Bookshop · 1888-1890 (1890s)
Edmond Bailly's bookshop, the Librairie de l'Art indépendant
Address · 11, rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 75009 Paris
Metro · Chaussée d'Antin – La Fayette (7, 9)
Today · Other use. Commercial building in the department-store district; nothing marks the former bookshop.
The story
Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, long lined with aristocratic mansions, gradually turned commercial under the Third Republic. At number 11, in premises that had housed Édouard Dujardin's La Revue indépendante, Edmond Bailly (1850-1916) opened the Librairie de l'Art indépendant. It was at once a shop, a publishing house and an informal salon, a few hundred meters from the Opéra and the grands boulevards, in a neighborhood then undergoing rapid change.
According to Churton, who draws on the memoirs of Victor-Émile Michelet, the place attracted more artists than occultists in the strict sense. Debussy is said to have met Satie there; one could run into Mallarmé, Villiers, Henri de Régnier, Odilon Redon or Péladan. Bailly published Symbolist poets, scores and esoteric texts, including a translation of the Tao Te Ching by Matgioi in 1893. According to Michelet, the atmosphere was less “charged with occult effluvia” than at Chamuel's on rue de Trévise.
The shop later moved and Bailly ended his days in relative obscurity; the publishing house disappeared in 1917, shortly after his death. Today number 11 lies at the heart of the department-store shopping district, and no visible trace recalls the bookshop. Churton publishes a recent photograph of the facade. The site remains above all a symbolic landmark: the place where music, poetry and esotericism met at the end of the 1880s.
To be checked · Churton dates the opening to 1888; other sources give October 1889. The bookshop later moved and did not close until 1917.