The Château-Rouge and the Père Lunette: Insights into the ‘slumming’ culture of late nineteenth-century France

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, in the old medieval streets remaining behind the façades of the great new ‘haussmannised’ thoroughfares of central Paris, many low bouges still harboured criminals of all kinds, and served as refuges for the ‘misérables’ at the lower end of the social scale. Two of these bouges, the Château-Rouge and the Père Lunette, in the area between the place Maubert and the boulevard Saint Michel, are known to modern readers mainly through J.-K. Huysmans’ description of them in La Bièvre et Saint-Séverin (1898). It turns out, however, that they were very well known at the time, and had been frequented and/or described over the years by many contemporary writers and artists such as Maurice Barrès, Rachilde, Oscar Méténier, Jean Lorrain, Albert Wolff, Rodolphe Darzens, Aristide Bruant, Marcel Schwob, Will Rothenstein, Robert Sherard and Oscar Wilde, as well as by journalists from France, Britain and the United States. Viewed through these writings, these places present us with a typical progression from authentic ‘misère’ to the status of inauthentic ‘tourist attractions’. In the process, we gain some insight into the characteristics of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Parisian ‘slumming’.