Ancienne Barrière du Trône (Tollbooth Pavilion and Column)

Eugène Atget's photograph depicts one of a pair of pavilions and columns that composed an ensemble that was part of a series of forty-seven formal gateways in the wall that circled Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. The pavilions, constructed in 1787, were designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and housed offices for the collection of taxes on goods being brought into the city. Their flat roofs and ponderous forms are largely due to the fact that they were intended to be the podiums for monumental columns, which were built, instead, to the side. The columns had sentry boxes in their bases and were linked to the customs houses by metal grilles, which had vanished by the time of Atget's view. This site, where more than one thousand people were guillotined during the Reign of Terror, is now the place de la Nation, a principal crossroads of the modern city rather than its eastern limit.

The upper edge of the photograph is shaped by rounded corners, the result of Atget's lens not fully covering the area of the glass-plate negative, and is punctuated by the traces of two of the clips that held the plate in place inside the camera. Both arcs and clip marks frame the scene like a stage proscenium, suggesting that the third act of Puccini's opera La Bohème, which is set at dawn at a Paris tollbooth, has concluded, its characters dispersed. Atget may have wanted to commemorate this elaborate tollgate because he thought that it would be demolished, as were forty-three of the original forty-seven. This one has survived to the present day.

Originally published in Eugène Atget, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 38. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.