Like many of his contemporaries, Balzac was acutely sensitive to the social diversity of Paris, as well as to the drastic mutations the city experienced throughout the first half of the 19th century. The various neighbourhoods of Paris were at the time identified more readily by the populations living in them than by their architecture. Novelists and draughtsmen in particular made a sport of describing the characteristics, real or imagined, of their inhabitants. Thus, the annuitant subsisting on a small income and the tradesman became emblematic of the Marais, the nouveau-riche of the Chaussée d’Antin, and the worker embodied the population of eastern Paris, while the aristocracy reigned over the district of Saint-Germain.
An accomplished caricaturist, Henry Monnier showcased the defining characteristics of inhabitants from six districts in this album of lithographs, dissecting their typical dress, taste in furniture, occupations and the company they kept. People mindlessly play cards in a salon of mismatched furniture in the Marais, while aristocrats engage in conversation in the district of Saint-Germain; men wearing suits, thick coats and top hats discuss business near the Stock Exchange (La Bourse), while families of modest means set up a picnic under a tree in the northern part of the district of Saint Denis, still pastoral at the time.
Style of dress, physiognomy and carriage became so many ways of determining the social status of passers-by and defining the social character of each district. The results were of course a caricature, all the more so because Parisian society was segregated only by district, but also the placement of apartments. Lower floors were considered more desirable than the upper levels, largely because the elevator did not appear before 1850, and its use became widespread only gradually over the 20th century.
‘Certain streets in Paris are as degraded as a man covered with infamy; also, there are noble streets, streets simply respectable, young streets on the morality of which the public has not yet formed an opinion; also cut-throat streets, streets older than the age of the oldest dowagers, estimable streets, streets always clean, streets always dirty, working, laboring, and mercantile streets. In short, the streets of Paris have every human quality, and impress us, by what we must call their physiognomy, with certain ideas against which we are defenceless. There are, for instance, streets of a bad neighborhood in which you could not be induced to live, and streets where you would willingly take up your abode. Some streets, like the rue Montmartre, have a charming head, and end in a fish’s tail. The rue de la Paix is a wide street, a fine street, yet it wakens none of those gracefully noble thoughts which come to an impressionable mind in the middle of the rue Royale, and it certainly lacks the majesty which reigns in the Place Vendôme.
If you walk the streets of the Ile Saint-Louis, do not seek the reason for the nervous sadness that lays hold upon you save in the solitude of the spot, the gloomy look of the houses, and the great deserted mansions. This island, the ghost of fermiers-generaux, is the Venice of Paris. The Place de la Bourse is voluble, busy, degraded; it is never fine except by moonlight at two in the morning. By day it is Paris epitomized; by night it is a dream of Greece.’
Balzac, Ferragus, 1833 (translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley)