A beggar’s book outworths a noble’s blood.
—Henry VIII, Act I, Scene I
Above the piano in our living room hangs a painting by the French neo-impressionist Jan Bonal. It is a pointillist Parisian street scene, executed much in the manner of Seurat or Signac, and carefully overlaid with the voile velour, the delicate velvet veil that is so characteristic of Bonal’s landscapes and cityscapes. The painting’s vantage point can be found in the IIIe arrondissement, and more precisely at 92 Quai de l’Hôtel de ville, where the viewer looks out across the Seine towards the elegant Haussmann apartment buildings of the Île de la Cité, above which soar the towers of Notre-Dame de Paris’s western façade, and the cathedral’s needle-like flèche, subsequently lost in the devastating fire of April 15, 2019. It has been some years since last I passed by this particular spot — I was making my way from the Mémorial de la Shoah towards the Latin Quarter if memory serves — but I am grateful that, with the assistance of Bonal’s cityscape, I can revisit it on a daily basis. (READ MORE: Poles Vote on Immigration While Other Europeans Suffer)
My favorite feature of the painting has always been the row of lovingly portrayed green boxes positioned along the quay, instantly recognizable as the iconic bookstalls of the Parisian bouquinistes, or outdoor secondhand booksellers, which Bonal afforded pride of place upon the canvas. Some 900 such boxes still line the banks of the Seine, from the Quai de la Tournelle to the Quai Voltaire on the Left Bank and from the Pont Marie to the Quai du Louvre on the Right Bank, making the river the only one in the world, as the old saying goes, that courses between two bookshelves. The dimensions and appearance of these boxes have been carefully regulated since the 19th century — they must be two meters long and 0.75 meters deep, the upper edge of the opened box must not reach over 2.1 meters in height, they must be painted a uniform shade of carriage green, and be kept open for business at least four days per week. The two miles of riverfront bookstalls, with their estimated 300,000 volumes for sale, are thereby kept in good order, free from the heaped-up bric-a-brac one finds in the open-air marchés aux puces at Montreuil, St-Ouen, or the Porte de Vanves.
Parisians, expatriates, and tourists alike have long been charmed by the bouquinistes, who have been plying their trade since the 16th century. Honoré de Balzac, in his 1845 account of Parisian street life Une rue de Paris et son habitant, marveled at how “curiosity makes one lose more time in Paris than anywhere else,” particularly when perusing the book-filled booths strung out along the Seine quays: “How may one walk without looking at those little oblong boxes, wide as the stones of the parapet, that all along the quays stimulate book lovers with posters saying, ‘Four Sous—Six Sous—Ten Sous—Twelve Sous—Thirty Sous’? These catacombs of glory have devoured many hours that belonged to the poets, to the philosophers, and to the men of science of Paris. Great is the number of ten-sous pieces spent in the four-sous stalls!” Even today, a bouquiniste’s box remains, as Umberto Eco put it, a “place for trouvailles,” for lucky finds. The seemingly endless procession of secondhand bookstands, so enticing to bibliophiles, Bohemians, cash-poor students, flâneurs, and sightseers, provides us with a glimpse of what the bustling premodern paysage parisien was once like, back when places like the Pont Neuf esplanade positively teemed not just with booksellers, but with pastry vendors, junk dealers, bouquettières, quack doctors, jugglers, street players, and customers from every walk of life. Only the humble bouquinistes have managed to survive until the present day, and even their time-hallowed position at the center of Parisian public life is growing increasingly precarious.
