| The German title of the Arcades project: Passagen-Werk. The German Passage is a romance borrowing, with the sense of arcade, covered way. The sense of a citation or piece of writing would usually be Passus rather than Passage, but the link's clear. Both senses are present in the French source word passage. The French arcade--originally an avenue of overarching trees--carries with it all sorts of echoes of the Arcadia of pastoral. |
The Paris Arcades came about as private commercial initiatives in the first part of the nineteenth century, with the city's burgeoning as a centre of retail capitalism. That means they predate Hausmann's vast urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III and the Second Empire (1852-), which gave Paris much of its present topography. If anything, they provide a partial model for that. The famous boulevards try, among other things, to translate some of the dynamic of the Arcades to the open-air arterial routes--and, of course, to replace the narrow and easily-barricaded streets which had been such a focus and haven for the insurrectionaries in the 1848 workers' uprising with a new regime of visibility and control. An illustrated guide to Paris from 1852, which Benjamin cites as "the locus classicus for the representation of the arcades," calls the arcades: |
| interior
boulevards, like those they open onto. These passages, a new discovery
of interior luxury, are glass-covered, marble-walled walkways through
entire blocks of buildings, the owners of which have joined together
to engage in such a venture. Lining both sides of these walkways which
receive their light from above are the most elegant of commodity shops,
so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature. (Cited in Buck-Morss) |
The arcades appear here above all, in this passage which Benjamin singles out, as a means of connection of what already exists.
