 1940 (Paris: Société des Editions “Franc-Tireur,”
1946).

145
pictures of the Liberation of Paris, because of their significant emotional effect on
viewers and their inscription of the events within the capital’s iconography of revolution,
became key components of postwar attempts to document, relive, and interpret France’s
experience of the Second World War.

146
Chapter 3

Paris, August 1944:
Photographic Histories of the Liberation of Paris

What a whirlwind of ancient memories, a mixture of hopes come from the depth
of almost every century, […], without our knowing it, spr[u]ng forth to encircle
and envelope the old city, in that particular week!
--François Boucher, 1945
1

In France, more than in any other country the popular imagination transforms the
present into history with extraordinary rapidity. Events and collective
experiences are miraculously crystallized into symbolic dates and emotion-laden
myths. Already ‘La Libération’ is such a myth.
--Howard C. Rice, 1945
2

“We still have, stuck to our retinas, the images of Paris [of the Liberation] which
are added to the thousands of other images of Paris that a man of this century stores in his
memory,” wrote one Parisian in the fall of 1944, “the living mixed with the defunct, fresh
colorful images mixed with old estampes.”
3
After four years of occupation by the
German army, fighting had finally broken out between members of the French Resistance
or FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieure) and German soldiers in Paris in August 1944.
The Liberation of Paris began with a series of strikes by metro workers and the French
Police on August 18 and 19 and would end after allied troops – led by General Leclerc’s
2
nd
Armored Division – entered the city and Charles de Gaulle triumphantly paraded

1
François Boucher, La Grande déliverance de Paris (Paris: J. Haumont, 1945), 12.

2
Howard C. Rice, “Post-Liberation Publishing in France: A Survey of Recent French Books,” The French
Review 18, no. 6 (May 1945): 328.

3
Les Barricades de Paris VII: la libération (Paris: A. Fleury, 1944).
147
down the Champs-Elysées.
4
Despite its secondary status in military terms, the Liberation
of Paris was the battle sold and pictured across France as the iconic battle of the
Liberation.
5
After all, it not only reestablished French sovereignty in Paris, it also
reestablished Paris as the nation’s capital.
6
Photographs of the Liberation, collected,
published, and exhibited in the weeks and months afterwards would work to construct its
symbolic importance as the founding myth of postwar France.
7

This chapter explores how these photographs became a sort of ‘instant history’ in
a flood of photographically-illustrated publications that celebrated, explained, and
documented the Liberation in its aftermath.
8
Accounts of the war enjoyed great
popularity, but according to one Paris-based American, Howard C. Rice, books about the

4
For a detailed account of the battle of the Liberation of Paris see: “Vivre la Libération: l’insurrection
nationale (août 1944)” in Philippe Buton, La Joie douloureuse: la libération de la France (Paris:
Complexe, 2004).

5
In 1944 and 1945, publishers printed dozens of books and pamphlets about the Liberation of Paris, not
about the D-Day invasions or the liberation of Lyon or Marseille. There is a long history of D-Day
photographs, but this was not a French mission, and so did not have the symbolic importance of the
Liberation of Paris, which featured the collaboration of the French Forces of the Interior and the Free
French Forces from abroad. French publishers did publish books about the liberation of other cities and
regions – in particular Braun and Rouff both published a series of books about the liberations of other
towns, but publications about the Liberation of Paris far outnumber them.

6
The wartime government established in 1940, following the German invasion of France, established its
headquarters in Vichy, a southern spa town previously known for its healing waters.

7
The idea of “myths” of modern nations draws on a long historical and sociological literature about shared
sites of cultural memory. This work has been particularly rooted in France. For more about myth and
memory in modern French history start with: Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957); Pierre
Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-1982); Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History
and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Eric Conan and Henry
Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, American ed. (Hanover: Dartmouth College, published by
University Press of New England, 1998). Historian Rosemary Wakeman has argued that the populism of
the Liberation shaped working-class culture in Paris from 1945 to 1958: Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic
City: Paris, 1945-1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

8
In all, at least 25 books that presented the Liberation in photographs were published between 1944 and
1946. I culled these books from published bibliographies in books about photography and the Liberation,
the library catalogues of the BNF and the BHVP, and searches in WorldCat.
148
Liberation were by far the most popular of the genre. Only biographies of Charles de
Gaulle rivaled them.
9
With titles such as – Seen during the Liberation of Paris, The
Liberation of Paris: the Historic days from August 19 to August 26, 1944 Seen by
Photographers, The Liberation of Paris Seen from a Police Station, and Eyes Peeled in
Insurgent Paris – even books and pamphlets that did not contain photographs emphasized
the importance of the Liberation as a visual spectacle.
10
Because the continuing German
occupation of the region surrounding Paris restricted newspaper circulation, the French
would first see images of the battle that freed the capital on the pages of
photographically-illustrated books and pamphlets as well as on the screens of local
cinemas.
11
But while scholars have devoted much attention to the representation of the

9
Rice likely knew his way around contemporary French publishing, after all, he would become Director of
the US Information Library at the US Embassy in Paris after the war. Rice, “Post-Liberation Publishing in
France,” 327–328. Rice joined the Princeton University faculty in 1948, where he also worked as an
assistant librarian for Princeton’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Presumably in Paris
for the duration of the war, Rice collected newspapers, pamphlets and other documents about France during
World War II. This collection is now housed at Princeton University. For more biographical information
about Rice see: Traci Ballou-Broadnax, “Howard C. Rice Correspondence with Alexander D. Wainwright,
1950-1980: Finding Aid” (Princeton University, June 26, 2007),
http://findingaids.princeton.edu/getEad?eadid=C1183&kw=.

10
Edmond Dubois, Vu pendant la Libération de Paris: journal d’un témoin, illustré de 21 photographies
(Lausanne: Payot, 1944); Jacques Kim, La Libération de Paris: les journées historiques de 19 août au 26
août 1944 vue par les photographes (Paris: OPG, 1944); Ferdinand Dupuy, La Libération de Paris vue
d’un commissariat de police (Paris: Librairies-imprimeries réunies, 1945); Claude Roy, Les Yeux ouverts
dans Paris insurgé (Paris: R. Julliard, 1944).

11
François Mauriac, a well-known writer and member of the Académie française, who was only 30 km
from Paris in August 1944, followed the events on the radio, not in newspapers, for his town was still
occupied by the Germans. Mauriac would have been able to listen to the BBC and Radio France. Parisians
could not listen to the radio because the Germans turned off the city’s electricity. François Mauriac, Paris
libéré (Paris: Flammarion, 1944), 5. What newspapers there were, were printed in very limited runs.
Historian Adrien Dansette’s history of the Liberation, based primarily on interviews conducted in 1944-
1945, reports that 100,000 issues each of Ce Soir, Libération, and Front National were printed during the
night of August 21. 400,000 issues of the Journal officiel des F.F.I. were published (which would be the
only issue of that newspaper). By 1951, Le Parisien libéré, which claimed to have the largest run of all the
Parisian dailies, printed almost 600,000 issues. Dansette, Histoire de la Libération de Paris, 257; “Le Plus
fort tirage et la plus forte vente des quotidiens du matin,” Le Parisien libéré, July 5, 1951, 584,520 on July
149
Liberation of Paris on film, they have almost entirely neglected the role that the
exhibition of Liberation photos at the Musée Carnavalet in 1944 and the publication of
photohistories in 1944 and 1945 played in interpreting the events of August 1944.
12
The
photographs of the exhibition became a cornerstone of the archival collections available
for future historians, and photographs published in illustrated books would allow
Parisians to revisit the joy that the Liberation of Paris brought them over and over again
in the years to come.
This chapter argues that the importance of the photographs of the Liberation
published in books and pamphlets originated not only in what they pictured but also in
the significance of the material history of their production.
13
Throughout the Liberation,
photographers crisscrossed the city documenting the historic events. Their ranks included
both amateur and professional photographers, who, like many of the Parisians who fought

4, 1951. Today, few libraries in France and the United States hold copies of the first Parisian newspapers,
but many purchased copies of books and pamphlets about the Liberation.

12
There is no scholarly work about photographic-illustrated books about the Liberation. For more about the
film La Libération de Paris (1944) as well as the Liberation in newsreels see: Sylvie Lindeperg, Clio de 5 à
7: Les Actualités filmées de la Libération: archives du futur (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2000); Brett Bowles,
“Newsreels, Ideology, and Public Opinion Under Vichy: The Case of La France en Marche,” French
Historical Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 419–463; Brett Bowles, “Jean Renoir’s Salut à La France:
Documentary Film Production, Distribution, and Reception in France, 1944–1945,” Historical Journal of
Film, Radio, and Television 26, no. 1 (March 2006): 57–86.

13
The idea that the conditions of the photograph’s production matter as much as what it pictures is
borrowed from the historical literature about the Holocaust and World War II. Historian Ilsen About and
historian of photography Clément Chéroux have argued that the content of the image and its formal
elements tell us about its conditions of capture. For more about how photography has shaped historical
encounters with the Holocaust start with: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four
Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008);
Sybil Milton, “Images of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 193–216;
Clément Chéroux and Ilsen About, “L’histoire par la photographie,” Études photographiques, no. 10, La
ressemblance du visible/Mémoire de l’art (November 1, 2001): 8–33; Barbie Zelizer, Visual Culture and
the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2001); Sarah Farmer, “Going Visual: Holocaust Representation
and Historical Method,” The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (February 1, 2010): 115–122.
150
the Germans, became accidental warriors caught up in the wave of resistance.
14

Liberation photographers recognized the battle’s deep engagement with the history of
Paris. As Parisians built barricades in the city’s streets, they drew on a history of
revolution that they knew through visual representations of it, often published in
illustrated histories. Photographers in turn acted with historians of the future in mind,
taking pictures for posterity as much as for the journalistic impulse of reporting. These
photographers produced thousands of photos, often risked their lives in order to do so,
and actively participated in the movement to dispatch Paris’s German occupiers. Just as
the crowds that reclaimed Paris’s streets during the Liberation reacted against German
and Vichy restrictions on mass assembly, the sheer mass of photographs they produced
represented a joyous defiance of German and Vichy restrictions on photography.
15

In the Liberation’s aftermath, dozens of photohistories used this mass of images
in order to present remarkably similar narratives that recast the Liberation as the work of
a unified and active French Resistance that had fought the Germans throughout the war.
These narratives obscured the complicated mess of internal French social divisions that
plagued the nation during World War II. After the war, they denied the often-violent acts

14
Since the nineteenth century, photographers have chronicled war, but this was the first time that so many
photographers without combat experience produced images of battle. The history of wartime photography
prior to World War II covers Roger Fenton and Alexander Gardner’s staged photographs of (respectively)
the Crimean War and American Civil War, Jimmy Hare’s coverage of the Russo-Japanese War, and the
explosion of photojournalism during the Spanish Civil War. For more about wartime photography see:
Thierry Gervais, “‘Le Plus grand des photographes de guerre’: Jimmy Hare, photoreporter au tournant du
XIXe et du XXe siècle,” Etudes photographiques, no. 26 (November 2010): 10–49; Anthony W. Lee and
Elizabeth Young, On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007); Michèle Martin, Images at War: Illustrated Periodicals and
Constructed Nations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Mary Panzer and Christian Caujolle,
Things as They Are, 1st Aperture ed. (New York: Aperture Foundation/World Press Photo, 2005).

15
Historian Rosemary Wakeman has described the Liberation as the joyous reclamation of Paris’s streets
by its people: Wakeman, The Heroic City.
151
of what became known as the épuration or the “purge,” as the FFI and de Gaulle’s Free
French forces attempted to identify and punish those who had collaborated with the
Germans.
16
Somewhat paradoxically, the producers of illustrated books relied so heavily
on photographs of the Liberation because they believed photographs were both more
objective and more evocative than other types of documents.
The history of photographs of the Liberation also offers up a new way of
conceptualizing how the photograph functions as a historical document that combines
objectivity and emotional evocation. Despite contemporary awareness of photographs as
authored documents, historians, curators, publishers, and authors also understood them,
to echo Académie française member François Mauriac’s characterization, as
“unimpeachable witness[es]” to history.
17
Photographs and their connection to strong
claims of evidence and proof offered a central means through which the myth of the
French Resistance came to dominate French memory of the Second World War.
18
And

16
French historian Henry Rousso, inspired by Robert Paxton’s argument that Vichy France initially
enjoyed wide-scale public support, has explored how the myth of the Resistance shaped French memory of
World War II. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, Morningside ed.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome; Henry Rousso, The Haunting
Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2002). Historians of French photography, such as Peter Hamilton have argued that French humanist
photographers’ “work and its subsequent presentation in the illustrated press contributed to the creation of a
more ‘inclusive’ image of France, of French society and of French culture” beginning after the Liberation.
This chapter argues that this unity really took root with the capture and publication of photographs of the
Liberation itself. Peter Edward Hamilton, “Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Postwar
Humanist Photography,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart
Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 77.

17
Mauriac echoed Poëte’s description of the photograph as the “document par excellence.” Mauriac, Paris
libéré, 5; Marcel Poëte, “Papiers Poëte, VOL 144”, n.d., 346, BHVP.

18
Historians have begun to explore how different media – printed, photographic and cinematic – created
meaning during and after the Liberation: Harry Roderick Kedward and Nancy Wood, The Liberation of
France: Image and Event (Berg Publishers, 1995); Christian Delporte and Denis Maréchal, eds., Les
Médias et la Libération en Europe: 1945-2005 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006).
152
yet, at the same time, as André Tollet, President of the Comité parisien de la Libération
claimed, “a collection of photographs is a much more evocative history book than a
textbook is.”
19
Photographers of the Liberation of Paris captured the moment, but –
drawing on their intimate familiarity with the city’s historical iconography – they also
mimicked a rich tradition of visual representations of revolution. Instead of functioning
solely as documents of the events or objects they depicted then, these photos called to
mind a much longer history of Paris and placed the Liberation within it.
The production of a sanitized iconography of the Liberation in photographically-
illustrated books, however, was part and parcel of postwar political divisions.
Remarkably, former collaborators as well as staunch French patriots and active members
of the Resistance published books that almost uniformly shied away from graphic
pictures of French revenge on Nazis and collaborators. Photo books presented images to
the public that redeemed both the nation and the capital after its disgraceful defeat of
1940. Moreover their production became a way for photographers, authors, editors, and
printers to prove their allegiances in the tumultuous climate of the épuration. That they
did so by producing a photographic historical record of August 1944 suggests that they,
like Marcel Poëte, Henri Lavergne, and Emile Henriot before them, imagined that
subsequent generations would learn about history through photographs.
20

19
Paris, du 19 au 26 août 1944 (Paris: Imprimerie Draeger frères pour la Préfecture de la Seine, 1945), 35.

20
And indeed historians generally consider photographs of the Liberation as transparent historical
documents of these events. For an example of photos of the Liberation used as self-evident illustrations see:
Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, eds., La France des années noires, vol. II (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
For a notable exception to this trend, namely work that investigates how images shaped culture, society,
and politics during and after the Liberation, see: Mary Louise Roberts, “La Photo du GI viril: genre et
photojournalisme en France à la Libération,” Le Mouvement social, no. 219–220 (September 2007): 35–56.
153
The Material History of Photography during the Occupation and the Liberation
After the Liberation, photographs carried the history of their production during
the Occupation and the Liberation. During the war, material shortages rendered film,
paper, and developing chemicals hard to come by for amateur and professional French
photographers alike. New laws made photography illegal for most of the French
population, and German soldiers, eager to document their days in Paris, replaced prewar
French street photographers. Censure laws strictly controlled photographs published in
the French press. During the Liberation, photographers reacted against these restrictions.
Taking photographs became a way of participating in the populist uprising against the
Germans, and their photographs would be imbued with the material history of their
production as they were subsequently published in books and pamphlets.
Like every other aspect of everyday life and economy, photography was strictly
controlled under the Occupation and in Vichy France. It became a medium of propaganda
at the same time that new laws and decrees proclaimed by the Vichy and German
governments restricted its practice. On April 26, 1940, the Third Republic had made
unauthorized photography illegal in the fourteen departments that formed the nation’s
eastern border.
21
An extension of the law on May 8, 1940 amended it to cover Paris.
22
In

21
Cited in Françoise Denoyelle, La photographie d’actualité et de propagande sous le régime de Vichy,
CNRS histoire (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2003), 39. The law of April 26, 1940 read “Il est interdit aux civils
de porter un appareil photographique et de prendre des photographies de quelque nature que ce soit sans
autorisation.” In 1942, it became illegal to produce cameras on French territory, Françoise Denoyelle,
“Photographie et collaboration. Les épurations dans l’industrie et les agences photographiques,” Histoire et
archives. Revue de la Société des amis des Archives de France (January 2001): 151. Laws restricting
photography remain common. Today’s anti-terrorism laws, for example, often prohibit photography in
public: Mike Seaborne and Anna Sparham, London Street Photography 1860-2010 (Stockport: Dewi Lewis
Publishing, 2011).

154
these regions, taking photographs became tantamount to spying. Because the Vichy civil
code was applied in the occupied zone, civilian photography would have been technically
illegal in Paris throughout the war.
23

And yet functionally, photography was anything but forbidden. Tourism held an
important role in Nazi visions of Europe’s future. Throughout the war, the Nazis
continued to think of Paris and France as premier leisure and pleasure destinations.
24
By
May 1941 alone, a German tourist publication claimed that over one million Germans
had visited the former French capital.
25
German tourists would have arrived in Paris with
cameras, prepared to take pictures of a city promoted in photographically-illustrated
books and guides through Germany. German soldiers stationed in the city also

22
Denoyelle, La photographie d’actualité et de propagande sous le régime de Vichy, 52 n18. This
extension of the code made it possible to punish those who took photos in order to forge identity papers.

23
My 96-year-old neighbor in Paris, who spent the war there, told me that people knew taking pictures was
illegal – but said that film was so rare that no one could take them anyway. She had one photograph that
her fiancé took of her and her friends in the Bois de Vincennes during the war. For histories of Paris under
Nazi Occupation start with: David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German
Occupation, 1940-1944, 1st ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981); Giles Perrault and Pierre
Azema, Paris Under the Occupation, trans. Allison Carter and Maximilian Vos (New York: Vendome
Press, 1989); Alan Riding, And the Show Went On (New York: Random House, 2010); Henri Michel, Paris
allemand (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981); Hervé Le Boterf, La Vie parisienne sous l’occupation, 2 vols. (Paris:
France-Empire, 1975).

24
As historian Bertrand M. Gordon has argued, Paris fit into Nazi plans for European tourism and thus
received very different treatment from other major European capitals: Bertram M Gordon, “Warfare and
Tourism: Paris in World War II,” Annals of Tourism Research 25, no. 3 (July 1, 1998): 616–638. For more
about the intersection of Nazi ideology and tourism see: Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy:
Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Kristin Semmens, Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (New York: Palgrave, 2005). The
Occupation forces set up their command centers in the city’s choicest hotels from the Hôtel Majestic (at the
place de l’Etoile) to the Hôtel Meurice (along the rue de Rivoli, a traditional favorite of moneyed English
tourists). The High Command installed itself in the place de l’Opéra, the heart of Haussmann’s nineteenth-
century redesign. Once a day at noon, German troops paraded down the Champs-Elysées.

25
Der Deutsche Wegleiter, 1941, cited in Gordon, “Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II.” Gordon
also cites figures from the French National Archives that corroborate the official estimates as well as the
existence of the organization “Jeder einmal in Paris” (Everyone in Paris once) which sought to provide a
Paris holiday to each and every German soldier. For more about how France fit into Nazi plans for a
German Europe see: Eberhard Jäckel, La France dans l’Europe de Hitler (Paris: Fayard, 1968).
155
compulsively photographed Paris’s famous monuments. As one contemporary observer
noted, “it seems funny, but every German soldier carries a camera. I saw them by the
thousands today, photographing Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides.”
26

Fig. 3.1: Roger Schall, “Only [the Germans]
have the right to take photos…”À Paris sous la
botte des Nazis.

Fig. 3.2: Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler in front of
the Eiffel Tower, June 1940.

Photographing Paris became a way for the Germans to take possession of it. The
caption of a photograph published in Jean Eparvier’s À Paris sous la botte des Nazis, a
1944 photohistory about the Occupation, characterized photography as an appropriation
of the city [fig. 3.1]. The photograph shows a German solider taking a picture of the
Assemblée Nationale, while the caption explains: “Only they had the right to take
pictures. It is thus – and only thus – that they were able to make off with a little bit of
Paris.”
27
Hitler himself, during his one-day tour of the city on June 28, 1940, had his

26
William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 413., cited in Gordon, “Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II.”

27
Jean Eparvier, À Paris sous la botte des Nazis (Paris: R. Schall, 1944). German soldiers also took
souvenir-style pictures of the torture and execution of civilians. For a description of photographs taken by
German soldiers and subsequently exhibited as proof of Nazi atrocities see: Didi-Huberman, Images in
Spite of All. For more about the photos taken by amateur German photographers during World War II see:
156
personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann immortalize his visit in touristic views at
important monuments. The resulting photos circulated throughout Germany in one of
Hoffmann’s many photo books: Mit Hitler im Westen. A photograph of Hitler in front of
the Eiffel Tower graced its cover, less a document than a symbolic image bragging that
the former French capital’s spaces now belonged to Germany [fig. 3.2].
28
Photography
provided a way for German soldiers to experience Paris – they came as occupiers and
tourists – as well as a means through which the occupation of the city was consumed on
the German home front and throughout German-occupied Europe.
Yet even as photography became a means of possessing Paris, it also served as a
way of publically denying the severity of the Occupation. Professional photographers,
photojournalists, and photo agencies continued to operate in occupied Paris. Both the
German illustrated magazine Signal, which was modeled on the American magazine Life,
and the Lyon-based Vichy French magazine 7 jours maintained Paris correspondents who
photographed life in the city.
29
Paris based photographers also sold pictures to La
Semaine, L’Illustration, Paris-Midi, and Paris-Soir.
30
These daily and weekly

Frances Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2012).

28
Gordon, “Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II.” Images of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower
also circulated in contemporary newsreels. Heinrich Hoffmann, ed., Mit Hitler im Westen (Berlin, 1940).

29
Pierre Vals, Moral, Brodsky, Kitrosser, and Schall all worked for 7 jours, founded by the former director
of Match, Jean Prouvost.

30
Paris Soir had belonged to Pierre Lazareff before the war. It had one of the largest circulations in France.
During the war, Lazareff sought refuge in the United States where he worked for the Office of War
Information. The Germans distributed L’Illustration, the weekly magazine published in Paris since 1843, to
French soldiers in POW camps. La Semaine also enjoyed a wide audience in both the occupied and
unoccupied zones. For more about Paris-Soir, L’Illustration, and La Semaine during the war see: Claude
Bellanger et al., eds., Histoire générale de la presse française: de 1940 à 1958, vol. IV (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1975), 43–44; 52; 59.
157
publications distracted the public with combinations of fiction, human-interest stories,
arts reviews, and faits divers all the while selling them anti-Semitic and pro-German
propaganda.

Fig. 3.3: André Zucca, Métro Marbeuf-
Champs-Elysées, 1943.
Fig. 3.4: André Zucca, “En suivant la mode,
mai 1942.”

Fig. 3.5: André Zucca, At the Vincennes Zoo,
c. 1942.

Fig. 3.6: André Zucca, At Longchamp, 1943.
Pictures of Paris in the illustrated press of the Occupation presented what the
Germans wanted the public to think happened there. The pictures these photographers
took were tightly controlled. All Paris-based photographers needed special permission
from the Germans in order to photograph public events and street scenes. The
photographers who worked for the French press also needed Vichy press accreditation.
158
The photographs of Paris taken by French photographer André Zucca, who worked as
Signal’s Paris correspondent, presented the city as a pleasure-capital, not a city at war.
31

Shot in color on German-provided color Agfa stock, they show fashionably dressed
Parisians walking in Paris’s streets and parks [figs. 3.3 & 3.4]. At a time when shortages
made buying film difficult or even impossible, Zucca captured Germans enjoying Paris’s
pleasurable offerings, its flea markets, cinemas, racetracks, and zoo, in bright color [fig.
3.5 & 3.6]. Similarly the wartime photographs of Roger Schall (the same photographer
who took the pictures for Jean Cocteau’s 1937 Paris de jour) sold to publications printed
in Vichy show carefree street scenes and official German activities, such as tours of
Napoléon’s tomb and the Louvre [figs. 3.1, 3.7, & 3.8]. The photographs of Paris
disseminated both in German and in Vichy-controlled territory presented the German
occupation as peaceful and friendly and Paris as the enduring site of prewar pleasures.

31
Before the war Zucca worked as a press photographer and was a member of the agency Alliance Photo.
The Bibliothèque historique exhibited a selection of Zucca’s photos in 2008. When the exhibit opened it
failed to mention that Zucca collaborated with the German press, thus sparking a controversy among
visitors, city officials, historians, and the press. For more about the public and historians’ reactions to this
exhibition see: Clarisse Fabre, “L’Exposition Zucca divise le public” in Le Monde, June 29, 2008 as well as
Mary Louise Roberts, “Wartime Flânerie: The Zucca Controversy,” French Politics, Culture & Society 27,
no. 1 (May 2009): 102–110; Fabrice Virgili and Danièle Voldman, “Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation, une
exposition controversée,” French Politics, Culture & Society 27, no. 1 (May 2009): 91–101.
159

Fig. 3.7: Roger Schall, “We never knew if they
were just painters like their too illustrious boss,
or if they were drawing maps of the capital,”
À Paris sous la botte des Nazis.

Fig. 3.8: Roger Schall, German soldiers
visiting the Louvre,
À Paris sous la botte des Nazis.
Despite the laws against it, for French civilians and photographers during the war,
photography was restricted rather than forbidden. It does not appear that the French
police, who were charged with enforcing the civil code, arrested photographers in large
numbers.
32
Civilians would have continued to take family snapshots, although shortages
of film, developing chemicals, and cameras meant they did so less often than before the
war. Photographing acts of war and aggression, however, would have been a punishable
offense. Being caught photographing the Nazis or possessing photographs of them would
have been cause for summary execution.
33

The Liberation thus would represent the end to restrictions on photography. Four
years of heavy restrictions made the freedoms of the Liberation – including photographic

32
I looked through thousands of arrest records at the Archives de la Police in Paris for all of July 1942
without finding an instance of an individual arrested for taking pictures.

33
The Germans executed members of the French Resistance for possessing certain photographs. One series
of photographs, for example, published after the war, depicts an execution of members of the French
Resistance. A German soldier took the photographs, and the Frenchman who was hired to develop them
stole copies, which he entrusted to members of the Resistance. The Germans subsequently executed these
men for possessing anti-German materials. Eparvier, À Paris sous la botte des Nazis, np.
160
ones – all the sweeter and more symbolic. While during the Occupation those who
possessed photographs of German actions or of French resistance ran enormous personal
risk (and endangered the life of any Resistance member depicted), the Liberation saw an
explosion of photography. In its first days, photographers and filmmakers continued to
employ furtive documentation techniques, mainly photographing German soldiers from
the safety of high apartment windows [fig. 3.9 & 3.10]. But as the events unfolded, they
stepped down into the city’s streets, rushing to document German atrocities and the
heroism of everyday Parisians.

Fig. 3.9: LAPI, “The same day, at the corner of
the rue de Maubeuge, Germans stop another FFI
car and execute its passengers on the spot,”
La Libération de Paris: 150 photographies.

Fig. 3.10: Still from La Libération de Paris,
the camera looks down from a safe perch onto
German trucks in the Place de l’Opéra.
As the Liberation unfolded, Parisian photographers became part of the popular
uprising against the German occupiers. Just as civilians with little military experience
fought in the battle of the Liberation, ‘amateur’ war photographers documented its
events. Most made a living as photographers, taking studio portraits or selling images to
advertisers, publishers, and the illustrated press. They were nevertheless amateurs when it
came to war photography. In taking pictures, they flouted the rapidly disintegrating laws
161
of Vichy France and the Occupation. Many recognized an opportunity to make money
selling their photographs to the press. Others saw photography as an act of resistance and
a means of participating in and celebrating the Liberation. Although experienced war
photojournalists such as Robert Capa and Frank Scherschel took pictures when they
arrived in Paris with the allied troops, photographers who had no prior experience
photographing war took the majority of the photographs of the Liberation that
publications printed over and over again in its aftermath. The photographic
documentation of the Liberation thus mimics its most salient mythical aspect: its
populism.
34

Amateur and professional photographers in Paris acted quickly to document the
events of the Liberation as they unfolded.
35
Foreign photographers – military personnel
and photojournalists alike – would not arrive in the city until August 25 with Leclerc’s
troops. But those who found themselves in Paris on August 18 and 19 understood the
importance of taking pictures. They thought photographs might serve as evidence of
German crimes and of French heroism, or simply become a way to remember these

34
How the Liberation of Paris was documented – as a sort of melee of photographers, with some efforts for
centralized organization – stands in marked contrast to the photographic documentation of the D-Day battle
for example, which was entrusted to experienced photographers employed either by magazines – such as
Life – or the army. Historians of photography have mostly discussed the populism of representation of war
and catastrophe with regard to the “Flickr generation.” See for example: André Gunthert, “Les
photographies de l’EHESS,” Études photographiques, no. 18, Les traces de l’histoire / Expérience du
document (May 2006): 120–137; André Gunthert, “L’image parasite,” Études photographiques, no. 20, La
trame des images/Histoires de l’illustration photographique (June 2007): 174–187.

35
For an incomplete list of photographers who took pictures during the Liberation see: Thomas Michael
Gunther and Marie de Thézy, Images de la libération de Paris (Paris: Paris Musées, 1994), 146–149. This
list includes those whose pictures were published or who donated their pictures to historical institutions.
Some of these are well-known professional photographers, others were amateurs about whom historians of
photography have little other record, not even a first name. It is impossible to account for photographers
who neither published nor donated their photographs after the war.
162
events. Interviewed in the 1980s, Pierre Jahan, a professional photographer, expressed his
satisfaction at “offer[ing] snapshots which, along with so many others, made it possible
to narrate these historic days in images.”
36
Many photographers risked bodily harm in
order to get their shots. Looking back on the Liberation, professional photographers Jean-
Marie Marcel and Robert Cohen, later recounted how they stood up during sniper fire to
take pictures. Marcel justified such dangerous risks by telling himself: “this is a historic
moment, I’m a witness, I can’t miss this.”
37
While these photographers imagined creating
public historical documents, others estimated their audience to be smaller and more
intimate. One amateur photographer, René Cassier, explained that he took pictures
merely “to remember, to show [others] (my children, for example) and one day explain
what this historic period was.”
38
Cassier imagined his documents as fodder for a family
album, not a published book.
Many of these photographers, however, hoped to sell their photographs to the
French and foreign press. The newspapers and photo agencies in Paris that had
functioned during the war stopped publishing and producing as the Liberation unfolded.
Those who ran them had done so with the permission of the German occupiers, and they
worried for their safety as the Germans pulled out of the city and fighting broke out in the

36
Ibid., 133. Jahan would go on to sell “stock” photographs of Paris to books and magazines in the 1950s
and 1960s.

37
Ibid., 134. Cohen made a similar statement: “this is a scene that deserves to be photographed and here I
am alone in front of these people with terrified faces, waiting for the fire to stop.” Before the war, Cohen
had directed the photo agency AGIP (Agence international d’illustrations pour la presse). Because Cohen
was Jewish, his agency was “aryanized” in 1941. He hid in Paris for the remainder of the war. For more
about Cohen see: Denoyelle, La photographie d’actualité et de propagande sous le régime de Vichy, 171–
173.

38
Gunther and Thézy, Images de la libération de Paris, 138.
163
streets. As the newly-formed Comité de libération de la presse requisitioned and
redistributed the equipment of newspapers and magazines active during the Occupation, a
Comité de libération des reporters photographes de presse set about doing the same with
Paris’s photo agencies.
39
The committee’s efforts to create one centralized photo agency
would fail.
40
Instead a number of prewar agencies would be resurrected. Robert Cohen,
who had founded L’Agence de l’illustration pour la presse (AGIP) in 1936, brought his
agency back. Photographer Suzanne Laroche revived Maria Eisner’s agency Alliance
Photo, changing the name to l’Agence de documentation et d’édition photographique
(ADEP).
41
The photographers who had been employed by the pre-war Paris offices of
Keystone, an internationally prominent, American-based photo agency, also reemerged
from hiding to take pictures.
42

39
For more information about the practical and legal organization of the press that occurred in the wake of
World War II see: Michael Palmer, “De l’Office français d’information (OFI) à l’Agence France-Presse
(AFP),” in Les Médias et la Libération en Europe: 1945-2005, ed. Christian Delporte and Denis Maréchal
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 149–162; Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française: de 1940 à
1958, IV:. Delporte and Maréchal, Les Médias et la libération en Europe. Henri Membré, who had worked
as an independent photographer during the war, assumed direction of the latter committee. He closed some
agencies outright and requisitioned others, including LAPI (Les Actualités photographiques
internationales) and SAFARA (Service des agences françaises, d’actualités et de reportages, associées), to
take pictures of the Liberation. When published, their photographs would be credited Photo Presse
Libération.

40
Membré’s efforts to create a monopoly on images sold to the press were quickly disavowed by the other
members of the Comité de libération de la presse. Françoise Denoyelle, “De la Collaboration à la
Libération. Quels photographes pour quels types d’images?,” in Les Médias et la Libération en Europe:
1945-2005, ed. Christian Delporte and Denis Maréchal (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 169.

41
For more about Alliance Photo see: Thomas Michael Gunther and Marie de Thézy, Alliance Photo:
Agence photographique 1934-1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). For more about photo agencies in Paris before
the war see: Francoise Denoyelle, La lumière de Paris. Tome 2: les usages de la photographie, 1919-1939
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). The French briefly interned Eisner, who was German, in 1940. After her
release she spent the war in the United States before co-founding Magnum in 1947.

42
For a brief description of the photographers and agencies active during the week of August 19-25, 1944
see: Gunther and Thézy, Images de la libération de Paris, 12.
164
Taking photographs of the Liberation, however, was still a dangerous activity that
invited German retribution. Decades later, professional photographer Serge de Sazo
described photographing two members of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (or FFI, the
French Resistance) who were stopped, and he believes, summarily shot, by the Germans
on August 18. The Parisian uprisings were just beginning. When one of the Germans
“saw [de Sazo,] [he] trained his rifle on [the photographer].”
43
De Sazo wisely fled the
scene. Photographs taken during the Liberation’s first days provide evidence of similar
dangers. At the Liberation’s start, FFI fighters occupied key buildings within Paris. As
the Germans shot heavy artillery at them, they responded with gunfire, hand grenades,
and Molotov cocktails.

Photographers documented these exchanges, standing shoulder to
shoulder with the men who shot rifles and threw grenades out of open windows [figs.
3.11 & 3.12]. When the FFI could capture a German tank and after General Leclerc’s
troops arrived, tanks battled in the streets. Photographers, once again, got as close as
possible, close enough to capture the puff of smoke that accompanied heavy artillery fire
from a tank [fig. 3.13]. At other times they photographed the street battles, capturing only
blurred images of tank battles [fig. 3.14]. Such photographs testify to the willingness of
photographers to endanger their lives, much in the same spirit as the veterans, police
officers, and average citizens who fought alongside the FFI.

43
Ibid., 139.
165

Fig. 3.11: Cover of La Semaine héroïque. Fig. 3.12: Photo Presse-Libération,
“Defense de la Préfecture de la Seine,”
Paris libéré.

Fig. 3.13: René Zuber, “Attack on the Sénat.” Fig. 3.14: “Photos L.,” Libération de Paris:
journées historiques.

The motley crew of fashion, press, and amateur photographers who documented
the Liberation might very well have understood their actions as part of the FFI’s fight to
liberate the city. Photographers had played an active role in the French resistance under
166
the Occupation, helping with the fabrication of fake identity papers.
44
A pair of
photographs taken by André Gandner, a professional photographer, during the Liberation
suggests parallels between photographers and armed members of the resistance.
45

Gandner documented the participation of a photographer in the Liberation of Paris [fig.
3.15]. The photographer, in civilian clothes, wears a helmet emblazoned with the cross of
Lorraine, the symbol de Gaulle selected for the Free French Forces. He holds a camera at
his waist and looks down through its viewfinder. This picture’s composition resembles
that of another Gandner photograph of a machine gun operator, taken not long before
[fig. 3.16]. Both men stare at the photographer through their respective machines. Both
wear helmets, drawing attention to the risks they ran. They adopt the same pose. The gun
operator, flanked by a woman and a smiling man and bestrewn with flowers, posed for
Gandner, most likely at his request. It is unclear whether the photographer is taking a
picture of the man on the left edge of the frame or posing for Gandner. Regardless of
whether Gander asked the photographer and the gunner to adopt the same pose or simply
caught them in it, his pair of photos implies that both men were warriors in the battle to
liberate Paris and France. They suggest that the act of photographing events became part
of the battle.

