Designating urban forms: French boulevards and avenues

Abstract

The study of the evolution of words used for naming urban forms can be a helpful element in studying the development of attitudes towards city building. This article, focusing on boulevard and avenue, sketches their development in the context of a few other words, mail, cours and allée. The success of the word boulevard, originally a military term for city wall, follows the success of Parisian promenades, the Grands boulevards. As a result, in the nineteenth century, all French ring roads and many other major roads were given the name boulevard. Another term was, by then, in vogue: avenue. The two curtailed the use of mail, cours and allée used frequently during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During most of the twentieth century, avenue was the dominant term. In the 1980s, however, boulevard made a spectacular comeback due to its association with the term Haussmannian Boulevards, a reference to nineteenth century Paris, a model for those who rejected modernistic town planning. Through the evolution of these two terms, this article aims to show that the use of generic terms functions, to some extent, as does the importing of models. Naming is, however, used much more frequently as it is less expensive than actually making a new place or thoroughfare on the imported model.

Notes

* Michael Darin studied Philosophy and Sociology in Jerusalem, Architecture in London and History in Paris. He taught for twenty years in the Ecole d'Architecture de Nantes and in the last seven years in the Ecole d'Architecture de Versailles where he is professor of History of Architecture and of Urban Forms. His research is focused on different urban forms typical of French cities: percées (major streets cut through existing cities), squares and boulevards. Recently, he contributed extensively to a book he edited with Géraldine Texier‐Rideau: Places de Paris, XIXe–XXe siècles.

L. Mumford, The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1970, p. 5 (originally published 1938).

Ibid., p. 4.

Books have been published on the meaning of the street names of all large French cities. There are several about Paris; a most useful one (A. Fierro, Histoire et mémoire du nom des rues de Paris. Paris: Parigramme, 1999) develops the ideas of an excellent doctoral thesis (M. Heid, Les noms de rues de Paris à travers l'histoire. University of Tübingen, 1972) and provides material that is not generally accessible to the public at large. One of the articles discusses the names of streets of French cities, in general: D. Milo, Le nom des rues, in P. Nora (ed.) Les lieux de mémoire, La nation, 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1986, pp. 283–315.

Manfred Heid is an exception. In a few comments on some generic terms, he draws attention to the interest of the subject as a whole.

A. Franklin, Les rues et les cris de Paris au XIIIe siècle. Paris: L. Willem, 1874. This book reprints the list of streets mentioned in the taille (a tax levied by the king on his subjects or his lands) of 1292.

M. Heid, op. cit. [3].

In some cases, the opposite was true, that is, usage simplified phrase‐names (as Heid calls them): la rue qui est devant Saint Pol (the street which is in front of Saint‐Pol) was later changed to the simpler construction: rue Saint Pol; M. Heid, ibid.

It designated the Celestsin embankment; A. Franklin, Estat, noms et nombre de toutes les rues des vingt quartiers de Paris en 1636, d'après le manuscrit inédit de la Bibliothèque nationale. Paris: L. Willem, 1873.

The old grandes rues became rues, as they were, by then, not so impressive compared with the new large ones.

M. N. Maire, La topographie de Paris, ou plan détaillé de la ville de Paris et de ses faubourgs. Paris, 1808; reprinted in A. Franklin, Nomenclature générale des rues de Paris sous la Révolution. Paris: A. Taride, 1908.

The copy kept at the Bibliothèque Administrative de la Ville de Paris was used as a register to which new elements were added (BAVP, Manuscripts Ms 202).

The figures are according to A. Fierro, op. cit. [3], p. 358.

There are two previous texts that deal with the word boulevard. One brochure explains the military term and gives ideas about further developments of the word (A. Demangeon, A propos du mot boulevard. Versailles: Ecole d'Architecture de Lille/Ville Recherche Diffusion, 1990) and one article deals mainly with the Parisian Grands Boulevards (L. Passion, Le mot et la chose, in B. Landau and C. Monod (eds) Les grands boulevards, Paris, 2000, pp. 207–209).