The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad will be held in the City of Light beginning on July 26, 2024, with a spectacular opening ceremony set to take place along the Seine. Given the estimated 600,000 spectators and 10,500 athletes who will be in attendance and the extensive nature of the parade route, the Paris Police Prefecture has been presented with something of a security nightmare. Concerned that an incendiary device might be placed in one of the bouquiniste boxes, the authorities have ordered the removal of around 570 of them for the duration of the proceedings. The plan to cart away the boxes is apparently not predicated solely on security concerns, given that Pierre Rabadan, the deputy mayor of Paris, informed the affected booksellers during a July 2023 meeting that “the boxes needed to be removed because they obstruct the view.” Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, was thoughtful enough to apologize for the disruption but still maintained that the stalls’ proximity to the Seine “means that for some of them there is an incompatibility with the normal organization.” The Cultural Association of Booksellers of Paris has countered that this is “as if the prefecture decided that the Eiffel Tower was too high and that the third and second floors had to be removed because they came within the scope of the cameras during the ceremony,” further noting that the legendary green book-boxes were left in place in 1957 when Queen Elizabeth II’s first royal visit to Paris was marked by a similar river parade. Jérôme Callais, speaking on behalf of the bouquinistes, went so far as to declare that “we agree that we will not move” and that “it’s out of the question to touch our boxes…. The only thing we ask is that they don’t touch our boxes. We are fragile enough as it is. We want to last a few more centuries.”
The Case for Bouquinistes
The Paris bouquinistes may have helped make the banks of the Seine a UNESCO World Heritage Site of “outstanding universal value,” but their line of work has never been a prestigious one. A 1697 tract entitled “Requête en Faveur des Bouquinistes,” likely written by the librarian and historiographer Étienne Baluze, sympathetically described how:
Les pauvres libraires qui n’ont pas moyen de loüer des boutiques ont tasché de gagner leur vie en estallant des livres depeu de conséquence sur les quays et sur les rebords du Pont- Neuf. Ces livres sont de vieux fonds de magazins de libraires, qu’on ne leur demande pas, le fretin (qu’ils appellent parmy eux cari–mara) des bibliothèques, la despouille de quelque pauvre prestre décédé , de meschants paquets achetez aux inventaires , tous livres qu’on n’ira jamais demander dans les boutiques de libraires. Cependant on se sert de ce prétexte pour empescher ces pauvres gens de continuer leurs estallages, parce, dit-on, qu’ils empeschent qu’on ne visite les boutiques de libraires; ce qui est très-faux. Car on ne trouvera pas à ces estallages des livres de conséquence, pour lesquels avoir il faut nécessairement aller chez les grands libraires.
[Those poor booksellers who have no means of keeping shops have tried to earn a living by selling books of little consequence on the quays and on the edges of the Pont-Neuf. These books are overstock from booksellers’ shops, which are no longer in demand, the leftovers (which they call among themselves “cari–mara”) from the libraries, the earthly possessions of some poor deceased priest, damaged specimens bought from the inventories, all books that you would never ask for in booksellers’ shops. However, there is a pretext used to prevent these poor people from continuing their stalls, namely, it is said, that they prevent people from visiting the booksellers’ shops; which is quite false, because one will not find in these stalls books of consequence, which one necessarily only finds at the bigger booksellers.]
By 1970, the bouquiniste Louis Lanoizelée was taking to the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes to lament the prospective decline and fall of his profession:
Bien sûr, les étrangers, visitant Paris, seront toujours curieux et charmés par le pittoresque de ces étalages de bouquins posés sur les parapets des berges de la Seine.Mais, quand le dernier vieux bouquiniste, qui vendait de vrais livres d’occasion, épuisés et rares, aura disparu, l’âme des quais quittera ces lieux de promenades littéraires, artistiques et surtout de rêveries. Le bibliophile recherchant un livre manquant à ses collections regardera d’un œil désabusé, les gravures fortement coloriées, les cartes postales, les livres soldés ou neufs, les romans policiers et toute cette littérature plus ou moins pornographique qui envahit les boîtes des quais comme une lèpre malfaisante. Il se dira que les bouquinistes des quais ont la même marchandise que les libraires en boutique et que cette nouvelle génération de marchands des quais vend de la camelote qui ne l’intéresse plus. Il est vrai qu’un bouquiniste âgé, qui quitte ce monde est remplacé par un plus jeune qui, trop souvent, ne connaît pas grand chose en livres et rien en littérature. Il va chez les marchands en gros, soldeurs ou autres. Aussi, dans quelques années les bouquinistes des quais auront les mêmes livres, gravures et policiers que les libraires en boutique.
