Illuminating the City of Light
The Making of Paris and the Modern City
Paris was made for the night. Standing atop the Eiffel Tower as the sun goes down, the streets pulse like fissures of lava in the crust of the city. Like the Japanese art of kintsugi, they join the city in gold. At street level, the lights come up and wash the stone façades along the boulevards in a golden glow, and their reflections melt into the Seine like a river of honey.
But until the 1660s, the City of Light was no such thing.
Like other cities of the time, darkness brought a pall that smothered urban life, turning streets into the treacherous terrain of murderers and thieves. By the time the lights first went on in the Parisian night, the French capital had become by day the first truly modern city, one in which urban life had been transformed and the city itself was a marvel to explore. Thanks to the enterprising efforts of entrepreneurs and the Bourbon kings, a war-torn wasteland first became the Paris we think of today, a city nonpareil.
Though Paris had been the capital of France from 987, centuries of war and religious strife had left it decimated and abandoned by its kings. When Henri IV took the throne in 1589, he reclaimed Paris as the seat of power, established a state policy of religious tolerance, and made peace with France’s enemies. With peace, it was time to build.
And build he did.
The first project he undertook was the construction of the Pont Neuf. While today it is Paris’s oldest standing bridge, at the time it was a novelty, a feat not only of civil but also social engineering. Built as the first bridge in Paris without housing, and with the Western world’s first modern sidewalks, the Pont Neuf offered Parisians an opportunity to see their city for the first time from the middle of the Seine river while experiencing spaces that were “absolutely reserved for pedestrians,” as one guidebook put it. As historian Joan DeJean describes in How Paris Became Paris, the view from the bridge made “Parisians aware that their city was now a sight worthy of visual appreciation.”
It quickly became the city’s most popular crossroads, and a “great social leveler” where Parisians first rubbed shoulders with strangers outside their class and social spheres. On the bridge, everyone from aristocrats to artisans could hear not only the latest news, but also enjoy street theater, stand-up comedy, and spicy political commentary—and in another first, outdoor shopping, as booksellers and other vendors set up stalls to sell their wares. With so many people and so much information, the Pont Neuf became a nexus of civic awareness but also disorder—occasional political unrest but more frequent daily traffic jams.
The bridge also spawned the invention of a new word to describe all these “people on foot”—the piétons, or pedestrians. The Pont Neuf enticed the aristocrat to step down out of his carriage and to join the riffraff, and so it was here that the first steps were taken in making Paris the original walking city. The Pont Neuf was “the place where Paris first became Paris, as well as the place where the modern city’s potential first became evident.”
Henri IV’s next great public work was similarly revolutionary.
The king wanted to build a magnificent public square not only to beautify the city and host public ceremonies, but to provide Parisians with a “proumenoir,” a place to walk in their increasingly populated city. In another first, the royal project would be financed by private investors and built by private developers under the watchful eye of the crown. When construction of the Place Royale finished in 1612, “Paris acquired the first purpose-built public recreational space in any European capital.” The square was surrounded by beautiful brick homes—virtually identical, one of the earliest examples of terraced housing—built atop covered walkways and commercial spaces where the merchants who lived above could sell their goods.
The memes write themselves: this kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism was first pioneered in Paris.
The neighborhood was immediately popular, both as a destination and a place of residence—so popular that aristocrats eventually bought up most of the houses surrounding the square over the ensuing decades. The popularity of the Place Royale also spurred the development of the surrounding area, the Marais, and with an artistic community and an “unprecedented early manifestation [of] youth culture.” Four hundred years later, the Marais is as hip as ever—naturally, it’s modern Paris’s gayborhood.
Henri IV’s last great project before he was assassinated (not for his urbanist ideas) was a plan to create a new residential island in the middle of the Seine. From two uninhabited islands—one occasionally hosted grazing sheep—the city embarked on its first attempt at urban land reclamation, driving piles and piers into the river and building embankments to create new land with a recognizably man-made shape. On this new island, a plan of generous lots and wide, right-angled streets was laid out in Paris’s first example of grid planning. It was there on the Île Saint-Louis on which Paris’s first houses were constructed from the now classic white pierre de taille (cut and smoothed stone), which would inaugurate a new era in Parisian building methods in a medieval city still largely built from wood.
With the Pont Neuf, the Place Royale, and the Île Saint-Louis, Henri IV’s visionary urbanist thinking would lay the literal groundwork for a new type of city, but it was his grandson, Louis XIV, who would implement such thinking on a citywide scale.
In 1669, Paris was still encircled by its medieval walls. It was also an era when the French still won wars, and so as Louis XIV fortified the national border and made Paris safe from invasion, he ordered the demolition of the city’s walls, marking the first time since it was founded by the Romans that “Paris was not a walled enclave, shut off from its surroundings, but instead a kind of city then unfamiliar to Europeans—an open city.”
Louis replaced the walls with a “rampart of trees” and built a “cours, a gigantic walkway or space for communal walking,” later called the “boulevard,” that made Paris
“a place dedicated to pleasure,” the kind of public city where people expected to find every entertainment associated with modern urban culture—from opera and dance to shopping and fine food—and where they expected to take pleasure in simply walking in the streets.
