Les Grands Boulevards. Photo taken by me, May 2019.

Paris is the capital city of the French Republic. Located in the Île-de-France region in the northern portion of France, Paris has been the center of French culture and government for many centuries and has been the epicenter of its many revolutions. The city today retains its importance in French culture and government and has a reputation for being one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and is a frequent destination for tourists from around the world. The city has a well-deserved nickname, La Ville Lumière or the City of Light. Paris gained this nickname due to the wide avenues and abundant streetlighting that was built beginning in the mid-nineteenth century under Emperor Napoleon III and his prefect of Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This Paris, however, is not the Paris that Adèle is from.

Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 and, while the exact time the novel takes place is not known, it can be assumed that the novel takes place in the early 1800s, while Napoleon III and Haussmann’s renovations of Paris did not begin until the 1850s. In Chapter XIV, Mr. Rochester calls Adèle a “genuine daughter of Paris” and I think that learning what Paris is like can give some insight into what Mr. Rochester means by this (Brontë 118). In his book City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris, Rupert Christiansen describes pre-Haussmann Paris as “a fetid wilderness of filth, stench, and crime, pitted with noxious warrens of tortuous backstreets cramped with decrepit tenement housing and swarms of wretched humanity” but that there were “oases of splendor” (30). With this context for how Paris was in the early 1800s and with examples of Adèle’s expectations, such as Rochester giving her a present, culminating in her saying “ma boîte! Ma boîte!” when she sees her present, I think that it is fairly safe to say that Adèle was accustomed to a life of at least some luxury when she lived in Paris (Brontë 118). At the very least I think that it is clear that she would not be counted among the “swarms of wretched humanity” that populated the majority of the Paris of her time (Christiansen 30). I think that it may also be understood that Rochester interacts with the upper class of France at the time and not with the lower classes, be they working class or peasant. Since Rochester is a member of the upper class in England and is wealthy, it can be assumed that he would be welcomed in some way into the upper-class society of other European nations. What is unclear due to the lack of clarity of the exact year that the novel takes place, is whether Adèle and Rochester are accustomed to the traditional aristocracy, the upper class of the first French Revolution, or the Napoleonic aristocracy.

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, edited by Deborah Lutz, 4th ed. Norton, 2016.

Christiansen, Rupert. City of Light: The Making of Modern Paris. Basic Books, 2018.