Le Passage de l'Opéra

boulevard des Italiens, 9e

This passage no longer exists. When Louis Aragon wrote about its mysterious potential in his 1924 commentary “Le Passage de l’Opéra” (for the book Paris Peasant), he lamented the imminent loss of the passage to l’haussmannisation, the urban planning process (commissioned by Napoleon III) during Parisian streets were transformed into the wide, straight boulevards it is known for today. For Aragon, walking through this passage at night was a way of escaping “public morals.” Many prostitutes lived there. “All of the nightlife of imaginations . . . the way in which a small shadow is lost and perpetuates in the poorly-lit zones of human activity. It’s there that the spiritual beacons appear . . . The door of mystery, a human slipup opens it, and there we are in the realm of shadow” (Aragon 25).

Opéra