This word was made out of two parts: (a) bol meaning plank or board; and (b) werc meaning work; A. Rey (ed.), Le Robert: dictionnaire historique de la langue française. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1993.

The word has been used in English since the fifteenth century; The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

A. Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, Paris: Le Robert, 1978 (originally published 1690).

‘The Tigris and the Euphrates are the two strong boulevards of this kingdom’; P. Richelet, Dictionnaire françois contenant les mots et les choses, Geneva: Slatkine, 1994 (originally published 1680).

D. Diderot and J. d'Alembert, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Stittgart: F. Frommann, 1966–1995, 1751–1765.

For a long time there was uncertainty as to the last letter of the word: d or t.

Trévoux, Dictionnaire universel François et Latin. Paris: microreproduction de L'édition 1771: compagnie des libraires associées, 1979 (originally published in 1771).

M. Poëte, La promenade à Paris au XVIIe siècle. Paris: A. Collin, 1913, p. 21. Pall‐mall was a game whose object was to strike a ball through an iron ring, requiring extensive space (in the general form of what would now, in English, confusingly be termed an ‘alley’).

In Brittany, 54 promenades were created between 1675 and 1791 in 28 towns; H. F. Buffet, Les promenades urbaines en Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle. Les Mémoires de la Société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Bretagne XXXV (1955) 11–30; quoted by D. Rabreau, La promenade urbaine en France aux XVII^e et XVIIIe siècles, in M. Mosser and G. Teyssot (eds) Histoire des jardins de la Renaissance à nos jours. Paris: Flammarion, 1990, p. 312.

E. Giraudet, Histoire de la ville de Tours. Marseille: Laffitte reprints 1977 (originally published in 1873); reprint, Tours, 1976. p. 280. The two mails became intramural urban forms as a result of the construction of a new city wall (1592–1685); A. Calvet, Tours, in M. Darin (ed.) Les boulevards circulaires, pp. 283–292. Versailles: Ecole d'Architecture de Versailles/Ville Recherche Diffusion, 1998.

V. Fouque and M. Lambert, Orléans, in M. Darin (ed.) ibid, pp. 205–219.

Castres, Vannes, Reims and Pithiviers, for instance; P. Lavedan, J. Hugueney and Ph. Henrat, L'urbanisme à l'époque moderne: XVI^e–XVIII^e siècles. Paris: Arts et Métiers graphiques, 1982, p. 174.

Madame de Sévigné often mentions her mail in her correspondence; Frantext (an electronic database established by the Institut National de la Langue Française, CNRS, www.inalf.fr/frantext).

Marcel Poëte does not agree; in his opinion, Sauval (1654), who was the first to suggest this connection, deduced it from the simple fact that Marie de Médicis was Italian; M. Poëte, op. cit. [21].

A cours was created in Marseille in 1666; it was named simply Cours before becoming Cours Belsunce in 1892; A. Blès, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Marseille. Marseille: J. Laffitte, 2001. In Nîmes, during the 1680s, a promenade was created on filled ditches in front of the demolished wall on the northern part of the city and it was divided into two parts: the Grand Cours and the Petit Cours; M. Lambert, Nîmes, in M. Darin (ed.), op. cit. [23]. In Grenoble, an atypical cours (a straight 8 km long road) was created outside the city between 1660 and 1669; today it is called Cours Jean‐Jaurès; P. Lavedan et al., op. cit. [25], p. 174.

In Bordeaux, the different cours, taken together, form a continuous line, clearly separating intramural and extramural parts of the city. Nantes does not have a similar figure; its two cours were erected only on the eastern side of the city.

For example, in Nantes: Cours Cambronne and Cours du Peuple (today, Boulevard Guist'hau).

D. Diderot and d'Alembert, op. cit. [18].

P. Lavedan et al., op. cit. [25], pp. 155, 173. A 1769 plan shows that these promenades form an ‘L’‐shaped figure around the city.