44
Robert Doisneau, for example, who worked as a professional photographer at the Renault factory before
the war and would sell his photos to the press afterwards, took pictures for the Resistance. For more about
Doisneau’s career see: Peter Hamilton, Robert Doisneau: A Photographer’s Life, 1st ed. (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1995).

45
Le Mémorial Leclerc et de la Libération de Paris – Musée Jean Moulin holds 600 photos taken by
Gandner primarily during the liberation (there are a few from the occupation and more from the postwar
period). Gandner worked as a professional photographer, selling photographs for the press and illustration.
He published in Life in the 1950s, photographed for Dior, and also worked as a reporter for L’Auto in 1942.
Denoyelle, La photographie d’actualité et de propagande sous le régime de Vichy, 391.
167

Fig. 3.15: André Gandner, Photograph of
photographer, circa August 26, 1940,
(Le Mémorial Leclerc et de la Libération de
Paris – Musée Jean Moulin).
Fig. 3.16: André Gandner, Photograph of
machine gun operator, circa August 26, 1940,
(Le Mémorial Leclerc et de la Libération de
Paris – Musée Jean Moulin).

The same mixture of spontaneous uprising and coordinated efforts that shaped the
battle to liberate Paris also marked efforts to document it in photographs. The photos of
the Liberation did not result from the coordinated work of a corps of army photographers.
The heroism of the Liberation inspired amateur and professional photographers, and they
raced to document it. Many had hoarded film throughout the war, hoping to use it to
photograph the city’s eventual liberation. Their actions testify to the widespread belief
that photographs would best preserve August 1944 for future generations. When
photographers did eventually take pictures, they became not just witnesses to, but
participants in the popular fight to save the city. Their photos’ subsequent collection
testifies to the importance contemporaries subscribed to these images.

Liberation Photographs Between Objective Documentation and Poetic Evocation
In the Liberation’s wake, the discourses about, the uses of, and the collection of
photographs echoed many of the understandings that shaped the use and collection of
168
photographs as historical documents of Paris during the previous sixty years. Archivists,
curators, librarians, government officials, and historians collected photos as material
proof of the events of the Liberation of Paris. But they also relied on the photograph as a
principle means of making that week of August 1944 emotionally resonant after the fact.
François Mauriac captured the duality of scientific proof and mysticism embedded in
photographs of the Liberation, when he described them as “an irrecusable testimony to
the miracle.”
46
Photos thus would function as both objective documents of its events and
a poetic means of bringing the Liberation to life and connecting it – through the mental
images that viewers brought to them – to a much longer past.
The Liberation kicked the French documentary impulse into overdrive. As soon as
it ended, a municipal committee, the Musée Carnavalet, and individual authors worked to
amass documents and accounts of it.
47
They did so with the understanding that first-hand
accounts were fallible. In 1945, Emile Henriot, the same journalist who in 1933 predicted
that historians would increasingly turn to photographs as documents of Paris’s past,
warned future historians “that henceforth they will have to be wary of our incomplete
accounts, given how little informed and knowledgeable we were and we still are about
what happened under our very eyes.”
48
Yet he did not apply the same warning to the
representations created by events that transpired before the camera’s lens. Instead the

46
Mauriac, Paris libéré, 5.

47
In addition to the municipal and national efforts discussed here, translator Suzanne Campaux (who
translated many English-language novels, including the work of novelist Pearl S. Buck into French) and
historian Adrien Dansette conducted interviews with participants throughout 1944-1945: Suzanne
Campaux, La Libération de Paris (19-26 août 1944): récits de combattants et de témoins réunis par S.
Campaux, Collection de mémoires, études et documents pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre (Paris: Payot,
1945); Dansette, Histoire de la Libération de Paris.

48
Emile Henriot, “La Vie littéraire: les témoins qui n’auront rien su,” Le Monde, April 25, 1945.
169
transparency of photographs offered a solution to the unreliability of contemporary
newspaper and eyewitness accounts.
Although the movement to collect documents about the Occupation and
Liberation would become national with the creation of the Comité nationale d’histoire de
l’occupation et de la libération de la France in January 1945, it began in 1944 in Paris.
49

Collecting a rich and varied source base for the history of the Liberation of Paris
promised to ensure the events’ continued symbolic value. In October 1944, a
collaboration between leadership of the FFI and curators of the Musée Carnavalet, lead
by its director François Boucher, resulted in the creation of the Comité d’histoire de la
libération.
50
The committee solicited eyewitness accounts, placing ads in major
newspapers that asked Parisians to send in “a map of your neighborhood’s barricades,
noting the construction date of each of them.”
51
In particular the committee sought
submissions from those “who [saw], and who did not write anything down, and whose
memories deserve to be collected before they are deformed by forgetting.”
52
The Charles

49
“Pour l’histoire de la Libération de la France,” Le Monde, January 10, 1945. This committee would in
turn become the Comité d’histoire de la seconde guerre mondiale (whose archives are conserved in the F 41
series at the Archives nationales), before its 1982 transformation into the Institut d’histoire du temps
présent (under the direction of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique or CNRS). For more
information about the archives of this service see the descriptions of the F 41 series conserved at the
Archives nationales.

50
This is according to a contemporary account given by Monique Cazeaux, a librarian at the Bibliothèque
de l’Arsenal, to the newspaper Le Parisien libéré. Jules Cousin, the founder of the BHVP, began his career
at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsensal. A. Metairie, “Un groupe d’historiens entreprend l’étude de la Libération
de Paris,” Le Parisien libéré, October 5, 1944. The committee’s members included employees of the city’s
major historical institutions from the Archives de France, Musée Carnavalet and the Musée des traditions
populaires to the Institut de France and the Sorbonne.

51
“Un Concours... pour l’histoire de la libération de Paris, chaque Parisien doit témoigner,” Le Parisien
libéré, September 19, 1944.

52
Georges Bourgon, “Histoire de l’Occupation et de la Libération,” Le Monde, April 24, 1945.
170
de Gaulles of the world could be counted on to write their memoires; the butcher who
took up arms during the Liberation was less likely to leave a record of his experiences.
By targeting working-class peoples’ accounts, the committee ensured that the
Liberation’s historical record of the Liberation would mirror its symbolic importance as a
popular uprising.
The national and Parisian committees formed to document the history of the
Liberation, as well as the Musée Carnavalet, collected multiple types of texts and images,
including “photos, sketches, tracings of graffiti, collected posters, and pamphlets.”
53
The
French responded enthusiastically. “Right away,” wrote a journalist in Le Monde,
“accounts, photographs arrived in abundance.”
54
At the Musée Carnavalet, François
Boucher started a separate effort to collect photos from August 1944. He too published
newspaper ads soliciting their donation from amateurs and also sought them directly from
photo agencies, professional photographers, and various French and American
government offices.
55
Thirty years after Marcel Poëte had accepted photographs as the
default means of documenting Paris during World War I, the Musée Carnavalet
mobilized to collect photographic documentation of Paris during the Second World War.

53
“Un Concours.”

54
People also donated “underground newspapers, the archives of resistance movements, [and] private
correspondence.” Bourgon, “Histoire de l’Occupation et de la Libération.”

55
Boucher publically solicited readers of the Figaro to send posters and photographs from the Liberation to
the museum. Le Figaro, September 7, 1944. He also wrote to the Musée de l’Armée, the SNCF, Paris’s fire
fighters, the architects of the Senate, the direction of the Palais Bourbon, and the Photographic Services of
the American Army. See: “Letter to the Photo Service of the American Army,” preserved at the Musée
Carnavalet. Information about the other agencies is cited in: Antonius Bracht, “La Libération de Paris et les
photos de l’exposition ‘Libération de Paris’ au Musée Carnavalet du 11 novembre 1944 au 14 janvier
1945” (unpublished paper, April 2000), Musée Carnavalet.
171
The Comité d’histoire de la libération and the Musée Carnavalet collected and
published photographs of the Liberation because contemporaries assumed that, unlike
eyewitness accounts, photos offered up irrefutable evidence. Historian Adrien Dansette
warned of the fallibility of the interviews he had conducted.
56
He also counseled against
trusting newspapers accounts, which had privileged “leftist lyricism! [and] reporting
dripping with literary heroism!” over “correct information.”
57
Photographs on the other
hand offered material slices of the Liberation. In the preface to her collection of
photographs and eyewitness accounts of the events of August 1944, translator Suzanne
Campaux described how neither the passage of time nor personal interpretation deformed
photographs, or “images shot during the action.”
58

Contemporaries also predicted that photographs, by offering direct access to the
events of the Liberation, would evoke more powerful emotional responses than textual
accounts. This belief drove the inclusion of so many photographs in books about August
1944. Indeed, one reviewer of François Mauriac’s book Paris libéré claimed its 120
photographs “will evoke these indescribable and blessed hours” “better than the – albeit
excellent – commentary that accompanies them.”
59
Similarly, reviewers of the film La
Libération de Paris agreed that images – and particular the moving image – powerfully
preserved the transcendent emotions of the Liberation. “No newspaper article, no book

56
He asked: “est-ce connaître la mer et le mystère de sa profondeur que d’avoir été un jour balotté par ses
vagues?” Dansette, Histoire de la Libération de Paris, 8.

57
Ibid.

58
Campaux, La Libération de Paris (19-26 août 1944), avant–propos.

59
R. G., “A Travers les rayons: Paris libéré,” Les Lettres françaises, March 3, 1945.
172
will ever equal this mix of image and sound which has captured the soul of a people in all
its fear and rage,” enthused one reviewer.
60
Photographs and films needed to be archived
because they actually “embodied certain scenes of the Occupation and of the Liberation”
that words could only describe.
61
Such comments about the power of images to evoke the
past replayed ideas about how images functioned as material traces of the past that had
shaped not only the formation of the collections of the Musée Carnavalet and the
Bibliothèque historique but also photographs’ uses as historical documents of Paris since
the early part of the twentieth century.
Photographs of the Liberation did indeed evoke the events they pictured, but they
also evoked so much more. Because they pictured elements of traditional revolutionary
iconography, these photos worked to cast the events of August 1944 within a much
longer history of revolutionary Paris. Contemporaries interpreted photographs of the
barricades, in particular, which figured heavily in illustrated books and exhibitions, as
expressions of Parisians’ unity of purpose. The Liberation thus came to signify not only
victory over the German Army, but also triumph over internal French divisions.

60
Dominique Prado “En regardant passer les images de la victoire,” in L’Aurore, September 28, 1944, p. 1,
cited in Bowles, “Jean Renoir’s Salut à La France,” 64.

61
Bourgon, “Histoire de l’Occupation et de la Libération.”
173

Fig. 3.17: Poster of the life of Pétain, with characteristic
rural themes.
Fig. 3.18: A typical Parisian at the
barricades, La Libération de Paris:
journées historiques.

Photographs steeped in Revolutionary imagery worked to purge French minds of
the iconography of Vichy France, which had celebrated the rural and the pious, the
peasant and the artisan [fig. 3.17].
62
Representations of Paris, factory workers (who were
likely to be communist), and secular symbols of the Republic, such as the Marianne, had
all been removed from France’s national iconography during World War II.
63
Photos of
Pétain had taken their place, just as a rural and small town ideal replaced Paris. With their
pictures of fighting and ceremonies occurring in front of the Opéra Garnier, the Hôtel de
la Marine, the Hôtel de Ville, the Sénat, and Notre Dame, books about the Liberation

62
These themes better served Vichy’s right-wing values of “family, work, and fatherland.” For more about
Vichy propaganda see: Laurent Gervereau and Denis Peschanski, eds., La Propagande sous Vichy (Paris:
Publications de la BDIC, 1990); Pascal Ory, Denis Marechal, and Yves Durand, Images de la France de
Vichy: 1940-1944 Images asservies et images rebelles (Paris: La Documentation française, 1994);
Dominique Rossignol, Histoire de la propagande en France de 1940 à 1944. L’utopie Pétain (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1991).

63
Statues of Marianne, for example, were removed from French government buildings.
174
helped to reaffirm Paris as the nation’s literal and symbolic capital.
64
What could be a
more resounding attack on the rural and wholesome iconography and ideology of Vichy
France, than images of the revolutionary working-class Parisian, complete with cigarette,
crouched behind sand bags and paving stones and ultimately victorious [fig. 3.18]?
Participants in the Liberation of Paris understood their actions as resurrections of
their revolutionary heritage. Posters calling civilians to build barricades quoted the
Marseillaise, which had become the hymn of the Republic during the French Revolution
and under every Republic since. They ordered “To arms citizens!” and to fight so that
“impure blood” might water their fields.
65
Eyewitness accounts describe how by August
23, the barricades had “sprouted everywhere,” seemingly growing out of the city’s paving
stones as if from long-forgotten seeds.
66
One journalist writing at the end of August
described the Liberation as “a week-long dream in which all of the glorious scenes from
[Paris’s] past reoccurred in its streets.”
67
Photographs captured this dream-like replay. In
an effort to efface the symbols and myths of the Vichy French identity, these photographs
helped reclaim the revolutionary tradition as the heart of French identity.
After the Liberation, photographs – as they were published in illustrated books
and displayed in exhibitions – continued to evoke the city’s long history of revolution.

64
There is also an element of justification in these images. Unlike other areas of the country, such as port
cities that Germany and Allied bombing destroyed in 1944, Paris remained largely intact after Liberation.
Showing photographs of the city during its Liberation celebrated but also justified and excused its
capitulation in 1940. Parisians would still eventually rise up and, in the meantime, historic Paris was largely
unscathed.

65
Reprinted in: Kim, La Libération de Paris, np.

66
Louis Chauvet, “Journal d’un témoin,” in La libération de Paris: 150 photographies (Paris: Fasquelle,
1945), np.

67
Pierre Seghers, “Les Visages de Paris,” Le Parisien libéré, August 30, 1944.
175
Although the last revolution in Paris dated from 1871, Parisians would have been
intimately familiar with the history of Parisian barricades in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871,
largely thanks to artistic and literary interpretations of them.
68
Writing in Le Monde,
journalist Robert Coiplet compared an eyewitness account of 1944 to Victor Hugo’s
description of the 1789 barricades in his novel Les Misérables (1862) as well as Prosper
Olivier Lissagaray’s historical narrative in Histoire de la Commune de Paris (1876).
69

When Georges Duhamel wrote that Notre Dame, in witnessing the Liberation, “seem[ed]
to remember all the battles it has seen over the course of centuries,” he recast previous
historians’ ideas about how Paris’s buildings and streets bore the traces of the events that
had taken place in the language of revolution.
70
Just as staircase railings had once vivified
sixteenth-century Paris for Vieux Paris enthusiasts, the barricades formed a connection
with all of the revolutions that had come before.

68
The national education system, consolidated during the Third Republic, emphasized France’s
revolutionary heritage. Many Parisians may even have seen Eugène Appert’s photographs of Paris’s
Communards. A series of books about Paris at the barricades since 1789 made the link between the
Liberation and earlier revolutions even more explicit. For the volume about the Liberation see: Les
Barricades de Paris VII: la libération. For more about history education in France, and the role of the
Revolution in it, start with: Monique Lise Cohen and Roch Jullien, Enseignement de la Révolution,
révolution de l’enseignement, ed. Fédération française des clubs UNESCO and Bibliothèque de Toulouse
(Toulouse: Conseil regional des Clubs Unesco Midi-Pyrénées, 1989); Raymond Humbert, ed., Il était une
fois la Révolution: les manuels scolaires racontent 1789-1799 (Paris: Dessain et Tolra, 1989); Pierre Nora,
“Lavisse, instituteur national,” in Les Lieux de mémoire: la République (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 239–276.

69
Robert Coiplet, “La Battaille dans la rue,” Le Monde, February 13, 1945. These are not just literary
descriptions of the barricades, but descriptions by important figures from the French left. Hugo was exiled
for his republican views during the Second Empire, and the publication of Lissagaray’s book – deemed
sympathetic to the extreme left – was halted by Third Republic censure. Scholars have since traced the
literary genealogy of the 1944 barricades: William Kidd, “Liberation in the Novels of May '68: The
Intertextual Image,” in The Liberation of France: Image and Event, ed. Harry Roderick Kedward and
Nancy Wood (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995), 323–334.

70
Georges Duhamel, La Semaine héroïque: 19-25 août 1944 (Paris: S.E.P.E, 1944), np.
176

Fig. 3.19: The death of Etienne Marcel,
Cadran.

Fig. 3.20: The Levée en masse, Cadran.

Fig. 3.21: Delacroix, Liberty Leading the
People, Cadran,

Fig. 3.22: The taxi drivers of the Marne, Cadran.
The American press and British Information Services picked up on the symbolic
importance of the barricades to the already symbolically important Liberation of Paris.
The September 1944 issue of the British Information Services’ French-language
magazine Cadran dubbed Paris “the capital of freedom.”
71
The issue featured a collage
of estampes and photographs depicting Paris’s history of revolution, from the death of
Etienne Marcel, who had opposed the king in the fourteenth century, to drawings of the

71
“Paris, capitale de la libérté,” Cadran, September 1944, 14.

177
Levée en masse during the Revolution of 1789, Delacroix’s Liberty, and the taxi drivers
who saved the French at the Battle of the Marne, and ending with photographs of the
Liberation in 1944 [fig. 3.19, 3.20, 3.21, & 3.22]. Although Life magazine only published
photographs of the Liberation, its reporter also described the Occupation as an aberration
in an otherwise strong tradition of resistance: “Paris quickly showed that the Occupation
had changed none of its historic character.”
72

Barricade photographs became a staple of French publications about the
Liberation as well. Almost every photographically-illustrated book and pamphlet about it
contained photographs of Parisians building or manning the barricades, while at the same
time they omitted photos of Franco-French conflicts that the war created. Producers of
books about the Liberation categorically omitted photos of scenes of violence between
the French that occurred as members of the Resistance took often-brutal revenge on
collaborators, such as members of the paramilitary organization the Milice and the
women who slept with German soldiers.
73
Photos of the barricades further masked these
divisions. Depictions of the barricades’ construction show men, women, and children
ripping up paving stones and cutting down trees [figs. 3.23 & 3.24]. Photographs of battle
project a similar image of social solidarity as bourgeois and working-class men, young

72
“Paris is Free Again!,” Life, September 11, 1944, 25.

73
A survey of twelve books, which include over 500 photographs, turned up only two of the Milice or their
headquarters. Only one photograph shows the public shaming of the French women who became known as
tondues, after their heads were shaved as punishment for their relations with the enemy. Instead, books and
pamphlets pictured violence against Germans. For more about the Milice see: Jean-Pierre Azéma, “La
Milice,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire, no. 28 (December 1990): 83–105; Jacques Delperrié de Bayac,
Histoire de la Milice, 1918-1945 (Paris: Fayard, 1969). In 1994, a French court convicted high-ranking
Milice leader Paul Touvier of crimes against humanity. For more about Touvier and his trial see: Richard
Joseph Golsan, Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs (Hanover:
University Press of New England Dartmouth College, 1996).

178
boys, and even women took up arms [figs. 3.25 & 3.26]. The city itself seemed to
participate by contributing iconic cast-iron tree grates, newspaper kiosks, and Morris
columns (used to advertise urban entertainments) [fig. 3.27]. As François Mauriac
enthused, “for the first time, it was not a question of fratricidal struggle, for the first time,
all of the French found themselves on the same side of the barricade.”
74
The barricades
would become the central feature of the myth of the pervasive unit of the French
Resistance during the war.

Fig. 3.23: Photo Presse-Liberation, “Tradition,
the people of Paris still know how to raise
barricades. Standing between “cellar and
garden,”
La Libération de Paris journées historiques
Fig. 3.24: The community gathers to build a
barricade, La Semaine héroïque.

74
Mauriac, Paris libéré, 5.
179

Fig. 3.25: Doisneau, Boys at the barricades,
Paris libéré.

Fig. 3.26: Women fought too, Paris libéré.

Fig. 3.27: “Barricade rue du Cherche midi,” La Libération vue d’un commissariat de Police.

Even during the fight to liberate Paris, it became clear that the barricades
functioned more as historical mementos than as an effective system of defense.
Barricades may have stopped cavalry units during the nineteenth century, but as one
eyewitness commented during the Liberation “if the Germans had wanted, […] with six
180
of their tanks, they could have smashed through every one of these barricades.”
75
Indeed
a photograph, published in Vu pendant la libération, of an American tank demonstrates
the fragility of piles of paving stones, sand bags, and assorted cast-iron street furniture
[fig. 3.28]. Modern warfare technologies required hardier defenses, such as the railway
rails the Germans planted vertically in the streets in order to defend their own strongholds
from the approach of Allied tanks [fig. 3.29]. Comparing the civilian barricade to such
defenses gives an image as anachronistic as cavalry units training to combat tanks.
76
In
both of these books, pictures that belie the efficacy of the barricades appeared side-by-
side with others that celebrate them as central to the city’s liberation. Other books
published maps of the barricade’s locations, ostensibly to show how they had spread
throughout the city [fig. 3.30]. But these maps really show the barricades’ uselessness,
for they also plot the places in which the Germans installed themselves to fight to the
end. Although the occasional German truck or tank zipped through the city, most of the
Germans left in Paris did not march through it, taking control of neighborhoods. They
were ensconced in the 8
th
and 16
th
arrondissements: traditionally wealthy and
conservative areas of the city that sprouted nary a barricade in 1944.

75
This quote is a paraphrase of something written in Reybaz’s Le Maqui Saint-Séverin, ou comment fut
délivré le quartier Saint-Michel (Paris: Maison du Livre, 1945): Coiplet, “La Battaille dans la rue.”

76
The shift from horses to motorized vehicles in the army spawned a lot of newspaper and newsreel
coverage. See for example the footage returned if one searches for cavalry and tanks in the online archives
of British Pathé: http://www.britishpathe.com.
181

Fig. 3.28: An allied tank easily breaks through a
barricade, Vu pendant la libération de Paris.
Fig. 3.29: German constructed anti-tank
defenses do not resemble traditional
barricades, Rue Royale, Paris libéré.

Fig. 3.30: Circles mark German strongholds. Dots represent Paris’s barricades, Paris délivré.

Instead the barricades provided a visual and material spectacle – an embodied
symbol – of the French spirit of solidarity and resistance in a familiar form.
77
Observers

77
As Vanessa Schwartz has argued, in the nineteenth century Parisians experienced newsworthy events as
spectacle in the illustrated-press and at the city morgue. They had also experienced spectacular
182
and historians in the war’s immediate aftermath noted as much. Historian Adrien
Dansette judged that the real fighting of the Liberation was a sort of guerilla combat:
[It resembled] an American movie: shots ring out from who-knows-where, a car
races by, men run with shotguns or grenades in their hands, stop to crane their
necks around the corner, and take off again with no apparent reason, as if they
were following the secret rules of a bewildering game.
78

The barricades, on the other hand, “offer[ed] a permanent spectacle that one c[ould]
admire at one’s leisure.”
79
Parisians both acted out the scenes that signified rebellion and
revolt for their forbearers and gathered there as a community during an uncertain time.
Afterwards Parisians described how they drank beer and wine ordered and delivered from
the local café and received foodstuffs passed out by the FFI.
80
Photographs show the
barricades as a place where young men smoked cigarettes and socialized with young
women in sundresses [fig. 3.31]. A cartoon published in October 1944, in which an
annoyed housewife asks her husband “are you going to keep pulling this barricade trick
on me?” as he walks out the door with his FFI armband and hunting cap, gently mocks
the fraternal camaraderie men must have found there [fig. 3.32].
81
The barricades and
even street fighting also attracted crowds who were motivated by a “curiosity without

entertainments in the form of reconstructed historical and real-life dramas such as panoramas, dioramas,
wax-figure reconstructions at the Musée Grevin, and on film in the movie theater. That they should
experience the Liberation of their city as a spectacular event, which they gathered to watch, should come as
no surprise. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

78
Dansette, Histoire de la Libération de Paris, 267.

79
Ibid., 268.

80
Ibid., 268–270. An article in the 1949 book Histoire de la guerre 1939-1945 would caption a photograph
of Parisians at the barricades as “les parisiens jouent aux barricades,” “La Libération de Paris” in Histoire
de la guerre 1939-1945 , eds. J. Galtier-Boissière and Charles Alexandre, (Paris, 1949), p. 364-369.

81
“cartoon,” Le Parisien libéré, October 14, 1944.
183
thought for danger, [and a] passion for gawking which created more than one casualty.”
82

The barricades offered a fixed spectacle for the photographer as well as the gawker.

Fig. 3.31: Young people socialized at the
barricades, La Libération de Paris.
Fig. 3.32: A cartoon mocking men’s use of the
barricades as an excuse to socialize,
Le Parisien libéré.

Fig. 3.33: Robert Doisneau,
August 23,
La Semaine héroïque.
Fig. 3.34: René Zuber,
August 22,
La Semaine héroïque.

Fig. 3.35: René Zuber, August 22,
Paris délivré.

82
Jacques de Lacretelle, La libération de Paris: 150 photographies (Paris: Fasquelle, 1945), np. The
badaud, which historian Greg Shaya translates as “the curious observer, the rubberneck, the gawker,” is a
figure familiar from the literature of and cultural history about nineteenth-century Paris. For more about the
badaud see: Gregory Shaya, “The Flâneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, Circa
1860–1910,” The American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004).
184
Unlike hand-to-hand combat, sniper fire, or tank fighting, which required
photographers to be in the right place at the right time or to brave dangerous conditions,
the barricades presented themselves as readily available scenes for the camera’s lens. At
least three photographers took pictures of the same barricade built at the corner of the
Place du Petit Pont and the Rue de la Huchette in the 5
th
arrondissement. Robert
Doisneau, René Zuber, and Pierre Roughol circled the barricade taking a plunging-shot
from a high-up apartment across the street that shows the whole barricade and its builders
[fig. 3.33] as well as close-up portraits of the men, women, and war veterans who
gathered there [fig. 3.34, 3.35, 3.37, 3.38].
83
They photographed it from behind [fig.
3.36], from the front [fig. 3.34], and up above [fig. 3.33]. These photographers returned
to capture the barricade’s transformation as it rose from a modest sandbag structure [fig.
3.38] into a large earthen mound [fig 3.33]. Unlike photographs of battle, which were
often blurry and taken from far away, these photographs are carefully composed and
technically well executed. Their figures almost seem posed. Yet, changes that one can
observe in the barricade’s structure indicate that these scenes were not restaged after the
Liberation.
84
Rather, the barricade provided a space of war that lent itself to
representation.

83
The barricade photos capture the inclusion of women in the Liberation, and eyewitness accounts make
much of women’s participation. Jacques de Lacretelle described this “chose admirable, dans cette guerre
totale où les femmes, les enfants, se ruèrent au combat.” Lacretelle, La libération de Paris: 150
photographies, np. And yet historians have shown that women’s participation in the Resistance would drop
out of its myth in the decades that followed. For more about women in the Resistance and Liberation see:
the essays in the Gender section of Kedward and Wood, The Liberation of France; as well as Karen H.
Adler, Jews and Gender in Liberation France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

84
After the Liberation, Robert Doisneau took a series of staged portraits of the editors and printers who
made up the underground press. It would have been too dangerous to take and to possess such photographs
during the war. These photographs were published in: Imprimeries clandestines (Paris: Le Point, 1945).
185

Fig. 3.36: August 21,
La Semaine héroïque,
Fig. 3.37: Pierre Roughol,
Revolutionaries of all stripes,
August 21,
À Paris sous la botte des Nazis.

Fig. 3.38: Female
revolutionary, August 21,
La Semaine héroïque.
The placement of the Rue de la Huchette barricade helps account for why so
many photographers took pictures of it. The square it overlooked sits on the Seine’s left
bank, just opposite its eponymous bridge, le Petit Pont. Heading north from the barricade
over the Petit Pont one arrives at the Préfecture de Police, the Hôtel Dieu, and Notre
Dame on the Ile de la Cité. Photographers would have passed in front of this barricade on
their way from the Left Bank to the FFI-occupied Préfecture de Police, where they
photographed the resistance efforts, or the Hôtel Dieu, where wounded fighters were
brought. But maps of the barricades in Paris indicate that photographers would have seen
numerous other barricades as they headed north.
85
They must have photographed this

Another of the post-war photographes humanistes, Izis Bidermanas also made a name for himself by taking
portraits of Resistance fighters after the Liberation. Three photo exhibitions held in Limoges in 1944-1945
featured his portraits of rural maquisards. For more about the photos and their exhibition see: Manuel
Bidermanas and Armelle Canitrot, Izis Bidermanas: Paris des rêves (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 10–12.

85
The map of barricades in Paris délivré indicates that photographers could have found at least seven other
barricades within a one-block radius from this one. Volunteers working at the Musée Carnavalet have, by
186
barricade over others because it was staffed by a collection of stock figures familiar from
Parisian visual culture: the bourgeois gentleman; the militant housewife, concierge, or
market woman; the gangster-inspired rough-and-tumble hero of the working classs; and
the mutilé de guerre, or one-legged veteran of World War I [figs. 3.34, 3.35, 3.37, &
3.38]. In turn, this one barricade was disproportionately represented in books and
pamphlets about the Liberation, appearing in À Paris sous la botte des Nazis, La Semaine
héroïque, Paris délivré, La Délivrance de Paris, 19-26 août 1944, and La Grand
délivrance de Paris. It seems to stand in for all Parisian barricades, just as the barricades
came to encapsulate the Liberation itself.
Photographs of the barricades came to hold such mythic power because a veil of
impartiality masked their partisan nature. Those who organized efforts to amass
documents of the Liberation valued the objectivity of photographs. Musée Carnavalet
curator François Boucher explained how “an abundant iconographic documentation” in
conjunction with “the greatest variety of hand-written or printed, official or private
sources accessible today” would provide, if not the history of the Liberation, at least an
honest account of it.
86
And yet photographs, in particular those of the barricades, were
carefully framed and selected in ways that interpreted the Liberation as a unifying
moment by casting participants in the Liberation as modern updates to historical Parisian
revolutionary iconography. These photographs became historical documents twice over,
freezing moments from August 18 to 26 and inserting them in a much longer past, evoked

identifying the location of each photographer’s images, reconstructed their trajectories for each day of the
Liberation. Notebooks with the results are stored at the Cabinet des Estampes there.

86
Boucher, La Grande déliverance de Paris, 11.
187
in the viewer’s mind. They entered the collections of the Musée Carnavalet, thus, as both
scientific and evocative historical documents. And their prevalence in published and
exhibited accounts of the Liberation of Paris testifies to further efforts to curate the
Liberation as a unifying moment.

Photographs as Partisans in Postwar Conflicts
While photographs presented the illusion of objectivity, in the aftermath of the
Liberation contemporaries used them in subjective and partisan ways. Because they
presented a front of impartiality, photos, rather than sketches, drawings, or newsreels,
became the privileged documents through which large-scale public exhibitions as well as
photographically-illustrated books and pamphlets made arguments about the experience
of the Occupation and the Liberation. The image of Paris, capital of revolution, came to
serve as a foil for the actions of the Germans during the Occupation. By producing and
disseminating the narrative of heroic Paris in photographically-illustrated books,
publishers, authors, and photographers who had developed ties with the Germans during
the war attempted to prove which side of that duality they really belonged to.
Historians, librarians, and government officials were not content to simply collect
archives of documents about the Liberation of Paris and the Occupation in the hopes that
future historians would one day find them interesting. Rather, in the months that followed
the war, they drew on their new collections in order to organize large-scale public
exhibitions about these most recent events in the history of Paris and the nation. In Paris,
throughout 1944 and 1945, a series of exhibitions about the war on subjects as varied as
188
the conditions of POW camps, the production of the underground press, and the role of
the French navy presented images to the public as evidence.
87
Despite their variations,
these exhibitions offered a clear dichotomy between those that celebrated the heroism of
the French during the war and those that detailed German atrocities. Nothing better
represents these two trends than the exhibition about the Liberation of Paris held at the
Musée Carnavalet, which opened on Armistice Day (November 11) 1944 and ran through
December 31, and the largest postwar exhibition, organized by the national Service des
crimes de guerre: “Les Crimes hitlériens,” which drew nearly a half million visitors.
Employing the same principles that had shaped the displays of the Musée Carnavalet in
the nineteenth century, organizers of both exhibitions used images, objects, and artifacts
in order to give visitors vivid and visceral access to the events of the war.

Fig. 3.39: Display of captured Occupation
artifacts (Musée Carnavalet).
Fig. 3.40: Homage to the barricades
(Musée Carnavalet).

87
An exhibition about the underground press opened in Paris in September 1944. The French navy
similarly organized an exhibit about its activities in the months that followed the Liberation. Starting in
November 1944, long before most prisoners has been released from German POW camps, Parisians could
visit “The Soul of the Camps: an exposition about the intellectual, spiritual and social life in POW camps.”
In December 1944, the resistance group Défense de la France presented an exhibition dedicated to the
production of counterfeit copies of official stamps and documents. These exhibitions were advertised in
newspapers: “Une exposition de la presse clandestine,” Le Parisien libéré, September 29, 1944.
189
The objects and images displayed at the Musée Carnavalet’s exhibition, like
photographs of the barricades, worked to insert the Liberation into the city’s long history
of revolution by tracing material links with the museum’s existing revolutionary
collections.
88
One of the exhibition’s display cases featured Nazi flags, helmets, weapons,
and street signs, while another held General von Choltitz’s own sword [fig. 3.39]. Gallic
roosters, symbol of the French nation, graced the walls of another room. In the room
dedicated to heroic figures of the Liberation, Boucher had paving stones, rifles and
machine guns artistically arranged to evoke a barricade [fig. 3.40]. These objects seemed
the modern equivalent of the artifacts of 1789, which included a scaled-down replica of
the Bastille, swords, flags, and Phrygian bonnets, on display elsewhere in the museum
[fig. 1.4]. One reviewer noted: “the stones of the barricades of the month of August 1944
have joined those torn in 89 from the Bastille.”
89
Even their arrangements into formal
aesthetic patterns – the wall of flags from 1944 and the fan of swords from 1789 – are
similar. But unlike in the rest of the museum, whose displays emphasized the importance
of other types of visual representations, photographs played the prominent role in the
Liberation exhibition. The exhibition thus speaks to the museum staff’s acceptance of
photos as the visual documents that would serve to write the history of their own era.
Even though reviewers and critics accepted photographs as material slices of the
reality of battle, they nonetheless credited them with the ability to evoke an emotional
connection to the past. One reviewer commented that the combination of photographs

88
One woman tried to donate songs about the Liberation. Boucher refused her gift, privileging documents
more in keeping with the museum’s existent collections. François Boucher, “Letter to Suzanne d’Olivéra,”
December 14, 1944, Cabinet des Estampes, Musée Carnavalet.

89
“Dans Paris et dans les pays: Pavés de Paris à l’honneur,” Les Lettres françaises, November 18, 1944.
190
and objects made the viewer “believ[e] to be brought four months back in time…and one
feels true emotion before the few Parisian paving stones brought in as the symbol of the
people’s insurrection.”
90
Like the museum’s rooms and displays in the nineteenth
century, objects and photographs from the Liberation evoked emotional reactions from
visitors thus allowing them to relive (or live for the first time) the Liberation. Now,
instead of occupying a secondary role as study documents for scholars, photographs took
center stage. Lining the exhibition rooms’ walls, photos provided the narrative that
allowed for the interpretation of the other objects that surrounded them.
The events that visitors relived at the Musée Carnavalet presented a carefully-
curated portrait of the heroic actions of the FFI, de Gaulle and Leclerc’s troops, and all
Parisians during the Liberation. Panels in the exhibition’s three rooms celebrated the
barricades, the Resistance leadership, and the FFI’s actions during various key battles.
91

The chosen photographs cast the Liberation as a moment of social solidarity by
emphasizing the participation of men, women, and children of all classes in the
construction of the barricades. Indeed, even though Parisians sent him photographs of
tondues, the women whose heads were shaved as retribution for sleeping with German
soldiers, Boucher chose not to exhibit them.
92
Rather, like most publishers and authors in
the aftermath of war, Boucher conformed to a heroic narrative of the Liberation. This

90
“Au Musée Carnavalet: L’Exposition ‘Libération de Paris’ retrace les heures glorieuses du mois d’août,”
Le Parisien libéré, November 11, 1944.

91
Many thanks to the staff of the Musée Carnavalet who shared with me their own research into the
exhibition, in particular their efforts to determine which photographs were included.

92
“Letter from Michel Pavelec of St.-Mandé,” October 14, 1944, Cabinet des Estampes, Musée Carnavalet.

