“Thank God - and my stores”

Fragment from "The Book of Passages" by Walter Benjamin

The Book of Passages, Walter Benjamin's unfinished work, is an annotated anthology of the culture and everyday life of Paris in the mid-19th century, including, along with the author's texts, excerpts from literature, press and printed matter, grouped by topic and comprehensively reflecting the life of the French capital. It demonstrates an example of innovative historical optics and at the same time offers a forward-looking analysis of the most important vectors of modern culture. We invite you to familiarize yourself with an excerpt from this work, which is being published in Russian translation for the first time.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarity, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Walter Benjamin. Book of Passages / Compiled by Rolf Tiedemann. M.: Ad Marginem Press, 2026. Translation from German by Vera Kotelevskaya, translation from French by Sergei Fokin. Content

“Before us,” says an illustrated Parisian guidebook, “is the whole picture of the city on the Seine in 1852, with its surroundings, the Grands Boulevards and the many passages leading to them. These passages, a recent invention of the luxury industry, are glass-covered, marble-lined galleries along a string of houses whose owners have banded together for such speculation. On both sides of these illuminated passages are lined the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is truly a whole city, a world in miniature, in which the idle buyer will find everything he needs. During a sudden downpour, they are a refuge for all those who are caught off guard by the weather and for whom they provide a sheltered, albeit cramped, promenade from the elements, where vendors also do not miss out on their profits.”

This excerpt is the locus classicus of the description of the passages, because it not only begins a rant about the flâneur and the weather, but one could also develop an idea about the way the passages were built from an economic and architectural point of view.

Fashionable shops: "The Maid of Honor" / "The Vestal" / "The Windy Page" / "The Iron Mask" / "Little Red Riding Hood" / "Little Nanette" / "The German Hut" / "At the Mameluke's" / "On the Corner" - the names are mostly taken from popular vaudeville shows. Glover: “At a young man’s ex”; or the pastry chef: “To Werther’s arms.”

“The jeweler’s name in huge letters, set with fake gemstones, is emblazoned above the door to the store.” “In the Véro-Dodat gallery there is a grocery store, above the front door of which you can read the inscription Gastronomie cosmopolite * : its individual letters are most comically composed of snipe, pheasants, hares, deer, antlers, lobsters, fish, bird offal, etc.”

When business was going well, the owner bought a week's supply in advance and, in order to free up space for storing goods, moved to the mezzanine floor. So the shop turned into a warehouse.

These were the times when Balzac wrote: “The great poem of the stalls is heard in multi-colored stanzas from the Place de la Madeleine to the outpost of Saint-Denis.”

“The day on which the Specialization * was inaugurated by Her Majesty Industry, Queen of France and several adjoining lands; on this day, as they say, Mercury himself, the special god of merchants and many other social professions, struck the pediment of the Exchange three times with his staff and swore by the beard of Proserpina that this word was to his liking.” The word spécialité was at first used only in relation to luxury goods.

“The narrow streets that surround the Opera, and the dangers to which pedestrians expose themselves when leaving the theater, constantly besieged by carriages, in 1821 led a group of businessmen to the idea of ​​using part of the buildings that separated the new theater from the boulevard. / This enterprise, which became a source of prosperity for its creators, had enormous advantages for the public. / Indeed, thanks to the wooden, very narrow and covered passage, a means of completely safe and direct communication appeared, leading through these galleries to the boulevard directly from the lobby of the Opera <...> On top of the entablature of Doric pilasters separating the shops, two floors are allocated for apartments, and above them, stained glass windows reign along the entire length of the gallery.”

Until 1870, carriages filled the streets. The narrow sidewalks were extremely crowded, and therefore people walked mainly in covered galleries, which provided protection from the vicissitudes of weather and traffic. “Thanks to our wider streets and more spacious sidewalks, the walking that our fathers could indulge in only in the arcades has become more convenient.”

Names of the passages: Panorama passage, Vero-Doda passage, Desire passage (once led to the place of gallant rendezvous), Colbert passage, Vivien passage, Passage at the New Bridge, Cairo passage, Reunion passage, Opera passage, Trinity passage, White Horse passage, Pressières passage (Bessier?), Passage Bois de Boulogne, passage Grosse Tête (passage Panoramas was formerly called passage Mires).