Ibid., p. 173.

A. Blès, op cit. [28].

Avenue de Paris, which opened in front of the palace, is about 90 m wide, while the other two, Avenues de Saint‐Cloud and de Sceaux, are each about 75 m wide.

In Moulins, the ditches were already filled in the fifteenth century and a planted promenade was created there during the two following centuries; M. Doutre, Moulins, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 157–164. [23]. In Aix, the same process took place in the second half of the seventeenth century; A. Fuzibet, Aix, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 51–65. [23]. Saint‐Rémy followed suite in 1694; A. Fuzibet, Saint‐Rémy de Provence, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 238–247. [23]. Reims started doing so in 1738 (P. Lavedan et al., op. cit. [25], pp. 155, 173).

Y. Brault, Le plan de Pierre Bullet (1673–1675), in B. Landau and C. Monod (eds) op. cit., pp. 29–37. [13]. The author insists on the fact that the initial declaration of the King (7 June 1670) was followed by others, and argues that the decision to create a promenade was expressed only in the declaration of 22 September 1676.

This process is described in: A. M. Châtelet, M. Darin and C. Monod, Formation et transformations, in B. Landau and C. Monod (eds), op. cit., pp. 42–51.

Archives nationales, H²2127.

Archives nationales, H²2128/1. It was applied to the whole promenade probably by extension of the use of the word to designate ‘… the area of the big bastion of the gate Saint Antoine’ Trévoux, op. cit. [20].

Frantext, op. cit. [26].

Barbier uses it twice in 1761, Bachomont in 1762, Mercier in 1774. Other writers continue to use the singular form, as does Condorcet in 1774. Some writers use the two forms; Rousseau, for instance, in 1778, uses the two within five pages; the singular form persists up to the 1820; Frantext, ibid.

‘Plan de Paroisses’, drawn by J. Junié, 1786.

Archives nationales, H²2132.

This Almanac, like all those that followed, gave the names of traders, artisans etc., according to street.

An example: two plans of Paris, drafted by Jean in 1810 and 1811, continue the old habit of drawing the promenade without naming it at all.

Rétif de la Bretonne, Le paysan perverti. Laussanne: L'age d'homme, 1977 (originally published 1776); Frantext op. cit. [26].

Marchand, Paris et ses curiosités. Paris: Marchland, 1804. Curiously, the most used historical dictionary of the present day gives the late date of 1842 as the first appearance of this term; A. Rey, op. cit. [14]

For him, a ‘poem’, is the place where a city ‘… is more specifically itself’; Honore de Balzac, La physionomie des boulevards, 1844, in Oeuvres complets. Paris: L. Conard, ed. 1940, vol. 40, p. 610. For Balzac, the variety of Paris was reflected in the variety of urban life taking place in the different sections of the Grands Boulevards.

M. Breitman and R. Krier (eds), Le nouvel Amiens. Paris: Institut Français d'Architecture, 1989. J. L. Kerouanton, Angers, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 66–77 [23].

‘Projet de la nouvelle ville Napoléon’, a plan annexed to a decree of 26/1/1805 giving details about the construction of the new town; Archives nationales, AF^IV, 151, carton 905, pièce 7.

The name was changed when the new Boulevard Amiral Courbet and Boulevard Victor Hugo were added to the two old cours in order to create a ring around the city; M. Lambert, Nîmes, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 186–204 [23].

A. Calvet, Tours, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 283–292 [23].

V. Fouque and M. Lambert, Orléans, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 205–219 [23].

J. Clemens, Marmande. Paris: CNRS, 1985. A volume of the series ‘Atlas historique des villes de France’.

M. Lambert, Avignon, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 90–101 [23].

A famous example is the Place Royale in Paris, which guarded its name for about 180 years, and then – between 1792 and 1800 – changed its name five times (Place des Fédérés, Place de l'Indivisibilité, Place du Parc d'Artillerie, Place de la Fabrication des Armes and Place des Vosges). This square was renamed Place Royale in 1814, took the name of Place de la République in 1830, Place des Vosges in 1831, Place Royale in 1852 and, since 1870, Place des Vosges; J. Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.