191
narrative certainly drew a large audience: according to museum records, 32,638 visitors
attended in the less than two months that it was open.
93
Public demand even inspired
museum officials to extend the exhibition until January 14, 1945.
94
The high attendance
suggests that memories of the Liberation, as pictured in sun-drenched photographs of it,
became a form of solace to Parisians during the “bleak winter days,” when, as Howard
Rice described the winter of 1944-1945, “the sunshine and joy of last summer seem far
away indeed.”
95

The exhibition “Les Crimes hitlériens” in turn presented objects and images as
evidence for a different narrative: the Nazi evils against which Paris’s liberators fought.
Under the authority of the Ministère de l’Information, the Service des crimes de guerre
opened its exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris on June 10, 1945, where it ran until July
31, 1945. “Les Crimes hitlériens” also traveled through France and Europe for the next
two years, presenting what one reviewer described as “a veritable indictment of
Nazism.”
96
A series of rooms encompassed Nazi atrocities at the death camps, the torture
and execution of FFI members (in particular the Resistance members who fought in the
Vercors), economic spoliation, and the massacre of the town of Oradour-sur-Glane.
97

93
“Visitor logs for the Liberation exhibition,” Cabinet des Estampes, Musée Carnavalet.

94
Another 1,598 visitors came during these last two weeks. Ibid.

95
Rice, “Post-Liberation Publishing in France,” 329.

96
“L’Exposition des crimes nazis est un accablant réquisitoire contre Hitler et les dirigeants du Reich,” Le
Parisien libéré, June 12, 1945.

97
See both reviews of the exhibition and bills for the letters commissioned by the organizing committee:
Activité du service des Crimes de guerre au ministère de l’Information, n.d., F 41/450, Archives nationales.
On June 10, 1944 SS officers killed the entire population of the small rural town of Oradour-sur-Glane. The
exhibition’s opening on June 12, 1945 roughly coincided with the one-year anniversary of those events. For
192
Enlarged photographs hung on the walls alongside artifacts, which included a train
wagon used to transport Jews towards death camps in the East. At the end of the
exhibition a diorama of a concentration camp and a screening room further brought the
events of the war to life.
98
“Les Crimes hitlériens” drew what one reviewer described as
“a silent and horrified crowd, [that] slowly shuffled before the charts, maps, and huge
photos of the Nazi atrocities.”
99

Both organizers and reviewers of “les Crimes hitlériens” understood photographs
as key to the emotional response they hoped to elicit with the exhibition. Installing panels
and lighting them properly was more important to the organizing committee than staying
within its budget. The committee spent 2,334,000 francs – or the amount of its entire
original budget – on the exhibition’s physical installation alone.
100
Photographs of the
exhibition as it was mounted in the southwestern city of Pau show that words sparsely
framed large photos, some of which extended over as many as four panels [fig. 3.41]. The

more about Oradour and its afterlives in French culture, memory, and memorialization see: Sarah Bennett
Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).

98
Budget documents describe how the diorama and screening room incurred unforeseen costs: “Folder
justifying the cost of the exhibition: Activité du service des Crimes de guerre au ministère de
l’Information”, n.d., F 41/450, Archives nationales. A newspaper review of the exhibition after it traveled
to Pau described “Enfin, dans le fond de la sale, une fresque immense et d’un réalisme horrifiant,
représente le charnier de Buchenwald. A ses pieds, terrifiante de vérité, une reconstitution en réduction
d’un camp de concentration. Rien n’y manque: barbelés, miradors, ‘lagerwache’ potence, poteaux de
tortures, four crématoire, tout y est.” “Au Pavillon des Arts se tient actuellement l’exposition des crimes
hitlériens,” La IVe République, April 19, 1946.

99
“En France et ailleurs...témoignage irrécusable,” Les Lettres françaises, June 23, 1945. Official
documents indicate that 487,270 visitors paid 10 francs each in order to see the exhibition during its two-
month Paris run. “Recettes d’entree, Activité du service des Crimes de guerre au ministère de
l’Information”, n.d., F 41/450, Archives nationales.

100
According to a report from the Ministrère de l’information sent to the Direction de l’Administration
générale on July 17, 1945, the exhibition ended up costing 5,800,000 francs: “Engagement de dépenses,
Activité du service des Crimes de guerre au ministère de l’Information”, juillet 1945, F 41/450, Archives
nationales.
193
combination of objects and photographs gave the exhibition, in the words of one
reviewer, an air of “brutal realism.”
101

Fig. 3.41: The exhibition “les crimes hitlériens” in Pau (Archives nationales).

Unlike the exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet, which celebrated the photograph’s
ability to bring the events of the Liberation back to life, “Les Crimes hitlériens” made
contemporaries question how well photographs functioned as historical documents.
Critics did admit that photos communicated better than textual accounts. One journalist
told his readers that he could not encapsulate the importance of the exhibition for them.
Instead, he instructed: “one must go see it in order to believe it.”
102
He, along with a
journalist writing in Combat acknowledged that even the flood of photos, first-hand
accounts, and films of Nazi atrocities that the public had seen since the war would only
ever provide “a feeble reflection of them, not powerful enough to give us a feeling for

101
G. Hourquet, “L’Exposition des crimes hitlériens au Pavillon des Arts,” l’Etincelle, April 16, 1946.

102
Ibid. Hourquet added the qualifier “là-bas” at the end of his sentence, likely referring to his own
experiences with torture or in German camps.

194
what really happened.”
103
Even though photographs may have a limited ability to
represent historical events, he argued, the public still had a responsibility to look at
them.
104
And critics did claim that the images at the Grand Palais exhibition were
sufficient to provide a profound response of “sorrow mixed with justified anger.”
105

But critics and commentators were also deeply conscious that photographs and
films could serve as documents of more than simply what they pictured. In the context of
the Grand Palais exhibition, they understood that the photo implied a photographer. For
organizers and commentators, photographs became proof of Nazi crimes not only
because of what they pictured, but also because of who had taken them. The photographs
of French civilians tortured by the Nazis and kept as souvenirs, presented, according to
one reviewer writing in Les Lettres françaises: “the most damning charge that one could
bring against the German occupier.”
106
This use of photographs in the Grand Palais
exhibition speaks to the existence of an understanding of the photograph as a material
object with a production history. And it suggests that contemporaries would also have
been keenly conscious of the respective material histories of photographs of the
Liberation of Paris.
Exhibitions about the Occupation and the Liberation helped to create clear
distinctions out of nebulous social boundaries. Categorizations of the Germans as war
criminals and the French as heroic resisters replaced a much more complicated reality.

103
Denis Marion, “L’écran: les atrocités allemandes,” Combat, June 19, 1945.

104
Ibid. He insisted “[nous ne pouvons pas] nous fermer les yeux et nous boucher les oreilles.”

105
“L’Exposition des crimes nazis...”

106
“Propagande utile,” Les Lettres françaises, August 18, 1945.
195
Photographs as well as artifacts drove this message home, bringing wartime experiences
– in a carefully curated form – back to life for visitors. Interestingly enough, however,
just as the Musée Carnavalet exhibition and photo collection offered the most resounding
evidence of its acceptance of photographs as historical documents of the future, critics
and commentators openly questioned the limits of the photograph’s ability to represent
the experiences of past time.
Regardless of whatever limits of photography critics identified, curators and
government officials still assumed that photographs were the best means for widely
educating the public about the war. Both exhibitions enjoyed such great success that their
respective organizers sought to bring them to even larger audiences in the months that
followed. François Boucher published his exhibition as a photohistory, while organizers
of “les Crimes hitlériens” took the exhibition on the road, traveling all over France and
Europe.
107
One critic, however, suggested that the most efficient and effective way to
convince the world of the severity of the Nazis’s war crimes in France would have been
to publish the photographs of them. In August 1945, he asked: “What is the government
waiting for to make an illustrated pamphlet with these images, printed in millions of
copies and distributed not only in France, but also to our Allies, and, why not, even to
Germany?”
108
Although an album accompanying the exhibition had been for sale for
twelve francs at the Grand Palais, this reviewer proposed – one year after the Liberation –

107
Boucher, La Grande déliverance de Paris. In France “les Crimes hitlériens” traveled to Lille, Dijon,
Besançon, Bordeaux, Lyon, Rennes, Brest, Nancy, Toulouse, Poitiers, Angers, and Strasbourg. It also went
to London and some of its surrounding areas, Brussels, Berlin, and Vienna. See documents of the
exhibition in F 41/450, Archives Nationales.

108
“Propagande utile.”
196
that the best, most wide-ranging document of the exhibition that would have the most
impact on how the Western world remembered the war would be not an exhibition, but a
mass-produced illustrated pamphlet.
In suggesting that “les Crimes hitlériens” be transformed into an illustrated
pamphlet, the reviewer writing in Les Lettres françaises revealed two important things
about photography and postwar France. First, his statement attests to the prevalence of
illustrated pamphlets and books about the war. This inspired him to suggest an illustrated
pamphlet in the first place. And second, his comment suggests that these other illustrated
pamphlets were serving, in the guise of objective photographic documentation, to justify,
interpret, exonerate, and mythologize many other wartime actions. In proposing the
dissemination of the images and information in “Les Crimes hitlériens” in a cheap
illustrated pamphlet, this journalist spoke to the importance of illustrated books and
pamphlets in shaping the Occupation and Liberation’s legacy in 1944 and 1945.
In 1944 and 1945, the French, by all accounts, were eager to purchase
photohistories of the Liberation of Paris. One of Le Monde’s literary critics, Robert
Coiplet (who in later years would often review books about photography) described how
those who had participated in the Liberation would collect books about it as treasured
souvenirs of “the best hours of their lives.”
109
And indeed already in November 1944,
another journalist enthused that “bookstores are running out of their stacks of [Libération

109
Coiplet, “La Battaille dans la rue.” For more about how Coiplet’s column “Courrier littéraire” (1945-
1960) engaged with questions of photography see: Michel Guerrin, Henri Cartier-Bresson et le Monde
(Paris: Gallimard, 2008).

197
de Paris du 19 au 26 août 1944]. Bravo!”
110
That such books would sell well is not
surprising, given that Parisians had also eagerly consumed the first newspaper accounts
of the Liberation, flocked to see filmed images of it on screen at local cinemas, and
visited the Musée Carnavalet exhibition in large numbers.
111
Books offered an advantage
over newspapers, whose poor quality paper did not hold up under repeated readings. And
unlike the movies and the Carnavalet exhibition, books were always available for
consumption.
There was great variety in the form and quality of illustrated books about the
Liberation published after the war.
112
They ranged from small pamphlets that cost as little
as 10 francs (or about five times the price of a daily newspaper) to larger-format books
printed on much higher-quality paper that cost anywhere between 70 and 200 francs.
113

They also varied greatly in terms of the relationship between photographs and text on
their pages. Some were essentially photo albums prefaced with a short essay by a well-

110
“Livres et documents,” Le Parisien libéré, November 1, 1944.

111
Eyewitness accounts describe how newspapers would sell out within a few hours. Edmond Dubois, a
Swiss journalist and editor who resided in Paris during the war, described how on August 22 “Les éditions
sont épuisées en quelques heures.” Dubois, Vu pendant la Libération de Paris, 70. On its first day, a single
showing of the film La Libération de Paris drew over 6,000 viewers. Bowles, “Jean Renoir’s Salut à la
France,” 64.

112
Some books about the Liberation used lithographs instead of photographs, see for example: Les
Barricades de Paris VII: la libération; Georges Fronval, Paris brise ses chaînes: épopée des 20
arrondissements et de la banlieue dans les journées du 19 au 25 août 1944 (Paris: Editions et revues
françaises, 1944); Roy, Les Yeux ouverts dans Paris insurgé.

113
Fronval, Paris brise ses chaînes: épopée des 20 arrondissements et de la banlieue dans les journées du
19 au 25 août 1944, 10fr; Les Barricades de Paris VII: la libération, 12fr; L’Insurrection de Paris (Paris:
France-éditions, 1944), 15fr. These prices are in “old francs.” The September 1944 issue of France d’abord
cost 2 fr; an issue of La Marseillaise that month cost 3 fr. Kim, La Libération de Paris, np. Mauriac, Paris
libéré cost 70 fr.
198
known author or member of the Resistance.
114
Others presented largely textual narratives
of the Liberation – first-hand accounts, compiled newspaper articles, and historical
analyses – illustrated with a handful of photos.
115
And, of course, some books did not
include any illustrations at first, although publishers would add photographs to them in
successive printings.
116
Differences between them, however, were largely restricted to
these issues of format and quality, rather than the substance of their narratives.
In general, books about the Liberation of Paris, written in its immediate aftermath,
presented similar variations on the same pictorial narrative of its events. They began with
images of the strike that started the uprising on August 19. Images of fighting at the
Préfecture de Police and other government buildings followed. Then they showed
pictures of fighting in the streets: from the torching of German tanks and trucks to the
construction and manning of barricades. Many included copies of the posters and
newspapers that called Parisians to arms and announced the success of their efforts.
Photographs presented the capture of German troops, marched through the very streets
they used to parade down. With the success of the homegrown insurrection already
pictorially apparent, books then included photographs of the Free French troops that
arrived in Paris on August 24. And they concluded with photographs of the subsequent

114
Lacretelle, La libération de Paris: 150 photographies; Kim, La Libération de Paris; Duhamel, La
Semaine héroïque; Paris délivré par son peuple (Paris: Editions Braun et Cie, 1944).

115
These included L’Insurrection de Paris; Boucher, La Grande déliverance de Paris; Campaux, La
Libération de Paris (19-26 août 1944); Dubois, Vu pendant la Libération de Paris. In Dubois’ book,
selections from the text caption the photographs, as if one could read the book in summary form, guided by
the images.

116
Paris vu d’un commissariat de Police, printed by the Préfecture de Police, and Adrien Dansette’s La
Libération de Paris, published in 1944 and 1946 without photographs, included photographs when they
were republished, the former in 1945 and the latter in 1959.
199
parades and celebrations as well as the chaos created when a few German snipers fired
into the crowds. While many books ended on the triumphant image of celebratory
parades, some concluded on a more sorrowful note with photographs of the memorials
and gravestones erected for those who died to free the city.
But although the photographically-illustrated pamphlets that flooded the market
presented what seemed to be a unified interpretation of the Liberation, this unity hid real
differences among their producers. It masked how the production of photographs and
books about the Liberation of Paris became a strategy to justify and excuse the wartime
actions of photographers and publishers and claim allegiance to the Resistance during the
climate of postwar épuration. While publishers and authors certainly published
photohistories of the Liberation of Paris because they thought people would buy them,
they also relied on the presumed transparency and objectivity of the photograph in order
to make claims about their own roles during the Occupation and Liberation.
Some of the very same printers and publishers who would produce photohistories
of the Liberation of Paris in 1944 and 1945 also published books for the Germans and the
Vichy government. Although some editors and printers had closed down during the
Occupation, others had remained active. Unlike French newspapers and magazines,
which the new government forcibly dissolved if they had continued to operate legally
under Vichy and the Occupation, most publishing houses and printers were allowed to
remain open after the Liberation.
117
Throughout the war, the printers Draegers frères,

117
For more about who remained open and who did not, as well as the history of underground publishing,
see: Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit: 1942-1955 le devoir d’insoumission, L’édition contemporaine
(Paris: IMEC éd, 1994).

200
who specialized in illustrated books and advertisements, printed Vichy propaganda that
included collected volumes of Pétain’s speeches.
118
In the postwar period they would
print four photohistories glorifying the Liberation, among them, a commemorative book
produced by the city of Paris.
119
The editor Fasquelle published a collected volume of
Pétain’s speeches in 1941 and a photohistory of the Liberation in 1945.
120
Similarly the
Parisian publisher Braun atoned for its publication of a photographically-illustrated book,
in German, about Hitler’s 1940 visit to Versailles with a series of illustrated books about
the Liberation after the war.
121
While these particular editors would not be arrested and
tried after the war, journalists accused Bernard Grasset, who was tried after the war, with
attempting to cover his wartime production by publishing books celebrating the

118
In addition to the speeches, Draegers also published books and pamphlets for the Ministère de la
Marine, the S.N.C.F, and the Ministère de l’Information: Philippe Pétain, Maréchal Pétain. La France
nouvelle, appels et messages, 17 juin 1940-17 juin 1941 (Montrouge: impr. Draeger frères, 1941); Robert
Lallemant, Marine Nationale. 32 photos de Robert Lallemant. (Paris: Secrétariat d’État à la Marine
(Draeger frères), 1942); La Reconstruction des ouvrages d’art du chemin de fer. L’oeuvre des services de
la S.N.C.F. et des entreprises françaises, juillet 1940-juillet 1942 (Montrouge: impr. de Draeger frères,
1942); Nouveaux destins de l’intelligence française (Paris: Ministère de l’Information Union bibliophile de
France Impr. de Draeger frères, 1942); Philippe Pétain, Maréchal Pétain. La France nouvelle, appels et
messages, 8 juillet 1941-17 juin 1943., vol. II (Montrouge: impr. de Draeger frères, 1943); Philippe Pétain,
Paroles du Maréchal (Vichy: Bureau de documentation du Chef de l’État (impr. de Draeger frères), 1943).

119
A.-G. Leroux, Un an (Paris: Editions Raymond Schall, 1946); Eparvier, À Paris sous la botte des Nazis;
Paris, du 19 au 26 août 1944; Claude Roy, Paris les heures glorieuses: août 1944 le CPL prépare et dirige
l’insurrection (Montrouge: Draeger frères, 1945).

120
Lacretelle, La libération de Paris: 150 photographies; Philippe Pétain, La France nouvelle: principes de
la communauté; Appels et messages (17 juin 1940-17 juin 1941) (Paris: Fasquelle, 1941). Other publishers,
although active during the war, limited themselves to novels, in the case of Rouff (who published Paris
brise ses chaînes in 1944), or Flammarion (who published Paris libéré with the preface by François
Mauriac).

121
Frieda Dettweiler and Johanna Müller, Ein Tag in Versailles, illustrierter Führer von Schloss, Museum,
Park, und Trianons (Paris: Braun, 1941); Paris délivré par son peuple.
201
Resistance and the Liberation.
122
The publications produced by these editors indicate that
the same opportunism that caused them to publish Vichy and Nazi-sympathetic
publications during the war pushed them to produce publications about the Liberation
after it.
The authors and groups who wrote and sponsored photohistories of the Liberation
of Paris also used them to mask their sometimes-questionable wartime activities. After
the war, author and journalist Jacques de Lacretelle introduced the volume La Libération
de Paris: 150 photographies and helped start the newspaper Le Figaro. But in the 1930s
he had worked as the editor of Croix-de-Feu, the newspaper of the nationalist and fascist
political party of the same name. When the provisional government sent him on an
official “propaganda” mission to the United States in 1945, a journalist in the Figaro
protested, reminding its readers of a particularly eloquent anti-American and pro-German
ode de Lacretelle had penned in 1941.
123
De Lacretelle might have feared the same fate as
another prominent pre-war author turned fascist, Robert Brasillach, who faced a firing
squad in in February 1945.
124
Likewise, members of the French police preferred that the
public remember their call to strike, which sparked the Liberation of Paris, – as it was

122
Le Parisien libéré accused Bernard Grasset, “ce collaborationniste notoire” of “pépar[ant] en toute hâte
un grand ouvrage dont le titre était déjà trouvé: Virgile de la liberté.” Les Parisiens, “Le rond-point des
lettres,” Le Parisien libéré, September 19, 1944.

123
“Ceux qui exagèrent,” Les Lettres françaises, January 13, 1945.

124
For more about the career and trial of Robert Brasillach see: Alice Yaeger Kaplan, The Collaborator:
The Trial & Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). De Lacretelle
scholar Douglas Alden claims that “[he] made no attempt – as so many of his contemporaries did – to get
on the Resistance band wagon,” but his preface to this book suggests otherwise. Douglas Alden, Jacques de
Lacretelle: An Intellectual Itinerary (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 245–249.
202
laid out in the pamphlet La Libération de Paris vue d’un commissariat de Police – rather
than their cooperation in enforcing the laws of the Occupation.
125

Commemorative photohistories even served to recast the actions of professional
photographers during the war. À Paris sous la botte des Nazis, published by Raymond
Schall in 1944, recast the material history of wartime photographs taken by
photographers Roger Schall, Joublin, Pierre Vals, Roger Parry, Maurice Jarnoux, and
André Papillon as heroic acts of documentation.
126
Their pictures show the German
occupation of Paris and some of its material conditions including bread lines and signs
declaring food shortages. But they largely document scenes of leisure and peaceful
coexistence – rather than violence or oppression – between German soldiers and French
civilians and were clearly taken with German permission. Nevertheless the book’s
preface provides an unambiguous reinterpretation of these photos, explaining that they
were in fact the products of acts of resistance:
In the hope of one day publishing it for all to see, [these photographers] wanted to
create evidence of the spirit of insubordination which never stopped to shine
down on Paris and France. Thanks to various ploys, the photographic documents

125
The pamphlet’s introduction challenged: “Who said that the Paris Police were ‘collaborators’?” Dupuy,
La Libération de Paris vue d’un commissariat de police, 30. In particular the French police (not the
Gestapo) had organized the deportation of Jews from Paris. During the round-up at the Vel’ d’Hiv of July
16-17, 1942 the French Police surpassed themselves in their execution of German orders. Asked to deport
only adults, the Police rounded-up and detained over 13,000 people, including more than 4,000 children, at
the indoor cycling area, before sending them to Drancy. For more about the French police’s role in the
deportation of Jews see: Michael Robert Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books,
1981).

126
These professional photographers sold pictures during the war to publications based in Vichy France
that included La Semaine, L’Illustration, Paris-Midi, and Paris-Soir. Furthermore, Schall, Jarnoux, Vals,
and Papillon all received Vichy accreditation, which would have allowed them to take photographs of
official Vichy events. Many Parisian photographers were accredited under Vichy in 1944, perhaps to cover
Pétain’s first and only visit to the city in April 1944. They would not have needed Vichy accreditation, but
rather German permission to take photographs just in occupied Paris. For more detailed description of these
photographers’ allegiances and employers during the war see the annexes of Denoyelle, La photographie
d’actualité et de propagande sous le régime de Vichy.
203
were taken behind the enemy’s back, quite often at the risk of the liberty – if not
the life – of the photographers.
127

Typeset in the shape of a Phrygian cap, a symbol of the 1789 revolutionaries, this preface
elides the very fact that these photographers had worked with German approbation, so
visible in their pictures [fig. 3.42]. À Paris sous la
botte des Nazis sought to preclude retribution by
recasting photographs taken to sell to the press as
historical documents captured as proof of enduring
spirit of French resistance.
128
And indeed, while
many photographers could have claimed
membership in the Resistance because of their
actions to document the battles of the Liberation,
none of the photographers who received top billing in À Paris sous la botte des Nazis
took the photographs of the Liberation that followed. The striking absence of their names
from those pages suggests that they may not have felt welcome at Paris’s barricades in
1944. Yet by publishing their photographs in a book that glorified the Resistance under
the Occupation and the Liberation of Paris, these photographers claimed membership in
this movement.

127
In case less-observant readers missed the Phrygian cap shaped preface, a letter from Charles de Gaulle
laying out the importance of the Liberation of Paris followed. Eparvier, À Paris sous la botte des Nazis.
Robert Delhay, director of the photo agency LAPI employed a similar defense at his trial – claiming that he
had really been working subversively to document Nazi crimes. Denoyelle, “Photographie et
collaboration,” 161.

128
The book did contain some photographs of Nazi atrocities, all taken by anonymous photographers.

Fig. 3.42: The preface to À Paris sous
la botte des Nazis…

204
The vast majority of those who penned the texts for books about the Liberation of
Paris did so as verifiable members of the Resistance of long-date. They included
journalists who had supported the Resistance (Georges Duhamel), government officials
(Alexandre Parodi), and active Resistance fighters (Claude Roy). In much the same way
that Nazi-sympathetic writers had sought to become the new literary elite of the regime
during the Occupation, these writers defined themselves as the darlings of the new
regime. Similarly, the French Communist Party, which had organized and planned the
uprisings of August 1944, published a pamphlet about the Liberation that celebrated it as
the triumph of its own homegrown insurrection.
129
For these actors, publishing books
about the Liberation of Paris only served to solidify their place in the postwar political
climate.
When one accounts for the production histories of books about the Liberation of
Paris, their very similar narratives take on meaning as evidence of and actors in the
political struggles that followed it. Avowed members of the Resistance as well as
implicated collaborators produced books that paid homage to a similarly sanitized version
of the events of the Liberation. The presumed objectivity of the photograph made it easy
to forget who had taken the photographs that illustrated these books and who, in turn,
published them in book form. Photographs offered a seemingly impartial account of the
Liberation that could be mobilized to mask a variety of unsavory wartime actions and
internal divisions among the French. At the same time, contemporaries, critics, and
government officials paid detailed attention to the material histories of photographs from

129
Jacques Duclos, L’Insurrection parisienne: 19-26 août 1944, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions du Parti
communiste français, 1946).
205
the Occupation that came to function as irrefutable proof of the horrific crimes committed
against the French population. In the postwar period photographs worked to polarize
memories of the war between experiences of victimhood and heroism.

***
In the aftermath of the Liberation, François Mauriac joined the voices of other
journalists, curators, and critics who celebrated that the week of August 19-26, 1944,
“this chapter of history, the most extraordinary that the illustrious city has ever lived
through, [had been] forever captured by photography.”
130
With this comment, Mauriac
acknowledged those who had rushed to document what was happening in the streets of
Paris, creating a historical record that mimicked the populism of the uprising itself. As
Georges Duhamel wrote, photographers “happily worked, in the dazzling light of these
days, to snatch certain of these beautiful images from the jaws of oblivion.”
131

Photographers had both recognized the importance of photographs as part of the
historical record and reveled in the relaxation of wartime restrictions of photography,
infusing their shots with freedom and joy. But, once again, Mauriac also spoke to the
issues that make the Liberation of Paris such a compelling incident in the history of
photographic history: its deep dialogue with the city’s past and the role of photographs in
its interpretation and reinterpretation as another mythic episode in Parisian history.
Photography had captured the barricades of 1871 and shelling during World War I as

130
Mauriac, Paris libéré, 5.

131
Duhamel, La Semaine héroïque, np.
206
well as the grandeur of more glorious moments such as the 1900 World’s Fair or 1931
Colonial Exposition. Parisians return again and again to these images as documents of
events and as evidence of past trauma and glory. Mauriac acknowledged a similar tension
in the Liberation photographs between the emotional and poetic experience of its events
and the objectivity of the photographs that had “captured it forever.”

Fig. 3.43: The gouache flag (Photothèque Hachette).

Perhaps no photograph illuminates this tension better than one published in the
1946 edition of the Almanach Hachette: petite encyclopédie populaire de la vie
pratique.
132
It shows a barricade constructed by Parisian civilians out of sandbags,
sawhorses, iron beams, and barbed wire. A tricolor flag flies from it, a declaration that
those who built the barricade felt their first allegiance to the greater nation. Its presence
speaks to the unity of the French as they fought for Paris’s freedom, an idea that by 1946,
the barricades had well come to represent. The photograph used in the production of this
volume, however, shows that while the original barricade did indeed exist as pictured,

132
Hachette published the Almanach, yearly (with a few gaps) from 1894 until 1975.
207
someone had painted the flag in with gouache [fig. 3.43].
133
Its addition betrays a desire
to emphasize the national character of the Parisian uprising, to cast it not as the actions of
the FFI, but as the work of the unified French people. It speaks to the fact that
photographs of the Liberation, as published in 1944 and 1945 – at the very height of the
épuration – worked to create the myth of French unity in the immediate aftermath of the
war. Furthermore it demands that historians reconsider whether the “useful fiction” of a
unified Resistance, which historian Henry Rousso argues formed in the 1950s, crystalized
much earlier around the Liberation of Paris.
134
But the added flag also suggests the
limitations of the photograph to represent this myth fully. After all, someone deemed the
simple image of a barricade insufficient to recount the full tale of French solidarity and
decided to add a tricolor flag to it.
135

The history of the collection, exhibition, and publication of photos of the
Liberation is one of almost whole-hearted acceptance of the ability of photographs to
faithfully capture the events they picture. Indeed, the events of August 1944 spawned the
first large-scale effort on the part of the Musée Carnavalet to collect photographic
evidence of a recent event for future historians. Curators and historians did collect other
types of documents as well, suggesting that the dominance of photographs did not, as

133
This photograph is kept in the Libération de Paris folder at the Photothèque Hachette. Volumes about
the Liberation have reproduced this photograph without calling attention to this clear manipulation. For
more about the practice of manipulating photographic images before the digital age see: André Gunthert,
“‘Sans retouche’,” Études photographiques, no. 22, Histoires d’un art moyen / Les réseaux de l’art
(September 2008), http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index1004.html.

134
Henry Rousso has argued that the myth of the Resistance helped the French forget differences that
divided them during the war. Robert O. Paxton, “Forward,” in Vichy: An Ever-present Past, by Éric Conan
and Henry Rousso (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), ix.

135
Thank you to Katie Hornstein for suggesting this idea.
208
Henri Lavergne predicted, make other sorts of documents obsolete.
136
Nevertheless, in
the weeks, months, and decades that followed, photographs, collected in edited volumes,
reprinted in newspapers, and, eventually, exhibited, would come to serve as transparent
windows onto the events of the Liberation. Because of the permanence of photographs
and particularly of photographic books, their sanitized narrative of the Liberation of Paris
lived on long after the 1940s. Subsequent generations learned about the Liberation
through the photographs of it in books and pamphlets that they found in their homes and
in libraries.
137
Newspapers and magazines regularly publish pictures of the Liberation,
and the city of Paris re-staged an exhibition of them in 1994.
138

In the wake of the war, however, critics would chastise the scholars who reduced
its narrative to a series of emotionally-resonant images. Claude Morgan, the communist
director of Les Lettres françaises, for example, praised sociologist Edgar Morin’s study
of postwar Germany for eschewing emotionally-laden description of scenes and
anecdotes in favor of a serious economic analysis.
139
Morgan’s criticism speaks to a shift

136
Henri Lavergne, “L’Histoire de demain,” L’Aurore, August 4, 1910.

137
After I presented a portion of my research about photohistories of the Liberation at a conference in
March 2011, an older French gentleman approached me to tell me that he and almost everyone he knew
owned La Semaine héroïque as a child. Duhamel, La Semaine héroïque.

138
For the 50
th
anniversary the Hôtel de Ville exhibited a selection of Liberation photographs, and many
newspapers printed large numbers of them. Communications scholar Susan Keith has argued that during
commemorations of the Liberation’s 60
th
anniversary, photographs “were used in ways that contribute to
the disappearance of detailed knowledge of the liberation” and “helped paint [its] joys […] as
unrealistically uniform.” This was just the culmination of a trend already well established in 1944. Susan
Keith, “Collective Memory and the End of Occupation: Remembering (and Forgetting) the Liberation of
Paris in Images,” Visual Communication Quarterly 17, no. 3 (2010): 135.

139
I assume that the credit C. M. refers to Claude Morgan: C. M., “L’Allemagne et nous: sus aux images
d’Epinal,” Les Lettres françaises, July 19, 1946. He was reviewing: Edgar Morin, L’an zéro de l’Allemagne
(Paris: Éditions de la Cité universelle, 1946). Morin could have easily resorted to emotional description of
Germany, after all, in 1946, he became head of propaganda for the postwar military government. For more
209
in accounts of the war and its aftermath. In the immediate postwar period, many scholars
and critics – including Morgan himself, who in 1945 opined, “how Paris was beautiful
with its barricades!” – continued to recount the Occupation and Liberation as a series of
emotional experiences.
140
But with time, critics and scholars came to expect the
application of scientific analysis to the events of the war. Singling out François Mauriac
as one of the worst offenders, Morgan declared that authors of accounts of the war and
Liberation needed to “stop considering events as a succession of Epinal prints [images
d’Epinal].”
141

This backlash helps explain the waning popularity of photohistories of the
Liberation, whose heyday had passed by late 1946 and 1947, but it also speaks to the
continued tension between description and analysis in scholarship as well as popular
history. Over the next several decades Morin would forge close ties with historians of the
Annales School and their training programs at the École pratique des hautes études
(whose sixth section become the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales). Somewhat
fittingly, in 1960 Morin founded France’s first scholarly group dedicated to the history of
mass media – the Centre d’études de communication de masse – where scholars studied

about Morin’s career see: Myron Kofman, Edgar Morin: From Big Brother to Fraternity, (London: Pluto
press, 1996); Jean Jacob, Edgar Morin, la fabrique d’une pensée et ses réseaux influents (Villeurbanne: Éd.
Golias, 2011).

140
C. M., “A Travers les rayons: Les Yeux ouverts dans Paris insurgé.”

141
These colorful prints were very popular in France throughout the nineteenth century, but the term also
came to mean any sort of simplistic or folk representation. C. M., “L’Allemagne et nous: sus aux images
d’Epinal.”

210
the very sort of propaganda that Claude Morgan claimed replaced rigorous scholarly
analysis.
142

Despite scholars’ attempts to apply rigor to the study of recent history,
representations of Parisian history that relied upon emotionally-laden images and myths
continued to proliferate in the postwar period. In fact, the city’s history seemed to matter
more than ever as it emerged from World War II as a faded shadow of its nineteenth-
century status. Historians, curators, and city boosters drew on the city’s glorious past to
shore up Paris’s declining universal importance, and in the process, reconceived of how
images of contemporary Paris functioned as documents of its history.

142
After a series of name changes the group is now called the Centre Edgar Morin.
211
Chapter 4

Repicturing the Past in Photographs and Estampes:
Postwar Decline, the 1951 Bimillénaire de Paris, and Photohistories

[these photographs are] truer pictures of an era than their subjects are
--Anonymous
1

In 1943, Musée Carnavalet curator Jacques Wilhelm explained how photographs
and estampes worked together to form an image of Paris’s past in the minds of its
inhabitants:
For the Parisian worthy of the name, images of the past superimpose themselves,
slightly blurry, over the clarity of the modern snapshot, doubling and tripling each
street, each square, each monument with the successive incarnations they offer,
the historical events of which they were the setting.
2

Unlike his fellow Parisian, whose comment that “a man of this century stores in his
memory [thousands of other images of Paris], the living mixed with the defunct, fresh
colorful images mixed with old estampes” opened the previous chapter, Wilhelm
believed that older images worked to influence what Parisians saw in contemporary
photographs.
3
Scenes known from estampes emerged from the deepest recesses of the
mind to animate the photograph. Wilhelm’s statement suggests that while photos had
largely replaced prints when it came to preserving and narrating the history of twentieth-
century Paris, non-photographic forms remained powerful vehicles through which

1
“A Travers les rayons: Petit musée de la curiosité photographique,” Les Lettres françaises, September 15,
1945.

2
Jacques Wilhelm, Visages de Paris: anciens et modernes (Paris: Les Editions du chêne, 1943), 5–6.

3
Les Barricades de Paris VII: la libération (Paris: A. Fleury, 1944).
212
Parisians knew previous centuries of their city’s past. Moreover, this remembered body
of other types of visual representations could transform the contemporary photograph
into a historical document by becoming the “images of the past [that] superimpose
themselves … over the clarity of the modern snapshot.” Working in this way, photos of
the Liberation had evoked a long pictorial tradition of revolution in Paris.
This chapter argues that the visual historical record continued to help Parisians
erase painful memories of the German Occupation, both during the city’s largest
historical festival to date – the 1951 Bimillénaire de Paris, or “Grand Bi,” which
celebrated the city’s 2000
th
birthday – and in a new type of photohistory layout that I
term repicturing, which placed contemporary photographs alongside estampes of
historical scenes.
4
It argues that both developments demonstrate the use of images to

4
This term is closely related to the idea of rephotography, a term that emerged from the 1977-1982
Rephotographic Survey Project that photographed – trying to replicate exact viewpoints and lighting
conditions – the scenes of nineteenth-century photos of the American West. Photographer Mark Klett, who
worked on this project, credits geologists’ practice of “repeat photography” with inspiring his
rephotography projects: Karin Breuer, “Mark Klett, Rephotography, and the Story of Two San Franciscos,”
in After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, by Mark
Klett and Michael Lundgren (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 4. Instead of rephotography,
which is exclusively photographic, I have chosen the term repicturing to describe a type of layout that
created connections between a photograph and non-photographic depictions of that same place from
previous eras. Later books – beginning in the 1960s – would place old photographs of the city alongside
contemporary ones, in order to picture how different places had changed. For more about rephotography
projects in general start with: Mark Klett et al., Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of
the American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004); Mark Klett, After the Ruins, 1906 and
2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006). For Paris-specific rephotography projects see: Yvan Christ, Les Métamorphoses de Paris, cent
paysages parisiens photographiés autrefois par Atget, Bayard, Bisson, Daguerre... [etc] et aujourd’hui par
Janine Guillot et Charles Ciccione (Paris: Balland, 1967); Yvan Christ, Les Métamorphoses de la banlieue
parisienne: cent paysages photographiés autrefois par Atget, Bayard, Beissein, Daguerre... [etc] et
aujourd’hui par Charles Ciccione (Paris: A. Balland, 1969); Christopher Rauschenberg, Paris Changing:
Revisiting Eugene Atget’s Paris (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007); Martin H. Krieger,
“Commentary: Lessons from Charles Marville—Preserving Detail in Media Documentation of Cities,
Studying That Detail in Urban Research,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 31, no. 2 (June 1,
2011): 217 –219.
213
access an emotional register of the past and the deep ties that bind visual history to the
history of images, even when dealing with the transparent medium of photography.
The Bimillénaire de Paris marked the acceptance of something that commentators
had long predicted: Paris was globally important for what it had already accomplished,
not for the promise of its future. Visual traces of the French capital’s long history played
a fundamental role in the construction of its historical prominence. The Bimillénaire
celebrated all of Parisian history since Julius Caesar’s arrival in 51 BC. Parisians simply
had to look back to nonphotographic visual documents in order to know over 2,000 years
of history. The photographic record, after all, preserved a scant century.
5
Familiar figures
involved in photo collecting and photographic history did seize upon the occasion as an
opportunity to produce photographic histories of Paris.
6
But for the most part, as
participants and organizers staged history in the streets and designed books and posters to
advertise the Bimillénaire, they drew on scenes they knew from the nonphotographic

5
Although Parisians may have drawn on old photos in order to restage the past, the Bimillénaire inspired
no large-scale exhibition of Parisian history in photographs, even despite the fact that 1951 also marked the
100-year anniversary of the death of Louis Mandé Daguerre. Nor did the commemorations organized in
honor of Daguerre receive official patronage from the Bimillénaire. The Société française de photographie
organized an exhibition dedicated to “the role that French inventors played in the development of
photography and cinema” at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle. The Conservatoire des arts et métiers also
held a series of public lectures about the history of photography. “La Vie à Paris: Au muséum d’histoire
naturelle: les conquêtes de la photographie,” Le Monde, June 16, 1951, sec. Dernières nouvelles; Robert
Coiplet, “Cent douze ans de photographies,” Le Monde, June 17, 1951. Much of the press coverage of the
anniversary accused Daguerre of stealing Niépce’s invention: Robert Coiplet, “Daguerre est mort le 10
juillet 1851 mais il n’avait pas inventé la photographie,” Le Monde, July 8, 1951; “Nos echos...Centenaire
de Daguerre,” Photo-France, September 1951.

