The Arcades Project

Published posthumously in 1999, The Arcades Project is an unfinished non-fiction book by German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Written between 1927 and 1940—the year of Benjamin's death—the book offers an architectural and cultural history of Paris during the nineteenth century. The "arcades" of its title refer to Paris's glass-covered pedestrian walkways, full of shops and gas lamps that light the corridors at night. According to the South African author J.M. Coetzee, The Arcades Project “suggests a new way of writing about a civilization using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks: history from below rather than above.”

In 1927, Benjamin began writing The Arcades Project, originally conceiving it as a newspaper article. The project quickly expanded in scope, and Benjamin spent the next thirteen years working on it. During this time, Benjamin, a Jew, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 after the Reichstag fire signaled Nazism had become the dominant political and philosophical ethos within the country. Benjamin spent most of the next seven years in Paris where he met the author George Batailles, to whom he entrusted The Arcades Project manuscript before his death. In 1940, having been denied a safe haven in both Spain and France and without the means to travel to the United States, Benjamin committed suicide by way of an intentional morphine overdose rather than fall into Nazi hands.

The book is divided into thirty-six sections that Benjamin refers to as "convolutes," which means bundles or sheaves in Latin. Benjamin's focus on arcades doubles as a metaphor for the loss of Paris's cultural and architectural heritage during the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1852 and 1870 during the era known as the Second French Empire, Napoleon III commissioned Georges Eugene-Haussman to renovate the city of Paris. This meant demolishing most of the narrow arcades in favor of wide avenues designed to reduce overcrowding, crime, and disease. Today, only thirty arcades remain out of the three hundred that existed during what Benjamin considers Paris’s cultural peak.



An early example of a shopping mall, the arcade holds a special distinction to Benjamin as the most important architectural feat of the nineteenth century. While less utilitarian or aesthetically pleasing than many other building types of the era, the arcades represent a dramatic shift in Western society from a culture of production to a culture of consumption. Benjamin writes, “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.”

The inhabitant of these arcades, Benjamin writes, is "the flâneur," an invention of the French poet Charles Baudelaire who is depicted as a passionate wanderer. “[The flâneur] was a figure of the modern artist-poet, a figure keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city, but also a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.” An avowed Marxist, Benjamin views the arcades as symbolic of a bygone era of consumerism, before capitalism became a global behemoth in the twentieth century. "The arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe."

After Haussman's renovation of the city, the arcades still existed but they were pushed into the shadows. As a result, they became centers not so much of consumerism but of intellectualism. At the Passage de l'Opera, early Surrealists like André Breton gathered to debate their craft and the future of art. Benjamin writes, “Dada was the mother of Surrealism. Its father was the arcade," referring to Dadaism, an early precursor to Surrealism that rejected the logic and reason of the modern capitalist world. Surrealism maintained many of Dada's tenets but also added an emphasis on dreams, something Benjamin directly attributes to the "phantasmagoric" qualities of the ruined arcades which many of the Surrealists inhabited.



Massive and discursive, The Arcades Project offers an unfiltered access point into one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.