Each of the two terms designates a very different type of street: the allées are 60 m wide and are composed of a central 40 m wide planted ground and two side roads (each with one sidewalk), while the boulevards are 40 m wide and are composed of one road lined with two sidewalks; P. Girard, Toulouse, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 259–282 [23].

F. Bodet, Sens, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 248–258 [23].

M. P. Halgand, Nantes, XIXe siècle and I. Roux, Bordeaux, XIXe siècle, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 173–185 and pp. 115–125 [23].

The first three were, however, related to portions of ring boulevards: Boulevard de Latour de Maubourg (1827), Boulevard Malseherbes (1829), Boulevard Mazas (1845, today Diderot); the fourth, Boulevard Morland (1847), was situated on the site of the ancient Mail of the Arsenal; A. Alphand (ed.), Receuil des lettres patentes. Paris: Imprimerie nouvelle, 1886.

I thank Marcel Roncayolo, who drew my attention to these boulevards of Marseille. Cf. Plan of Marseille 1837, Bibliothèque nationale, département des plan et cartes GE D 2508.

Cf. two plans of the city: 1825, Bibliothèque nationale, département des plans et cartes GE C 4076; 1841, Bibliothèque nationale, département des plans et cartes GE D 2634.

For all the above details, cf. M. Darin, L'avènement d'un modèle urbanistique, in B. Landau and C. Monod (eds) op. cit., pp. 57–58 [13].

For both projects, cf. Archives Nationales F^1a 2003⁶⁷. The idea of designating this grand street leading towards city centre as an avenue never arose.

A. Husson, De la régénération de la rive gauche de la Seine. Paris: Printed by Chaix, 1856, p. 5.

Among these new boulevards there were 40 m wide radial streets around Place de l'Etoile and Place de Trocadéro, as well as grand streets associated in one way or another to a circular form: Boulevard Saint‐Germain, Boulevard Voltaire and Boulevard Haussmann. There were also Boulevard de Neuilly (today Avenue de Villiers), Boulevard du Nord (today boulevard Magenta), extended in 1863 by today's Boulevards Barbès and d'Ornano.

Its original name was Boulevard Boujeon. In 1864, its name was changed to Boulevard Haussmann.

A. Alphand, op. cit. [61].

I thank Anthony Sutcliffe, who mentioned this fact to me.

It differs from all streets named either boulevard or avenue, as it is not planted with trees. Charles Garnier, the architect of the Opera House, argued that trees would ruin the perspective of his building and, after much struggle, won the battle; E. Hénard, Etudes sur les transformations de Paris 1903–1909. Ed. Paris: L'Equerre, 1982, p. 29 (originally published 1903–1909).

Avenue Marigny, Avenue Montaigne (replacing the Allée de Veuves) and Avenue Gabriel; A. Alphand, op. cit. [61].

M. Bouvard and M. L. Taxil, Recueil d'actes administratifs. Paris, 1905, plate15.

On 31 August 1855, following the city council decision to celebrate the visit of the Queen of Great Britain; A. Alphand, op. cit. [61].

E. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française. Paris: Hachette, 1863.

Ch. Merruau, Rapport sur la nomenclature des rues et le numérotage des maisons de Paris. Paris: Printed by C. de Mourgues Frères, 1862.

For the evolution of the of the area annexed to Paris, cf. B. Rouleau, Villages et faubourgs de l'ancien Paris; histoire d'un espace urbain. Paris: Seuil, 1985.

Other words were considered inadequate. Allée, according to the commission, was appropriate to a lane in a garden or a park, but not for an urban street lined with houses; route was a term for roads outside the cities, chemin was adequate for rural lanes; chemin de ronde was ‘absorbed’ by the term boulevard. The commission eliminated the terms cours and mail without explanation; by then, neither were in use as generic terms in Paris.