6
Louis Chéronnet’s editors reprinted two of his popular photohistories of the city: Louis Chéronnet, Paris
tel qu’il fut: 104 photographies anciennes (Paris: Editions Tel, 1951); Louis Chéronnet and Louis Ferrand,
Paris, mon coeur (Paris: Pierre Tisné, 1952). Louis Chéronnet died in 1949 or 1950, so the reprinting of his
books could just as well be attributed to his death as the Bimillénaire: André Wurmser, “Paris, par coeur,”
Les Lettres françaises, January 10, 1952. Art critic, photo collector, and popular historian Yvan Christ also
published a selection of his private collection of Atget photographs for a history of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
in 1900, printed as part of the neighborhood’s festivities. Yvan Christ, Saint-Germain-des-Prés 1900 vu par
Atget, 1951.
214
visual record. Their ensuing representations recycled and repurposed not just the content
but also the forms and styles of old images of many types. Rather than emphasizing
images as scientific documentation of the past, the Bimillénaire’s festivities relied on
them to bring the past to life in emotionally resonant ways.
By depicting scenes and figures familiar from the city’s historical visual record,
photographs of Paris during the Bimillénaire functioned, once again, as a means of access
to a subjective and imagined past. Even when they did not appear side-by-side with old
estampes in repicturing layouts, photographs published in magazine coverage of the
Bimillénaire worked to create connections with classically Parisian scenes known from
older pictures. They offer important evidence of how the structures of contemporary
photojournalism – like the norms of photographic illustration that developed within
publishing houses in the 1920s – shaped the photograph’s changing function as a
historical document of Paris. Speaking to photography’s limitations as a form of
documentation, magazine editors even explained that the camera could only capture parts
of what made Paris so important, the rest resided in the imaginations of those who loved
it. Photographs, thus freed from referring strictly to the physical city, could make
connections with ideas and pictures of the French capital throughout time.
If the fundamental development in photohistories of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s
was the emergence of the photograph’s use as a picture of a frozen moment, the
fundamental shift that occurred in the 1940s and 1950s entailed the need to teach readers
to conceptualize photographs as gateways to a past imagined as a collection of old prints
and paintings. Just as in the wake of World War I, heightened nostalgia for Paris 1900
215
pushed historians and critics to employ photographs as snapshots of lost time, the
experience of the Occupation changed how popular and municipal historians and curators
used photographs as historical documents.
7
Mirroring the marked escapism of popular
wartime entertainments, they revived older modes of understanding photos as gateways
to a more appealing imagined past. Beginning during the Occupation, they put together
repicturing books that theorized the photograph’s documentary insufficiency.
Photographs, after all, could only capture one moment, not the centuries of history that
made Paris great. Repicturing books acknowledged the importance of what each viewer
saw in contemporary photographs, and, using prints and paintings, their producers sought
to provide readers with mental images that would do justice to Paris’s past. After the war,
the ways in which publishers, curators, and authors had called upon Paris’s past greatness
to shore up its difficult present would continue to influence the relationship between
photographs and estampes as well as the very conception of the Bimillénaire itself.

The Bimillénaire as a Form of History
During the summer of 1946, the American journalist Janet Flanner, who wrote a
Paris column for The New Yorker under the pen-name Genêt, commented that “in the

7
This was not the first time that the experiences of war in Paris changed the content and form of visual
representations. Art historian Holly Clayson has argued that the experiences of the Paris Siege of 1870-
1871 affected not only the subjects artists chose to represent, but also how they depicted them. Paul Fussel
has argued that the experience of World War I changed literary modes and styles. And, Charles Rearick has
argued that the experiences of the First and Second World War changed the content of popular forms of
French entertainment including songs and films, making the “little people” into popular national heroes. S.
Hollis Clayson, Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71) (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002); Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory, the illustrated ed. (New York:
Sterling, 2009); Charles Rearick, The French in Love and War: Popular Culture in the Era of the World
Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
216
midst of the new, Paris is also certainly leaning heavily on its past.”
8
After the war, Paris
no longer seemed the shining bastion of modern living and entertainment that it had since
the nineteenth century. The city dedicated a large-scale public festival to its history in
1951, in part because the past was all that Paris had left. The Bimillénaire celebrations
were certainly staged in order to attract tourists back to the capital, but the city could
have orchestrated any number of different types of events in order to do so. The choice to
celebrate Paris’s “birthday” speaks to the past’s increasing significance as a means of
erasing memories of the German Occupation and reaffirming Paris’s global importance
as well as to the fruitfulness of interpreting the Bimillénaire’s festivities as a type of
popular history.

Fig. 4.1: Façade of Printemps decorated
for the Bimillénaire, François Kollar
(Médiathèque du Patrimoine).

Fig. 4.2 “Journée des drags,” June 1951
(Paris en Images).

8
Janet Flanner (Genêt), Paris Journal 1944-1965, ed. William Shawn (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 63.
217
Although the Bimillénaire often figures in histories of twentieth-century Paris,
historians have not previously studied it as a form of intermedial historiography.
9
The
product of a cooperation between the city’s Municipal Council and its Chamber of
Commerce, the Bimillénaire featured a veritable hodgepodge of hundreds of celebrations
and events: from balcony decorating contests, decorated store fronts [fig. 4.1], themed
window displays, and special exhibitions at a variety of museums to historical parades,
défilés of old carriages and cars [fig. 4.2], concerts of old music in historic buildings,
bike and automobile races, and scores of public dances. The city invited mayors of capital
cities – as well as the mayors of every other “Paris” in the world – to attend an official
day of celebrations on July 8, which featured military music, an homage rendered to Paris
by its provinces, a series of public balls, and a firework display depicting key episodes of
Parisian history.
10
Drawn by advertisements and promotions – such as an essay contest
for American college students and months of a Paris-themed Lil’ Abner comic strip –
more foreign tourists visited the capital than ever before during the summer of 1951.
11

9
Historians of tourism have noted its success in attracting foreign tourists – and especially Americans – to
the capital, and historian Rosemary Wakeman has pointed to the Bimillénaire’s festivities as an example of
the vibrant street life and culture of public spectacle that flourished in Paris after the war. Christopher
Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004); Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009). For more about tourists in Paris see: Harvey A. Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris: American
Tourists in France Since 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

10
The invitation of every mayor of “Paris” caused a particular flurry in the American press. Some of the
American cities even had to appoint mayors for the occasion: “Paris Hails U.S. ‘Parisian’,” The New York
Times, June 21, 1951.

11
The fireworks display drew perhaps the most visitors of any of the Bimillénaire’s events. According to
police reports 80,000 people alone gathered on the Esplanade des Invalides to watch the fireworks with an
additional 100,000 elsewhere in the city. The newspaper Combat reported 400,000 total spectators.
Documents contained in “Folder 3 Fête du Bimillénaire de Paris,” Archives de Police, Paris. “400,000
spectateurs ont assisté au feu d’artifice du ‘Grand Bi’,” Combat, July 9, 1951. For the essay contest see:
Jean Carlier, “Quatre Américains rêvaient de Paris: Invités pour le grand Bi ils s’intéressent aux
218
But many festivities, which took place during the spring and fall, were staged by
Parisians and intended for a predominantly Parisian audience, a fact that belies
characterizations of the celebration as little more than a tourist attraction. Organizers may
have hoped that the Bimillénaire would promote the city to tourists, but its festivities also
created an idea of historical Paris for its own residents.
The Bimillénaire de Paris, the closest thing to an Exposition Universelle
celebrated since the Paris Exposition of 1937, marked the culmination of shifting
understandings of the basis for Paris’s continued global importance. Less than a century
earlier, at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Victor Hugo had famously imagined Paris as
the future capital of Europe and humanity itself. While Hugo recognized the importance
of Paris’s (particularly revolutionary) past, he described the city’s universal role as
waxing, not waning.
12
But by the early twentieth century, critics began to suspect that
Paris’s greatest moments might lie behind it. At the 1900 World’s Fair, Albert Robida’s
“Vieux Paris” – featuring architectural reconstructions and themed shops, restaurants, and
taverns – was the third highest grossing display.
13
Vieux Paris stood alongside modern
novelties including the glass-and-steel Grand Palais and Galerie des Machines as well as
new means of transportation such as the moving walkway (trottoir roulant) and the

chinoiseries du 18e siècle et aux secrets de l’omelette,” Combat, July 11, 1951; Jean Carlier, “Quatre
Américains rêvaient de Paris: l’enseignement des universités américaines prépare à la vie: étudiants en
télévision ou en journalisme y sont formés,” Combat, July 12, 1951. Endy, Cold War Holidays, 109.

12
He explained: “Rome is more majestic, Trier is older, Venice is more beautiful, Naples is more graceful,
London is richer. What does Paris have then? The Revolution.” Victor Hugo, “Introduction,” in Paris-
Guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France, vol. I (Paris: librairie internationale, 1867),
xviii.

13
Elizabeth Emery, “Protecting the Past,” Journal of European Studies 35, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 65. For
more about the 1900 Vieux Paris exhibition see Emery’s article as well as: Daniel Compère, Albert Robida
du passé au futur. Un auteur-illustrateur sous la IIIe République (Amiens: Encrage, 2006).
219
recently-opened Métropolitain.
14
As they stood on the “road of the future,” as promoters
dubbed the trottior roulant that ran along the quay between the Invalides and the Champ
de Mars, visitors could gaze at Vieux Paris, which rose from the Seine’s opposite bank.
15

In 1912, historian G. Lenôtre claimed that Vieux Paris, rather than the modernized city
on display at the World’s Fairs, set Paris apart from other capitals.
16

Throughout the 1930s journalists continued to locate Paris’s importance in its
past. Popular Parisian historian Léon Gosset described London as a huge city devoid of
history and Rome as a city with nothing but a past.
17
At the same time that Gosset
described Rome, Benito Mussolini was drawing up plans to replace Rome’s history with
the monumental grandeur of fascist architecture at the Esposizione Universale Roma

14
For more about 1900 World’s Fair see: Jean-Christophe Mabire, L’Exposition universelle de 1900 (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2000); Richard Mandell, Paris 1900: The Greatest World’s Fair (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1967); Anne Friedberg, “Trottoir Roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of
Spectatorship,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed.
John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

15
The past played an increasingly prominent role in the displays of Paris’s Expositions Universelles over
the course of the nineteenth century. The 1867 Exposition included the first displays of historical artifacts
in its History of Labor pavilion. The exhibition of 1889 featured panoramas depicting the storming of the
Bastille, the life of Jeanne d’Arc, and a retrospective of the past hundred years of French history as well as
reconstructions of the Bastille and Châtelet prisons, an eighteenth-century Breton village and housing
throughout the ages (in architect Charles Garnier’s History of Habitation display). For more about these
displays see: Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855
and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Nils Muller-Scheessel, “Fair Prehistory:
Archaeological Exhibits at French Expositions Universelles,” Antiquity 75, no. 288 (June 2001): 391–401;
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).

16
In Vieux Paris: maisons et vieilles demeures, G. Lenôtre explained that Paris was different from other
modern cities such as London, Vienna, Chicago and Cairo, not thanks to its boulevards but because of “Old
Paris, what a sight!” Visitors could step off of the standardized modern boulevard and marvel at “the traces
of familiar history and the charming mystery of unknown histories.” Lenôtre recounted that when asked to
choose which part of the city they preferred, visitors would always pick the traces of Vieux Paris. G.
Lenôtre, ed., Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures, vol. 1 (Paris: Ch. Eggimann, 1912), np.

17
Léon Gosset, Tout Paris par l’image: les sites, les monuments, tous les trésors de Paris avec 471
illustrations (Paris: Hachette, 1937), 7. Gosset called London, “the universe’s trading post, but [which has]
almost nothing is left of its past.” He described how “Rome, on the other hand, reigns thanks to the prestige
of its unique incomparable past. Each street corner has been the scene of an episode in the world’s history.”
220
(E.U.R.), which stood less than 10 km from Rome’s historic center. Paris, on the other
hand, Gosset continued, “has known how to combine respect for the past with the
necessities of life, therein lies its great charm.”
18
In 1930 illustrator, painter, and engraver
Robert Bonfils even recast Hugo’s enthusiasm for the present into an appreciation of the
past: “it is [Paris], after Athens and Rome, which for centuries has shaped the ideas of
men; ‘Paris, Victor Hugo was able to say, works for the world community.’”
19
The
Bimillénaire de Paris marked the culmination of a decisive shift from a rhetoric promoted
by city boosters and at Parisian World’s Fair exhibitions that focused on the endless
possibilities of the French capital’s future to an emphasis on the glories of its past.
That municipal officials and the owners of Parisian businesses conceived of a
major festival to bring tourists back to Paris as a celebration of the past becomes all the
more significant when compared with the summer’s other major European festival: the
Festival of Britain.
20
Like the Bimillénaire, the 1951 Festival of Britain, which included a
main hub of activity on the South Bank of the Thames and displays and events
throughout the British Isles, enticed foreign tourists to come fete the nation’s postwar
recovery. Although it ostensibly commemorated the Great Exhibition of 1851, which set
the pace for such celebrations as futuristic, the 1951 Festival’s tenor was decidedly

18
Ibid.

19
Robert Bonfils, 200 vues de Paris: guide des musées, églises, monuments, bibliothèques, curiosités,
spectacles (Paris: Larousse, 1930), v.

20
For more about the Festival of Britain see: Becky Conekin, “The Autobiography of a Nation”: The 1951
Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). The third major European postwar
festival was the 1950 Holy Year of Pilgrimage to Rome, which drew 3 million tourists. As historian Robert
Ellwood has explained, because of its postwar and Cold War context, “probably no other Holy Year since
the Middle Ages has had quite the political as well as spiritual significance of 1950.” Robert S. Ellwood,
1950, Crossroads of American Religious Life (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2000), 145, 144.
221
forward looking. Historian Raphael Samuel has described it as “determinedly modernist
in bias, substituting, for the moth-eaten and the traditional, vistas of progressive
advance.”
21
And indeed designs for the South Bank center show a futuristic fantasyland
[fig. 4.3].
22
With its rocket-shaped Skylon tower and concrete and aluminum Dome of
Discovery, the site, or at least renderings of it, glowed with the promise of future
innovation. The Bimillénaire, which commemorated the Roman arrival in Paris, could not
have been more different. In the eyes of the Parisian press it was also better: a front-page
headline on July 4, 1951 proudly declared “the English [are] fleeing their ‘Festival” for
our ‘Bimillénaire.’”
23

Fig. 4.3: Sketch of the Festival of Britain South Bank location.

21
Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (New York:
Verson, 1994), 55.

22
This design resembles Disney Land’s futuristic landscapes, which would open four years later. For more
about modernism, Disney, and design see: Karal Ann Marling, ed., Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The
Architecture of Reassurance (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1997).

23
Jean Carlier, “Les Anglais fuyant leur ‘Festival’ pour notre ‘Bimillénaire’” Combat, July 4, 1951.
222
The Bimillénaire offers a compelling example of how municipal officials and city
boosters would use Paris’s past importance to counter its apparent postwar decline. While
Great Britain could celebrate its victory in World War II and subsequent modernist-
inspired reconstruction, France had little tangible progress to fete. The nation suffered a
humiliating defeat in 1940 and was in the process of losing its colonial empire.
24
Around
the world French lost ground to English as the lingua franca of international diplomacy
and commerce.
25
By the late 1940s, novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir
observed that France “ha[d] become a second-class power.”
26

Even Paris itself was distinctly shabbier than it had been at the height of its glory
in 1900.
27
Parisians could and did celebrate the fact that Paris, unlike so many other

24
Moreover, the Occupation had created sharp divisions within French society. In its aftermath these
divisions played out violently and publically as the new government executed dozens of public intellectuals
and politicians and imprisoned or publicly shamed tens of thousands. For more about these divisions start
with: Peter Novick, The Resistance Versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (New
York: Chatto & Windus, 1968); Alice Yaeger Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial & Execution of Robert
Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For more about this period in France’s loss of its
empire start with: Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1997); Edward
Francis Rice-Maximin, Accommodation and Resistance: The French Left, Indochina, and the Cold War,
1944-1954 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic: 1944-1958,
trans. Godfrey Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1987).

25
The triumph of English was part of the broader trend of Americanization. Historian Victoria de Grazia
has argued that the United States’ consumer imperialism threatened and “cast disrepute on the Old World’s
claim to rule by virtue of its imperial civilizing mission, heritage of art, and bourgeois revolutionary
values.” In other words, American imperialism threatened to upturn the very values that defined Paris’s
claim to global importance. For more about American cultural imperialism and France see: Victoria De
Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 5; Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of
Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For more about the decline of French
see: Marc Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait français (Paris: Plon, 2004).

26
Simone de Beauvoir cited in H. Lottman, The Left Bank (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 233.

27
Indeed Charles Rearick argues that these years spawned intense nostalgia for Paris 1900: Charles
Rearick, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011). Historian Colin
Jones has argued that this attachment has roots in the interwar period: “The alacrity with which post-war
Parisians latched on to the notion of pre-war Paris as the glamorous cynosure of la belle époque […]
suggested that Paris was more willing to rest its claims to modernity on the past than on the future.” Colin
223
European capitals, had survived the war largely intact.
28
The Bimillénaire would
commemorate what the festival’s original organizer, poet Jules Romains, described as the
“incredible happiness” of “the miracle [...]. Paris would justifiably never get over
marveling at having been so tested while remaining so intact, so old and so alive.”
29

Nevertheless allied bombing and fighting during the war had damaged parts of the city. A
general lack of materials and money also meant that many buildings and neighborhoods
had gone so long without necessary physical maintenance that they were literally
“rotting” in their foundations.
30
In defiance of the capital’s crumbling condition, the
French would cling to Paris and its reputation as the historical capital of the civilized
world.
Although most Parisians seemed to agree upon the importance of celebrating the
city’s past, the implementation of plans for the Bimillénaire caused much criticism.
Throughout the summer, journalists and critics dismissed the Bimillénaire as an overly
commercialized, historically inaccurate spectacle. Scholars criticized its very premise,
arguing that the Bimillénaire would spread “the false idea that the creation of Paris dates

Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 384. Wakeman explains: “In the confusing
and exhilarating late 1940s and 1950s, it was not exactly clear what the future would hold for Paris as
either a national or an international capital. […] The city’s stunning moment of modernity had passed.”
Wakeman, The Heroic City, 10.

28
Only Paris’s industrial suburbs – particularly Argenteuil, Asnières, Boulogne-Billancourt, Courbevoie,
and Saint-Ouen – suffered particularly heavy destruction thanks to British and American aerial bombing.
For more about destruction during the war and subsequent rebuilding see: W. Brian Newsome, French
Urban Planning, 1940-1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (New York:
Peter Lang Publishing, 2009).

29
Jules Romains et al., Portrait de Paris (Paris: Perrin, 1951), 8.

30
Wakeman, The Heroic City, 330. Paris did not even enjoy material prosperity in the postwar years.
Wartime rationing continued until 1949.
224
back to only 2,000 years ago.”
31
Paris, they insisted, “is ten thousand years old.”
32
One
journalist, writing in Le Parisien libéré, lamented that “history holds such a small place
in the festivities which are supposed to commemorate the city’s life history.”
33
Novelist,
poet, and prominent Communist Louis Aragon attacked the Bimillénaire as rightwing and
capitalist. He refused to attend the celebrations to which he had been invited, declaring on
the front page of Les Lettres françaises: “This Paris [of the Bimillénaire] is not mine.”
34

And indeed many of the Bimillénaire’s festivities – a garden party for officials
and visiting dignitaries or musical spectacles featuring Edith Piaf, Frank Sinatra, and
Maurice Chevalier – did seem to have only tenuous historical themes.
35
Even the lyrics of
“Paris a ses 2000 ans,” the song that Chevalier recorded for the occasion, repeated festive
platitudes (“Paris is 2,000 years old, and is singing its way to 5,000!”) rather than
engaging with Parisian history. The Bimillénaire also served as a publicity stunt,
mentioned in everything from advertisements for department store sales to promotional

31
E. Gilbert, “À propos du bimillénaire de Paris,” Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française 48, no. 7
(1951): 346.

32
“Paris a dix mille ans: Nous avons reçu la lettre suivante,” Le Monde, July 10, 1951. Similarly, a
breaking-news article on the front page of L’Aube magazine declared: “Paradoxes bimillénaires: Lutèce
était (déjà) habitée par... des Parisiens!,” L’Aube magazine, July 6, 1951.

33
“De Paris à Saint-Denis,” Le Parisien libéré, July 4, 1951.

34
Louis Aragon, “Victor Hugo par Aragon,” Les Lettres françaises, June 28, 1951. In homage to the
history of Paris, Aragon penned a series of articles about Victor Hugo that continued in the next two issues.

35
The garden party was held for all the invited mayors in July, while the musical spectacle featuring Edith
Piaf and Frank Sinatra along with dancers from the Opéra de Paris ballet closed the Bimillénaire on
December 14, 1951. The latter event was held in the Palais de la Porte dorée, then the Musée de la France
d’Outre-mer, which had been built for the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. “Documents relating to closing
ceremonies”, n.d., Fêtes du bi-mill 14 décembre 1951, Police Archives.
225
newsreels for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1951 Technicolor musical An American in
Paris.
36

The desires of the organizing committee and municipal officials to stage
historically accurate festivities did not always succeed. The organizing committee turned
down requests from Printemps to sponsor its multiple commercial events, including a
proposed “Quinzaine Artistique.”
37
The Préfet de la Seine refused other propositions on
grounds of historical accuracy: he reminded the organizer of a proposal to recreate “small
wooden houses” on the Pont-Neuf, for instance, that that bridge alone had never actually
had buildings on it.
38
Throughout the spring and summer, inaccurate historical
reconstructions drew wide criticism. Theater critics panned one of the Bimillénaire’s
supposed highlights: the medieval play, “Le Vray mystère de la passion,” staged in July
on the Parvis de Notre Dame.
39
They had no problems with the acting or script, but
derided the quality of the play’s historical reconstructions. As Marc Beigbeder fumed in
Le Parisien libéré, “I blame the directors” for ruining the play.
40
They “threw up

36
The department store Printemps ran print ads for “Bimillénaire” sales: “[publicité] Au Printemps 2eme
mise en vente du Bimillénaire,” Le Parisien libéré, July 2, 1951. Christopher Endy notes the joint publicity
campaign launched by MGM and the Bimillénaire, but evidence of it is also present in the archives of the
Organizing Committee. Endy, Cold War Holidays, 109; “Comité du Bimillénaire: réunion du Comité
executif du 22 janvier 1951”, January 22, 1951, Series Chambre de Commerce, Archives de Paris.

37
For example, the committee rejected demands for patronage from certain events, such as one from the
Grands magasins du Printemps for a subvention for a “Quinzaine Artistique” that the committee judged
“ayant essentiellement un caractère commercial.” “Comité du Bimillénaire: réunion du Comité executif 30
janvier 1951”, January 30, 1951, Series Chambre de Commerce, Archives de Paris.

38
Folder 3 Fête du Bimillénaire de Paris, Archives de Police, Paris.

39
Marcelle Capron, “Sous le ciel de Paris et dans un cadre médiéval: Le ‘Vray Mistère de la Passion’,”
Combat, July 2, 1951. Arnoul Gréban wrote the play in the fifteenth century.

40
Marc Beigbeder, “Devant Notre-Dame: ‘Le Vray mystère de la passion’ a manqué de passion
dramatique,” Le Parisien libéré, July 2, 1951.
226
cardboard sets – some of which represent stained-glass windows! – instead of quite
simply using the set offered up – if one knows how to use spotlights – [by] the
magnificent and varied façade of Notre-Dame.”
41
Historical accuracy, it would seem, did
matter after all.
The Bimillénaire de Paris was a commercial and touristic event, but it also staged
histories of Paris. The fact that municipal officials decided to celebrate Paris’s 2,000
th

birthday despite glaring historical inaccuracies (Caesar had actually arrived in Paris 2,002
years earlier) makes their decision to do so even more significant.
42
It speaks to the
increasing importance of Paris’s past to its twentieth-century identity. Of course, like all
historical representations, the Bimillénaire was selective and biased, often reflecting the
far from liberal values of the city’s Chamber of Commerce and Municipal Council,
presided over by Charles de Gaulle’s brother Pierre. Nevertheless, the festivities did not
just stage events at will. Certain ideas about historical accuracy played a part in the
Bimillénaire commission’s planning decisions. As a collection of forms of historical
representation, the Bimillénaire’s many activities provide unique evidence of how
ordinary Parisians knew about their city’s past.

The Bimillénaire and Historical Style
The events and publicity of the Bimillénaire testify to the continued importance of
the city’s visual history, especially its non-photographic forms. Paris’s historical and

41
Ibid.

42
As Janet Flanner pointed out, “Julius Caesar conquered Gaul in 51 BC - actually two thousand and two
years ago, of course.” Flanner (Genêt), Paris Journal 1944-1965, 147.
227
cultural institutions drew on the city’s rich visual historical record when they put its
“material history” on display throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1951.
43
They
exhibited an array of objects and images ranging from paintings and non-
photographically illustrated books to banknotes, coins, seals, and tapestries.
44
The
importance of visual historical documents, however, was not limited to their inclusion in
museum displays. Indeed estampes shaped the form that the Bimillénaire’s celebrations
took in Paris’s streets, how photographers documented those events, and the styles of
images produced for publicity and in illustrated books for the occasion.
Exhibitions at Paris’s cultural institutions privileged estampes and paintings over
photographs as a means of creating emotionally resonant displays. The Hôtel de Ville’s
exhibition of “beaux livres,” for example, included illuminated manuscripts and books
illustrated with engravings, woodcuts, and lithographs.
45
The Musée Carnavalet, even

43
Les Grands créateurs de Paris et leurs oeuvres: juillet-octobre 1951 (Paris: Les Presses artistiques,
1951), np.

44
In 1950, the Cabinet des Médailles and the Archives Nationales, for example, hosted an exhibition of
2,000 years of Parisian history told in coins, medals, banknotes, and seals. The Hôtel de Ville and the
former royal tapestry workshop at les Gobelins both focused on craftsmanship during a smaller period with
exhibitions of “Les Beaux livres de Paris” and seventeenth-century Parisian tapestry. Such displays helped
realize the organizing committee’s particular effort to include events that would allow visitors to
“appreciate Parisian artisanal traditions and spark particular and global interest in Parisian Trades.”
L’Histoire de Paris depuis 2.000 ans: Exposition de numismatique et de sigillographie organisée avec le
concours du Cabinet des Médailles et des Archives Nationales, juin-juillet 1950 (Paris: Imprimerie
nationale, 1950). Michel de Brunhoff, “Le Point de vue de Vogue,” Vogue, juin 1951. “Projet
d’organisation des Fêtes du Bi-millénaire dans les arrondissements de Paris”, sd, Series Chambre de
Commerce, Archives de Paris.

45
The idea that photographically-illustrated books were not “beaux livres,” or art forms and collectors’
objects, was not unique to this exhibition. Although a literary critic reviewed and praised photographically-
illustrated books as “beaux livres” in Les Lettres françaises in 1946, in the same publication in 1951 a
review article about French book publishing from 1900-1950, which vaunted the period as “the greatest era
in 500 years of the French Illustrated Book,” did not even mention the era’s greatest popularization: the
photographically-illustrated book. “Les beaux livres sur Paris,” Les Lettres françaises, December 20, 1946;
G. Blaizot, “Le Livre français de 1900 à 1950: Bilan d’un demi-siècle,” Les Lettres françaises, December
6, 1951.
228
though it had displayed the history of the Liberation in photographs just a few years
earlier and possessed collections that would have allowed it to stage a photographic
history of the city, did no such thing. One of its curators even lamented that the
museum’s exhibition about the city’s progressive transformations throughout the
centuries had to include so many of them.
46
The twentieth-century shift in urban
documentation practices, he explained, had forced his hand. “Ordinary photographs,”
instead of prints, documented contemporary building projects. Instead of acknowledging
these historical developments in the constitution of city archives, this curator shifted the
blame to “modern artists” who “had hardly, or at least with hardly any precision, devoted
themselves to representing new buildings.”
47
Despite the fact that he simply used these
images as stand-ins for the buildings themselves, the Musée Carnavalet curator
demonstrated enduring ideas about the photograph’s secondary status as a form of urban
documentation.
Even the Bimillénaire’s organizing committee seemed primarily interested in a
non-photographic past, which it drew on in planning a series of historical reenactments to
serve as the summer’s crowning events. Throughout the summer and fall of 1950, the
committee discussed staging historical processions through Paris’s streets. Their subjects
were to include Paris of the Middle Ages from Saint Geneviève to Joan of Arc, the
entrance of Henri IV into Paris, Voltaire’s return, the Revolution of 1789, and, somewhat

46
The Bibliothèque historique collaborated with the museum on this exhibition. Les Grands créateurs de
Paris et leurs oeuvres: juillet-octobre 1951.

47
Ibid., np.
229
vaguely, nineteenth-century Paris.
48
Some would have literally recreated historical
events: Henri IV, for example, would have arrived at the Louvre on the same path he
would have taken through the city in 1594. Others would have drawn on and reinforced
the historical identities of certain neighborhoods by passing through them. The Middle-
Ages themed cortège, for example, would have wound through the area surrounding the
Latin Quarter, the Arènes de Lutèce, the Hôtel Cluny, and up into the Ile de la Cité.
49
Had
they actually taken place, the processions thus would have celebrated and brought
attention to cityscapes that bore the traces of previous centuries.
The plans to reenact historical processions speak to the historical visual record’s
influence on the organizing committee’s ideas about the past. Images of processions were
popular historical scenes for centuries.
50
In the sixteenth century, for example, an
anonymous French engraver depicted Henri IV’s entrance, and François Gérard produced
an oil painting of a similar scene in 1817 [fig. 4.4]. The latter hung in Louis-Philippe’s
Musée d’histoire de la France established at Versailles.
51
Artisans at the Manufacture de
Sèvres copied the painting for reproduction in porcelain form, while engraver Louis

48
“Comité du Bimillénaire: réunion du 3 septembre 1950”, September 3, 1950, Series Chambre de
Commerce, Archives de Paris.

49
“Comité du Bimillénaire: réunion du 25 juillet 1950”, July 1950, Series Chambre de Commerce,
Archives de Paris.

50
Processions and parades themselves were not just key historical events; they were also already forms of
representation. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
(New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 116. The plans to restage historical processions beg comparison with D.
Medina Lasansky’s work about the Renaissance revival of Fascist Italy, during which many historical
processions were reenacted: D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and
Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

51
The Musée historique at Versailles showcased the nation’s history in painting. For more about the
museum see: Thomas Gaehtgens, “Le Musée historique de Versailles,” in Les Lieux de mémoire: la Nation,
ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 143–168.
230
Choquet copied it again in 1850 for use in book illustration.
52
Depictions of this
procession and others became a staple of illustration in histories of Paris throughout the
twentieth century. Marcel Poëte selected numerous images of processions, including one
of Henri IV’s entrance, for his album of Parisian history [fig. 4.5].
53
In particular, he
recommended the “representations of backdrops in printed accounts of monarchs’
entrances and diverse celebrations” to scholars as some of the best historical documents
of Paris.
54
This rich history of representations of processions certainly must have
influenced the Bimillénaire’s committee. Unfortunately, by the autumn of 1950,
budgetary constraints forced it to renounce certain projects including, as one of its
members commented, the “large historical processions whose financial effects have,
without a doubt, escaped their promoters and which, given the Committee’s resources,
risk only being cavalcades unworthy of the city of Paris’s prestige.”
55

52
Tamara Préaud and Derek E. Ostergard, The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and
the Triumph of Art and Industry, 1800-1847 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 86.

53
Marcel Poëte, Une Vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours, vol. Album (Paris: A. Picard, 1925),
image 109.

54
Ibid., Album:vi–vii.

55
“Comité du Bimillénaire: réunion du 6 octobre 1950”, October 6, 1950, Series Chambre de Commerce,
Archives de Paris. Overspending caused the committee’s budget constraints, but the state also never
contributed the money it had promised to the Bimillénaire.
231

Fig. 4.4: François Gérard, Entry of Henri IV into Paris, 1817.

Fig. 4.5: Henri IV’s entrance into Paris in Marcel Poëte, Une vie de cité, Paris, Album.

History would nonetheless come to life in Paris’s streets throughout the spring
and summer. The committee planned small historically-themed events, sponsoring
neighborhood initiatives to stage a Second Empire themed celebration at the Buttes-
Chaumont and a “cortège du boeuf gras,” or Carnival parade to cross Paris during the
232
spring.
56
Crowds gathered in Saint-German-des-Prés to watch costumed Parisians play
and dance to traditional music.
57
At the Moulin Rouge, dancers kicked up layers of
petticoats during performances of the “French Can Can.”
58
And Parisians hitched horses
to carriages and crank-started old cars to cross the city.

Fig. 4.6: Period costume, from Cortège de
vieilles voitures pour inaugurer la Quinzaine
de Saint Germain des Prés, 1951 (INA).
Fig. 4.7: The parasol Cortège de vieilles
voitures pour inaugurer la Quinzaine de Saint
Germain des Prés, 1951 (INA).

When Parisians dressed up to resurrect the past, they did so in ways that
mimicked the scenes they knew from photographs as well as historical estampes. Footage
filmed during the June 7, 1951 parade that opened Saint-Germain-des-Prés’s Bimillénaire
celebrations shows that Parisians donned clothes found in their grandparents’ closets and
used clothing stores [fig. 4.6].
59
But they adopted gestures that they must have known

56
“Conférence de Presse du 20 mars 1951”, March 20, 1951, Series Chambre de Commerce, Archives de
Paris.

57
“Le marché Saint Germain des Prés s’éveille au son des farandoleurs,” Journal télévisé 20h, June 13,
1951.

58
“A MONTMARTRE: CAN CAN 1880,” Les Actualités françaises, July 26, 1951.

59
“Cortège de vieilles voitures pour inaugurer la Quinzaine de Saint Germain des Prés,” Journal télévisé
20h, June 7, 1951.
233
from old photographs. One female passenger, for instance, held a parasol aloft much in
the manner of a woman in a photograph published in Louis Chéronnet’s A Paris vers
1900 [fig. 4.7 & 4.8].
60
During events held for the Bimillénaire festivities in the
neighborhood of the Chaussée d’Antin, women also parroted the fashion and style that
they knew from fashion photography and engravings [fig. 4.9]. These festivities included
a parade of women’s silhouettes from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
Photographs may have become the documents through which Parisians would know
about twentieth-century Paris, but a variety of prints still seemed important for how they
knew about the history of other centuries.

Fig. 4.8: Parasol, Vérascope Richard, in Louis
Chéronnet’s A Paris vers 1900.
Fig. 4.9: The clothes may be old, but the pose
is very mid-twentieth-century. Quinzaine de
la Chaussée d’Antin (Paris en Images).

How photographers and cameramen framed these historical reenactments
demonstrates an even more apparent contemporary engagement with the pictorial past.