[Of course, foreigners visiting Paris will always be curious and charmed by the picturesque displays of books placed on the parapets of the banks of the Seine. But when the last old secondhand bookseller, who sold genuine secondhand, out-of-print, and rare books, has disappeared, the soul of the quays will leave these places of literary, artistic, and above all trance-inducing walks. The bibliophile looking for a book missing from his collections will look with a disillusioned eye at the highly-colored engravings, the postcards, the books remaindered or brand new, the detective novels, and all that more or less pornographic literature which invades the boxes like a malignant leprosy. He will say to himself that the booksellers on the quays have the same merchandise as the booksellers in the shops and that this new generation of merchants on the quays sells junk that no longer interests them. It is true that an old bookseller who leaves this world is replaced placed by a younger person who, all too often, does not know much about books and nothing about literature. He goes to the wholesale merchants, discounters, or others. In a few years, the bouquinistes of the quays will just have the same books, engravings, and detective novels as boutique booksellers.]
Standing amidst the mounting ruins of the riverside book trade, Lanoizelée could only look back wistfully at the “paradis perdu,” the veritable “paradise lost” of the old bouquinistes, so beloved by bibliomanes from the Renaissance to the Lost Generation and through to the present day.
A Dying Heritage
The 21st century has taken an even greater toll on the remaining outdoor booksellers, some of whom report earning a mere 20 euros a day, rather less than a modestly-gifted Parisian busker. Desperate to turn any sort of profit, many bouquinistes began selling cheap plastic souvenirs alongside secondhand books, prompting the Paris City Hall to hold crisis talks in 2008 aimed at averting the total collapse of the bouquiniste industry. Vendors were reminded that out of every four boxes, three must be devoted to the printed word, while the fourth may feature postcards, prints, stamps, and other souvenirs. Lyne Cohen-Solal, then the deputy mayor in charge of commerce and crafts, made it clear to the beleaguered bouquinistes that “the Paris city council isn’t interested in handing out free plots to people who want to sell souvenirs made in China to Chinese tourists on holiday in Paris.” (READ MORE: From Deconstruction to Wokeness: French Conservatives Fight Back)
Times have changed, however, as Alain Ryckelynck, the former head of the bouquinistes’ union, has noted: “Once, French people of a certain age would come down to the river for their traditional stroll,” but “now it’s essentially tourists who might not read French and look at the books out of curiosity but no longer buy…. You can’t just offer something there is no market for or you’ll die of hunger.” Some bouquinistes have simply ignored city hall’s directive to eschew shoddy tourist tat; others passive-aggressively set up trestle tables stocked with plastic Eiffel Towers directly in front of the book-boxes. Vanishingly few have taken up Cohen-Solal’s suggestion to offer stationery supplies and other tangentially book-related goods in their fourth box, the demand for fountain pens, ink, and blotting paper being hardly more flourishing than the one for secondhand books, sad as that is to relate for those of us who are happiest with a book in one hand and un stylo plume in the other.
For the Love of Books
There do remain a certain number of bibliophiles who value secondhand books, who enjoy the sensation of bibliosmia (that unmistakable old book smell caused by the decomposition of lignin organic polymers into vanillin), and who are always on the look-out for serendipitous trouvailles. Those remaining booklovers, part of civilization’s rearguard detachment, still understand, as the Scottish poet John Ferriar so memorably put it:
How pure the joy, when first my hands unfold
The small, rare volume, black with tarnished gold.