The Verot-Dauda passage (built between the rue Boulois and Grenelle-Saint-Honoré) “owes its name to two wealthy sausage makers, M. Verot and M. Doda, who in 1823 began to lay out this passage and erect huge buildings adjacent to it; which in those days was captured in the expression that the arcade was a beautiful work of art, hewn out between two blocks ."

In the Vero-Doda passage the pavement was laid with marble tiles. Rachel lived there for a while.

Colbert Gallery, No. 26. “There, under the guise of a glover, an accessible beauty shone, who, however, due to her youth, gave credit only to herself; she forced select lucky people to take care of her toilets, from which she thought to make a fortune. <…> This young and beautiful woman under the glass was called Absolute; but philosophy would waste all its time in searching for it. The gloves were sold by the maid; she demanded them all the time.”

Trading yard. “Here they first tried the guillotine for slaughtering sheep; the inventor of the device lived simultaneously in the Trading Court and on the Rue Ancienne-Comédie.”

“The Cairo arcade, where lithography is chiefly done, must have shone when Napoleon III abolished the obligation of stamp duty on commercial advertisements; this liberation enriched the passage, which showed appreciation for the expense of decorating the stores. Previously, when it started to rain, you had to walk through these galleries, many of which had no glass covering, with open umbrellas.”

Maubert's impasse, formerly d'Amboise. In houses No. 4 and 6 in 1756 there lived a poisoner with two assistants. One morning, all three were found dead: they had inhaled poisonous gas.

The era of the Greenland under Louis XVIII. With dramatic inscriptions on fashion stores, art serves the merchant.

After the Panorama passage, which was established by 1800 and whose secular reputation was strong from the very beginning, comes, for example, the gallery opened in 1826 by the sausage makers Vero and Doda, shown in a lithograph by Arnoux from 1832. Only after 1822 did the opening of a new passage take place: in the period 1822–1834, the construction of most of these bizarre passages began, the most remarkable of which are concentrated between Croix de Petit Champs Street in the south, Grange-Batelier Street in the north, Sevastopol Boulevard in the east and Vantadour Street in the west.

Shops in the Panorama passage: the Veron restaurant, reading room, music store, Marquis, wine merchants, hosiery makers, haberdashers, tailors, shoemakers, hosiery makers, booksellers, cartoonists, Variety theater. Vivien's passage, on the contrary, was businesslike. There wasn't a single luxury store there.

He was nicknamed “the genius of the Jacobins and industrialists,” but Louis-Philippe is also credited with the following words: “Glory to God - and to my shops.” Passages as temples of commercial capital.

The newest Parisian arcade on the Champs Elysees, built by the American jewelry king, is no longer trading.

In Paris, towards the end of the old regime, bazaars and shops of a new type were opened, where goods were sold at fixed prices. Under the Restoration and Louis Philippe, a number of fashion stores appeared: “The Lame Devil”, “Two Chinese Dummy”, “Junga”, “Pygmalion”; but these trading establishments were an order of magnitude lower in comparison with modern stores. The era of big stores begins under the Second Empire. They developed rapidly after 1870 until recently.

Arcades as a prototype of department stores? Which of the above stores were located in the arcades?

The system of specialization, by the way, provides a historical-materialist key to understanding the flourishing (if not the emergence) of genre painting in the forties of the last century. As the participation of the bourgeoisie in art increased, it differentiated, however, in accordance with the too narrow understanding of art by this stratum, only in the sphere of the subject of the image - this is how historical scenes, animal paintings, scenes with children, images from the life of monks, families, villages appeared, taking shape as separate genres.

The influence of trade on Lautréamont and Rimbaud should be traced!

“Another characteristic, especially from the time of the Directory (to about 1830), is the lightness of the fabrics. Even in the most severe frosts, you hardly see furs or warm clothes. Risking their own skin, women dress as if there was no sign of winter, as if nature had suddenly transformed into an eternal paradise.”

But the theater in those days also supplied fashionable things with its vocabulary. Hats a la Tarar, a la Theodora, a la Figaro, a la the High Priestess Iphigenia, a la Calprenade, a la Victoire. The same stupidity that seeks verisimilitude in ballet betrays itself by calling a newspaper - around 1830 - Le Sylfe.