60
Louis Chéronnet, A Paris ... vers 1900, Découverte du monde (Paris: Éditions des Chroniques du jour,
1932). At the turn of the century, Jules Richard had also sold this photograph as a stereoscopic slide. For
more about Richard and these images see: Jules Richard, Le Vérascope et les homéoscopes (Paris: J.
Richard, 1900).
234
Just as Hollywood’s Frenchness films of the 1950s brought the art of the Impressionists
to life in cinematic Technicolor, cameramen filming the Can Can dancers at the Moulin
Rouge in the summer of 1951 for the Actualités françaises suggested that the dancers
were the figures of the poster come to life.
61
They panned from Toulouse-Lautrec posters,
to a contemporary poster done in the same style, to the past come to life in the form of the
dancers [fig. 4.10 & 4.11]. Although camera operators had front-row access to film at the
Moulin Rouge, the film’s editors also chose to include footage of the dancers framed by
the crowd [fig. 4.12]. These shots played up the contrast between dark spectators and the
brilliant stage. In doing so, they both mimicked similar contrast in the posters of
Toulouse-Lautrec and captured the sexualized and highly-classed act of looking that was
a hallmark of Lautrec’s depictions of Paris’s turn-of-the-century dance halls [fig. 4.13].
The performances at the Moulin Rouge that summer seemed to celebrate both the hall’s
history and the history of its depiction in the visual arts.

Fig. 4.10: Toulouse-Lautrec poster in
A MONTMARTRE: CAN CAN 1880, 1951
(INA).
Fig. 4.11: Dancers in A MONTMARTRE: CAN
CAN 1880, 1951 (INA).

61
For more about how these productions staged the art of the Impressionists see the first chapter of:
Vanessa R Schwartz, It’s so French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
235

Fig. 4.12: Dancers framed by the crowd in A
MONTMARTRE: CAN CAN 1880, 1951 (INA).
Fig. 4.13: Another poster, which also appeared
earlier in A MONTMARTRE: CAN CAN 1880,
1951 (INA).

Fig. 4.14: A poster for the Bimillénaire in Montmartre, anonymous, 1951.
236

Fig. 4.15: A picturesque landscape view of Montmartre, Villain, 1825, in Le Vieux Paris.

Contemporary illustrators who made promotional materials for the Bimillénaire
similarly mimicked historical style more than content. The artist who designed
Montmartre’s 1951 poster drew on conventions of picturesque landscapes, often used to
depict Montmartre of a hundred years earlier [figs. 4.14 & 4.15].
62
The poster features
framing elements, or staffage, in the form of decorative scrollwork and trees that
surround three nineteenth-century figures posed on the top of the hill’s monumental
staircase. The artist mixed styles and eras, for the staircase was built as an approach to the
Sacré Coeur church, completed in 1914. Similarly, a poster for an exhibition about the
history of the Compagnons du Tour de France, an artisans’ organization active since the
Middle Ages, mimicked conventions of medieval art in order to depict carriages and men
in top hats that did not populate thirteenth-century Paris [fig. 4.16].
63
This poster does not

62
For more about the history of picturesque landscape and its conventions, which were intimately linked to
tourism, see: Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in
Britain, 1760-1800 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989); Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How
Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

63
Roger Lecotté, Archives historiques du compagnonnage (Paris: Mémoires de la fédération folklorique
d’Ile-de-France, 1956).
237
employ the rules of perspective, by which the largest figures inhabit the foreground and
recede in size towards the background. Rather it uses size to indicate relative importance:
the compagnons dwarf everything else in the image. The juxtaposition of architectural
elements and oversized figures greatly resembles that of illuminations that graced
medieval manuscripts, such as those in a fourteenth-century copy of The Life of Saint
Denis that depict the Saint himself entering Paris [fig. 4.17].
64
Both posters employed
historical styles of representation to evoke the historical identities of their subjects:
Montmartre as a nineteenth-century place of pastoral ideals and easy pleasures and the
compagnons as a relic of medieval France. They also suggest that historical style played
just as important of a role as historical content when it came to restaging 2,000 years of
Paris’s past during the Bimillénaire.

Fig. 4.16: Poster for exhibition about the
Compagnons, 1951.
Fig. 4.17: Saint Denis’s entrance into Paris, in
The Life of Saint Denis, fourteenth century.

64
Marcel Poëte also reprinted this image in his Une vie de cité, Paris.
238
The Bimillénaire may have provided the impetus for the production of
representations of Paris that mimicked historical styles, but this phenomenon was not
limited to the celebrations of 1951. Indeed, as Paris’s past glory became increasingly
important to its contemporary identity throughout the 1940s, picture books about the
contemporary city similarly infused pictures of it with historical styles and forms. A 1949
history of Paris, Paris tel qu’on l’aime, which had sold over 100,000 copies by 1951,
illustrated the city’s history with a mixture of historical estampes, photographs, and
contemporary illustrations.
65
The book updated a genre familiar from Hoffbauer’s Paris à
travers les âges to G. Lenôtre’s Le vieux Paris. One American reviewer described it as “a
big fat colorful book” in which the editor “has carved up Paris like a deft butcher and
assigned a chunk to [each of] a number of separate writers” including well-known
historians, curators, and authors.
66
A different artist illustrated each essay, and while
some, including Bernard Villemot, who became known for his subsequent Orangina ads,
remained faithful to their personal style, others dabbled in historical eclecticism. The
illustrator “Cyril,” who worked on Louis Chéronnet’s essay about Montparnasse, cycled
through turn-of-the-century painting styles: from an illustration that evokes the broken
brush strokes of the Impressionists and Pointillists to a depiction of an artist workshop in
which the split perspectives of aspiring Cubists have already deformed the nude model
they sketch [figs. 4.18 & 4.19]. This volume would be reprinted and heavily advertised

65
Doré Ogrizek, Paris tel qu’on l’aime, Le Monde en couleurs (Paris: Editions Odé, 1949). “[publicité]
Paris tel qu’on l’aime,” Réalités, June 1951.

66
Horace Sutton, “Travelers’ Tales,” Saturday Review, March 31, 1951.
239
during the Bimillénaire, contributing yet another example of its restaging of the history of
visual representations of Paris.
67

Fig. 4.18: Cyril, Café in broken brushstrokes,
in Paris tel qu’on l’aime 1949.
Fig. 4.19: Cyril, Cubist model,
in Paris tel qu’on l’aime 1949.

Starting even earlier, photo books used similar methods to infuse contemporary
representations of the city with past styles. The 1945 photo book Paris Relief: Histoire de
Paris des origines à nos jours included a text by historian Pierre d’Espezel, a series of
color reproductions of paintings that had been recently exhibited in the Gallerie
Charpentier, and a series of contemporary photos presented in an old format: the
stereoscopic view.
68
The large volume’s thick cover contained pockets holding a wooden
stereoscopic viewer and 100 stereoscopic photos of Paris, taken by photographer Roger
Schall [fig. 4.20]. The very act of sliding photos into the viewer would have transported
the reader back in time, to an era when such devices were common parlor amusements.
69

67
“Ad for Paris tel qu’on l’aime.”

68
Pierre d’ Espezel, Paris relief: Histoire de Paris des origines à nos jours (Paris: Editions Chantecler,
1945).

69
For more about the stereoscopic viewer as a nineteenth-century entertainment see: Jonathan Crary,
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press,
240
While the photographs may depict the contemporary city, their form creates a tangible
connection with its past. Seen through the stereoscope, the photographs are colored with
Parisian history (and the history of photography).

Fig. 4.20: Stereoscopic viewer in Paris relief, 1945
(author’s photograph, courtesy of the Getty Research Institut).

The Bimillénaire thus created representations of history that operated in the
emotional register of Parisian history as the history of its visual representations. The
forms of its festivities and propaganda testify to the continued importance of estampes
and paintings as well as old photographs for understandings of Paris’s past. In some
ways, it only made sense for organizers, curators, artists, and editors to rely on prints and
paintings of the city in order to stage 2,000 years of its history. More importantly, their
uses of images demonstrate an understanding of history as imagined reconstruction rather
than scientific documentation or analysis. And their mimicking of past visual styles
suggests that form played just as key of a role as content in resurrecting the Parisian past.
Similarly photographs of the Bimillénaire’s events would make connections with
centuries of history by drawing on familiar tropes from Paris’s long visual history.

1990); Robert J. Silverman, “The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century,”
Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (October 1, 1993): 729–756.
241
Contemporary Photographs as Historical Documents
Although photographs may have had little presence in exhibitions that
commemorated Paris’s 2000
th
birthday, they did illustrate articles devoted to the
Bimillénaire published in illustrated magazines. Most magazines, however, printed
neither old photographs as visual histories of Paris nor photographs of the events of the
Bimillénaire. Instead, they showcased contemporary photos of Paris’s monuments,
people, and everyday activities. In part, the structure of the in-house and photo agency
archives that provided images to photo magazines shaped their reliance on contemporary
photographs. Photo magazines nonetheless selected photos that forged connections with
the past, by evoking other scenes from Paris’s visual historical record. Their publication
during the Bimillénaire illuminates how, even as critics such as Emile Henriot and
municipal officials including Marcel Poëte predicted that photographs would serve as the
preferred historical document of the future, prints became more, not less, significant to
their utility.
In keeping with illustrated magazines’ general treatment of culture rather than
current events, photographically-illustrated magazines promoted and participated in the
Bimillénaire more than they covered its festivities. Major French and American
periodicals – from Paris Match, France-Illustration, le Monde illustré, Réalités, and
French Vogue to the American Life and even The National Geographic Magazine –
dedicated lengthy articles and special issues to Paris during the spring and summer of
1951. The New York Times Magazine did publish a spread of photographs of the
Bimillénaire celebrations, from the signs reading “Paris is 2,000 years old” that lit up
242
façades around the Place de l’Opéra to balls, dances, and parades held in the city’s
honor.
70
And Paris Match published photographs of the fireworks display held on July
8.
71
But, the vast majority of photos published for the occasion did not depict the
Bimillénaire’s actual festivities.
72
These publications either printed spreads of
contemporary photos that showcased typically-Parisian architectural details and aspects
of everyday life or celebrated Paris’s glorious past by publishing its history in estampes.
The Bimillénaire prompted magazines to publish photographs of the
contemporary city. France Illustration included views of the city’s famous monuments
and buildings including the Pont Neuf, the Palais de l’institut, the Louvre and the
Tuileries gardens, and the Pont des Arts, as well as shots of people fishing along the
Seine and shopping for bouquets at the Marché aux fleurs. Paris Match devoted a color
cover and seven-page spread in its July 28
th
issue to Izis’s photographs of the city, its
monuments, and partygoers at night.
73
The popular American magazine Coronet created
a sixteen-page spread of the same subject: “Paris after Dark.” Life mixed photographs of
monuments and buildings – the column at Bastille and Notre Dame – with more poetic

70
Eugene Kammerman, “Paris: Aetat. 2,000,” The New York Times, June 3, 1951, sec. The New York
Times Magazine.

71
“Le Match de Paris vous offre le bouquet du bimillénaire,” Paris Match, July 21, 1951.

72
I looked at coverage of the Bimillénaire in daily newspapers Le Monde, Combat, L’Aube, Le Parisien
libéré, The New York Times, The Times of London, and weekly and monthly publications Paris Match,
Réalités, France-Illustration, le monde illustré, Touring, Les Lettres françaises, Photo-France, National
Geographic, Vogue, Revue de l’art belge, Coronet, Gourmet, Holiday, House and Garden, Saturday
Review, The Rotarian, and UN World. Some of these publications, of course, went to press before the
Bimillénaire’s main events in July. Daily newspapers, such as Le Parisien libéré, did publish some photos
of the actual events of the Bimillénaire that took place on July 8. But these were mainly limited to portraits
of visiting officials. The Times of London published a photograph taken during a rehearsal of “Le Vray
mystère de la passion” on June 30 and a photograph of floodlit monuments on July 10.

73
“Les Nuits de Paris ont 2000 ans,” Paris Match, July 28, 1951.
243
and evocative offerings such as cyclists on a cobblestone street, a lone nun, and young
women avoiding puddles after a recent rain. Even Touring, a French magazine devoted to
cars and travel, featured views of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and a small
street in Montmartre. The similarities between the types of photos published in these
various magazines are no more apparent than in the respective covers of the monthly
magazine Réalités and Touring [figs. 4.21 & 4.22]. Both show the Place de la Concorde
from different angles, populated only by a lone figure targeted at the magazines’
respective readerships. The Réalités cover features a young woman in red, and Touring, a
shiny black 1951 Renault Fregate. Photographs of contemporary Paris, with their mix of
historical monuments and a distinctly modern present, could appeal to any readership.

Fig. 4.21: Cover of Réalités,
June 1951 (BAVP).
Fig. 4.22: Cover of Touring, September-
October 1951 (Bibliothèque de tourisme).

If any cultural form in 1951 should have embraced photographic histories of
Paris, it was the photographically-illustrated magazine. And yet, even they printed
244
reproductions of estampes, even to depict the century since photography’s invention. The
special Bimillénaire issue published by France-Illustration, for example, included an
article that used reproductions of old maps, caricatures, and paintings as historical
documents.
74
Like Doré Ogrizek’s Paris tel qu’on l’aime, it incorporated contemporary
illustrations that drew on past artistic styles. For example, a small illustration of the
church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés includes modern details such as cars and the awning of
the Deux magots café, but also reproduces the distinctive bold, curved lines of etchings
[fig. 4.23], suggesting the past that contemporary Saint-Germain evoked. In the United
States, editors at the The New York Times asked Jean Cassou, director of the Musée de
l’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, to select a series of paintings “typical of Paris’s
‘eternal spirit’” (mostly twentieth-century views) for publication.
75
Only Life magazine
printed old photographs in its account of the city’s defeats and victories from “Caesar to
Hitler.”
76
After reprinting key paintings and estampes from Paris’s rich revolutionary
iconography, the article ends with four photographs, arranged vertically.
77
They present a
kind of historical filmstrip that begins with the German occupation of Paris in 1871 and
ends with the 1944 arrival of Free French troops [fig. 4.24]. Separated from the rest of the

74
Albert Mousset, “Le Passé prestigieux de Paris,” France Illustration, April 21, 1951.

75
“Three Ages of Ageless Paris,” New York Times Magazine, July 22, 1951.

76
“A Salute to Paris on Her 2,000th Birthday,” Life, July 30, 1951. The only other exception here is the
New York Times Magazine which published an article about an exhibition of Atget photographs held at the
New School for Social Research: “Yesterday’s Paris, Photographs,” New York Times Magazine, November
25, 1951.

77
This revolutionary iconography resembles what the British French-language propaganda magazine
Cadran printed at the Liberation of Paris: “Paris, capitale de la libérté,” Cadran, September 1944.
245
article by two full-pages of advertisements and crammed onto a page with an ad for
Gillette razors, this filmstrip, however, seems almost an afterthought.

Fig. 4.23: Church of Saint-Germain-
des-Prés, in France-Illustration,
April 21, 1951.

Fig. 4.24: Photohistory in Life, July 30, 1951.
These magazines, which scholars have argued were popular precisely because of
their embrace of photography, certainly did not exclude old photographs because of some
disdain for them as lesser documents.
78
Why then did so few of them print photographic

78
Contemporary observers and scholars point to wartime deprivations as the cause of the illustrated press’s
popularity. In the United States after the war, Life magazine continued the great success that it knew during
the war. The illustrated press remained popular longer in France than in America, scholars explain, because
the French were slower to purchase televisions. For more about French illustrated magazines start with:
Claude Bellanger et al., eds., Histoire générale de la presse française: de 1940 à 1958, vol. IV (Paris:
246
histories of the city in order to celebrate its 2000
th
birthday? Many historians might
respond that the Bimillénaire was a publicity stunt, not an actual engagement with
history. Viewed in that light, magazines simply functioned as a sort of tourists’ look book
in order to encourage readers to buy magazines or even plane, boat, and train tickets to
Paris. Rather than unveiling the Bimillénaire as a sham, however, the choice of
photographs reveals how norms of magazine illustration influenced forms of historical
interpretation.
How magazines sourced and used photographs during what scholars have
described as the golden age of photo magazines influenced the publication of
contemporary photos of Paris during the Bimillénaire. As photographer Willy Ronis later
described, “the public had an insatiable thirst for images [folle soif d’images], and, for
several years, photography for the printed page knew a period of great fertility.”
79
In
general, these magazines commissioned photos directly from photographers, selected
them from in-house archives, or purchased them from photo agencies.
80
Photo agencies
privileged recent photographs, which had the most flexibility as illustrations. Even if
photo agencies that specialized in illustration had housed large collections of old
photographs, it would have been difficult to search for them by date as photo agencies,

Presses universitaires de France, 1975); Claude Bellanger, ed., Histoire générale de la presse française: de
1958 à nos jours, vol. V: De 1958 à nos jours (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1976).

79
Willy Ronis, Sur le fil du hasard (Paris: Contrejour, 1980), np.

80
Izis, for example worked exclusively for Paris Match, which also created a large photo archive. Former
photo curator at the Bibliothèque historique Marie de Thézy and photographer and publisher Claude Nori
have described how “le plus souvent, les photographies publiées n'ont pas été faites sur commande: elles
sortent des archives de photographes, qui les ont prises au hasard de leur inspiration et de leurs activités.”
Marie de Thézy and Claude Nori, La photographie humaniste: 1930-1960, histoire d’un mouvement en
France (Paris: Contrejour, 1992), 31. This process bears striking resemblance to the functioning of
publishers’ photo archives such as the photothèque Hachette.
247
like municipal photo archives, organized photographs in boxes according to subject, not
date.
81
In part then photo magazines did not publish photographic histories of Paris for
the Bimillénaire simply because they did not have easy access to old photographs.
The type of generic illustrations of Paris that magazines published in 1951 also
conformed to contemporary conventions of photographic illustration. As photographer
Marcel Bovis has explained, the postwar public thirsted, specifically, for “illustrated
stories about the life of everyday people.”
82
While these magazines did publish photos of
news and events, many of their pages were given over to photographs of the everyday. As
one photo critic wrote looking back on the postwar period from the late 1970s, “while
photojournalists covered the news, [photo] illustrators such as Izis [who worked for Paris
Match] specializ[ed], from the beginning and for 20 years, in places where nothing
happens.”
83
Photographers such as Izis, Robert Doisneau, Roger Schall, René-Jacques,
and Marcel Bovis supplied “evocative photographs,” which told a story or captured an
ambiance, both directly to popular photo magazines and to the photo agencies that served
them.
84
The stories such photographs told included the historic grandeur of Paris.

81
A French television special that aired in 1964 featured this process at Rapho: Claude Fayart, Albert
Plécy, and Michel Tournier, “Agence Rapho,” Chambre Noire, 1964, INA.

82
Photographer Marcel Bovis had written that the postwar period saw an increased demand for “des
histoires illustrées racontant la vie des gens ordinaires.” les rédacteurs des Éditions “Time’-’Life,” Le
Reportage photographique, trans. Simon Noireaud (Amsterdam: Éditions “Time-Life,” 1972), 68.

83
J. Leroy, “Monographie, Izis,” Photo-Revue, January 1977.

84
Bovis described these photographs as telling a story or capturing an ambiance. Marie de Thézy and
Claude Nori have argued that “plus que des reportages, les vues que demande la presse aux photographes et
à leurs agences sont des photographies d’évocation.” les rédacteurs des Éditions “Time’-’Life,” Le
Reportage photographique, 7. de Thézy and Nori, La photographie humaniste, 31.
248
Indeed, during the Bimillénaire these evocative photographs of Paris, its
buildings, and its people worked to created connections to a long history of other types of
visual representations of the city.
85
Like the uses of photographs in photohistories from
the first decades of the century, the use of photographs during the Bimillénaire spoke to
the belief, still held by many scholars that the city itself was the best document of its past.
Writing in France Illustration, scholar, trained chartiste, and bureaucrat Albert Mousset
claimed “the history of our country [is] incarnated in Paris.”
86
Or, as Pierre Gauthiez,
who also authored popular histories of the city in the 1920s, inscribed in the BHVP’s
copy of the Musée Carnavalet’s 1951 exhibition catalogue: “Paris, immense mosaic,
conserves its own memories.”
87
For readers of this persuasion, magazines did not have to
publish photographs of past events because contemporary photos captured the past’s
traces in the city’s bridges, monuments, buildings, and people.
But whereas enthusiastic history lovers at the turn of the century animated
contemporary photographs of the city with an imagined past known through texts and
literature, as well as estampes, in the 1950s contemporary photographs seemed chiefly to
evoke memories of old pictures of Paris. Indeed, a literary critic for Le Parisien libéré,
described how even un-illustrated books did not evoke fantasies or memories of the city

85
Scholars of photography have written about how the work of postwar humanist photographers – in
particular their photos of Paris – expressed particular themes that appealed to both French and American
audiences’ visions of France. They have not, however, ventured the idea that humanist photography
captured and expressed a particular vision of Parisian history. Peter Edward Hamilton, “Representing the
Social: France and Frenchness in Postwar Humanist Photography,” in Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997); Nina Lager Vestberg,
“Robert Doisneau and the Making of a Universal Cliché,” History of Photography 35, no. 2 (2011): 157.

86
Mousset, “Le Passé prestigieux de Paris.”

87
Les Grands créateurs de Paris et leurs oeuvres: juillet-octobre 1951.
249
so much as images of it. In a review of Portrait de Paris, the volume of essays published
by the city in honor of the Bimillénaire, this critic proclaimed “never has an non-
illustrated book elicited more beautiful images in the mind.”
88
Good histories of Paris, he
implied, evoked not stories but pictures of it: visual sound bites of paintings, prints, and
photographs that had come to form a visual canon of Parisian history.
89
By creating
connections with this canon, contemporary photographs conjured up Paris’s past.

Fig. 4.25: Anglers along the river’s
banks. France-Illustration,
April 21, 1951.

Fig. 4.26: The bustling flower market on the Ile de la
Cité. France-Illustration, April 21, 1951.
Photographs created connections with Paris’s visual historical record because they
mimicked both subjects and ways of framing the city familiar from it. In the 1910s and
1920s history buffs had sought traces of the past in the features of Paris’s built
environment. In the spring and summer of 1951, magazine coverage showed Parisians as

88
H. P., “Plaisir de lire: Portrait de Paris,” Le Parisien libéré, July 26, 1951.

89
This is very similar to historian of Paris and theorist Walter Benjamin’s idea of the past, which as
Vanessa Schwartz has described “flash[ed] up as an image.” Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Walter Benjamin for
Historians,” The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001).
250
the living embodiment of the past. Magazine photographs privileged depictions of people
and details of everyday life, offering up a catalogue of historical types in the present day.
In France Illustration, photographs of the banks of the Seine populated by river barges
and fishermen [fig. 4.25] as well as the city’s bustling flower market [fig 4.26] on the Ile
de la Cité, like photos of Parisians building barricades in the streets in 1944, pictured
instantly-recognizable figures and activities.
90
Photographs in National Geographic
Magazine and Life featured Parisian police officers in their distinctive capes and white
gloves, a sort of living “street furniture” as familiar as Morris columns and press kiosks
[fig. 4.27]. Moreover, it is no accident that the first installment of American fashion
photographer Irving Penn’s series of “small trade” portraits appeared in French Vogue’s
June 1951 Bimillénaire issue.
91
These pictures too drew on a long-standing tradition of
representing petits métiers in prints, broadsides, illustrated books, physiognomies, and
photographs. And while the editors of Réalités did not commission petits métiers
portraits, they did claim to have spent six months sifting through 30,000 photographs in
search of pictures that captured Paris’s “essential characteristics.”
92
The results were

90
Histories of the city often begin with a description of settlement, commerce and fishing springing up
along the river’s banks. This is always how Poëte begins his histories of Paris. See for example: Marcel
Poëte, Une Vie de cité: Paris de sa naissance à nos jours, I, vol. I, La Jeunesse: des origines aux temps
modernes (Paris: A. Picard, 1924); Marcel Poëte, How Paris Was Formed, How to Know Paris (Paris:
Impr. Henry Maillet: libr. Hachette, 1925); Marcel Poëte, L’Enfance de Paris, formation et croissance de la
ville, des origines jusqu’au temps de Philippe-Auguste (Paris: A. Colin, 1908).

91
Irving Penn, “Visages et métiers de Paris,” Vogue, June 1951. For more about the series see: Virginia
Heckert and Anne Lacoste, Irving Penn: Small Trades (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009). Doisneau’s
biographer, Peter Hamilton, has explained that in 1950 Vogue asked Robert Dosineau to do a series of
petits métiers photographs, shot in the studio. He refused because he preferred to shoot outside. Peter
Hamilton, Robert Doisneau: A Photographer’s Life, 1st ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 222, 224.
The Getty curators do not mention that the small trade series resulted from a commission. For Penn’s
descriptions of them see: Irving Penn, Passage (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992).

92
“Images de Paris: Les sept aspects essentiels de la Cité,” Réalités, June 1951, 54.
251
seven photographs of “the human beings, the child, the worker, the student, the tourist,
the elegant woman, who bestow on a monument or a site its true appearance” [fig. 4.28].
The editors of Réalités went through 30,000 photographs only to find themselves with
contemporary versions of historical Parisian physiognomic types.

Fig. 4.27: French policeman in Life,
July 30, 1951.
Fig. 4.28: “Elegant woman” or one of the
seven essential characteristics of Paris, in
Réalités, June 1951 (BAVP).

The choice of perspectives of the photographs included in articles about the
Bimillénaire also worked to evoke traditions of representing the city. The cover of French
Vogue featured a Robert Doisneau photo of a fashionably-dressed female model perched
high above a familiar cityscape [fig. 4.29]. Behind her lies a grey expanse of Paris, the
Seine, its many bridges, and, in the distant background, the Eiffel Tower. The scene
evokes not only the city’s history, visible in the accumulation of buildings, quays, streets,
squares, and monuments, but also a long history of aerial views of it from the 1739 Plan
252
Turgot to the aerial photos popular since the 1930s.
93
France-Illustration, le monde
illustré made this connection explicit by publishing contemporary aerial photographs and
Merian’s 1620 bird’s-eye map of the city within the same article.
94
Just as with publicity
materials created for the Bimillénaire, the significance of these photographs lay not only
in what they pictured but also in how they pictured it.

Fig. 4.29: Vogue, June 1951

Understood as evocative documents used to create links with Paris’s past, the
photographs published during the Bimillénaire become much more than photojournalistic
fluff sold to audiences who were simply mad for pictures. Certainly the conventions and
workings of photo magazines pushed them to use relatively recent photos. But the

93
For books with aerial views see: Paris vu en avion (Paris: Aero-Photo, 1930); Louis Hourticq, Paris vu
du ciel (Paris: Henri Laurens, 1930); Roger Henrard, Paris vu du ciel (Paris: Armand Colin, 1952).

94
Mousset, “Le Passé prestigieux de Paris.”
253
contemporary photographs they selected reproduced styles, forms, and types from a well-
established and long-standing visual vocabulary of Paris. These pictures point to an
important chapter in the history of the uses of photographs as documents of the Parisian
past and present that encompassed more than their incorporation within magazines.
Editors, historians, and publishers had re-embraced the use of photos as documents of
much more than just what they pictured. As the editors of Coronet explained, the camera
could never actually capture Paris’s true nature:
[Paris] is so overlaid with the longings of those who have never been there, so
wrapped in the nostalgia of those who have, that the reality as pictured in these
pages is only half the whole. The rest lies beyond the reach of any camera lens, in
the imaginations of pleasure-hungry men and women, scattered across the
world.
95

These editors agreed with Jacques Wilhelm that photographs of Paris demanded that
viewers animate them with images and memories from their own imaginations. While
certainly many of those images might be personal memories, they were also images from
the rich history of visual representations of Paris of the kind that the Bimillénaire drew
upon. Contemporary viewers, as we know from the history of the photographs of the
Liberation of Paris, might have seen connections to the city’s long past in them. In part,
we can be sure that contemporary photographs did bring scenes known from estampes to
life in Parisians’ minds because photo books and photohistories since the 1940s had
taught them to see contemporary photographs as imagined gateways to a past known
through its visual representations.

95
“Paris After Dark,” Coronet, September 1951, 69.
254
Learning to See the Past in the Present and Estampes in Photographs
Although photographs may have become the privileged document to preserve
Paris’s twentieth century, during the Second World War prints became increasingly
integral to how Parisians would understand those photographs as historical documents.
Unlike historians and curators in the early twentieth century, who also used the
photograph as a gateway to the imagined past, these mid-twentieth-century historians and
critics no longer assumed that readers would automatically employ photos as prompts to
imagine the past. In photo books and a new form of photohistory, the repicturing book,
they taught viewers to stop considering the photograph as a snapshot of the moment of its
capture and instead to use it as an evocative aide-mémoire. How they did so helps explain
the relationship between photographs and prints that shaped their uses during the
Bimillénaire, much as they had in histories of the Liberation of Paris published in 1944
and 1945. The very decision to celebrate 2,000 years of Parisian history in 1951 may
even be understood, at least in part, as a product of how Parisians learned to see their past
through repicturing books.
The repicturing book emerged during World War II amidst a general decline in
book publication. The Occupation drastically reshaped the French publishing industry,
which saw many fewer photo books and photohistories of Paris published between 1940
and 1944 than in the previous decades.
96
Starting in 1940, all of French book production
dramatically slowed. In September 1940, the Germans published “The Otto List” of

96
These books include: Maurice van Moppès, Images de Paris (London: Hachette (distribution), 1940);
Pierre MacOrlan, Voyage dans Paris (Paris: Editions de la nouvelle France, 1941); Georges Pillement,
Destruction de Paris (Paris: Grasset, 1941); Louis Chéronnet, Paris tel qu’il fut: 104 photographies
anciennes (Paris: Editions Tel, 1943); Wilhelm, Visages de Paris: anciens et modernes.
255
forbidden books that were pulled from circulation.
97
As one American professor wrote in
1941, this list “strictly controlled, if not entirely stifled” French presses.
98
After the
German invasion many writers fled Paris, taking refuge in the South or abroad. But while
there were fewer books produced during the war, audiences for them actually grew. As
critic Jacqueline Barde wrote after the war, “the Occupation […] unleashed a ravenous
appetite for reading.”
99

Despite new restrictions on publishing, the French could read many books about
the war itself.
100
Underground presses produced works that avoided German and Vichy
censure laws, but even officially-sanctioned publications dealt with themes of defeat,
occupation, collaboration, and exile.

In memoirs and histories of the summer of 1940,

97
For more about French publishing during the Occupation see: Pascal Fouché, L’édition française sous
l’occupation: 1940-1944, 2 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque de littérature française contemporaine de l’Université
Paris 7, 1987); Jean-Yves Mollier, Édition, presse et pouvoir en France au XXe siècle, 1 vols. (Paris:
Fayard, 2008); Anne Simonin, Les Éditions de Minuit: 1942-1955 le devoir d’insoumission, L’édition
contemporaine (Paris: IMEC éd, 1994).

98
Albert Schinz, “L’Année littéraire mil-neuf cent quarante et une,” The Modern Language Journal 26, no.
4 (April 1, 1942): 256. He advised his readers that “ce qui n’a pas été publié est fort probablement
beaucoup plus important que ce qui a été publié.” American academic journals from the period of the
Occupation provide the best overview of French publishing activities. Because of state censorship, French
critics could make no honest evaluations of what was going on in France. Additionally, the Americans did
not hesitate to name which authors, editors, and publishers agreed with and promoted Nazi and
collaborationist ideas.

99
Between “long nights of black-out, the difficulty of traveling, forced leisure time, the interminable wait
of women [on the home front] and men in the camps, people who had never even thought about reading as
an escape mechanism, for want of a better alternative, dove right into it.” Barde here, of course, refers to
men in German POW camps who had access to books, magazines, and newspapers. The men, women, and
children in concentration camps did not have access to reading material. Jacqueline Barde, “Physique du
livre,” Le Dépositaire de France: organe officiel du syndicat national des dépositaires de journaux et de
publications (June 1956): 346.

100
University of Pennsylvania Professor of French Albert Schinz described how “the war thr[ew] its
shadow everywhere,” even into “literary activity.” Schinz, “L’Année littéraire mil-neuf cent quarante et
une,” 259. For an incomplete bibliography of memoires and accounts of the defeat and Occupation,
compiled in 1943, see: Albert Gaudin, “Témoignages 1939-1942,” The French Review 16, no. 3 (January 1,
1943): 226–233; Albert Gaudin, “Témoignages 1939-1942. (Suite),” The French Review 16, no. 4
(February 1, 1943): 319–328.
256
writers recounted and accounted for France’s defeat and Occupation. Others waxed
nostalgic about the loss of pre-war life. For books such as journalist Elliot Paul’s 1941
The Last Time I Saw Paris and poet and novelist Francis Carco’s 1941 Nostalgie de
Paris, prewar Paris became a crystallized site of nostalgia.
101
A desire to escape
Occupied Paris colored the few photohistories and photo books about Paris published
during the war. These books presented the city’s glorious past – especially as imagined in
pictures – as a tonic to the difficult present of the Occupation.
The presence of occupation forces encouraged Parisians to imagine that an
alternate reality of un-occupied Paris existed somewhere just out of reach. From 1940 to
1944, the former French capital presented the uncanny juxtaposition of familiar
monuments and landmarks populated by German signage and soldiers. The illustrator and
songwriter Maurice Van Moppès, in exile in England, addressed the disbelief felt by
many when he wrote:
yes, Paris, the city and its outskirts still sit on the Seine, the weather is still fickle,
the river continues to flow between the palaces and the bookseller’s boxes. But its
features are transformed, however, and if one recognizes them as one does those
of an invalid, one cannot stop oneself from seeing the ravages caused by the
pain.
102

Just as photographs of Paris from before World War I had given Parisians an uncanny
sense of a tangible, yet unreachable lost past, the fact that the city remained physically

101
Francis Carco, Nostalgie de Paris (Genève: Ed. du Milieu du monde, 1941); Elliot Paul, The Last Time I
Saw Paris (New York: Random House, 1942). Foreign presses, significantly, published both. Howard C.
Rice noted in The French Review in 1942 that “significant French writing has been driven ‘underground’ or
been published abroad (in Great Britain, Switzerland, Canada, United States, and South Africa), and that
still more is being meditated in silence while awaiting more favorable publishing conditions.” “Queries,
News and Notes,” The French Review 16, no. 2 (December 1, 1942): 181.

102
van Moppès, Images de Paris, np. Van Moppès wrote comic songs about the War and Occupation, sung
on the BBC. For more about these songs see: Christopher Lloyd, “Comic Songs in the Occupation,”
Journal of European Studies (September 2001): 379+.
257
intact while its dancehalls, cinemas, restaurants, theaters, and cafés served the Germans
haunted Parisians throughout the Occupation.
103

In response, authors and editors presented books about Paris published during the
Occupation as a means of time travel, transporting their authors and readers to the pre-
war city. They offered a twist on the familiar promotion of photographically-illustrated
books as a means of visiting Paris without setting foot in the city. A reviewer in La
Nouvelle revue française described how Carco’s Nostalgie de Paris played off Paris’s
inaccessibility to evoke the past: “this Paris made, for those exiled on the Riviera, farther
than it was for a foreign traveler of yesterday, is coupled with another Paris, even farther
away, irreparably distant, for it is the Paris of [Carco’s] past.”
104
For some, like Carco,
physical Paris seemed as inaccessible as its past.
Illustrations, however, became a means of conjuring up timeless images of Paris.
In his 1941 Images de Paris, van Moppès drew the city as he remembered it from before
the war, not as it was under the Germans. His illustrations show bustling streets,
prosperous businesses, and typically Parisian pleasures of cafés, booksellers, flea
markets, open-air balls, and gardens. The author and quintessential Parisian Pierre
MacOrlan similarly rejected Paris’s occupied state in his preface to the 1941 photo album
Voyage dans Paris. He focused on continuity within Paris, describing the city as a place

103
Alan Riding has described the vibrant continuation of Paris’s cultural amusements during the
Occupation: Alan Riding, And the Show Went On (New York: Random House, 2010).

104
Henri Thomas, “Nostalgie de Paris, par Francis Carco,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, October 1, 1941,
493–494. This reviewer, writing in a publication eminently sympathetic to the Nazi occupation, did not like
or approved of Carco’s nostalgic attitude to Paris. He continued: “l’éloignement provisoire de la capitale, la
nostalgie momentanée, ne sont que prétextes à s’enfoncer dans l’éloignement et la nostalgie du souvenir.”
He ended the review with the affirmation that “Le mythe Paris n’est pas achevé; nul événement ne peut le
terminer, en faire une chose d’Histoire, un objet de regrets.” Ibid., 495.
258
where “from century to century, the same night stroller has nourished himself on the
same romantic substance.”
105
The pictures that illustrated these books offered up many of
the exact same scenes that were published as contemporary photographs in 1951,
suggesting continuity in the historical identity of Paris in which those who loved it took
solace. Instead of offering a photohistory of prewar Paris, the photographs of Voyage
dans Paris evoke an idealized version of the city. Its photographs seem intentionally
unstable. Some gesture to the war and German occupation [figs. 4.30 & 4.31], but for the
most part, they evoke an indefinite moment in the city’s history.
106

Fig. 4.30: Marcel Bovis, The empty city
suggests the Occupation,
Voyage dans Paris, 1941.
Fig. 4.31: Marcel Bovis, a pair of very small
soldiers appears framed in the Arc du Carrousel,
Voyage dans Paris, 1941.

