What the covered passages of Paris actually are

Two of them are worth understanding before the rest: the Passage des Panoramas, opened in 1800, and the Galerie Vivienne, opened in 1826. One is the oldest glass-roofed commercial gallery in Paris and the first commercial space in the city to get gas lighting. The other is the most beautiful thing of its kind ever built.

The passage that paid for a submarine

The Passage des Panoramas has the strangest origin story in Paris.

In 1799, an American shipowner and land speculator named James William Thayer bought the confiscated Hôtel de Montmorency-Luxembourg at auction. He needed a way to make money from the large garden running down to the Boulevard Montmartre.

His partner was another American: Robert Fulton, then stuck in Paris trying to sell the French Directory and Napoleon on his inventions — a submarine called the Nautilus, a steamboat, and a torpedo. Fulton had bought the French import rights to the "Panorama", an immersive 360-degree painted view patented in Britain in 1787.

Thayer built two enormous circular wooden rotundas — 17 metres across, 7 metres high — along the boulevard frontage to house the panoramas, and cut a covered walkway through the old mansion so that paying spectators could reach them from the Palais-Royal without crossing the mud. The passage opened in 1800.

Here is the part that is hard to believe and is nonetheless documented: the money visitors paid to see Fulton's panoramas went into building his submarine. He tested the Nautilus in the Seine and at Brest. Napoleon dismissed the whole thing as impractical and ungentlemanly, and Fulton took his steamboat designs to the British instead.

The first gaslight in commercial Paris

In 1817 the Passage des Panoramas became the first public commercial space in Paris to install gas lighting, using Philippe Lebon's coal-gas "thermolamp" technology.

That is a bigger deal than it sounds. Lit shops could stay open into the evening. A covered street with gaslight was, for a few years, the most modern place in the world to spend money — roofed against the weather, lit after dark, and free of horses.

The passage runs about 133 metres long and a little over 3 metres wide, on slender cast-iron columns carrying iron beams under a glazed canopy. In 1834 the architect Jean-Louis Victor Grisart expanded it with four lateral galleries cut through the same block.

The Galerie Vivienne, and what luxury looked like in 1826

In 1823 Louis-Auguste Marchoux, President of the Chamber of Notaries, bought his own house at 6 Rue Vivienne along with three neighbouring properties, including stables belonging to the Duke of Orléans. He wanted to capture the wealthy foot traffic moving between the Palais-Royal, the Bourse and the Grands Boulevards.

He hired François-Jacques Delannoy, who had won the Prix de Rome in 1778, and the gallery opened in 1826 under the name Galerie Marchoux before almost immediately becoming the Galerie Vivienne.

Neoclassical, Pompeian in its decorative vocabulary, crowned with a hemispherical glass dome. If you only walk through one passage, walk through this one.

Where flânerie was invented

The passages did something beyond commerce: they created a new way of being in a city. Strolling with no destination — flânerie — needed somewhere pleasant, sheltered and worth looking at, and the arcades supplied it.

That is why Walter Benjamin spent the last thirteen years of his life on The Arcades Project, an unfinished study of these specific buildings as the birthplace of modern consumer culture. The passages are, in a real sense, where shopping became a leisure activity.

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Small things worth looking for

• A winged wolf. The Stern engraving works occupied premises in the Passage des Panoramas from 1834 to 2015. The interior survives essentially unchanged as Caffè Stern, listed woodwork and all, including a taxidermied winged wolf near the window.
• A concrete entrance that shouldn't be there. The jarring modern doorway on Rue Saint-Marc dates from 1929, when the architect Henri Sauvage demolished the mansion's original 1704 stone portal to put up an office block.
• A candelabra that no longer exists. The neighbouring Galerie Colbert had a bronze gas candelabra with seven crystal globes at the centre of its rotunda, known as the Cocotier Lumineux — the luminous coconut tree. It was where young Parisians arranged to meet. It was destroyed when the gallery was first demolished in 1873.

The night Berlioz was floored by a song

In his memoirs, Hector Berlioz describes being inside one of the glass-domed rotundas in 1830 when a crowd of more than four thousand people sang La Marseillaise, then banned.

The dome concentrated the sound. When the crowd hit "Aux armes, citoyens!", Berlioz — a composer, professionally difficult to overwhelm with noise — collapsed to the ground, and the singers he had brought with him were struck dumb.

It is a useful reminder of what these spaces were. Not quaint shopping arcades. Enclosed public rooms in the middle of a city that was, at that moment, in revolt.