Boulevard culture and advertising as spectacle in nineteenth-century Paris

In La Vie des boulevards: Madeleine-Bastille (1896), the journalist Georges Montorgueil wrote that ‘the movement of advertising and journalism towards the Boulevard was inevitable.’ ¹ He then asked rhetorically: ‘Isn’t it after all the purpose of journalism to be at the centre of activity?’ The Grands Boulevards, which formed a semicircle on the right bank from the Madeleine to the Bastille, were the geographical centre of news, entertainment, fashion and advertising in nineteenth-century Paris. Also known simply as ‘the Boulevards’ or ‘the Boulevard’, they date from the seventeenth century when the old ramparts were converted into a promenade. ² Newspaper headquarters and advertising brokers were located in the area throughout the nineteenth century, making the Grands Boulevards into a centre for news and communications that reached its peak at the fin-de-siècle. The animated telegraph rooms of the newspaper headquarters attracted large crowds while the newspapers themselves not only reported in minute detail on events on the Boulevards, but were read in the cafés along the street so that much of what was advertised was available just around the corner. The proximity of the places where newspapers were read to the boutiques, department stores, theatres and café-concerts advertised in their pages underscored the centrality of information and consumption to life on the Boulevards.