In Voyage dans Paris, MacOrlan embraced the imaginative power of photographs
rather than their power to document a particular space in a specific time with scientific

105
MacOrlan, Voyage dans Paris, np.

106
Cultural historian Pascal Ory has described how Robert Doisneau’s photographs of Occupation Paris
were strikingly still. He describes how Doisneau photographed empty space, spaces in which “tout se passe
comme dans un film surréaliste des années vingt, où les objets et les lieux familiers s’évanouissent par
magie.” Robert Doisneau and Pascal Ory, Doisneau 40-44 (Paris: Hoëbeke, 2003), 16.
259
accuracy. He refused to name what year they depicted. Instead, he instructed readers to
use their imaginations to animate the photos. He explained that even when not in the city,
“we carry Paris with us” in the form of memories and mental images of it.
107
“While
flipping through the collection of these images,” MacOrlan suggested, “each [reader] can
choose one and furnish it according to his creative powers.”
108
He imagined that readers
would draw these images from a shared urban and national history, describing how:
in each of these squares, in each of these streets, we all possess a friendly ghost
who comes to his master’s call like a loyal dog. He rushes through the oldest ages
of our country and of our city.
109

For contemporary readers the ambiguous photographs of Voyage dans Paris thus became
gateways to the long and rich Parisian past.
MacOrlan’s interpretation of the photograph as an evocative document creates
connections to past understandings of its function as a historical document. His ghost of
the past bears similarities to the spirit that Marcel Poëte believed emerged from visual
representations. But instead of coming out of the photo, MacOrlan’s ghost came from the
reader’s mind to inhabit the picture. The idea also harkens to how photographs functioned
for turn-of-the-century Vieux Paris amateurs. But the photograph no longer provided
transparent access to a building or object that evoked the past, now the photo itself
evoked the past.
Readers in the 1940s were not, however, used to thinking about photographs as
evoking multiple moments in time. Departing from the previous decade’s norms,

107
MacOrlan, Voyage dans Paris, np.

108
Ibid.

109
Ibid.
260
MacOrlan and others imagined the process of repicturing, inviting viewers to share an
imagined past and understand the contemporary photograph as an indeterminate historical
document. The process gave visual form to the oft-evoked idea that the past haunted the
contemporary city. Although the repicturing book was new in the 1940s, its layouts
would become a staple of photohistory production in the decades to come and influence
how, during the Bimillénaire, contemporary photos created links to Paris’s past. The
repicturing book marked a shift from the imagined past as a series of indeterminate
mental images and the photo as a document of a particular moment, to the photograph as
a gateway to a succession of discrete scenes remembered from prints and paintings.
In forging explicit links between contemporary photographs and mental images of
Parisian history, repicturing books drew on earlier forms of Parisian and French history
books. Readers of such books would have been familiar with the idea that people carried
around images of the past in their heads. Since the turn of the century, young French
children had learned history as a succession of images.
110
In the 1950s, a journalist
writing in France-Soir would even declare the image “the veritable Esperanto” of
international education.
111
Repicturing books also gave visual form to older historical
forms, such as the books of Georges Cain, which switched between describing the
contemporary city and the scenes and figures of its past. Repicturing books mimicked

110
Art historian and homme politique Armand Dayot produced a series of such books with the publisher
Flammarion. Each one proposed to teach a “young public” the history of the French Revolution, the
Restoration, the Second Empire, or the Commune “according to images from the time.” Armand Dayot,
Histoire contemporaine par l’image: 1789-1872 d’après les documents du temps (Paris: Flammarion,
1900), 2.

111
“Les millions d’enfants ont donné leur verdict: le véritable esperanto d’aujourd’hui c’est l’image...et la
réalité a dépassé le merveilleux,” France-Soir, 1958, Edition Spéciale Hachette Bruxelles edition., Fonds
Hachette, Carton S2 B1 C37 HAC, IMEC.
261
such books, replacing words with pictures. They updated the format of Feodor
Hoffbauer’s Paris à travers les âges with its side-by-side images of one Parisian location
and the events that occurred there through the ages, for the photographic age.

Fig. 4.32: Repicturing in Jacques Wilhelm’s Visages de Paris, 1943.

Musée Carnavalet curator Jacques Wilhelm, whose explanation of the intermedial
historical consciousness opened this chapter, pioneered the first repicturing history of
Paris. The pages of his 1943 Visages de Paris: anciens et modernes presented one or
several engravings or photographs of Paris throughout the centuries next to more recent
photographs [fig. 4.32].
112
Instead of using the photograph merely to evoke historical

112
None of the photographs show traces of the Nazi occupation. Wilhelm, Visages de Paris: anciens et
modernes. The book’s layout is credited to Jacques Fourastié, who likely was the same Jacques Fourastié
262
scenes as authors and publishers had done in the 1920s, Wilhelm directly showed these
scenes as pictures to his readers. The juxtaposition reaffirms the present as photographic
and photographable and the past as artistic representations. While Wilhelm, like
MacOrlan, ventured the idea that all “Parisians worthy of the name” carried images of
their city’s history in their minds, the book’s format suggests that they still needed to
learn these scenes. Wilhelm contended, after all, that the ability to resurrect Parisian
history belonged only to “the Parisian who loves his city, [and] studies its history.”
113
In
addition to promoting the collections of the Musée Carnavalet, as many books by its
curators did, Wilhelm taught readers how to use them to evoke their city’s past. Writing
during the Occupation, he drew heavily on Paris’s revolutionary iconography. Wilhelm
thus not only presented Parisians with images of their former successful resistance
against occupation and tyranny, he taught readers to see these scenes in photos of the
contemporary city.
War and occupation influenced the very development of the form as well as the
content of repicturing books. Remembering Paris’s glorious past as the City of Light, the
Capital of France, and the Capital of Civilization acquired increasing significance during
the Occupation, just as it would in 1951, but for different reasons. It became a way of
scoffing at the German presence for a few months or years, which seemed paltry in
comparison to centuries of French greatness. Wilhelm described how the ability to call up
this filmstrip of historical images also set Parisians apart from their German occupiers,

who throughout the 1940s and 1950s designed posters for films including Jacques Becker’s 1942 Dernier
atout, Jean Delannoy’s 1944 Le Bossu, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), Maurice de
Canonge’s Le Dernier métro (1945), René Clément’s La Bataille du rail (1945).

113
Ibid., 13. Emphasis is added.
263
comparing the “Parisian worthy of the name,” who knew its past in pictures, to “all those
who only pass through, [and] only see of Paris its current and exterior appearance.”
114
In
other words, the Germans might see Paris in its occupied form and understand themselves
as victors, but true Parisians gained possession over their city because they knew and
imagined “the faces of its successive transformations and those of the men who brought it
to life with their presence.”
115
The German Occupation galvanized Parisians to resurrect
their past as a means, not just to repossess the city, but also to reestablish its role as the
capital of France and the capital of world tourism. The German presence encouraged
contemporaries to question the documentary sufficiency of the contemporary photograph,
which could only capture moments of the Occupation, leaving the centuries of prestige
and the revolutionary heritage that they believe truly defined Paris unpictured.
Repicturing books remained a popular genre after the war. The publisher
Calmann-Lévy published an eleven-volume repicturing series entitled Paris à travers les
siècles (1948-1966), with photos by René-Jacques, whose work regularly illustrated
books about Paris, and essays by Philippe Lefrançois, who wrote similar essays for books
about Italy.
116
Many books, such as Louis Chéronnet’s Paris, mon coeur, included a few

114
Ibid., 5–6, 13.

115
Ibid., 13.

116
For the first three volumes: Philippe Lefrançois and René Jacques, Paris à travers les siècles: La Cité -
le Pont-Neuf - La Place Dauphine - le Palais - le coeur de La Cité - Notre-Dame et son cloître - l’ile Saint-
Louis, 1st ed. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1948); Philippe Lefrançois and René Jacques, Paris à travers les
siècles: le Grand Chatelet - le Quai de la Mégisserie - Saint-Germain-l’auxerrois - le Louvre - le Carrousel
- les Tuileries - le Jardin des Tuileries - la place de la Concorde, 1st ed. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1949);
Philippe Lefrançois and René Jacques, Paris à travers les siècles: Saint-Eustache - les Halles - l’avenue de
l’opéra - le Palais-royal - la rue de richelieu - la Place des victoires - la Place Gaillon - la Bourse - la
Butte aux gravois, 1st ed. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1949).

264
repicturing layouts.
117
And in 1957, editor Robert Laffont updated the genre with the
dynamic layouts of L’Histoire de Paris et des parisiens.

Fig. 4.33: A print provides the historical scene that lies just behind the photographed façade of the
Louvre, Histoire de Paris et des Parisiens, 1957.

Laffont’s book created relationships between photographs and estampes and
cycled through the many different ways of using the photograph as a historical document
– and its relationship to other types of images – developed throughout the twentieth
century. He used prints to bring to life the places depicted in photographs, such as in one
collage where a print of the Cour carrée du Louvre gives the flat plane of a contemporary
photo of the Louvre’s façade both spatial and temporal depth [fig. 4.33]. The book’s
layouts mimic the erasure of the photograph’s frame, which in early twentieth-century
books emphasized photographs as transparent representations of objects. A page
dedicated to Roman Paris, for example, presents a frieze of the god Mercury. Its position
on top of a photograph of the Arènes de Lutèce suggests a relationship between the object
and the place: perhaps they shared a creator, or the arena’s excavations uncovered the

117
Louis Chéronnet and Louis Ferrand, eds., Paris, mon coeur (Paris: Editions Pierre Tisné, 1945).
265
frieze [fig. 4.34]. In another layout the isolated and repeated figure of a religious pilgrim
treks across the printed page [fig. 4.35]. In pages dedicated to the nineteenth century, old
photographs present snapshots of the city as it was, as they did in 1930s photohistories.
Here, however, figures from prints and paintings bring these old photos of Montmartre to
life [fig. 4.36 & 4.37]. These layouts speak to the sheer variety of ways in which editors
and historians imagined photographs and prints working together to resurrect Paris’s past.
The printing of a second edition of Laffont’s book in 1973 offers a compelling testimony
to the continued popular of the repicturing genre since the Second World War.

Fig. 4.34: Mercury at the Arènes de Lutèce. Histoire de Paris et des parisiens, 1957.
266

Fig. 4.35: This repeated figure, emerging from a document describing a pilgrimage route, seems
to reenact a trek across the page, L’Histoire de Paris et des parisiens, 1957.

Fig. 4.36: This hand-drawn figure of
Montmartre icon Aristide Bruant seems poised
to stroll into a photograph of Montmartre,
L’Histoire de Paris et des parisiens, 1957.
Fig. 4.37: Here, a copy of Toulouse Lautrec’s
depiction of dancer Jane Avril compliments a
photograph of the Moulin Rouge, L’Histoire de
Paris et des parisiens, 1957.
267
Although the German Occupation made Parisians long for prewar Paris, it did not,
as in the case of World War I, inspire photohistories of it. Unlike Paris 1900, interwar
Paris, with its stark political divides and tainted role in the defeat of 1940, could not
fulfill Parisians’ nostalgic longings for an easier and better era. The postwar period
continued to produce histories and photohistories of Belle-Époque Paris.
118
But the
Occupation and the uncertain decade that followed it also sparked a sort of unspecific
longing for any and all great periods of the Parisian past, which changed what Parisians
saw in contemporary photographs of their city. Instead of evidence of physical,
economic, and global decline that photographs of shabby and war-damaged Paris might
present, Parisians chose to see a slideshow of great episodes from the past. Perhaps a
reviewer of Louis Chéronnet’s 1945 photo book of the history of photography, Le Petit
musée de la curiosité photographique, was referring to the photograph’s ability to create
connections with the history of images and not just refer to the objects it depicts when he
deemed certain photographs “truer pictures of an era than their subjects.”
119

***
In a 1964 photo book about Paris, Jean Pastreau, journalist and author of
numerous histories and books about the city, claimed that to think about the Parisian past

118
See for example: Robert Burnand, Paris 1900 (Paris: Hachette, 1951); Dans les rues de Paris au temps
des fiacres (Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne, 1950); Jacques Castelnau, En remontant les grands boulevards
(Paris: le Livre contemporain, 1960), As well as the film: Nicole Védrès, Paris 1900, Documentary, 1947.

119
“A Travers les rayons: Petit musée de la curiosité photographique.”
268
was to “pass images of the history of Paris before the magic lantern of time.”
120
He
described this as a “dangerous game,” for “there are just too many of them!”
121
Pastreau
no longer imagined the Parisian past as a series of memories or even remembered textual
accounts of events. Rather he conceived of Parisian history as a slide show of visual
representations of events, from the “the flight of Louis XVI, the agony of Robespierre,
[and] the scenes of February 6, 1934” to the Liberation.
122
His statement highlights how
the history of Paris, for many, had become synonymous with the history of its visual
representation in multiple types of images.
Pastreau conceived of this succession of images not as a modern slideshow, but as
a nineteenth-century magic lantern show. His imagination reproduced not just the content
of historical images but mimicked their very forms. Prasteau’s statement highlights the
important role that different types of images, styles, and material supports had come to
play in the twentieth-century historical imaginary. When people thought about the past,
they associated certain media with certain eras of history, and they reproduced those
styles when they depicted past periods.
Prastreau’s statement also speaks to a desire to find an unbroken link between
Paris of the present and Paris of the past. Indeed, in a period that witnessed the veritable
decline of Paris’s importance as a world capital, nothing became more important to city
boosters and Parisians than defining their city as the living embodiment of its glorious

120
René-Jacques and Jean Prasteau, Paris la nuit: la ville lumière, Collection Panorama (Paris:
Bibliothèque des arts, 1964), 10.

121
Ibid.

122
Ibid.
269
history. Both the Bimillénaire and repicturing photohistories speak to this postwar desire
to replace recent tumultuous events with a long history of the French capital’s grandeur
and global importance. Organizers and Parisians who participated in the Bimillénaire thus
conceived of it as the celebration of historical styles, dress, festivals, music, and art,
rather than the reenactment of famous scenes of political division or revolutionary fervor.
Historical style became so important, because it offered a means of providing historical
continuity. Similarly, curators and historians theorized the insufficiency of the
photograph to fully document Paris. Because so much of the city’s importance lay in its
past, viewers needed to bring memories and images of it to contemporary images of the
city. If they did not, they would only see a small fragment of the capital’s true identity.
Only the subjective and emotional effect of the photograph could truly realize its
potential as an objective document of the past.
The desire to trace connections between contemporary Paris and millennia of its
history mirrored contemporary trends in Annales School historiography, which
increasingly studied the “longue durée,” or historical continuity, rather than brief
histories of events.
123
Starting with Fernand Braudel’s history of the Mediterranean, first
published in 1947, Annales historians studied long trends, such as the relationship
between humans and the land (or the sea, as the case may be). As historian Peter Burke

123
Fernand Braudel’s history of the Mediterranean represents the first real history of the “longue durée,”
but other historians soon followed suit with studies such as: Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et
l’Atlantique: 1504-1650, 11 vols. (Paris: A. Colin [then] S.E.V.P.E.N, 1955); Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et
le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730, contribution à l’histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris:
S.E.V.P.E.N. (Impr. nationale), 1960). The development of demographic history also figured in this
emphasis on duration: Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), 57. Braudel believed that historians’ unique contribution to
the social sciences lay in the study of the “longue durée.” Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et Sciences sociales :
La longue durée,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 13, no. 4 (1958): 727. Braudel’s essay was
in part a defense against the popularity of Structuralism and its modes of analysis.
270
has suggested, Braudel’s desire to transcend the actions of days, months or even years,
developed as much out historiographic concerns as it did from the fact that he wrote most
of the book in a prisoner of war camp outside of Lübeck, Germany.
124
Burke explains
that “in the circumstances in which [Braudel] drafted his study, in captivity, it was
psychologically necessary for him to look beyond the short term.”
125
The same conditions
of war, defeat, and occupation shaped professional, amateur, and municipal histories
alike. Like Braudel, Parisians of the 1940s and 1950s looked to their city’s very long
history in order to transcend the humiliation, disappointment, uncertainty, and pain of the
present.
But even in subsequent decades, when asked to consider the present in great
detail, Parisians continued to see the city’s rich visual historical record there. The
100,000 photographs of the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” held to
systematically document the city in the month of May 1970, demonstrate that people did
not just see other images in photographs of Paris: they also recognized and reproduced
these images when they looked at the city itself. Despite contestant organizers’ intention
to simply document Paris, contestants ended up documenting the influence of old
photographs and other types of images on how they saw the city of the present.

124
Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989, 33.

125
Ibid., 40.

271
Chapter 5

“C’était Paris en 1970:”
Urbanism, Amateur Photography, and Photographic History

Paris in 1970,
a little bit of the year 2000, traces of the year 1000.
-Juliette Gréco
1

From this moment forward, by the hundredth of a second, Paris examines its present.
2

On April 25, 1970, nearly 15,000 amateur photographers gathered under the iron-
and-glass umbrellas of Baltard’s pavilions at les Halles, a masterpiece of nineteenth-
century architecture. They were there to embark upon a massive “operation” to document
Paris in photographs: “C’était Paris en 1970,” an amateur photo contest sponsored by the
FNAC, a cooperative electronics and camera store.
3
It was fitting that this operation
started at the former site of the city’s recently-emptied central markets, whose iron-and-
glass pavilions would be demolished just a year and a half later. As the soon-to-be ruins
of Paris’s nineteenth-century glory sheltered them from rain, contestants received
envelopes containing assignments of 250m by 250m squares of Paris that they would be
responsible for documenting over the course of May 1970. These amateur photographers

1
Claude Bolling, Pierre Delanoe, and Juliette Gréco, “C’était Paris en 1970” (Philips, 1970), BNF
audiovisuel.

2
“(publicité) Pour sauver Paris, qui meurt un peu tous les jours: La Fnac lance l’opération ‘C’était Paris en
1970’,” Le Monde, March 21, 1970, sec. supplément.

3
The FNAC, or Fédération Nationale d'Achats des Cadres, began as a discount club in 1954. Shortly
thereafter, its directors launched a catalogue business selling photography equipment. By the late 1980s, it
had opened a chain of multi-media megastores, which competed with HMV and Virgin Megastores. For
more about the FNAC see: Vincent Chabault, La FNAC, entre commerce et culture: parcours d’entreprise,
parcours d’employés (Paris: Presses universitaires de France “Le Monde,” 2010); Jean-Louis Pétriat, Les
années Fnac: de 1954 à après-demain (Paris: Fayard, 1991); Didier Toussaint, L’inconscient de la FNAC:
l’addiction à la culture (Paris: Bourin, 2006).

272
would ultimately submit 100,000 photographs that the FNAC later donated to the
Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris as historical documents for future
generations.
4
This chapter is the first-ever scholarly study of the FNAC photographs. It
explores the ideas that drove the conception of the contest, reactions to it, and the
photographs that its participants took. “C’était Paris en 1970” embodies the realization
and mass acceptance of the ideas that shaped a century’s worth of photographic
documentation projects, archival collections, and photo histories of Paris.
When participants in the FNAC contest took pictures of Paris, they drew on
multiple ways of thinking about what, exactly, city photographs captured and how these
photographs would function as historical documents. Participants photographed
topography – urban objects and architecture – as amateur historians of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Paris, or Vieux Paris, had in the century’s first decades. They
reproduced ideas about images as scientific documentation developed three quarters of a
century earlier at the Musée Carnavalet and Bibliothèque historique. Echoing the shift
that occurred in illustrated histories in the 1930s – from using the photograph as a
document of the object it depicted to conceiving of it as a preserved slice of time –,
participants also took photographs that captured the moment. More than simply

4
The FNAC photographs are held at the BHVP. Approximately 70,000 black and white prints are stored in
paper folders – one for each carré – and shelved in the library’s basement. The 30,000 color slides that
participants submitted are stored separately in plastic folders. Although sometimes consulted by researchers
or loaned for exhibitions, the contest photographs have never drawn the attention of academic historians or
art historians. They have even suffered from some benign neglect at the hands of the library staff. Only a
handful of photographs – fewer than 300 – were catalogued after the contest (there seems to be no pattern
to how these were selected). The library “misplaced” the color slides, only to rediscover them in the
basement in late 2011. The quantity of photographs made it impossible for me to look at all of them. I have
looked at all of the catalogued photographs as well as over 7,000 of the black-and-white photographs,
selected from a variety of different types of carrés (wealthy, working-class, subject to modernization in the
1960s, relatively unchanging in that decade, industrial, full of gardens, containing familiar monuments, and
unknown corners of the city).

273
conceiving of these images as documents of the present, however, participants framed
shots in ways that also created subjective and evocative links to Paris’s past. Like
photographers during the Liberation of Paris, they created snapshots of historical
continuity in the city. Finally, they took pictures that seemed to capture the timeless
essence of the city into a single photograph, much in the style of contemporary press
photography. The photographs of “C’était Paris en 1970” demonstrate the wider
resonance of archivists, librarians, editors, curators, and critics’ ideas about photographic
history within amateur photographic practices and the popular historical consciousness.

The FNAC contest embraced the idea that everyone could be a photographer, and,
by extension, a historian. Organizers took the idea championed over and over again
throughout the century – that the present would live on in photos – and made it the
contest’s organizing force. They realized the predictions of Emile Henriot and Paul
Valéry that photographers would work as historians of the future.
5
Ads for the contest
bragged that it would “transform all Parisians into reporters, into archivists, into explorers
of the Parisian sublime or commonplace.”
6
More than just a byproduct of photo books (as
Henriot wrote) or photojournalism (as Valéry predicted), history became photography’s
primary goal.

5
Emile Henriot reminded professional photographers: “photographers of 1933, it’s for the year 2000 that
you are working.” In 1939, Paul Valéry proclaimed that the very discipline of history in the twentieth
century was at risk of being reduced to “things seen, moments of direct capture, each corresponding to the
action of a possible cameraman, the spirit of the photographic reporter.” Emile Henriot, “Photos de Paris,”
Le Temps, January 30, 1933; Paul Valéry, “Discours du centenaire de la photographie,” Etudes
photographiques, no. 10 (November 2001).

6
“Pour sauver Paris.”

274
Organizers’ choice of jury members bore testimony to the long history of
preserving Paris in photographs. Advertisements that included the jury’s roster suggest
that organizers believed participants would have been familiar with both the leading
practitioners of photographic history and its tradition in Paris.
7
This list included the
photojournalist Izis, who worked for Paris Match in the 1950s, and Jacques Henri
Lartigue, perhaps France’s most famous amateur photographer.
8
Materials also promised
that Musée Carnavalet curator Jacques Willhelm, who first published repicturing books
about Parisian history during the war, and Alexandre Debray, the former secretary of the
Comité du Bimillénaire de Paris, would judge photographs.
9
That same ad announced
that art and architecture critic, historian, and photo collector Yvan Christ, who published
a series of photo histories in the 1950s and 1960s, would sit on the jury.
10
Advertisements
for the contest thus promised not only 150,000 francs in prize money, but also the

7
The list of jury members appeared in advertisements for the contest: Ibid.

8
The actual composition of the jury changed by the time it set to work. Both Lartigue and Izis would,
however, end up judging photographs. Lartigue began photographing Paris in the early twentieth century,
producing a series of photo albums of his life over the course of the century. These were exhibited at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1962. For more about Lartigue start with: Kevin Moore,
Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

9
“Pour sauver Paris.” Later accounts of the jury did not include these names. It is unclear whether they
were simply not named, or if they did not actually sit on the jury.

10
Christ wrote architectural criticism for the magazine Arts in the 1960s. He also published a series of
photo histories of various neighborhoods and churches in Paris. And he published the first rephotography
books about Paris that placed contemporary views alongside old photographs. For a sampling of his work
start with: Yvan Christ, Eglises parisiennes actuelles ou disparues (Paris, 1947); Yvan Christ, Saint-
Germain-des-Prés 1900 vu par Atget, 1951; Yvan Christ, La Belle histoire de Paris (Paris: Olivier Perrin,
1964); Yvan Christ, L’âge d’or de la photographie, Arts et Artisans de France (Paris: Vincent, Fréal et Cie,
1965); Yvan Christ, Les Métamorphoses de Paris, cent paysages parisiens photographiés autrefois par
Atget, Bayard, Bisson, Daguerre... [etc] et aujourd’hui par Janine Guillot et Charles Ciccione (Paris:
Balland, 1967).

275
opportunity to have experts, well versed in photography’s uses for preserving the city’s
history, review entrants’ work.
Paris in 1970 desperately needed some form of preservation. The 1960s and
1970s saw a series of radical renovation projects that fundamentally altered the city’s
topography. The quintessential Parisian singer Juliette Gréco sang of “Paris in 1970” as
containing “a little bit of the year 2000, traces of the year 1000.”
11
Real estate developers
tore down old neighborhoods and replaced them with towering blocks of offices and
apartments. Highways replaced the sleepy quays of the Seine. The city seemed like it was
changing so fast that only photography, operating at “1/100
th
of a second,” as contest
advertisements described, could capture these changes. It was changing so fast that, as the
contest title’s use of the past tense suggested, yesterday’s photograph would be
tomorrow’s historical document.
The contest welcomed the participation of all amateur photographers, but its
organizers dictated specific parameters for how to document Paris. FNAC co-founders
Max Théret and André Essel and director of public relations André Gouillou set up three
categories of submissions that aimed to ensure total coverage of the city – the impossible
positivist ambition of truly documenting every square meter of Paris in May 1970 – while
also leaving room for contestants’ personal experiences and interpretations of the city.
The first dictated an assigned carré, or square. Contestants were asked to provide “a

11
Gréco recorded this song specifically for the contest. Pierre Delanoë wrote the words, and Claude Bolling
composed the music. Bolling, Delanoe, and Gréco, “C’était Paris en 1970.” For more about Juliette Gréco
see: Bertrand Dicale, Juliette Gréco: les vies d’une chanteuse (Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 2001).

276
report describing as completely as possible, and with an unlimited number of
photographs, a sector of Paris corresponding to a square measuring 250 meters on each
side.”
12
Organizers divided the city into 1755 of
these squares and employed a lottery system to
assign seven or eight participants to each [fig.
5.1]. Photographers could also submit entries in
two other categories: “two photos dedicated to
making known a strange or little known aspect
of Paris” as well as “a single photo, which can
be taken anywhere in Paris, and for the
contestant best represents Paris during the
month of May 1970.”
13
Photographers could use black-and-white or color film. Over
14,000 individuals signed up.
14
Their 100,000 entries provide an unprecedented
opportunity to understand how people who were neither historians nor professional
photographers conceived of their city’s present, past, and future through its photographic
representation.
With so many participants, it is impossible to summarize or fully describe all of
the contest’s images. By virtue of its size and scale, the contest photos are rife with
diversity and sets of contradictions. At times, however, participants in “C’était Paris en

12
“Pour sauver Paris.”

13
Ibid.

14
“14 016 personnes,” France soir, April 24, 1970.

Fig. 5.1: Contest carrés.

277
1970” composed remarkably similar views of their city.
15
In some cases different
photographers took nearly identical pictures of the same objects.
16
All across the city,
participants imitated Vieux Paris photographs while documenting traces of the past in the
city. They took photographs that commented on urban change: nostalgically picturing
ruins created by new construction or showing modern towers looming over old sections
of the city. They took snapshots of everyday life that evoked iconographic traditions of
picturing Parisians. In short, participants did more than simply fulfill the contest’s
mission of scientifically preserving a moment of history – Paris, as it was in May 1970.
As their photographs attest, by showing how Parisian life in the midst of large-scale
modernization was still deeply colored by its past, they could not help but build on a
century of photographic history to comment on the city’s present and future.

Amateur Photography and Documenting Paris’s History
With its premise that every photographer could produce archival quality images,
the FNAC contest spoke to the breakdown of the distinction between the categories of
professional and amateur photography.
17
Promotional materials encouraged anyone who

15
These themes emerged over the course of more than a month spent looking at the photographs.

16
Desir (11668), Michel Cristescu (12790), Jean-René Teichac (24978), Juan Miro (20317), and one
anonymous photographer all took remarkably similar, in some cases the exact same, photos in the squares
951, 952, and 955 around the Front de Seine development. Most often photographers wrote their participant
numbers, not their names, on the back of their submissions. The library has a computer print out of
participant numbers with their names and addresses from which I have identified them. In case of error, I
have included both here. Some photographs noted neither their number nor their name.

17
For more about the social category of amateur photography see the first chapter of: Patricia Rodden
Zimmermann, Reel Families: a Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995), 1–11.

278
owned “even [a] very simple” camera to participate.
18
It was not always the case that
simple cameras could produce archival quality images. Although amateurs began taking
photographs as soon as photography was invented, the expense of cameras and materials
as well as the difficulty and time involved in developing glass plates made amateur
photography a pastime of the wealthy.
19
As photographic materials and equipment
became cheaper over the course of the twentieth century, buying a camera and film was
expensive but not an extravagant luxury. Indeed, in 1970, amateurs used the same type of
equipment and could produce the same quality of images as professionals.
20

The 1970 contest represented a revival of turn-of-the-century municipal practices
that called upon amateurs to help document Paris in photographs. From 1903 to 1907, the
Commission municipale du Vieux Paris had sponsored a series of amateur photo contests.
These contests, which asked participants to document specific aspects of the city, were
more limited in scope than “C’était Paris en 1970.” The first contest, held in 1903, called
for images of “the banks of the Seine within Paris’s fortifications,” “the flower markets,”
or “architecture, sculpture and decorations that predate the seventeenth century in

18
“Pour sauver Paris.”

19
The history of French amateur photography is dominated by the study of wealthy turn-of-the-century
amateurs, such as Lartigue and the members of the Société française de photographie, and the study of how
digital technologies and internet photo sharing platforms, such as Flickr, changed the world of amateur
photography. Historian of photography Marin Dacos has argued that although turn-of-the-century
advertisements and photography manuals claim that photography was available to everyone, close attention
to their descriptions of people and materials indicates that “everyone” meant the wealthy. Marin Dacos, “Le
regard oblique,” Études photographiques, no. 11, Sociologie des amateurs/Empreintes de l’art (May 2002):
44–67.

20
When professional photographers could no longer rely on the fact that their images were technically
more sound than those of amateurs, they introduced less tangible concepts that set their work apart. For
example see Henri Cartier-Bresson’s explanation of “the decisive moment:” Henri Cartier-Bresson, Images
à la sauvette (Paris: Verve, 1952).

279
Paris.”
21
Participants submitted two copies of each photograph. They pasted one onto
cardboard so that it could be exhibited if selected as a prize winner. Organizers asked that
contestants print the second using a “fade-resistant process.”
22
The latter prints would
enter the Musée Carnavalet’s Cabinet des estampes. The “fade-resistant processes”
ensured the photographs’ availability to researchers for decades and centuries to come.
Organizers of the FNAC contest recognized what members of the Commission
municipal du Vieux Paris had realized decades earlier: amateur photo contests offered a
cheap way of acquiring photographs. Although very few photographers participated in
the Commission municipale’s first contests, in 1905, sixty-one submitted photos. The
jury gave 1,100 of their submissions to the Musée Carnavalet’s estampes archive. The
Commission paid 1,000 francs to install the exhibition and to make medals for its
winners.
23
Each photo thus cost less than one franc, half the going rate professionals
charged. Similarly, the organizers of “C’était Paris en 1970” estimated that if they hired
professionals to take the 200,000 photographs they hoped to receive, it would cost the
city over two billion francs.
24
Amateurs would work for free and pay for film, paper, and

21
“Organisation, par la Ville, d’expositions photographiques de sites choisis, soit à Paris, soit dans le
département de la Seine,” Bulletin de la Commission municipale du Vieux Paris (October 23, 1902): 225–
226.

22
These processes included “charbon, platine, tirage aux encres grasses ou agrandissement sur gélatino-
bromure.” “Création d’expositions de photographies,” Bulletin de la Commission municipale du Vieux
Paris (January 15, 1903): 5. These instructions spoke to the general concern about the possibility of
preserving the new generation of archival documents that photography and film represented. This concern
was also evident in other contemporary accounts: Henri Lavergne, “L’Histoire de demain,” L’Aurore,
August 4, 1910; Marcel Poëte, “Letter to Victor Perrot”, June 3, 1918, Fonds Victor Perrot, Bibliothèque
du film, Cinémathèque française.

23
“Création d’expositions de photographies,” 6.

24
“Pour sauver Paris.”

280
developing. The FNAC would help absorb the costs of advertising and judging, leaving
the city with only the cost of cataloguing and storing the resulting images. But whereas
photographers in the early twentieth-century contests sponsored by the Commission
municipale du Vieux Paris retained the rights to their images, participants in “C’était
Paris en 1970” signed away their rights to their photos in order to participate.
25

The question of photographers’ rights in the FNAC contest sparked a large public
protest by professional. Their protest speaks to the fact that contemporaries understood
photo archives of Paris as archives of images for publication – potential sources of profit
– not simply tools for the scholarly study of urban change. The FNAC launched a
publicity campaign for the contest at the beginning of March 1970. By the end of the
month, the Association des journalists-reporters-photographes et cinéastes, the
Association nationale des photographes publicitaires, and the Groupement des
photographes-illustrateurs all condemned the contest as a violation of France’s March 11,
1957 law protecting intellectual and artistic property.
26
Henri Cartier-Bresson agreed and
withdrew from the contest’s jury in protest.
27
The Fédération Nationale des Sociétés

25
The Commission decreed that “L’auteur reste maitre de la propriété du cliché.” “Création d’expositions
de photographies,” 5.

26
B.G.A., “A la suite de protestations de professionnels: Des patronages officiels sont retirés à un concours
de photographie sur ‘Paris en 1970’,” Le Monde, n.d.; B.G.A., “A la suite de protestations: le règlement du
concours photographique ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ est amendé,” Le Monde, n.d.; V. R., “Président de la
F.N.S.P.F. communique,” Photo-revue, August 1970; “A la suite de protestations d’associations
professionnelles, deux patronages officiels sont retirés au concours photographique ‘c’était Paris en 1970’,”
La Correspondance de presse, n.d.; “Trois associations de reporters photographes et de photographes
publicitaires denoncent le concours ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ comme contraire à la loi de 1957 sur la
production des droits d’auteurs,” La Correspondance de la Presse, n.d. For more about French copyright
law covering photographic production see: Molly Nesbit, “What Was an Author?,” Yale French Studies,
no. 73 (January 1, 1987): 229–257.

27
One article snidely asked why Cartier-Bresson had not read the contest’s rules before agreeing to sit on
its jury. “Le Concours de la FNAC,” L’Echo de la presse, April 13, 1970.

281
Photographiques de France (FNSPF) revoked its official participation.
28
These groups
and individuals perceived the contest as a threat to the structures that safeguarded
professional photographers’ ability to sell their photographs. Likewise, the Préfet de Paris
and the Préfet de Police rescinded their official sponsorship of the contest in mid-April.
29

The FNAC’s lawyers studied the question and declared that the contest did not in fact
violate the 1957 law because participation in it was voluntary.
30
It promised that
photographers could maintain ownership of the negatives of all prints that they
submitted.
31
Moreover, the FNAC reassured participants that it “promised not to use the
photographs for any commercial purpose.”
32

Regardless of these clarifications, “C’était Paris en 1970” still appeared to
threaten professional photographers’ relationship to the large industry of photographic
illustrations of Paris that had developed over the course of the twentieth century.
Professional photographers depended on the press, but also the secondary market of
illustration in magazines and books. Editors were no longer Vieux Paris amateurs, such
as Charles Eggimann, using their own personal photo collections to illustrate Parisian

28
Letter from the society’s president cited in: “On écrit au ‘Canard’,” Le Canard enchainé, April 22, 1970.

29
“Quand les journalistes obligent le Préfet à respecter la loi,” Le Journal des journalistes, April 1970. The
Préfet de Paris would become a veritable obstruction to the contest, refusing participants the right to
photograph in municipal cemeteries.

30
As “une offre de contrat d’adhésion aléatoire,” the contest was subject to the same articles of the Civil
Code that regulate gambling. Using basic logic, the lawyer declared “la rescision de la cession des cliché,
qui est une des règles du concours, ne peut être remise en question par ceux qui acceptent de le faire.” A
Boccara, “Concours et droits”, n.d. Boccara cites articles 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967.

31
They could continue to “tirer, exposer et vendre leurs photos comme ils l’entendent.” André Gouillou,
“Lettre sur l’article 5”, avril 1970.

32
The C.E.O. of the FNAC, André Essel, signed this promise in letters to the press. B.G.A., “A la suite de
protestations: le règlement du concours photographique ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ est amendé.”

