Memoirs of the Grand Boulevards of the 19th century

This article analyzes the social representations that have structured the dominant historical discourses on the nineteenth-century Grands Boulevards. Two versions of the Boulevards history have taken hold in popular memory. The first, established in memoirs during the second half of the nineteenth century, held that the life of "the Boulevard" was most brilliant and prestigious back in the times of the "Dandys", Balzac, and the cafe Tortoni - somewhere between the 1820s and 1860s. The memoirists disagreed about which decades were best, but they agreed that the era of glory was followed by many years of decline - from an elitist and xenophobic point of view - culminating in the most lamentable decadence around the turn-of-the-century. This historical emplotment persisted in writings about the Boulevard until the years after the Second World War, when a new bright depiction of the era around 1900 emerged along with a new period label - "la Belle Epoque" Swept along by that appealing interpretation, popular historians after 1945 created and propagated the memory of a new golden age for the Grands Boulevards, portraying them as still lively and fashionable right up to the Grande Guerre.