In the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris had more than a hundred and fifty covered passages: glass-roofed arcades lined with shops, restaurants, and reading rooms, sheltered from the weather and lit by gas. They were the first heated, artificially lit public spaces in the city. They were also, almost entirely, demolished by Haussmann when he rebuilt Paris in the 1850s and 60s. About twenty survive.
The surviving passages are the closest thing Paris has to a preserved interior from the Belle Époque. The Galerie Vivienne, the Passage des Panoramas, the Galerie Colbert, the Passage Jouffroy: each has its own character, its own state of preservation, its own tenants. Walking through them is walking through a city that was almost entirely erased.
What you will see
We walk a linked handful of them, beginning with the Galerie Vivienne, the best preserved of the survivors, where the mosaic floors, the carved woodwork and the Librairie Jousseaume, a bookshop open since 1826, are all still in place. From there the route reaches the Passage des Panoramas, the oldest still standing, opened in 1800 and now given over to stamp dealers, vintage poster shops and several serious restaurants, and the Galerie Colbert, restored by the Bibliothèque nationale, with its rotunda and its odd mixture of academic institutions and a café.
Running underneath all of it is the question of why so few are left. We look at what Haussmann's rebuilding did to this part of the city, what the streets looked like before the grand boulevards replaced the medieval plan, and why the arcades, which had been the most modern public spaces in Europe, fell out of use within a generation.
Galerie Vivienne · Passage des Panoramas · Galerie Colbert
Pépin's advice
Go on a weekday morning. The passages on a Saturday afternoon are crowded and commercial. On a weekday morning they are quiet enough to see what they actually are.
End with lunch in the Passage des Panoramas. Several of the restaurants in the Passage des Panoramas are genuinely good. Eating in a nineteenth-century arcade is the obvious way to end the tour.
Good to know
Much of this walk is under glass and sheltered from the weather, but it is still a walk, on old floors and with few chances to sit along the way. Metro line 3 reaches Bourse and line 8 Grands Boulevards, and we meet at the entrance to the Galerie Vivienne on the rue Vivienne. The passages are private property with their own hours, and a few of them close on Sundays, which we take into account when we confirm the day with you.
