neighborhoods. She refuses to be humiliated. “Myself,” she says to Count
Mornay in a direct allegory of France’s submission to German occupation,
“I adore freedom.” At the film’s end she plunges into the whirlwind along
the boulevard du Crime. It absorbs her, and she disappears.
The film serves as an apt introduction to this book. In 1985 the French
author Hugo Lacroix mused that “like the Rodin Museum, Marseille’s zoo,
swimming at Collioure, the autoroute du Sud, the Vaux-le-Vicomte chateau,
and the Paris Métro, Les Enfants du paradis is one of those poles of conversion
. . . that is not so much our national heritage as it is our national paradise.”
2
This spectacular evocation of the street life of Paris demonstrates perhaps
better than any flaunting of sources the significance of the city’s public pag-
eantry. The film’s title, which translates as Children of Paradise or Children of
the Gods, refers to the city’s poor, who occupied the cheap seats high in the
balconies of the boulevard du Temple’s popular theaters. They were anything
but a passive audience. Performing on the boulevard to attract ticket buyers,
players were at their mercy. It was this raucous public that decided who was
popular, who would find fame, and who would go hungry. Anyone who failed
to entertain them was attacked with bawdy uproar and even violence. What
is captured so expressively in Les Enfants du paradis is public life as theater,
or theatrum mundi. Melodrama, tragedy, and subversion infiltrate the film’s
screenplay. The concept has a long tradition. Both the theater and urban
space evolved historically as stages of action and drama. The medieval and
Renaissance procession, the festival, and the public ceremony were all part
of the “publicity of representation” identified by Jürgen Habermas as crucial
for creating the space of the city as the privileged eye of power.
3
Social signals
were staged. Public posturing and performance were a projection of culture;
public behavior, a form of art. They made social encounters meaningful.
Needless to say, the categories of public and civil society changed dra-
matically during the modern era. New divisions between private and public,
between older social codes and new ones, remapped the spaces of the city.
Theatrical hyperspace was eventually appropriated by the Paris citizenry as
a “theater of revolution” that inaugurated sweeping changes in public space
and collective civic life. By the 1830s the virtuoso public performance, the
grand geste, had become indispensable to romantic sensibilities. Mime Bap-
tiste Debureau and actor Frédérick Lemaître were popular heroes, “men of
the people”—stock types of collective urban life. King Louis-Philippe paid
homage to this populist theater in his annual procession along the boulevard