Grands Boulevards

From Paris Hotels Reviews

The Grands Boulevards is the collective name given to the eight streets that form one continous, broad thoroughfare running from the Madeleine to Rèpublique, then down to the Bastille. Lined with classic nineteenth-century apartment blocks, imposing banks, cinemas, theatres, brasseries and neon-lit fast-food outlets, the Grands Boulevards are busy and vibrant, if not the most alluring or fashionable parts of Paris – though this was not always so. The western section, from the Madeleine to Porte St-Denis, follows the rampart built by Charles V in the mid-fourteenth century. When its defensive purpose became redundant with the offensive foreign policy of Louis XIV, the walls were pulled down and the ditches filled in, leaving a wide promenade (given the name boulevard after the military term for the level part of a rampart).

The boulevard soon became a fashionable place to be seen. In the nineteenth century Parisians came in droves to stroll and sit out drinking lemonade or beer in the numerous cafès. Passers-by were assailed by the constant sound of corks popping, and on one walk Liszt ran into Heine, Balzac, Chopin and Berloiz. The chic cafè clientele of the west-end boulevard des Italiens set the trends for all of Paris in terms of manners, dress and conversation, and there was much intellectual debate and ferment. Balzac called the boulevards “the poem of Paris”, what the Grand Canal was to Venice, saying that whoever stepped onto them was lost to their charm: “on y boit des idèes” (here people drink in ideas”).

The eastern section developed a more colourful reputation, derived from its association with street theatre, mime, juggling, puppets, waxworks and cafès of ill repute, earning itself the nickname the boulevard du Crime and immortalized in the film Les Enfants du Paradis. Much of this area was swept away in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Baron Haussmann when he created the huge place de la Rèpublique.

As recently as the 1950s, a visitor to Paris, would, as a matter of course, have gone for a stroll along the Grands Boulevards to see "Paris vivant". And something of this tradition still survives in the theatres and cinemas (including the Max Linder and Rex – the latter an extraordinary building inside and out, and numerous brasseries and cafès.

It was at 14 boulevard des Capucines, in 1895, that Paris saw its first film, or animated photography, as the Lumière brothers' invention was called. Some years earlier, in 1874, another artistic had taken place at no. 35 in the former studio of photographer Fèlix Nadar – the first Impressionist exhibition. It was greeted with outrage by the art world; one critic said of Monet's Impression, soleil levant (“Impression: sunrise”), "it was worse than anyone had hitherto dared to paint".