Ch. Merruau, op. cit. [76], p. 38.

In Marseille, two important roads leading into the city were named Boulevard de la Madeleine (today de la Libération) and Boulevard Michelet. This was also the case in Ajaccio (Boulevard Sampiero), Nice (Boulevard Gambetta) and Saint‐Maxime (Boulevard Georges‐Clemenceau). Many localities around Paris named some of their roads leading to Paris boulevards.

Lille is at one extremity of the Y figure, while Roubaix and Tourcoing are at the two others.

The 50 m were divided as follows: sidewalk/road for slow local traffic/two lines of tramway/road for rapid transit traffic/pedestrian walk + path for horse riding/road for slow local traffic/sidewalk; A. Demangeon and A.‐C. Werquin, Le grand boulevard de Lille Roubaix Tourcoing, 1896–1992. Versailles: Ecole d'Architecture de Lille/Ville Recherche Diffusion, 1986.

This is the case in Nantes with the Boulevards Allard, Saint‐Aignan and de Launay around the Place du Général‐Mellinet.

In Lille, for instance, new streets in the 1860s that cut across the neighbourhoods south‐west of the historic centre were all named boulevard. The same was true of the two streets opened through the historic town of Agen, the Boulevard de la République and the Boulevard Carnot. In Cusset, a small town near Vichy, a boulevard that was opened in 1906, which leads straight into the centre of the old city, is now named after General de Gaulle; P. Francisco and O. Micaud, Cusset, in M. Darin (ed.) op. cit., pp. 135–147 [23].

For instance, Ajaccio (Boulevard Lantivy), Dieppe (Boulevard du Maréchal Foch and Boulevard de Verdun), Hendaye (Boulevard de la Mer), as well as Le Havre, Juan‐les‐Pins, Monaco, Touquet, Sainte‐Maxime, etc.; Michelin, Guide Rouge. Clermont‐Ferrand, 1989.

E. Hénard, op.cit. [71].

J. C. N. Forestier (edition presented by B. Leclerc and S. Tarrago i Cid), Grandes villes et systèmes de Parc: France Maroc Argentine. Paris: Institut Français d'Architecture, 1997.

E. Joyant, Traité d'urbanisme. Paris: L. Eyrolles, 1923.

In the garden suburbs built during the 1920s and the 1930s, the main roads were called either route, rue or avenue but never boulevard. Quite small streets were sometimes named avenue, but never boulevard. This is the case in Plessis‐Robinson, Châtenay‐Malabry and Aulnay. In Suresnes, many circular streets are named avenue but, curiously, one street that traverses the centre is named boulevard.

In Paris, the numbers in 1997 were 359 avenues and 124 boulevards.

Montrouge, for instance, has four avenues and only one boulevard. The exception is the fashionable Neuilly with its 19 boulevards and 12 avenues.

These high figures show that, in Marseille, language is used differently than in other French cities and many tiny streets or even dead‐end alleys could be designated in this city as boulevard or avenue.

Roubaix continued to label the portion within its jurisdiction as a boulevard.

The use of old generic terms to name modern urban forms and the fact that only two new ones were invented (autoroute and souterrain, meaning motorway and underpass) indicates that modernistic town planning ideas were applied without deep cultural conviction.

In Paris, from the 1960s onwards, boulevard périphérique has designated the motorway built around the city on the land of the nineteenthth‐century fortifications. In the enormous market of Rungis (which replaced the old Les Halles of Paris), the ring road is named boulevard circulaire, while the other roads are called avenues and rues. The same is true of La Défense, the neighbourhood of tall office buildings west of Paris, which is surrounded by a motorway named boulevard circulaire and where the routes crossing the area under the pedestrian deck are named avenues.