Alexandre Dumas at an evening with Princess Mathilde. Poems dedicated to Napoleon III:

In your imperial luxury
Nephew and uncle are equal
My uncle took the capitals
Nephew - capitals (capitaux)

An icy silence followed.

“The backstage * ensured the uninterrupted rhythm of exchange life. The working day did not end, the night did not fall. When the Tortoni cafe closed, the crowd of stockbrokers moved to the neighboring boulevards, closer to the Opera passage, and there they continued to bet on increases or decreases.”

Speculation in railroad shares under Louis Philippe.

“Same origin [i.e. e. from the House of Rothschild] and Meares, the amazingly eloquent businessman who had only to open his mouth to convince his creditors that losses were profits; his name was, however, removed from the name of the Meares arcade due to a scandalous lawsuit, after which this arcade became the Princes arcade (along with the famous Peter's restaurant)."

The cry of the seller of the stock exchange bulletin: when the stock price increases - “Exchange growth”, when it decreases - “Price fluctuations on the exchange”. The concept of "demotion" was banned by the police.

In terms of importance for shadow stock trading, the Opera Passage can be compared with the Berlin Kranzler Eck. Stockbrokers' jargon "in the days leading up to the outbreak of the Prussian War [1866]: Alfonsine's three percent annuity, land credit <...> "fat Ernest", Italian annuity <...> "poor Victor", chattel credit, "little Jules".

The cost of stockbroker services is from 2,000,000 <sic> to 1,400,000 francs.

"Passages, most of which date from the Restoration."

Some information about what happened before, during and after Scribe and Rougemont. Premiere June 28, 1828. The first part of the trilogy depicts society under the Old Order, the second - the reign of Jacobin terror, and the third - society of the Restoration era. The main character, a general, becomes an industrialist in peacetime, or rather a large manufacturer. “Manufactory here replaces for the highest ranks the field that the Hard-Working Soldier cultivates. The industry's praises were sung both in Restoration vaudevilles and in songs crowned with laurels by soldiers. The bourgeois class, at its various levels, was opposed to the noble class: the fortune acquired by labor was opposed to the saving family coat of arms, the towers of the old castle. This third estate, which became the dominant force, also had its saints.”

The wooden galleries, “which were demolished in 1828–1829 to give way to the Orleans Galleries, were formed by three lines of modest benches and consisted of two parallel passages covered with tar paper, boards and several stained glass windows that provided lighting. Visitors walked directly on compacted earth, which turned to mud during heavy rains. So there you go! People still fled to this place, which could not be called magnificent, to these shops that seemed like shacks in comparison with those that were built in their place. These shops specialized in two types of industry, each of which had its own appeal. There were many milliners who worked, sitting on high stools facing the public; there were no glasses in the shops; the very excited girls' faces were the main attraction for some visitors. Then the wooden galleries became the center of the new bookstore.”

Julius Rodenberg about the small reading room in the Opera passage: “How pleasant this dim room appears in my memory, with its tall bookcases, green tables, red-haired employee (an avid book lover who read novels all the time, instead of offering them to visitors), German newspapers that warmed the German soul every morning (with the exception of “Cologne”, which appeared on average once ten days). But if there is news in Paris, then it should be received here, and here we learn it. In a quiet whisper from mouth to mouth (after all, the red-haired man strictly makes sure that neither he nor the visitors are disturbed), no louder than the scratch of a pen on paper, they move from the table to the boîte aux lettres * . The kind employee has a friendly smile in store for everyone, and paper and envelopes for correspondents: the first mail is prepared - Cologne and Augsburg will receive the news; and now - at twelve! “It’s time to go to the tavern.”

“The Cairo Passage clearly resembles, in a smaller form, the Salmon Passage that used to be on the Rue Montmartre, on the site of today’s Rue Beauchaumont.”

On the old shops, occupied with trade, which is found only here, there are small old-fashioned mezzanines with windows, on the frames of which the numbers corresponding to each shop are visible. From time to time you will see a door opening onto a corridor, at the end of which there is a small staircase leading to the mezzanine. The doorknob of one of them has this handwritten sign:

Without slamming the door, you will greatly oblige the master working next to you

Another sign there:

ANGELA 1st floor, right