At the same time, while there may be something romantic about exploring the book-lined catacombs of glory in search of a trouvaille, the fact is that the connoisseur is so spoiled for choice nowadays that the effort is hardly necessary. If I have my sights set on, to take a recent example, a first edition of Maurice Maeterlinck’s La Princesse Maleine, I can simply order it from an antiquarian bookseller like the incomparable Le Feu Follet, and DHL will have it on my doorstep in a matter of days. The bouquinistes of the quays simply cannot compete with established Parisian bookshops like Le Feu Follet, Pingel, Laurent Coulet, or Bonnefoi Livres Anciens in terms of searchable inventories or sheer ease of shopping, let alone domestic and international shipping, and in an era of instant gratification inevitably find themselves at a further disadvantage. Yet all bookstores in this degenerate day and age are under intense pressure, not just the bouquinistes, and I have looked on in horror as La Hune, Le Pont Traversé, the flagship Gibert Jeune in the Latin Quarter, and other libraires have shut down in recent years due to rising rents, pandemic-related lockdowns, and declining readerships (although the Gibert brand is gamely attempting to survive by reinventing itself as Quinze.bis, a “hybrid and meeting place” featuring not only books but also yoga sessions, music, crafts, decorations, gifts, and artworks). (READ MORE: Be Ethnic: What Schomburg and de Pareja Teach Us About Identity)
The quayside bouquinistes, marginal as they have always been, find themselves experiencing even greater stress than their upmarket boutique-based cousins, and the Olympic disruption may constitute a coup fatal. In an open letter to Le Monde published on August 9, 2023, the philosopher Daniel Salvatore Schiffer and forty other Parisian intellectual co-signers warned that “the scheduled disappearance of these magnificent bookstalls — a disappearance that is theoretically temporary, for the duration of the Olympic Games — puts a whole sector of economic life at risk of becoming a catastrophe for these modest booksellers, at the height of the tourist season. They will suddenly be deprived, without compensation, of a large part of the income they need simply to survive, to the point of potential bankruptcy.” For Schiffer and his fellow intellectuals, the plight of the bouquinistes is not just a matter of imperiled livelihoods, though that alone would be enough to reconsider the removals, for “the symbolism, when culture is so disregarded, and the irreplaceable wealth of books sacrificed on the altar of the commercialized sport, even more than on that of a ‘security perimeter,’ is shocking. It’s scandalous in the light of the literary city par excellence that is Paris, and particularly its Left Bank, from Notre-Dame to the Académie Française!” This desperate “plea in favor of the bouquinistes of Paris” is thus “in the broader sense a defense of culture in its noblest educational, highest moral and most historically valuable aspects, in the face of the obtuse insistence on its destruction.” The bouquinistes are not short of well-wishers — the Change.org petition “Sauvegarde des bouquinistes des quais de la Seine” has more than 130,000 signatures at the time of this writing — but there remains a distinct likelihood that an ancient and estimable profession will indeed be sacrificed on the altar of sports, hyper-commercialism, and the security state.
Just a Few More Centuries
Daniel Salvatore Schiffer began his entreaty to save the bouquinistes by citing Albert Camus’ maxim that “anything that degrades culture shortens the paths that lead to servitude.” There is no disputing that the booksellers of the quays represent canaries in the coal mine of cultural degradation and decline and that the Paris Police Prefecture will deserve its fair share of the blame for hastening their demise. But the plight of these humble book vendors reminds me of another maxim, that of Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “El suicidio más acostumbrado en nuestro tiempo consiste en pegarse un balazo en el alma [the most customary form of suicide in our time consists of firing a bullet into the soul].” This is a self-inflicted wound caused by a wider public that has put cultural philistinism, instant gratification, efficiency, and corporate-sponsored sporting events ahead of a half-millennium of uninterrupted tradition. The bouquinistes have a simple request: “to last a few more centuries.” The same might well be said of much of our collective cultural patrimony. Perhaps the persecution of the bouquinistes in the run-up to the XXXIII Olympiad can serve as a wake-up call, not just for Parisians whose city’s identity is being eroded by the forces of hyper-modernity, but for an increasingly benighted culture all too accepting of degradation.
Whenever I look at Jan Bonal’s pointillist cityscape, I am inescapably reminded of the fire that gutted Notre Dame de Paris and brought Viollet-le-Duc’s spire crashing down. In the aftermath of the conflagration, an international architecture competition to design a new flèche was launched, and some of the ghastly early proposals included a new roof and spire constructed of crystal and stainless steel, or of copper and glass. Thankfully, the French National Heritage and Architecture Commission made clear that the structure would be returned to its last “complete, coherent and known” state and that the replacement spire would be scrupulously modeled after that of Viollet-le-Duc and built with 200-year-old oaks from the Domaine de Berce. In time, the Parisian skyline will once again look like it does on Bonal’s canvas, and I remain hopeful that the bouquinistes and their iconic carriage green boxes will likewise return to their rightful place along the parapets of the Seine for centuries to come.