Paris

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches Paris mainly through poetry, which he connects to history and to current political events. He twice reads the poem Aragon wrote while hiding in Dieulefit during the Occupation, far from a Paris he missed. In 2019, the poem serves him as an airlock into the logic of the subject. In 2023, he reads it to console himself for a missed demonstration1. In it he defends the popular Paris of street marches, born in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and in the French Revolution. He defends it against anti-Jacobinism, which blames Paris rather than capital, and takes the example of Carhaix. Starting from the Pont-Neuf, he shows that great poetry expresses the historical depth of the city, since for him man is a historical animal1. In Nerval's Promenades et Souvenirs, he follows the search for lodgings in pre-Haussmann Paris. It leads from Montmartre, a "rural paradise" threatened by progress, to Les Halles, the "hell of the living"2. In both cases, he brings in Baudelaire's "Le Cygne" (The Swan), an image of exile in a changing city21.

1. 1Aragon, “The Paris Peasant Sings”5 Aug 2023
2. 2#3 Nomad or sedentary? The case of Nerval6 Jun 2021

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.