282
history books.
33
If publishers and the press could return to that model, using a freely
accessible catalogue of Paris created by amateur photographers, why would they ever
choose to purchase illustrations from professional photographers again?
34
Roland
Bourigeaud, president of the Fédération Nationale des Sociétés Photographiques de
France, worried that this violation set a precedent “not only [for] financial losses from
eventual reproduction rights, but also [for] the suppression of the authors’ names on any
published or exhibited photographs.”
35

Despite criticism from the press and professional photographers, amateurs
remained enthusiastic about the contest’s mission to document Paris. They ignored
criticism that, echoing comments made about the Bimillénaire de Paris and its capitalist
motivations, charged that the FNAC would make a huge profit from the contest.
Ownership of the photos aside, with 14,006 photographers signed up by April 16, the
FNAC certainly stood to profit from record film and photo developing (if not camera)
sales during May 1970.
36
A journalist writing in the satirical newspaper Le Canard

33
G. Lenôtre, ed., Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures, (Paris: Ch. Eggimann, 1912-1914).

34
This eventually did happen to professional photography. Today, amateur photography has saturated the
photographic market. Amateurs are willing to sell their photographs for much less than professionals.
Some, excited by the prospect of seeing their work in print, will give away their images for free. Scholars
have pointed to the advent of digital photography as the beginning of amateurs’ effects on the professional
market: Stephanie Clifford, “For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path,” The New York Times,
March 29, 2010. The FNAC contest indicates that professionals worried about the explosion of amateur
photography long before that.

35
R., “Président de la F.N.S.P.F. communique.” Little did they know that, over the next few decades, the
institutionalization of photography in France would make the photograph’s author more, not less, important
to publishers and curators. For more about the emerging importance of the author see: Gaëlle Morel, Le
Photoreportage d’auteur: l’institution culturelle de la photographie en France depuis les années 1970
(Paris: CNRS Ed., 2006).

36
At the turn of the century, Kodak had used similar contests in order to promote sales. For more about
Kodak’s amateur photography contests see: “An Amateur Snapshot of Kodak’s Early Days,” Lens Blog,

283
enchaîné admired the city’s cleverness, “once again,” not only to “call [upon] the
enthusiasm and generosity of suckers [gogos]” but also to do so “for the benefit of a
private business.”
37
One participant refuted this charge, proudly declaring: “I am one of
these guys that the ‘Canard Enchaîné’ so kindly calls ‘generous suckers [gogos].’”
38
The
prize money did not drive him; instead he relished: “the absolute certainty […] of
participating in a useful project for the city that I love so much.”
39
Interviewed forty years
later, participant Christian Vigne did not even recall a public scandal about rights.
40
He
signed up for the contest: “Because I loved photography (this is still true) and Paris.”
41

Whatever their motivations, these enthusiastic amateur photographers would
create an invaluable archive of Paris in 1970. Despite the library’s failure to catalogue or
make the photographs available to researchers, its staff did recognize that making every
amateur photographer a documentarian had certainly multiplied the BHVP’s collections.
As Henry de Surirey de Saint-Remy, the director of the library in 1970, wrote, the
library’s photo archive was “as if by the wave of a magic wand, tripled, if not

March 2, 2012, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/an-amateur-snapshot-of-kodaks-early-days/.
André Essel did admit that the contest was “indiscutablement promotionnelle pour la photo et, par
conséquent, pour la F.N.A.C.” “On écrit au ‘Canard’.” “Communiqué à la presse”, April 17, 1970. The real
figure of participants is likely lower. The number 14,006 does not account for the fact that some
photographers likely signed up multiple times (Christian Vigne asked two friends to sign up so that he
could document three carrés). Christian Vigne, “Interview with photographer over email”, May 8, 2010.

37
“On écrit au ‘Canard’.”

38
P. D., Viroflay, “Courrier: Un Super-gogo bénévole,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres, spectacles, modernité,
September 1971.

39
Ibid.

40
Vigne, “Interview with photographer over email.”

41
Ibid.

284
quadrupled.”
42
Patrice Broussell, who became director of the library after de Saint-Remy,
praised the value of this “massive documentation […] on the state of the city at one given
date.”
43
The several thousand photographers who participated could simply cover more of
Paris than several dozen professionals.
Many participants attempted to document their squares as completely as possible.
In doing so, they evoked a nineteenth-century tradition of architectural and street
photography epitomized by Charles Marville rather than the story-telling street
photography of contemporary professional photographers and photojournalists. The
contest asked them to “systematically cover all of the streets and all of the squares, all the
monuments and all the buildings, and all of the green spaces, and cemeteries, and the
ground, and the underground […] and all the Parisians as well,” regardless of what they
found historically significant.
44
For some participants this comprehensive documentation
started with what one photographer dubbed “overall perspective” taken from a local bell-
tower or monument [fig. 5.2].
45
Then they moved down to ground level for generic street
views, pictures of waterways, sidewalks, and alleyways [fig. 5.3]. They photographed
building facades and storefronts [fig. 5.4]. One contestant plotted out all of the important
buildings in his square, which included the café-tabac, the bar-restaurant, the metro

42
Henry de Surirey de Saint-Remy, “Images de Paris confiées à Paris 1871-1971,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres,
spectacles, modernité, September 1971, 19.

43
“Paris, villages: Numéro spécial de Paris aux Cent Villages publié à l’occasion de l’exposition des photos
recueillies lors du concours photographique Paris aux Cent Villages; 17 novembre - 18 décembre 1976
BHVP,” Paris aux cents villages, 1976.

44
“Pour sauver Paris.”

45
P. D., Viroflay, “Courrier: Un Super-gogo bénévole.”

285
station, and the boulangerie. He made sure to take photographs of each.
46
Participants
gained entrance to private courtyards and buildings, and finally zoomed in and took
pictures of architectural details [figs. 5.5 & 5.6], without, of course, forgetting to
photograph the residents of their carrés [fig. 5.7].

Fig. 5.2: An example of a “general
perspective” taken from the July
Column at the Bastille (Mireille
Allegretti) and an example of the
binders of catalogued photos.

Fig. 5.3: A typical street
view in Belleville (Jean-
Paul Letourneur).
Fig. 5.4: Example of shot
of a building façade
(Claude Mougin, 17878).

Fig. 5.5: An interior courtyard along the
faubourg Saint-Antoine (anonymous).
Fig. 5.6: Architectural detail
(Evelyne Gabriel, 23039).

46
Ibid.

286

Fig. 5.7: Portrait of a concierge and child
(anonymous).
Fig. 5.8: Street view that cuts off the tops of
buildings (Max Amélot).

Fig. 5.9: Facades with tops cut off (Alain
Plantier, 11306).

Fig. 5.10: An oddly framed architectural detail
(anonymous).
While the FNAC photos multiplied the quantity of photographs at the BHVP, they
did not always contribute to the archive’s quality. Many of the contest photos are quite
beautiful: their content is well chosen and their execution (in the picture and the print)
technically sound. Some contestants, however, submitted blurry or poorly developed
photographs.
47
Others donated photos whose haphazard compositions suggest that they
gave little thought to what exactly their images documented. Contestants produced
images that are neither street views nor views of facades. Some look down streets, but cut
off a significant portion of the buildings that line them [fig. 5.8]. Others similarly capture

47
Many photographers developed their own photographs. Because some of them used cheap paper or did
not properly fix the images, some of their photos are more faded today than turn-of-the-century prints.

287
facades or architectural details with missing portions [figs. 5.9 & 5.10]. Yet others crowd
too much information into one frame, accurately documenting the bustle of city life, but
creating almost illegible photos [figs. 5.11 & 5.12]. Pictures such as these suggest that the
documentary impulse made it possible for participants simply to open the camera’s
shutter with the conviction that whatever etched itself onto the film was of value. Few of
their street photos offer the same framing or compelling subjects and moments of
contemporary professional photography.
48

Fig. 5.11: A photograph with too much
information (Saint Etienne, 23162).
Fig. 5.12: A dense composition
(Jean Delvolve, 10108).

In the end, relying on amateurs produced an uneven documentation of Paris in
May 1970. Not only were the contests’ photographs of varying quality: only 2,800 of the
original 14,006 participants even submitted complete entry packets.
49
The folders
dedicated to certain carrés contain hundreds of photographs by multiple photographers.
Others received no submissions. On the one hand, assigning photographers to squares

48
Professional photographers carefully selected their photographs, taking many more than they offered for
publication. Many of the FNAC photographers – driven by the need to document all aspects of the city –
submitted every photograph, regardless of quality, that they took of their assigned square.

49
Complete entry packets included documentation of the carré as well as entries in the two other prize
categories. The actual number of photographers is likely higher because many continued to submit
documentation of their carrés after the deadline had passed. “Le Roman-photo de l’opération ‘C’était Paris
en 1970’,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres, spectacles, modernité, September 1971, 10.

288
guaranteed the documentation of some out of the way places.
50
On the other hand, some
squares, for instance those containing les Halles, (as assignment that many participants
coveted for the contest’s “aesthetic [aspect] and historic aspect were perfectly united”
there), went nearly undocumented.
51
Most likely those assigned to such squares lacked
the time, money, or motivation necessary to complete their assignments.
Nevertheless, amateurs created an unparalleled archive of Paris seen through the
lens of photographers liberated from the constraints of publication and without an
audience in mind. Professional photographers took photographs that told a story, one that
they hoped would appeal to multiple editors.
52
Amateurs photographed objects and
scenes that they thought might one day have historical value. The FNAC contest
photographs thus are not just documents of Paris in 1970. As Broussel enthused in 1976,
they are also documents “of the way that Parisians saw their city and how they looked at
one another.”
53
In what they chose to photograph and how they chose to photograph it
amateurs captured the traces of multiple ways of seeing the city. Broussel predicted that
the photographs would show future generations how thousands of Parisians “saw, felt,

50
One photographer wrote to the FNAC thanking the contest organizers for the opportunity to “connaitre
un coin que j’ignorais absolument et qui m’a surprise.” O.A., Paris, “Courrier: Bravo,” La Galerie: Arts,
lettres, spectacles, modernité, September 1971, 186.

51
Vigne, “Interview with photographer over email.”

52
les rédacteurs des Éditions “Time’-’Life,” Le Reportage photographique, trans. Simon Noireaud
(Amsterdam: Éditions “Time-Life,” 1972), 68.

53
“Paris, villages,” np.

289
and interpreted their Paris.”
54
They also offer an invaluable testimony of how they
understood their city, its present, and its past as photographable commodities.

Topographic Photography of Urban Change
Like many projects to document Paris in photographs – be they Marville’s,
Atget’s, or those of the Commission Municipale du Vieux Paris – the FNAC contest was
predicated on the idea that photography needed to capture parts of Paris before they
disappeared. In 1970, however, Paris seemed to be changing more rapidly than ever
before. As its very name, “This was Paris in 1970,” not “This is Paris in 1970” indicated,
the city was changing so fast that its present was already its past. Participants’
photographs became historical documents even before they were developed. The real and
imagined rapidity of urban change in Paris drove the contest’s organization. And
participants responded to it as they tried to capture the city’s changing topography by
photographing elements of the past that remained in the city, the ruins of contemporary
construction, and the new cityscape that rose up over old Paris.
Throughout the previous decade it did seem as if Paris were changing with the
blink of an eye. Unlike other European cities, Paris did not experience a postwar building
boom, largely because it had suffered little destruction during World War II. Although
most Parisians initially celebrated the city’s survival, by the early 1950s many began to
regret it. One commentator even remarked jealously that London, thanks to German

54
de Saint-Remy, “Images de Paris confiées à Paris 1871-1971,” 19.

290
bombs, had ample parking lots.
55
Postwar industrial recovery, however, would drive
redevelopment and expansion in Paris, beginning first at the city’s edges with the
construction of housing for new workers.
56
In 1958, construction of the boulevard
périphérique, a ring highway around the city, began. The “périph’” replaced la Zone, the
shantytown built on the former site of Paris’s fortifications, which was destroyed after
World War I. Starting in the 1960s, a series of slum-clearance projects razed working-
class neighborhoods in the 13
th
, 19
th
, and 20
th
arrondissements and replaced them with
modern apartment blocks. In 1966 and 1967, new expressways along the Seine’s right
bank meant that cars appropriated the quays from fishermen, strollers, and sunbathers.
Planners also systematically zoned Paris in such a way as to remove industrial activity
from inside city limits.
57
In 1958, the city’s wine markets left their centuries-old location
along the quai Saint-Bernard in the 5
th
arrondissement. And, the city’s central markets at
les Halles moved to the suburb of Rungis in 1969 in order to facilitate the flow of goods
that arrived at the markets by highway and via the Orly airport.
58

55
Henry Gasquet, “Nous irons à Paris ... en voiture,” Touring: revue du Touring club de France, April
1951.

56
For more about the postwar development of French suburbs see: Annie Fourcaut, Emmanuel Bellanger,
and Mathieu Flonneau, Paris-banlieues, conflits et solidarités: historiographie, anthologie, chronologie,
1788-2006 (Paris: Creaphis editions, 2007); Rosemary Wakeman, The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

57
For more about debates about zoning Paris, and how national interests pushed to remove industrial
production from Paris and relocate it to the provinces see the last chapter of Wakeman, The Heroic City.

58
For scholarship about and contemporary criticism of these renovations see: Norma Evenson, Paris: A
Century of Change, 1878-1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Louis Chevalier, The
Assassination of Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); François Loyer, “Préface,” in La
Bataille de Paris: des Halles à la Pyramide, chroniques d’urbanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 7–30. In his
articles for Arts, Yvan Christ repeatedly urged his readers to “Dénoncez les vandales!” responsible for
contemporary urbanism.

291
These changes inspired the mayor of the 20
th
arrondissement Claude Gourbeyre to
propose the idea for a massive project to photograph Paris.
59
The contest and urban
change would also have been linked in the minds of its participants, who might have
learned about both in newspapers.
Throughout the month of March, contest
advertisements appeared alongside articles
about the opening of the boulevard
périphérique and advertisements for
“Galaxie,” a new-town development in the
13
th
arrondissement [5.13].
60
Since the
1950s, urban developers had touted the well-planned new town, which combined
residential and commercial spaces, as the solution to the tentaculaire sprawl of Paris’s
suburbs.
61
The Galaxie ad, in particular, spoke to the massive urban changes that would,
as its developers assured, “finally [bring to] Paris what used to be done only outside of
Paris.”
62
Galaxie’s tall, sleek buildings offered an added incentive to photograph Paris
before hundreds of similar towers had changed the cityscape forever.

59
“Le Roman-photo de l’opération ‘C’était Paris en 1970’.”

60
“Un Concours de photos sur Paris en 1970,” Le Monde, March 5, 1970; “Galaxie Advertisement,” Le
Monde, March 8, 1970.

61
For more about new towns in France start with: K. Cupers, “In Search of the User: The Experiment of
Modern Urbanism in Postwar France, 1955--1975” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Interfaculty Program on
Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning, Harvard University, 2010).

62
“Galaxie Advertisement.”

Fig. 5.13: Advertisement for Galaxie, a ‘new
town’ built in the 13
th
arrondissement.

292

Fig. 5.14: Gébé, Paris’s changing topography, reprinted in La Galerie.

While journalists and scholars would criticize and protest against the renovations
that destroyed large swathes of Paris, the contest adopted a neutral stance.
63
Organizers
seemed resigned to urban change, declaring: “One cannot stand in the way of the
transformation of Paris.”
64
One could mourn the city’s changes, the ad continued, but
“isn’t it the defining characteristic of healthy cities to be at once rooted in the past and
built for the future…”?
65
Many Parisians did not react quite as neutrally, as the cartoonist
Gébé showed in his parody of the contest published in the magazine Pilote [fig. 5.14].
66

Gébé depicted a pair of lovers, in front of a bench and tree, with one whispering to the
other “this will be the bench of our first love. This will be our tree…”. As “Paris
evolves” and the tree becomes a stump and a phone booth replaces the bench, the young
man revises “Ok! This will be our telephone booth.” As “Paris transforms itself” he

63
See, for example, the series of articles that journalist and art critic André Fermigier wrote first in Le
Nouvel Observateur and then Le Monde between 1967 and 1985 as well as historian Louis Chevalier’s
1977 polemic against Parisian renovations: Loyer, “Préface”; Chevalier, The Assassination of Paris.

64
“Paris mobilise tous les Parisiens qui ont un appareil photo,” Le Monde, March 28, 1970.

65
“Pour sauver Paris.”

66
The cartoon is reproduced in the special issue of La Galerie devoted to the contest: Gébé, “Paris qu’on
pioche,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres, spectacles, modernité, September 1971. Gébé, Georges Blondeaux, was a
prolific cartoonist, who published in major French periodicals including Paris Match, and worked as editor
of Hara-Kiri and Charlie-Hebdo. For more about Gébé see: “Supplément spécial Gébé,” Charlie-Hebdo,
April 14, 2004.

293
expounds: “This will be our construction site.” The FNAC contest, Gébé charged,
showed similarly naïve optimism for contemporary urbanism.
Instead of challenging urban change, the organizers of the contest stressed the
possibility of preserving the city in photographs. Advertisements insisted that it would be
fruitless to restage “the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” Participants’ photos
would soften the destruction by documenting for posterity what was disappearing.
67

Echoing the language of the Commission municipale du Vieux Paris, contest
advertisements lauded the value of “sav[ing] at least the image of that which is
condemned or might be condemned to destruction.”
68
Their submissions would ensure
that destroyed sections of the city survived in the historical record.
Organizers’ belief in the photograph’s ability to preserve the city scientifically
and objectively had deep historical roots. A similar idea had shaped the first systematic
photographic documentation of Paris during the Second Empire, done by Charles
Marville. Scholars and critics have characterized the urban renovations of Paris under the
Fifth Republic, which inspired “C’était Paris en 1970,” as a replay of the Second
Empire’s changes.
69
The fact that both projects produced unprecedented photographic

67
Contest organizers reminded potential participants that “la mort des pierres, comme la mort des homes,
ne s’accomplit définitivement qu’avec l’oubli.” “Pour sauver Paris.”

68
“Paris mobilise tous les Parisiens qui ont un appareil photo.”

69
Anthony Sutcliffe, for example, describes the Fifth Republic’s urban renovations as a replay of
Haussmannization. Neither he, nor other scholars, have remarked upon the parallels between Marville’s
project and the FNAC contest. Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993), 160.

294
documentation of the city only strengthens this parallel.
70
Furthermore both sets of
photographs – as well as those of the Commission municipale du Vieux Paris – ended up
at the Bibliothèque historique.
Publicity for the contest featured old photographs in order to highlight the value
of the photographic historical record. One advertisement’s photo, taken in the early
twentieth century, shows the original Palais de Trocadero, built for the 1878 World’s Fair
and destroyed in 1937 to make way for a more modern construction [fig. 5.15]. The
ornate structure, which echoed the ‘exotic’ architecture of North Africa and the Middle
East, sits within the framing base of the Eiffel Tower, which sports unfamiliar orientalist
arches on its lowest platform. This image emphasizes that even those monuments that
remain in the city change over time. Its caption urged readers to participate “so that,
tomorrow, photos like this one will preserve the memory of Paris today.”
71

70
Unlike Haussmannization, the urban changes of the 1960s produced no municipal efforts to preserve
objects and artifacts pulled from the buildings slated for destruction. Haussmann, after all, had sought to
preserve artifacts of Paris’s past, culled from demolished buildings and neighborhoods at the city’s
historical museum. A few highly visible private and community campaigns did try to save certain structures
– notably the Baltard pavilions at les Halles. Orren Hein, a young American, even tried to buy them. Two
pavilions were eventually saved. The Parisian suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne purchased one; the other was
shipped to Japan. For more about these efforts see: “Urbanisme. Parapluies pour une poignée de dollars,”
l’Express, June 7, 1971; Bertrand Lemoine, Les Halles de Paris: L’histoire d’un lieu, les péripéties d’une
reconstruction, la succession des projets, l’architecture d’un monument, l’enjeu d’une “Cité” (Paris:
Equerre, 1980).

71
This advertisement is reproduced in “Le Roman-photo de l’opération ‘C’était Paris en 1970’,” 7.

295

Fig. 5.15: Contest ad featuring a photograph from the Archives de la Planète,
reprinted in La Galerie.

The 1970 contest’s advertisements also paid homage to the history of collecting
photographs as historical documents. The photo of the Palais de Trocadero belonged to
one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious image archive projects: Albert Kahn’s les
Archives de la planète. In 1909, Kahn, a wealthy Parisian banker, launched an effort to
create an archive of the entire globe in photos and on film.
72
Over the course of the next
two decades, he collected stereoscopic views, color photographs, and films of
architecture, nature, and everyday life in France’s many regions and around the world.
Although the financial crisis of the 1930s bankrupted Kahn, his archive remained intact,
and historical societies regularly gathered at the Bibliothèque historique in the 1950s and

72
For more about Kahn and the Archives de la Planète see: Teresa Castro, “Les Archives de la Planète: A
Cinematographic Atlas,” Jumpcut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 48 (Winter 2006); Teresa Castro,
“Les Archives de la Planète ou les rythmes de l’Histoire,” 1895: bulletin de l’Association française de
recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma 54 (2008): 57–81; Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday,
and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

296
1960s to watch projections and films from it.
73
Organizers were keenly aware that by
proposing to record history, their project emulated efforts from the past.

“Des Restes de l’an 1000”
Participants reproduced the nostalgia for traces of old Paris that marked turn-of-
the-century photo documentation projects. Their submissions, Henry de Surirey de Saint-
Remy wrote:
hint at a way of seeing and feeling that is altogether consistent with the standing
tradition of the [library’s] existing collections. ‘Glints of the past,’ ‘Hidden Paris,’
or else ‘From typical to picturesque,’ are some of the captions at which certain
participants tried their hands.
74

Citing the captions that photographers gave their own images, de Saint-Remy shows that,
like G. Lenôtre and his fellow amateur history buffs, these participants imagined that old
buildings and architectural details contained the spirit of the past. Discovering history
among construction sites surprised and delighted some. For the category of little-known
places or aspects of the city, for example, one contestant submitted a photo of the
pavillon Carré de Baudouin, an eighteenth-century decorative building, or folly, built
before the French Revolution and still standing in the 20
th
arrondissement [fig. 5.16].
75

On its back, he romantically imagined the building mulling over the secrets of its past:

73
The Actualités archives at the BHVP contain notices advertising projections of images from the Archives
de la Planète in 1957-1961, 1963-64, and 1966-67. These notices are tucked into folders that contain
invitations to the Bibliothèque’s exhibitions held in the early years of the twentieth century. From 1921 to
1950, screenings were also regularly held at Kahn’s home and gardens in Boulogne-Billancourt. For more
about the screening and reception of Kahn’s films see Chapter 7 of: Amad, Counter-Archive, 226.

74
de Saint-Remy, “Images de Paris confiées à Paris 1871-1971,” 20.

75
The photograph’s caption incorrectly identifies the building as Marie-Antoinette’s hunting lodge. Also
called the pavilion Pompadour, in the nineteenth century it belonged to the family of Jules and Edmond de

297
Its aristocratic façade [front]
Still stands in the neighborhood
Under its melancholy eye
History has come to hide
Young, it made great efforts
To be welcoming
Now, with its secrets
It dwells on its past.
76

Many participants similarly focused on finding what this photographer dubbed the hiding
places of Parisian history.

Fig. 5.16: The pavilion Carré de Baudouin
(Jean-Michel Sicard [sic],16595).

Goncourt. For more about the Goncourt brother’s interest in the eighteenth century see: Debora Silverman,
Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989).

76
Folder 576, Photos FNAC, BHVP. “Son front aristocratique/s’impose encore dans le quartier/sous son
œil mélancolique/l’histoire est venue se cacher/Jeune il s’est beaucoup démené/à se faire
hospitalier/maintenant avec ses secrets/il se penche sur son passé”

298

Fig. 5.17: Vieux Paris details
(Bernard Pouzet, 19884).

Fig. 5.18: Vieux Paris details
(Serge Bain, 12309).
Fig. 5.19: Vieux Paris details
(Lionel Favreau, 21955).
In photographing traces of the past, participants created images that bear
remarkable resemblance to old documentary photographs. Not surprisingly, given the
long history of photographing the city, they even captured many of the same objects as
these old pictures. Channeling turn-of-the century urban documentation practices that G.
Lenôtre had described nearly 60 years earlier, participants photographed wrought-iron
details, staircase railings, and doorknockers [figs. 5.17, 5.18, & 5.19].
77
Their
photographs of architectural details parrot the framing and cropping of illustrations
published in Parisian photohistories during the 1910s and 1920s [figs. 2.4, 2.5, & 2.6].
Other participants captured courtyards and alleyways that looked unchanged since
Marville documented Paris as well as a wooden cart seemingly taken straight from an
Atget image [figs. 5.20, 5.21, & 5.22]. Contestants hunted for these old objects and
scenes familiar to them from old pictures, testifying to the important role that
photographs played in their understanding of Paris’s past.

77
Lenôtre described his friends and colleagues: “enthusiastic investigators travel all over Paris, penetrate
into the courtyards of its oldest buildings, brave concierges, climb staircases, tour the building, noting all
that makes it unique; a door knocker, wood-paneling, a sculpted door or window frame, a painted ceiling, a
Bacchus head at a cellar entrance, a wrought-iron balcony, a wooden banister, a trumeau mirror.” G.
Lenôtre, ed., Le Vieux Paris: souvenirs et vieilles demeures, vol. 1 (Paris: Ch. Eggimann, 1912), np.

299

Fig. 5.20: An alleyway that
seems to have survived the
twentieth century unchanged
(François Berton, 12276).
Fig. 5.21: Atget could have taken
this photograph (J. C. Longeron,
20164).
Fig. 5.22: An Atget photograph
of the Cour des Dragons that
incorporates similar elements, in
Saint-Germain-des-Prés 1900:
vu par Atget.

Fig. 5.23: Detail of metro
entrance (Catherine Le Pape).
Fig. 5.24: Detail of the Marché
Saint Quentin pavilions
(Didier Baitreaud).
Fig. 5.25: A letter box
(D. Trinquecostes),
reprinted in La Galerie.

In addition to capturing traces of Paris familiar from old photographs, participants
adapted the form and look of these documents to new subjects. They imitated the close-
up photographs of architectural details that were a hallmark of turn-of-the-century
photographs, often appearing in illustrated histories of the city. They turned this mode on
characteristic details of Paris 1900, such as Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau metro
entrances and iron-and-glass pavilions of the city’s various markets as well as the

300
quotidian fixtures, such as mailboxes, of contemporary life [figs. 5.23, 5.24, & 5.25].
78
In
at least one case, a photographer also mimicked turn-of-the-century processing
techniques. His photographs captured ruins of the past, especially picturesque buildings
in the process of demolition and decay [fig. 5.26].
79
And he printed them in sepia-tones,
reproducing, to quote Louis Chéronnet, the “beautiful, slightly faded shades of red” of
nineteenth-century photographs.
80
When asked to create historical documents of the city,
such participants restaged not only the scenes familiar from old photos, but also their
very material qualities.

Fig. 5.26: Sepia-toned print (anonymous).

In pursuit of comprehensive documentation, however, photographers also
produced images that defied conventions of Vieux Paris or picturesque photography. In

78
Atget, for example, photographed scenes of daily life at the market pavilions at les Halles, but his
photographs capture bustling scenes of market activity. He reserved the close framing of architectural
details for “historical” artifacts from earlier centuries.

79
This photographer was assigned to a square on the hill of Belleville and Ménilmontant.

80
Louis Chéronnet, Paris tel qu’il fut: 104 photographies anciennes (Paris: Editions Tel, 1951), 5.

301
some cases, participants’ obligation and/or desire to photograph objects, buildings, and
monuments from different angles and points of view and from varying distances
interfered with otherwise picturesque images of Vieux Paris. One participant, for
instance, framed the Regard de la lanterne, a small seventeenth-century stone building in
the 19
th
arrondissement that served as an access point to a subterranean aqueduct, against
a nineteenth-century building [fig. 5.27]. This photographer felt compelled to take a
second shot of it, this time from the other side, with a recent building for the backdrop
[fig. 5.28]. Taken together, these two photographs – one, a Vieux Paris-style document of
Paris’s photographic and architectural past, the other a study in contrast between Vieux
Paris and its future replacement – mark the collision of old photographic styles,
monuments of Paris’s past, and signs of its future that animated the contest’s mission and
its entrants’ images.

Fig. 5.27: Regard de la lanterne, framed
against 19
th
-century construction
(Saint Etienne, 23162).
Fig. 5.28: Regard de la lanterne, framed
against 20th-century construction
(Saint Etienne, 23162).

302
“Paris se penche sur son présent”
While many participants in “C’était Paris en 1970” documented Paris “mull[ing]
over its past,” the contest organizers insisted during the month of May 1970 that “Paris
study its present.”
81
They emphasized the need to photograph the new and changing.
Participants also needed to create a photographic record that would “save today’s Paris
from oblivion.”
82
In response, contestants captured the emergence of what, in 1967,
journalist and art critic André Fermigier dubbed “Paris III”: a radical new cityscape that
sharply contrasted with the remains of Vieux Paris (Paris I) and Haussmann’s Paris (Paris
II).
83
Critical, nostalgic, and celebratory by turns, participants’ photos betray deep
concerns about what urban redevelopment meant for the city’s present and future.

Fig. 5.29: Graffiti that pays homage to May ‘68
(Michel Cristescu, 12790).

Fig. 5.30: Political graffiti
(Jean-René Teichac, 24978).

81
“Pour sauver Paris.”

82
Ibid.

83
Loyer, “Préface,” 32–33.

303

Fig. 5.31: “Trash collectors’ strike”
(Anne Marie Joubert, 23199).
Fig. 5.32: “Ils sont venus, ils sont tous là – Brel
[sic]” The song is by Charles Aznavour
(Véronique Daumont, 14431).

For many participants, their efforts to photograph Paris in 1970 continued the
spirit of 1968’s protests against “capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism.”
84

Participants photographed the posters and graffiti of ongoing social movements whose
demands evoked the protests and language of ’68 protests [figs. 5.29 & 5.30].
85
They also
documented the evidence of social unrest in the city, from piles of garbage left by the
garbage collectors’ strike to marchers in the street [figs. 5.31 & 5.32].

84
Two thirds of the participants in “C’était Paris en 1970” were younger than 30. Although May ’68 was
far from exclusively a youth movement, it was likely that many of these young photographers had
participated in the protests and strikes of two years earlier. These numbers are from the FNAC’s press
release on April 16, 1970. “Communiqué à la presse.” The social and political unrest of ’68 began with
student protests in Paris at the beginning of May and became, by June, the largest general strike in the
nation’s history. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 4,
8. The literature on May 1968 is vast. Start with Ross’s book, which explores its many different narratives.
For more about photography and ‘68 see: Audrey Leblanc, “La couleur de Mai 1968,” Études
photographiques, no. 26, Saisi dans l’action : repenser l’histoire du photojournalisme (November 2010),
http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index3121.html.

85
In one instance two separate participants captured the same graffiti declaring “libérez [??] le dantec le
bris,” referring to the intellectuals Jean-Pierre Le Dantec and Michel Le Bris, who were both arrested in
1970 because of their affiliation with the illegal Maoist newspaper La Cause du peuple. For more about Le
Bris and le Dantec within the context of French intellectuals’ engagement with Chinese communism see:
Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of
the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

304

Fig. 5.33: “This was still Paris in 1970”
(Alain Plantier, 11306).
Fig. 5.34: “Paris: 1m
2
of open space per
inhabitant” (J. C. Longeron, 20164).

Moreover, as Patrick Broussel noted, their photographs served as social
commentary “insisting on the squalid aspects of certain neighborhoods or the inhumanity
of contemporary urbanism.”
86
One photographer pointedly captioned courtyard toilets:
“This was still Paris in 1970” [fig. 5.33]. While documenting the same carré in the 11
th

arrondissement, a different photographer captured a pleasant-looking young boy sitting
on what looks remarkably like a bale of straw, and remarked: “Paris: 1m
2
of open space
per inhabitant” [fig. 5.34]. Images such as these protested against the lack of indoor
plumbing and open spaces in working-class neighborhoods. Although real estate
developers and government officials at the time argued that their projects provided much
needed quality housing, many Parisians remained skeptical of these claims. Gébé
encapsulated participants’ concerns when he depicted the destruction of picturesque Paris

86
“Paris, villages,” np.

305
in the name of “we must provide people with decent housing!” that, instead, resulted in
the construction of office buildings [fig. 5.35].
87

Fig. 5.35: Parody of the need to build housing, Gébé.

A spirit of protest against the forces of real-estate development drove
photographers to pay particular attention to the human costs of redevelopment. As they
photographed anonymous buildings in the process of destruction, contest participants,
unlike turn-of-the-century Vieux Paris photographers, often seem more motivated by a
concern for the future of their inhabitants than for the historical significance of the
buildings in question. Contestants’ photographs of buildings in the process of demolition
and the traces of those already destroyed (fireplaces and staircases that remained in
shared walls) capture the price and disruption of renovation [figs. 5.36 & 5.37]. One
submission voiced this concern for the human cost of renovation, asking on the back of a
picture of a billboard announcing demolitions for the Galaxie development: “But who
lived here?”

87
Gébé, “Paris qu’on pioche.”

306

Fig. 5.36: Remains of a building left in a shared
wall (anonymous).
Fig. 5.37: Buildings torn apart to make way
for the Galaxie development (Xavier
Baptistal).

Fig. 5.38: A fragment of the fortifications that used to surround Paris
(Jean Peyrin, 11390).

Participants’ photographs nonetheless suggest the impossibility of historical
preservation in the face of urban renovation. Amateur photographers framed urban
change in ways that show how it ran roughshod not just over peoples’ lives but also over
the past. In the area around the site of the future Bercy interchange of the boulevard
périphérique, several photographers documented a remaining cornerstone of the
fortifications that had once ringed the city. One photographer, instead of framing this
subject as a historical artifact in the manner of other participants, composed a wider shot
that transforms it into one of many elements of an urban wasteland that the highway

307
would soon replace [fig. 5.38]. He framed the cornerstone as a developer might have seen
the remains of the past: no more significant than the other debris – broken pipes, pieces
of tarmac, and a rusted barrel – waiting to be cleared from the site. One can imagine that
these elements might even be left over from la Zone. If the ruins of Paris’s fortifications
could not resist modern urbanization, how could average Parisians hope to survive it?

“Un Peu de l’an 2000”

Fig. 5.39: Near la Villette
(Michel Amet, 17602).
Fig. 5.40: Near the Place d’Italie
(Xavier Baptistal).
Fig. 5.41: Front de Seine
(Tom Keller, 1024).

In documenting the cityscape of Paris III, participants in “C’était Paris en 1970”
accused new construction of brutally dominating old Paris. Henry de Surirey de Saint-
Remy, director of the BHVP, described how in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
photographs, the “past and the present rub shoulders in the same image.”
88
Photographs
from 1970 show no such intimacy: the new now towers over the old.
89
Photographers

88
de Saint-Remy, “Images de Paris confiées à Paris 1871-1971,” 17.

89
The Montparnasse Tower, completed in 1972, is the best-known skyscraper project within the city limits,
but tall buildings invaded working-class neighborhoods throughout Paris. For more about building
urbanization during this period see: Chevalier, The Assassination of Paris; Evenson, Paris.

308
assigned to squares all over the city consistently produced similar images of towers rising
up over old buildings, blocks, and streets [figs. 5.39, 5.40, & 5.41]. Standing back from
their subjects, they framed photographs that captured just how massive these new
buildings were in comparison to the two or three story buildings that remained from the
days when Paris’s outer arrondissements were small villages [fig. 5.42]. Other
participants tilted their cameras up, giving the towers, which Yvan Christ dubbed
“poisonous […] giant mushrooms,” a dizzying dominance over fragments of the old city
[fig. 5.43].
90
New construction became even more menacing when photographers framed
it so that old Paris dead-ends in a modern tower, casting its shadow down on an already
dark and narrow street [fig. 5.44]. Their photos show old Paris trapped by modernization.

Fig. 5.42: Towering over
former villages
(Philippe Besacia).
Fig. 5.43: Dizzying towers,
Front de Seine
(Jean-René Teichac, 24978).
Fig. 5.44: New construction is
a dead-end, near the Place des
Fêtes (anonymous).

These photographs seem to suggest that contemporary urban renovation was
worse than Haussmannization. Yvan Christ dubbed this period of urban change

90
Saint Remy cites Christ in: de Saint-Remy, “Images de Paris confiées à Paris 1871-1971,” 20. In 1967,
before the completion of any of these projects, André Fermigier described less sinister forms “une partie de
dominos redressés à la vertical.” André Fermigier, “Le Troisième siège de Paris: Allez voir au Grand Palais
les dominos de l’an 2000, c’est de votre vie qu’il s’agit (Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 avril 1967),” in La
Bataille de Paris: des Halles à la Pyramide, chroniques d’urbanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 34.

