The Project

Paris close to the ground

The Paris XVIII Laboratory intends to reconstruct the mobility of information and the spatial uses of the event in the Paris of Lights. The population, the conflicts, the language, the exchanges and the trade which meet in a district, a neighborhood, a crossroads or a street announce among the actors of social practices and public engagements which one does not necessarily seize with only reading the archives. By thinking of space as a social link, LP18 makes it possible to interrogate the archive by map.

The data

As early as 1753 an apprentice bookseller, the young Simeon Prosper Hardy, began writing an event log which he kept until October 1789, thus covering the end of the reign of Louis XV and almost the whole reign of Louis XVI. Hardy wrote his Loisirs, or Journal of events as they come to my knowledge, on the registers originally intended for the current accounts of his bookstore, the Golden Column, Hardy quickly became aware of the value of his work for posterity and built his journal in this perspective, constantly citing its sources and reporting, as a witness, the different events of Paris in the second half of the 18th century: a Paris in full swing, truly seized day by day between 1764 and 1789. The testimony of this man from the book appears to be one of the most significant documentary collections for understanding urban society in its representations and practices.

The map

Using the fully vectorized version of the ALPAGE project of the boards produced by Edme Verniquet between 1785 and 1791, our site makes it possible to link the archives integrated in our database to different representations of the capital, from older plans to to the modern environment of Google Maps.