Louis thought beyond the streets and built embankments along the Seine to allow Parisians to admire the river, including specific spaces for pedestrians called trottoirs. He expanded the Tuileries gardens, built the famous Champs-Élysées and the Cours-La-Reine, and installed benches along all the public promenades. The idea of strolling sur le boulevard entered the vernacular, as did the newfangled idea of walking to get “fresh air,” because it was good for one’s health.
It was under Louis XIV’s reign that the Parisian flâneur was born—and the king himself was among them. During the years when he was executing his vision, “journalists regularly recorded sightings of the king ‘walking all over the city’ like an average Parisian—to be sure that Paris was becoming the kind of city in which ‘everyone…can walk about with great ease.’” Louis XIV was also concerned about vehicle congestion and embarked on a program of widening, straightening, and aligning city streets. Notably, Louis XIV achieved this transformation “without the wholesale destruction associated with Paris’ second major redesign in the nineteenth century” under Baron Hausmann.
But everything the Bourbon kings built was inaccessible after sundown.
Louis XIV would change that, too. In March 1662, the king issued a royal patent to a private investor named Laudati de Caraffe who first conceived of “an idea fundamental to our concept of a modern city: a city can only function as it should—that is, around the clock—if its streets are lit at night.” For more than a century and a half, the Parisian government made several abortive attempts to light its streets, including ordering private homeowners to keep candles lit in their street-facing windows. The city also installed lanterns in some public spaces in the 1640s, but it too abandoned this effort.
Until Louis XIV and Laudati de Caraffe arrived, Parisians who wished to venture out at night carried torches to elude those lurking in the dark. On October 14, 1662, Laudati opened the Center for Torch and Lantern Bearers of Paris. His employees bore torches and lanterns “stationed at strategic points in the most frequented areas of the city” and “for a set fee light-bearers would illuminate your way to any spot in Paris.”
Louis XIV and Laudati grasped that public safety, expanded into night, would be a boon for commercial prosperity. While Laudati’s system of lightbearers lasted in some form until the French Revolution, the king and his chief financial adviser, Colbert, realized that a more expansive approach to street lighting could have a more revolutionary impact on Parisian life. So in March 1667 they appointed Nicolas de La Reynie as lieutenant general of the Parisian police and directed him “to purge the city of disorder and to create abundance for its inhabitants.”
La Reynie immediately got to work, and by October 1667, the city had installed 2,736 stationary metal lanterns on Paris’s 912 streets. The lanterns had two-foot-square glass panels, inside of which burned enormous candles that could last up to 10 hours. Attached to the sides of houses about one story above the street, the lanterns were accessed by a pulley system that lowered them to the ground, where the candles could be replaced and lit. Initially limited to the winter months, by the end of the century the lanterns were operating for nine months of the year.
La Reynie also deployed police officers to man the streets at night. Crime fell dramatically, business hours were extended, and late night socialization—the new concept of “nightlife”—became a reality as shops, restaurants, and cafés extended their hours. A guidebook from the 1690s stated that Paris’s street lighting “alone is worth the trip, no matter how far away you live. Everyone must come and see something that neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever dreamed of.” Inspired by Paris, other cities no longer had to dream: street lighting caught on across Europe, with Amsterdam introducing a system in 1669, followed by Berlin in 1680, then Vienna in 1688, and London by 1691 (but only on moonless nights). Meanwhile, the Parisian system continued to expand: “By 1702, 5,470 lanterns were positioned all through the city’s streets. By 1729, that number had grown to 5,772; and by 1740, to 6,408.”
Unsurprisingly, the revolution happening on Paris’s well-lit streets transformed Parisian society, too. The public boulevards and parks allowed for social mixing between classes and an unprecedented level of freedom for women. As DeJean writes
Foreign visitors to seventeenth-century Paris were constantly amazed at the freedom women enjoyed there, at what a visible presence they were in every new public venue then created—behavior that was clearly unfamiliar in other European capitals.
Meanwhile, the great works built by Henri IV and Louis XIV required tremendous sums, and a new class of nouveau riche (itself a neologism) financiers rose, often from rags to riches, to finance royal ambitions. This new Paris was of course imperfect, as the later Revolution would lethally prove, but it was one in which “all residents share the same space—and usually on an equal footing.”
Paris would of course continue to evolve in the ensuing centuries. Hausmann’s grand boulevards would bulldoze huge portions of what remained of the medieval city, the Eiffel Tower would later rise above the mansard roofs, motor vehicles would clog the city’s streets, and the lanterns would give way to electric lightbulbs. But much of the Paris of the 17th-century Bourbon kings, the world’s first modern city, remains. From the Pont Neuf to the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), one can amble down the ample sidewalks of Paris’s tree-lined boulevards. And when the sun goes down, and the streetlamps start to glow, Paris again becomes the City of Light, as it first did three-hundred and fifty-seven years ago—when the Sun King brought daylight to the Parisian night.
Great post! It’s always nice to appreciate the things we take for granted.