309
“Sarcellization,” after housing blocks built in the 1950s in the northern suburb of
Sarcelles.
91
Sarcellization marooned Parisians in high-rise buildings, which
overshadowed the rest of the city. At least Haussmannization had opened Paris to the
circulation of light, air, and people. In 1974, then President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
would ban the construction of skyscrapers within the city limits. In 1970, however,
nothing indicated that towers would not become the new norm. Indeed, to some, Gébé’s
vision of Paris in 2001 as a solid wall of glass-fronted modern buildings and highways
along the Seine, punctuated only by skyscrapers, seemed all too likely [fig. 5.45].
92

Fig. 5.45: Gébé imagines Paris in 2001, reprinted in La Galerie.

Photographs from the FNAC contest show that average Parisians – who were
neither urban historians nor architecture critics – brought a historical consciousness and a
critique of new construction to the building projects that peppered Paris’s outer

91
Yvan Christ, Les Métamorphoses de la banlieue parisienne: cent paysages photographiés autrefois par
Atget, Bayard, Beissein, Daguerre... [etc] et aujourd’hui par Charles Ciccione (Paris: A. Balland, 1969),
xvi. Sarcelles is a northern suburb of Paris, which in the 1950s and 1960s saw the construction of a “grand
ensemble:” numerous tower residences for immigrants (including many Pieds-Noirs from Algeria). It
became one of the most infamous cases of postwar development. For more about Sarcelles see: Evenson,
Paris, 245–249; Camille Canteux, “Sarcelles, ville rêvée, ville introuvable,” Sociétés & Représentations 17
(2004): 343; Annie Fourcaut, “Les premiers grands ensembles en region parisienne: Ne pas refaire la
banlieue?,” French Historical Studies 27, no. 1 (2004): 195–218.

92
Gébé, “Paris qu’on pioche.” Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Play Time offered a similar critique of the city. Tati
presents a comical but bitterly critical depiction of a future Paris dominated by the International Style in
which Vieux Paris and even the Eiffel Tower are nothing more than distant reflections in the city’s glass
façades.

310
arrondissements. Historians of urbanism and architecture have noted that new urbanism
projects did not cause large-scale public protest as long as they remained along the city’s
edges: along the Front de Seine, at Montparnasse, near the Place d’Italie, and on the hill
of Belleville.
93
They claim that Parisians would only mobilize when destruction and
reconstruction threatened the city’s historic center.
94
The photos of “C’était Paris en
1970” demonstrate, to the contrary, that average Parisians did care about renovation
projects in outer districts. During the contest they both documented localized campaigns
to save neighborhoods and took photographs that trouble over the effects of Paris’s new
“poisonous mushrooms.”
Participants criticized modern architecture in their photographs of the city of the
future. All over Paris, they took similar photos of the facades of new tower buildings.
Looking up, they filled the frame with the building’s façade, reducing it to a series of
evenly placed windows [figs. 5.46 & 5.47]. The camera angle makes the buildings
vertiginous, while the framing excludes all other elements – including the sky – and turns
the building façade into an incomprehensible geometric pattern. Modern architecture,
these images say, alienated and disoriented.

93
Architectural historian François Loyer has described how the press in the 1960s drew on the language of
“hygiène sociale” to support the destruction of neighborhoods in the city’s outer arrondissements: Loyer,
“Préface,” 13.

94
Loyer has argued, for instance that “the affair of les Halles was the catalyst for Parisians’ historical
consciousness.” And indeed vocal press campaigns against new construction, focusing on the site of les
Halles, would only beginning in 1969 and 1970. Ibid., 14.

311

Fig. 5.46: Modern façade, Front de Seine
(Jean-René Teichac, 24978).
Fig. 5.47: Façade of modern
building, near Popincourt
(J. C. Longeron, 20164).

These amateur images showed how modern architecture also changed the social
fabric of Paris. Participants, as well as the editors of the magazine of art and culture, La
Galerie, which published a special issue devoted to the contest, compared photographs of
new and old buildings side by side. In doing
so, they drew on the logic of repicturing
layouts in photohistories of Paris, such as
one chosen by Musée Carnavalet curator
Jacques Wilhelm in Paris, mon coeur
(1945) that presented the contrast between
Vieux Paris and Haussmann’s Paris [fig.
5.48].
95
Comparison was key to reading these images. One photographer insisted: “do not
separate” the “old-fashioned perspective” “from the modern perspective” [figs. 5.49 &
5.50]. In La Galerie, the editors explicitly stated the judgment this comparison afforded.

95
Louis Chéronnet and Louis Ferrand, eds., Paris, mon coeur (Paris: Editions Pierre Tisné, 1945).

Fig. 5.48: Paris II and Paris I,
Paris, mon coeur.

312
The advent of “air conditioning” had revolutionized not only the look of building facades,
but changed people’s lives. “In those days, windows could open and inhabitants [could]
lean out to watch the spectacle of the street,” but in 1970, residents of new construction
would be cut off from their neighborhoods.
96
New apartment buildings would alienate
Parisians from their neighbors and their city because they prevented the very sort of
interactions that occurred when photographers tilted back their cameras and
photographed smiling Parisians instead of permanently-shut windows [fig. 5.51].
97

Fig. 5.49: “Old-fashioned
perspective” (Desir, 11668).
Fig. 5.50: “Modern perspective”
(Desir, 11668).
Fig. 5.51: “Before the
expulsion” (anonymous).

When taking pictures of the details and facades of the newest buildings in Paris,
participants applied modes of scientifically documenting their city developed at the turn
of the twentieth century. They produced topographic documents: photographs of Paris’s

96
“Special Issue: ‘C’était Paris en 1970’,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres, spectacles, modernité, September 1971,
56–59.

97
Whoever catalogued the FNAC photographs at the BHVP found a similar message in another photograph
of an old woman leaning out of a window. This person chose to end the album dedicated to square 1554,
part of the 13
th
arrondissement where the Galaxie development would soon be built, with an image of a
Parisian engaged in street life from up above. Also, this photograph shows that most Parisians did not – and
still do not – have air conditioning.

313
streets, buildings, and details, both new and old. In doing so, they reproduced
photographic documentation practices premised on the idea that the photograph presented
a literal or exact copy of the objects it pictured. Photographs presented a transparent
historical record at the same time that they represented change and progress through the
contrast of old and new. And yet even as they employed the camera as a scientific
instrument that objectively recorded reality, participants also used photographs to
interpret and criticize the objects and changes they documented.

Pictures of Pictures of the Everyday
The contest’s slogan, “from this moment forward, by the hundredth of a second,
Paris examines its present,” also promoted the idea that photographs preserved history
because they captured slices of time.
98
This notion had first appeared in Parisian histories
in the 1930s, when old snapshots served as glimpses of the city’s past. The idea that the
photograph froze time in increments of 1/100
th
of a second, or centiseconds, shaped how
amateur photographers framed Paris in 1970. Capturing time meant photographing, as the
contest requested, “all the Parisians as well in their everyday lives.”
99
In response,
participants worked as photographic anthropologists, documenting the fleeting, everyday
scenes and people of Paris’s present. Once again, they recreated scenes that they knew
from street and press photography. As they bore the traces of Paris’s photographic

98
“Pour sauver Paris.”

99
“La France mobilisée pour constituer les archives photographiques de Paris,” Union (Reims, n.d.).

314
heritage, contestants’ photographs similarly worked to comment on 1970’s elements of
continuity and change as well how Parisians resisted and embraced the new.
Working in the tradition of street photographers since the 1920s, participants took
photographs that emphasized the banal, personal, and distinctly non-monumental. As Izis
described his work for Paris Match, “I preferred to take photos where there was nothing,
or very little was happening.”
100
The French press of the 1940s and 1950s developed an
insatiable demand for the work of Izis and his contemporaries, which photographer
Marcel Bovis dubbed “illustrated stories recounting the lives of ordinary people.”
101

Publicity materials encouraged submissions resembling this tradition of press
photography:
Of course, the monuments will be preserved. Everything that one shows tourists.
The entire Paris-on-stage. All of spectacular Paris. But who will have
photographed intimate Paris – hidden deep in a courtyard, or so mundane that one
has a hard time imagining [these scenes] one day becoming as precious as their
equivalent under Napoleon or under Philippe-le-Bel….
102

In response, photographers sought to capture the intimate side of the everyday, such as
images of laundry hung out to dry [figs. 5.52 & 5.53]. When they photographed the
shabby underbelly of Paris, such as the homeless sleeping on benches and sidewalks, they

100
N. Neveux and Izis, “Izis: photographe travaille sur les nerfs,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres, spectacles,
modernité, September 1971, 30. Izis contrasts his work to that of other press photographers who “face à
l’événement, faisaient des photos-choc pour retenir l’attention du lecteur.”

101
Cited in: les rédacteurs des Éditions “Time’-’Life,” Le Reportage photographique, 68.

102
“Pour sauver Paris.”

315
paid homage to the likes of Germaine Krull, André Kertesz, and Brassaï, whose
photographs had first upended monumental depictions of Paris in the 1920s [fig. 5.54].
103

Fig. 5.52: “in 1970, on a
beautiful spring day,
people still dry their
laundry in the sun,”
(Catherine Driguet,
21383).

Fig. 5.53: A voyeuristic view of the
intimate lives of Parisians
(anonymous).
Fig. 5.54: “Homeless at rest (rue
Cuvier)” (Henri Musialek, 22766).
Organizers’ insistence on the commonplace also found historical precedence in
Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète. During the same years that Vieux Paris amateurs
actively avoided capturing contemporary details of everyday life, Kahn’s operators mixed
views of monuments and mountains with photographs and films of everyday dress, work,
and habits. While it is unlikely that most of the contestants would have seen the contents
of Kahn’s archive, organizers were certainly familiar with the precedent of valuing the
banal details of everyday life as disappearing historical artifacts.
104

103
Sichel argues that these photographers upended monumental visions of Paris: Kim D. Sichel, “Paris vu
par André Kertész: An Urban Diary,” History of Photography (Summer 1992): 105–115. For more about
photographic representations of the homeless see: Kim D. Sichel, “Pictures of the Edge: Photographic
Representation and the Margins of Society,” Exposure 26, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 50–54.

104
After all they had used images from Kahn’s archive for contest publicity.

316

Fig. 5.55: “The siesta between 1
and 2pm” in the Tuileries
(Julien Fion, 27724).
Fig. 5.56: “The Tuileries in 1970
at 6:30pm, young people”
(Julien Fion, 27724).
Fig. 5.57: “An avid angler”
Front de Seine (Claudine
Chenevard, 16427).

Scenes of the everyday offered connections to past photographic styles and
documentary projects, but they also seemed to offer direct connections to timeless
elements of Paris’s past. Many participants found that the scenes of Parisians’ everyday
habits they documented had not changed for centuries. As one commented on the back of
a photograph of laundry drying: “In 1970, on a beautiful spring day, people still dry their
laundry in the sun” [fig. 5.52]. The caption creates continuity with the photographer’s
past, but also foreshadows the future historian’s voice, remarking on the unchanging
habits of Parisians.
105
Like much of urban history, it proposes that the city’s infrastructure
changes while its people remain the same. Scenes that featured leisure activities –
strolling in parks, sitting on benches, and fishing in the Seine – offered similar
interpretations of historical continuity [figs. 5.55, 5.56, & 5.57].
106
Only their dress had

105
Since then, scholars have indeed studied hygiene: Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:
Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); Georges Vigarello,
Le Propre et le sale: l’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen âge (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1985).

106
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century when river traffic was funneled away from the river and city center
into a series of canals in the north of the city, representations of the Seine showed it as a place of work and

317
changed since engravers, lithographers, and photographers of the last two centuries
portrayed Parisians engaged in the same pastimes.

Fig. 5.58: A street sweeper in 1970 near
Montorgueil (Lionel Favreau, 21955).
Fig. 5.59: A street sweeper in 1970 near
the Place d’Italie
(Françoise Lefebvre, 17546).

Fig. 5.60: A street sweeper in Sortilèges de
Paris (1952) (Patrice Molinard).
Fig. 5.61: A street sweeper in 1906 in
Dans les rues de Paris au temps des
fiacres (1950) (uncredited).

Amateur photographers created further continuity with the past by imitating well-
known urban typologies of petits métiers: from pavers, peddlers, and painters to market

bustle. After these canals were built, the river became primarily a place of leisure. For more about the
cultural and social history of the Seine and its Parisian banks, which are now classified as a UNESCO
world heritage site, see: Isabelle Backouche, La trace du fleuve: La Seine et Paris (1750-1850) (Paris:
Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2000); François Beaudoin, Paris/Seine: ville
fluviale, son histoire des origines à nos jours (Paris: Nathan, 1993).

318
sellers and knife sharpeners. Street sweepers, for instance, appeared in photographs taken
all over the city [fig. 5.58 & 5.59]. These images evoke two centuries of written and
visual descriptions of them that Parisians would have known from books, photo books,
photohistories, and historical exhibitions at the Musée Carnavalet.
107
When they took
pictures in the city’s streets, participants captured the same lone figures wielding the
exact same model of twig-broom, set slightly apart from the bustle of the city [figs. 5.60
& 5.61]. Participants’ photos did document change: Parisians of African descent now
worked as municipal street sweepers [fig. 5.58]. But they also captured continuity, for at
a time of increasing modernization and mechanization of labor, some work would
continue to be performed by hand in traditional ways.
Photographs that imitated representations of traditional trades, however, largely
showed how tenuous modern Paris’s link to the past was. Many of the petits métiers and
scenes that participants documented were on the verge of extinction in 1970. Participant
Christian Vigne remembers focusing on photographing “small Parisian workshops
destined to disappear rapidly.”
108
A caption in La Galerie described how a photograph of
a concierge momentarily froze this figure, which otherwise “tends to beat a retreat before

107
This tradition included written descriptions, such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1782 Tableau de Paris,
as well as visual representations: Honoré Daumier’s 1840 sculpture “Le Portier parisien – Le Balayeur,”
Atget’s turn-of-the-century photographs, Irving Penn’s 1950 studio portrait Balayeur de rue, and other
contemporary photos. Popular songs about Paris often described street sweepers. For example, French
singer Jacques Dutronc sang in his 1968 “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille:” “Je suis l’dauphin d’la place
Dauphine/et la place Blanche a mauvaise mine/Les camions sont pleins de lait/Les balayeurs sont pleins de
balais.” The Musée Carnavalet’s 1941 exhibition of photographs of petits métiers would have included
images of street sweepers. Paintings, engravings, and statues of the city’s small trades were also present in
the museum’s permanent collections. Photo books about Paris such as Paris de jour (1937) and Sortilèges
de Paris (1952) contained pictures of contemporary street sweepers as did photohistories such as Dans les
rues de Paris au temps des fiacres (1950).

108
Vigne, “Interview with photographer over email.”

319
the invasion of intercoms, mail boxes, double glass doors, and marble entry halls, in
short, in front of the invasion of the modern, well-appointed apartment building
[standing].”
109
1970 offered a last opportunity to document Parisians whose resemblance
to those in old pictures helped to forge the city’s historical identity.
Contest participants also drew on Paris’s historical photographic record in order
to create convincing depictions of resistance to the city’s changing infrastructure.
Throughout the decades that preceded the “C’était Paris en 1970” contest, photographs,
in particular those taken during the Liberation of Paris and published for the occasion of
the Bimillénaire de Paris, had celebrated Parisians’ defiant resistance and capacity for joy
in the face of hardship.
110

During the contest, participants’ images displayed hope for the renovated city in
portraits of its children. In the area around the Front de Seine development, one
photographer captured a small boy clutching a large briefcase on his way to school [fig.
5.62].
111
The boy blithely navigates the uneven terrain of the construction site, walking
on the few inches of solid ground that border it. He, like another young boy photographed
in the Bercy interchange system, head down, intent on pushing a baby carriage through a
construction site, seems undaunted by the renovations of Paris [fig. 5.63]. The second
photographer’s caption “Ups and downs [cahots]!” describes the scene – indeed the baby

109
“Special Issue: ‘C’était Paris en 1970’,” 42.

110
This is quite similar to the argument that historian Charles Rearick makes in: Charles Rearick, The
French in Love and War: Popular Culture in the Era of the World Wars (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1997).

111
He brings to mind, of course, the young boy in Albert Morisse’s 1956 film Le Ballon rouge. For more
about the film and Paris see: Piet Schreuders, “Het Parijs van le Ballon rouge,” Furore, no. 21 (2012).

320
carriage would lurch a bit in this terrain – while also providing a metaphor for the
Parisian experience of urban renovation. These ups and downs were cultural as well as
physical, and the photograph of the boy at the Front de Seine provides a portrait of the
city faced with American cultural imperialism [fig. 5.62]. He passes in front of three
posters advertising the Harlem Globe-Trotters. Although he represents the very
demographic that the Globe-Trotters targeted, he is seemingly impervious to their star-
spangled appeal.
112
With him, the photographer creates an image of the hardy and
independent Parisian, neither disturbed by urban change nor seduced by American
entertainments.
113
The prominent place afforded to children in these photographs
suggests that the next generation would be better able to navigate the changing city.

Fig. 5.62: On the way to school
(Jean-René Teichac, 24978).

Fig. 5.63: “Cahots!” (Naujac Andree, 12320).

112
The Harlem Globe-Trotters are an exhibition basketball team known for their comic routines and
basketball-handling tricks.

113
For more about American cultural imperialism in Europe see: Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French:
The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Victoria De Grazia,
Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2005).

321

Fig. 5.64: Children playing
hopscotch under the périphérique
(anonymous).

Fig. 5.65: An adventure on the périph’
(anonymous, same photographer as fig. 5.64).

Fig. 5.66: Robert Doisneau,
children playing in the suburbs,
La Banlieue de Paris (1949).
Fig. 5.67: Doisneau,
young people along the Zone,
La Banlieue de Paris (1949).

Contest submissions pictured the endurance of Parisian panache, as they captured
Parisians playing in and defying urban wastelands much in the manner of those who
joined the Resistance during World War II and had their pictures taken at the barricades.
One photographer documented children playing hopscotch in the construction site

322
underneath the newly constructed boulevard périphérique, impervious to the
photographer as well as the traffic that would soon pass over their heads [fig. 5.64].
Participants captured Parisians in cheeky defiance of construction projects and new
automobile-only territories: the same contestant in the carré around the Bercy
interchange also photographed a man and boy directly defying the “no pedestrians” sign
that looms over their heads [fig. 5.65]. These photographs bear striking resemblance to
Robert Doisneau’s portraits of children and young people, taken in the 1940s and 1950s,
playing in and around the ruins of the destroyed Zone, which would become the
boulevard périphérique [figs. 5.66 & 5.67].
114
Their resemblance marks urban change in
1970 as the chaos of suburban development let loose within the city limits.
115
But these
photographs also captured a moment of resistance unique to the era.
Many “passéistes,” as certain nostalgic Parisians were called, resisted urban
change by ignoring the new.
116
Their nostalgic images of the ruins of old Paris and the
city’s disappearing traditions echoed the opinions of many contemporary critics and
commentators who mourned the city of the past. The photographer Izis, for example,
admitted to loving the Paris of 1970 a little less than the city of the 1930s. He explained
“it’s still a marvelous city, once you live there, you never need to go anywhere else.

114
While he often worked within the city proper, Doisneau lived in Paris’s southern suburbs and
photographed working-class life there. These photographs were very close to Doisneau’s heart. He
published many of them in the 1949 La Banlieue de Paris with text by Blaise Cendrars. His letters with
Cendrars about the book and its photographs were the only correspondence that he saved. They are kept at
the Atelier Doisneau, run by his daughters in his former studio in their childhood home. “Visit to Atelier
Doisneau,” December 14, 2009.

115
François Loyer described how it was as if “le paysage tentaculaire des banlieues cernant Paris venait
tout d’un coup à l’envahir et à le submerger.” Loyer, “Préface,” 13.

116
Yvan Christ referred to himself as a “passéiste:” Christ, Les Métamorphoses de la banlieue parisienne,
ix.

323
However, it is difficult today to take a picture without finding a car in the frame.”
117

Indeed parodies and criticism targeted the presence of cars everywhere in the city. As the
editors of La Galerie reminded its readers, the city had so many automobiles that at the
“Place de l’Opéra, the traffic cops are replaced every hour so that they don’t die
asphyxiated like rats…who fall dead after three minutes!”
118

Fig. 5.68: New cars from the Citroën plant
(Charles Huchet, 15117).

Fig. 5.69: A modern Parisian
(Xavier Baptistal).
Not all participants, however, dwelled on the destruction of urban renovation and
the loss of traditional and historic Paris. Some created images of Paris’s resilience that
portrayed Parisians as modernizers and innovators. They celebrated the car’s presence in
the city, whether coming off the assembly line at the Citroën factories or squeezed into
small parking places along its narrow streets [fig. 5.68]. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, for
example, a participant photographed not only the Café Flore and the Deux magots –
established hotspots of previous generations of Parisian artistic and literary life – but also
le Drugstore Publicis, which embodied a new style of hangout. It was a truly French store

117
Neveux and Izis, “Izis: photographe travaille sur les nerfs.”

118
“Special Issue: ‘C’était Paris en 1970’,” 158.

324
with an American flair that sold books, records, newspapers, and magazines, while also
serving hamburgers and milkshakes and filling prescriptions.
119
Similarly, participants
may have captured Parisian petits métiers, but they also photographed the newest and
latest style of Parisians, including hippies and members of the Hare Krishna movement
[figs. 5.69, 5.70 & 5.71]. Just as the director of BHVP claimed that “[Atget’s
photographic] testimony is the most precious when it deals with the Paris and Parisians of
his own time,” the submissions of “C’était Paris en 1970” provide invaluable
documentation of all that was new in 1970.
120
Their photos argue that Paris was neither a
museum repository of images of its own past, nor a construction site for sanitized and
dehumanizing suburbs, but a vibrant city still capable of innovating for the future.

Fig. 5.70: Hippies (Sylvain Sermanet),
reproduced in La Galerie.
Fig. 5.71: Hare Krishnas in front of Le
Drugstore, (Pierre Witkowski),
reproduced in La Galerie.

119
Started in 1957 by advertising giant Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet on the Champs-Elysées, “le Drugstore”
soon had multiple locations in the city. For more about Bleustein-Blanchet and le Drugstore see: Marcel
Bleustein-Blanchet, The Rage to Persuade: Memoirs of a French Advertising Man (New York: Chelsea
House, 1982); Gérard Chevalier, “La boutique des années 1960: un nouvel espace pour un nouveau mode
de consommation,” in La mode des sixties. L’entrée dans la modernité, ed. Dominique Veillon and Michèle
Ruffat (Paris: Autrement, 2007), 193–201.

120
de Saint-Remy, “Images de Paris confiées à Paris 1871-1971,” 17.

325
As amateur photographers documented Paris in May 1970, they captured events
and detailed its everyday life. They demonstrated their knowledge of historical images, in
many cases capturing people who might have stepped off of the pages of earlier Parisian
photohistories. They portrayed Paris as a place where the past live on in the streets of the
present. They mimicked the photography of contemporary photojournalists that
demonstrated Parisians’ resilience in the face of hardship. Yet even as they photographed
familiar scenes and figures, participants also took pictures that directly addressed their
own moment’s particular story of change and continuity. They framed Paris as a place
where the new threatened to overshadow the past, while also counteracting that image
with evidence of the city as a fountain of resistance and creativity.

The FNAC Photographs After May 1970
In 1971, historian Alain Decaux, addressing both the organizers and contestants
of “C’était Paris en 1970,” imagined “a century from now a historian finding the
thousands of photographs you put together. What gratitude he will owe you!”
121
In the
months and years since, however, “C’était Paris en 1970” has not lived up to Decaux’s
enthusiastic prediction. The FNAC exhibited a selection of the photos at the pavilions of
les Halles in 1970, drawing a large audience and mixed reviews. Despite popular
enthusiasm for the project, though, these photos largely have been forgotten.
122
Historians
have rarely heard of the photographs, let alone thought to consult them.

121
“Alain Decaux: les historiens vous remercient,” La Galerie, September 1971.

122
Some of the FNAC photos did travel to the USSR in 1974 as part of an exhibition about contemporary
French architecture. The BHVP would also occasionally lend photos from it to exhibitions within France.

326
The contest “C’était Paris en 1970” ended where it had started: at the Baltard
pavilions of les Halles. From October 28 to November 15, 1970, visitors could see a
selection of contestants’ submissions (including all of the prize winners) in Pavilion 8,
where just two years earlier, they could have bought eggs and poultry. There the FNAC
celebrated the successful completion of the operation to preserve Paris in photographs. In
advertisements for the exhibitions, organizers bragged:
the twenty arrondissements, the seventy-eight neighborhoods of the capital have
been illustrated, observed, immortalized, in their richness or in their destitution,
their brilliance or their banality, such as they were at least for a moment in the
history of Paris. No other capital in the world has such a heritage to offer the
future.
123

And the FNAC cited 70,000 visitors who attended despite a general boycott of the
exhibition in the press. Still riled by the contest’s supposed disregard for copyright law,
all major French magazines and newspapers refused to review or otherwise provide free
publicity for the contest.
124
Although the FNAC had created a rich trove of images, a
special issue dedicated to them published in August of 1971 by the relatively short lived
magazine of arts and culture, La Galerie, was the first and only large-scale use of the
contest’s images in the press.
The FNAC’s rhetoric continued to emphasize how the contest had captured a new
vision of the capital in its entirety, but the prize-winning photographs suggest that

“Exposition d’architecture française contemporaine en l’U.R.S.S.,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, February
1974, v. The box of documents relating to the contest that is held at the BHVP contains a series of letters
from institutions and exhibitions requesting loans of certain images.

123
“Le Roman-photo de l’opération ‘C’était Paris en 1970’,” 13.

124
No newspaper would review or publicize the exhibition. The FNAC had to buy advertising space to
publicize it. Ibid., 12.

327
organizers judged submissions according to aesthetic criteria. One participant criticized
the jury for selecting generic shots of Paris. She lamented: “Paris in May 1970 seems to
have been completely lost, for the images provided do not at all situate the spring of
1970.”
125
Another photographer who visited the exhibition twice, complained: “both
times I came out profoundly disappointed!”
126
He too felt that the photos on display
captured little of the change and rupture of their moment. In particular, what must have
been a highly-stylized photo of the Eiffel Tower left him sputtering: “What will Parisians
of the year 2070 think when they see a deformed Eiffel Tower? They’ll think that
Parisians of 1970 did not know how to build straight.”
127
The contest photos on display,
he suggested, were too artistic to function as reliable historical documentation.

Fig. 5.72: The first prize photograph (Bellin),
reproduced in La Galerie.

125
Mlle C.G., Paris, “Courrier: Quels critères?,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres, spectacles, modernité, September
1971.

126
M. R.G., Issy-les-Moulineaux, “Courrier: Une Tour Eiffel bicornue,” La Galerie: Arts, lettres,
spectacles, modernité, September 1971.

127
Ibid.

328
The photograph that won first prize presents the most galling betrayal of the
contest’s prerogatives [fig. 5.72]. It presents none of the elements of change and
continuity that made so many of the “C’était Paris en 1970” photos compelling. Instead it
presents a technically perfect (each water droplet discretely frozen in midair), well-
composed, and completely generic photograph that could have been taken in any
European city. As one participant keenly remarked how could “a bronze horse head
among sprays of water […]possibly […] epitomiz[e] Paris?”
128
Granted, the prize
committee had been overwhelmed by submissions and had only two weeks make its
selections.
129
But without a caption you would not even know that this photograph was
taken in the French capital, let alone in 1970. Its selection speaks to a fundamental
disconnect between the contest’s rhetoric and its jury’s decisions. Contest organizers
asked participants to create a new kind of photo archive that privileged documentation
over aesthetic sensibility, and yet the people who judged the photographs did so with
aesthetic criteria in mind. Over the course of the next several decades, this privileging of
aesthetic criteria and an interest in photography as a separate aesthetic medium, even in
the case of photographs in historical archives, helped the FNAC photographs on their
slide into oblivion.
130

128
Ibid.

129
The committee awarded many other prizes. This photograph won first prize, while a variety of
photographs that arguably better captured Paris in May 1970 took second and third prizes.

130
To compound the FNAC photographs’ problems, no one at the library seemed sure as to the final state
of the photographers’ rights to their images. The BHVP received numerous requests to lend the
photographs for exhibition and publication. Although more often than not the library complied, they
repeatedly denied requests for publication or online exhibition, claiming they did not own the rights. The
library did, in fact, have the right to exploit these photographs, but the uproar caused by professional

329
***
In 1958, art historian Georges Duthuit denigrated the photograph’s ability to
capture the present. “‘Photography,’” he claimed, “‘turns life into something at once
passive and belonging to the past... The future has no place in the photograph, which
automatically belongs solely to time past.’”
131
The use of photography to constitute
archives of the present during “C’était Paris en 1970” both confirmed and challenged
Duthuit’s judgment. Contest organizers, as the use of the past tense in the contest’s title
indicates, did imagine that photographs instantly became artifacts of the past. Their
primary value, however, would only take shape in the decades to come. By creating an
archive of all of Paris, they hoped to capture the things and places that would become
significant to future historians. Organizers encouraged participants to photograph scenes
“so mundane that one has a hard time imagining them one day becoming as precious as
their equivalent under Napoleon or under Philippe-le-Bel….”
132
The future, contest
organizers implied, would treasure such photographs of “time past.”
During the “C’était Paris en 1970” contest, participants already conceived of their
photographs as historical documents. Responding to the contest’s rhetoric, they captured
the objects and scenes of the city that struck them as valuable for future generations,
creating documents of streets and architecture as well as people and everyday life. The

photographers about the contest made its successive directors uncertain about that fact. Information from
letters and memos in the box of documents about the FNAC contest held at the BHVP.

131
Originally published in Les Lettres nouvelles, cited in: Michel F. Braive, The Photograph: A Social
History, trans. David Britt (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 333. Duthuit was a leading expert on Matisse
and the Fauves painters. He also wrote about photography, responding to André Malraux’s Musée
imaginaire with his own Le Musée inimaginable (1956), and publishing L’Image et l’instant in 1961.

132
“Pour sauver Paris.”

330
framing, processing techniques, and compositions these photographers chose betray their
familiarity with a century of photographs of Paris and the idea that photos would be used
to tell history. Rather than simply photographing scenes that they knew from historical
texts; contestants reproduced the contours of the old photographs that they knew from
exhibitions, books, and the press. They combined attention to the city’s photographic past
with new compositions that captured its dramatic changes. In doing so, these amateur
photographers created compelling documents of a city pulled between its past and its
future. As the editors of La Galerie noted
about one photograph of a workshop: “at 25
rue Miollis, artisanal practices seem to take
us back to the heart of the nineteenth
century” [fig. 5.73].
133
And yet, in this
particular workshop: “it’s a matter of
making springs for the deity of our time: the
automobile.” Whether they photographed
new tower buildings rising up over old streets and blocks or workshops such as this one,
contestants’ photographs, sometimes even within the same image, capture the tensions
between long-held traditions (and their representations) and the drive to modernize Paris
with fast cars and skyscrapers. In capturing this tension, participants also preserved
something of how they, themselves, understood Paris.

133
“Special Issue: ‘C’était Paris en 1970’,” 82.

Fig. 5.73: A nineteenth-century workshop for
the twentieth century (Jacques Choppin),
reproduced in La Galerie.

331
The photographs of “C’était Paris en 1970” likewise embody tensions in the idea
of photos as historical documentation. For each photo that captures an emotional or
subjective interpretation of the challenges of urban change, the archive contains hundreds
that endlessly catalogue streets, buildings, and physical details. The sheer mass of such
photographs demonstrates that many contestants thought researchers would most likely
use their photos as a sort of illustrated encyclopedia of Paris in 1970. They must have
imagined historians as detectives, searching in their pictures to clarify some essential
detail or to illustrate a conclusion reached by other means. Alain Decaux, the historian
who predicted the gratitude that future scholars would express upon discovering this
archive, was projecting his own delight at having found a photograph of the Italian inn
where Napoléon Louis Bonaparte (the first Napoléon’s nephew) died in 1831.
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Although the photograph helped Decaux resurrect Forlì of the 1830s, he only sought it to
add color to a scene that he already knew from other sources. Organizers seemed
similarly hard-pressed to imagine a different sort of historical method that the “C’était
Paris en 1970” photographs might facilitate. After all, by awarding the first prize
photograph to a scene that denoted nothing particular about the city in a moment of
radical urban change, they seemed to disavow the contest’s ability to do anything but
capture generic recycled scenes of Parisian beauty.
And yet, the same moment that produced a photographic survey of one month in
the French capital also produced microhistory, a new historiographic movement premised
on the value of reconstructing past events, entire towns, or even individual lives in

134
Decaux, “Alain Decaux: les historiens vous remercient.”

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painstaking detail.
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Five years after the FNAC contest, Annales historian Emmanuel Le
Roy Ladurie would publish the first microhistory of the French historiographic tradition:
Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324.
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Certainly the same desire to create an
exhaustive documentation of Paris over the course of one month bears some connection
to scholarship that sought similarly exhaustive documentation (for Le Roy Ladurie, the
notes of an agent of the Inquisition) in order to study places and episodes in depth.
Practitioners of microhistory build conclusions about societies and cultures out of the
minutia of the historical record. Taken as representations of Paris, the photographs of
“C’était Paris en 1970” may not suffice to write a microhistory of the French capital in
May 1970. After all photographs of architectural details and streets can only tell us so
much about the past. If viewed as material traces of the month-long production of a mass
urban historical archive, however, the contest photos become material sources for a
microhistory of amateur photographers’ participation in the much larger process of
photographically documenting and narrating Parisian history that compellingly shaped
municipal and popular historical practices throughout the twentieth century.

135
Microhistory is often associated with the Italian historiographic tradition and notably the work of Carlo
Ginzburg. For a discussion of it in the French tradition start with: Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds.,
Histories French Constructions of the Past, Postwar French Thought Series (New York: New Press, 1995).

136
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan: de 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). An
American scholar wrote the other classic French microhistory: Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin
Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
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Conclusion

Paris’s Municipal Historical Institutions Since 1970:
Collecting the Historical Visual Record

Photography had indeed, as Marcel Poëte predicted in the 1920s, revolutionized
the study of Parisian history. That it did so is hardly surprising. Throughout the twentieth
century critics and commentators repeatedly declared that photography had
fundamentally altered any number of domains: as communications scholar Jean Keim
claimed in 1963, “photography has invaded the totality of our existence.”
1
Photographs
had not only colonized the archives of municipal historical institutions but also the pages
of books and magazines, and they had spawned the creation of institutions dedicated
solely to their dissemination and preservation. Over and over again those interested in
Parisian history found that photos, whether encountered as loose prints or published in
magazines and books, provided a unique encounter with the past. In photos they saw both
the possibility for unparalleled scientific documentation and the ghostly traces of past
time. This tension between the photograph as evidence of what it pictured and as the
container of dreams, memories, and associations animated its use throughout the century.
The contest “C’était Paris en 1970” closes this study of Paris’s photographic
histories because its photos offer up tangible evidence of the ways that photography had
shaped how the wider public, not just librarians, curators, historians, and critics,
understood the city’s past. In looking at photographs, they had learned history, and they
had learned about how photographs could function as documents of it. But the FNAC

1
Jean A. Keim, “La photographie et sa légende,” Communications 2, no. 1 (1963): 41.
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contest also offers a fitting conclusion because it stands for the end point of a particular
way of collecting and understanding photographs as historical documents. Beginning in
the 1980s, photographs would enter the collections of the Bibliothèque historique and the
Musée Carnavalet first as works of a photographer – filed by author – and second as
documents of the city. This epilogue charts how this shift came about and argues that the
interest in photography as a transparent medium of documentation that developed at the
beginning of the century, by its end, had evolved into a self-conscious attention to the
history of Paris in pictures as the history of photography and film itself.
For although the acquisition of the FNAC photographs at the Bibliothèque
historique marked the last large-scale positivist project to document Paris in photos as a
means of preserving its history, the 1980s saw the construction of a new municipal
historical institution of a similarly ambitious scope: the Vidéothèque de Paris, an archive
of every filmed image of the city ever made. The history of collecting practices at these
two institutions, along with the Musée Carnavalet in the 1980s speaks to the true
emergence of a canon of visual Parisian history over the course of the twentieth century.
They no longer sought to acquire just any image that would document Paris and its past.
Rather, they sought to amass the photographs and films that Parisians already recognized
as historical documents of the city.

After FNAC: the Bibliothèque historique and the Musée Carnavalet
The “Cétait Paris en 1970” photographs helped revive photo collecting at the
BHVP. They set in motion institutional changes that led to an increased appreciation not
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just for the utility of the photograph for history but also for the history of photography
and the history of photographers.
2
These new values changed what types of documents
would be collected in the following decades at both the Bibliothèque historique and the
Musée Carnavalet. And they also shaped how curators and patrons alike would value and
use existing collections of photograph