Home » This seems timely, somehow: riveting street scene movies of Paris in the 1890s

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This seems timely, somehow: riveting street scene movies of Paris in the 1890s — 17 Comments

  1. Great footage. Until I read the book, Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City by Stephane Kirkland, I assumed Paris as I’ve known it just evolved over time. From the description at Amazon:

    “Traditionally known as a dirty, congested, and dangerous city, Paris was transformed in an extraordinary period from 1848 to 1870, when the government launched a huge campaign to build streets, squares, parks, churches, and public buildings.”

    The vision, the politics (complete with a coup d’etat), the economics make for fascinating history.

  2. At about 4:20, a little boy is standing directly in front of the camera and someone (obviously the person making the film) pokes him with an umbrella and he protests briefly then moves out of shot! Obedient children!! That’s so old school.

  3. Alan Rudolph’s 1988 film, “The Moderns,” is a great, moody favorite of mine. It’s about the Twenties expatriate scene in Paris (Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and all that).

    The segues often use B&W footage from Paris at the time, then shift to the film in B&W, then amp up the saturation to full color. It works.

    The soundtrack is one of the few I play for its own sake. It’s Mark Isham and a French singer/songwriter, Charlélie Couture, who performs/scats songs which sound like they might have been authentic to the period. (But what do I know?)

    The film concerns a romantic triangle with an art forgery subplot. A bit convoluted but fun. There are some wonderful digs at Hemingway and Stein.

    Hemingway: Paris is … a traveling picnic. Paris is a portable banquet…

    Wallace Shawn character: You should work on that.

  4. There is a good book about Paris in the 1890s: “Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals; a sparkling panorama of “la Belle Epoque” by Cornelia Otis Skinner, 1962. The “Grand Horizontals” of the title, by the way, was the term of the period for the leading courtesans of Paris.

  5. David McCollough’s The Greater Journey is also a good book. It describes Americans who traveled to Paris in the 1800s to study art and medicine.

  6. The two speed, two level, moving walkway is amazing. Also, the pedestrians and their attire. The bicycles interested me, particularly the handlebars. I vaguely remember as a child, that a gentleman’s bike had handlebars like that except that they bent upwards in height rather than the downward arc shown in the film.

    I saw an interesting documentary about a year ago that contained a segment on the advent of the “modern” bicycle with roller chains and pneumatic tires, and how it revolutionized personal transportation. It had photo of a fabulous velodrome style freeway for bicycles only, that went from downtown LA to downtown Pasadena. The filmmakers uncovered a portion of the old bike freeway in someone’s backyard in LA.

  7. Talk about bringing history alive…

    This footage was shot 32 years before my 97 yr old father was born.

  8. Stunning. Opens with Notre Dame de Paris and closes with the Eiffel Tower….

    The heroics required just to cross the Champs Elysees. And all those Charlot characters walking around. (Think I’ll look into a walking stick.)

    Would recommend “The Banquet Years” for a cultural-artistic angle of the era when Paris was the center of the world.

  9. LYNN HARGROVE on April 16, 2019 at 2:16 pm at 2:16 pm said:
    Note the moving sidewalk at the end of the video.
    * * *
    Those flabbergasted me – I had no idea they actually existed, although I immediately thought of Heinlein’s 1940 story, The Roads Must Roll — apparently, H. G. Wells also used the concept in 1897 and 1899, and may have actually seen the originals.*

    I was intrigued by the bicyclists almost uniformly NOT using their hands, the relatively FEW people in the second segment obviously looking at the camera (I wonder if it was camouflaged later?), and the total lack of anything like traffic control.
    Loved the fire brigade’s galloping horses.

    *Wikipedia says: “The first moving walkway debuted at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. It had two different divisions: one where passengers were seated, and one where riders could stand or walk. It ran in a loop down the length of a lakefront pier to a casino.[7] Six years later a moving walkway was also presented to the public at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. The walkway consisted of three elevated platforms, the first was stationary, the second moved at a moderate speed, and the third at about ten kilometers per hour (six miles per hour). These demonstrations likely served as inspiration for some of H. G. Wells’ settings mentioned in the “Science Fiction” section below.”

  10. Fantastic selection.

    Wide open streets, quite clean; moving sidewalks; no-hands bike riding (look ma!); parts where folks did look and parts where folks didn’t look at the camera; horse-drawn fire brigade, perhaps with a steam powered water jet?.

    Lovely kids sailing ships, and great ships. Different groups of horse drawn carriages, a few singles, a few fully loaded with well-dressed people crowded in (drawn by 6 horses).

    Everybody in hats!

  11. That moving walkway is awesome. It looks like someone took an old Merry-go-round and “stretched it out”. Wild.

  12. The traffic free-for-all was fun, as were the pedestrians risking life and limb as a matter of course.

  13. It was mesmerizing to watch. I have to admit I was surprised by the complete lack of cars. People had been making steam powered vehicles since the 1770s, but they were basically just locomotives with road wheels. Hardly practical for city driving. By 1880 the manufacturers made great efforts to improve their vehicles so that they were practical and reliable enough to drive every day. Apparently they succeeded as by 1890 Europeans were buying them from companies like Daimler or Benz.

    They weren’t buying a lot as at that point they were really just playthings for the rich (it really took Henry Ford and the 1908 Model T before regular folks saw them as practical and more importantly affordable transportation). But I thought I’d at least see one vehicle on the streets of Paris.

    I was surprised when I saw the galloping horses, until I realized they were fire horses. Cities in Europe and the U.S. had speed limits which is why all the other carriage and cart horses are moving at no faster than a trot.

    President Ulysses S. Grant once got a speeding ticket for galloping his horse through the streets of Washington D.C. Actually, he got more than one ticket for that when he was President. Naturally being a former Army officer he was a good horseman, and he loved to go fast whether riding or driving his coach. When the police officer chased him down and grabbed Grant’s carriage horse’s bridle it took half a block to bring the coach to a stop. The police officer was embarrassed to find that he had just pulled over the President and offered to forget the whole thing but Grant insisted on the ticket.

  14. Pingback:Not So Long Ago – Other People's Videos

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