In Evry and Cergy‐Pontoise, all the main roads are named boulevards. In Saint‐Quentin‐en‐Yvelines, there are streets named boulevards but they are smaller, some but not all of them circular. Val d'Europe, the territory of EuroDisney, is defined by a perfectly circular road, called a boulevard. Within it there are curved routes and straight ones; half of them are named boulevards and the other half avenues.

The examples of avenues are taken from Versailles (Avenues de Paris, du Roi and de la Reine) and Paris (Avenues des Champs Elysées and de Breteuil); the examples of ‘Haussmannian Boulevards’ are Parisian: boulevards Sébastopol, Saint Michel and Raspail; Geneviève Dubois‐Taine, Boulevards urbains. Paris: Presses de l'Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussée, 1990.

This is also the case outside France. In a recent book about multiway urban streets, the authors chose the word boulevard as a generic term even though only 12 (five in Vietnam) of the 50 streets studied (in ten countries) are actually named boulevards; A. B. Jacobs, E. Macdonald and Y. Rofé, The boulevard book: History, evolution, design of multiway boulevards. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002.

Metaphoric use in football: ‘The Brazilian defence was totally helpless opening boulevards for the rapid Bolivian attackers’; Le Monde (9 November, 2001). In politics: during the last presidential election a politician found that the fact that M. Chirac and M. Jospin competed for the votes in the centre ‘… opened him a boulevard’; Le Monde (28 February, 2002).

Le petit Larousse 2004, Paris: Larousse, 2003 includes, for the first time, the expression ‘open a boulevard to’ and defines it: ‘to permit, by clumsiness or by leniency, the development of a harmful phenomenon’; Le petit Robert 2004 does not yet mention this sense of the word.

One example: ‘The mountains of Norway and Lappland are admirable boulevards that protect the northern countries from this wind’; Ch. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, 1755; Frantext, op. cit. [26].

M. Proust, De côté de chez Swann. Paris, 1913. English edition Swann's way, New York: Vintage Books, 1989, p. 421:

• Words present to us a little picture of things, clear and familiar, like the pictures hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter's bench, a bird, an anthill, things chosen as typical of everything else of the same sort. But names present to us – of persons, and of towns which they accustom us to regard as individual, as unique, like persons – a confused picture, which draws from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the colour in which it is uniformly painted …

Le Robert, for instance, mentions two major characteristics: ‘1. A wide street encircling a city’ and ‘2. A very wide street, often planted with trees’; J. Rey‐Debove and A. Rey (ed.), Nouveau petit Robert. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1993.

F. Choay, Boulevard, in F. Choay and P. Merlin, Dictionnaire de l'urbanisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002 (first edition 1988), p. 121. Criticism of this kind of ‘abuse’ goes back to Littré's 1863 dictionary, (note 75, see above).

Borrowing names and words is a transcultural business. Fifth Avenue is at least as well known today as the Avenue des Champs Elysées. Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards are more evocative in the present than the Grands Boulevards, which have lost their aura since the 1950s (when Yves Montand sang about them). On a different level, it is interesting to note that, already in 1862, the Merruau commission, arguing for the distinction between boulevard and avenue, referred to ‘the American avenues’ and defined them as ‘… most important public ways which penetrate into the heart of the cities …’. In the same way, the expression ‘Haussmannian Boulevards’ seems to have been used by Anglo‐Saxon authors before being adopted in France. A full study of the evolution of the words boulevard and avenue would, thus, have necessitated taking into account cities and linguistic uses outside France.

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Notes on contributors

MICHAËL DARIN *

* Michael Darin studied Philosophy and Sociology in Jerusalem, Architecture in London and History in Paris. He taught for twenty years in the Ecole d'Architecture de Nantes and in the last seven years in the Ecole d'Architecture de Versailles where he is professor of History of Architecture and of Urban Forms. His research is focused on different urban forms typical of French cities: percées (major streets cut through existing cities), squares and boulevards. Recently, he contributed extensively to a book he edited with Géraldine Texier‐Rideau: Places de Paris, XIXe–XXe siècles.