The Urban Environment
Pre-revolutionary Paris, writes Jeffry Kaplow, was a densely populated city of over six-hundred-thousand inhabitants, where the social classes rubbed shoulders.
The Russian traveller Nikolai Karamzin saw Paris for the first time in March 1790, and his reaction was no different from that of thousands of his predecessors. All were impressed by the grandeur of the city, its vastness, colour and all-pervasive sense of movement.
All noted the size and density of the population (600,000 and more in 1789), the animation of the streets, and, above all, the sharp contrasts between extreme luxury and abject poverty, the opulence of the noble and financier, the mediocrity of the artisan, and the starving faces of the ubiquitous beggars. Karamzin wrote:
‘Soon we entered the Faubourg Saint Antoine, and what did we see there? Narrow, dirty, muddy streets, evil looking houses and people in tattered rags. “So this is Paris,” I said to myself, “the city that seemed so magnificent to me from afar.”
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