Musical accompaniment: Ça valait la peine by Coralie Clément

Paris comes to life in vivid color as the City of Light in our collective imagination a little before the turn of the century, but what was it like before the 1889 Paris Exposition, when the Eiffel Tower debuted… in other words, in the era when the Revolution was long behind it but before modernity began to creep in?

Imagine being able to prowl the streets of Paris before the turn of the century! The city was a mysterious place, filled with cramped streets and intriguing shadows. City officials knew Paris was extraordinary and that it was changing, so they hired Charles Marville to immortalize the place in pictures.

Marville made this self-portrait, but his specialty was photographing places.

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Let’s have a look at some of Marville’s work. Almost all the pictures here were taken in the early 1860s.

La Bièvre

Met Museum

Rue Estienne from the rue Boucher (First Arrondissement):

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Rue de Constantine

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Passage Saint-Guillaume (vers la rue Richelieu) (first arrondissement)

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The last photograph was taken by Charles Negre. The year was 1853 and the man is Henri Le Secq, who was himself a photographer. Le Secq is surveying the city exactly the way one should: in a top hat and standing beside Stryge, the ‘spitting Gargoyle’ of Notre Dame de Paris.

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