The Belly of Paris (3 page)

It is not by chance that the layout of today's Paris bespeaks power and militarism. To many at the time, the emperor was simply bulldozing neighborhoods and building streets through them in which troops could quickly be deployed. A wide boulevard, later known as the boulevard Saint-Michel after a statue that was erected in a central square, cut a wide swath through the Latin Quarter. The same reshaping took place on the right bank. Poor people were evicted, neighborhoods were leveled, boulevards and monuments were built.

By the time Zola returned to Paris, the area around Les Halles
was unrecognizable to him just as it is to Florent in the opening of
The Belly of Paris
. Paris streets were renamed after men of power, and only a few names remain today, mostly in the former Les Halles neighborhood—rue de la Ferronerie (Foundry), pas du Mule (Mule Path)—to remind Parisians not only of the old Paris names but of what the old Paris was. The gentrification and destruction of working-class neighborhoods is a theme that runs through
The Belly of Paris
and many other Zola novels. In
Au Bonheur des dames
, published ten years later, in 1883, a department store opens and an entire neighborhood of shops is put out of business. It is a process that has, sadly, continued in Paris, but
The Belly of Paris
is set at the dramatic beginning of this process.

Zola writes about longing for the little remaining of old Paris,
“les belles rues d'autrefois”
the beautiful old-fashioned streets, and as an example he cites rue de la Ferronerie. I remember feeling the same way a hundred years later, after they tore down Les Halles and it was just a hole in the ground and some of these same streets, including rue de la Ferronerie, were all that was left of the old neighborhood. It is all gone now, of course.

Not only public works but also poverty expanded in the Paris of Napoleon III. Inflation dramatically reduced the spending power of the average Parisian. Many of Paris's 1.7 million people were near starvation. The average worker spent between a third and two thirds of his income on bread. At the same time conspicuous displays of gluttony were made fashionable for the ruling class, encouraged by the emperor. Peace was maintained by police repression. As many as 35,000 Parisians were arrested for vagrancy in a single year.

In 1866, things grew even worse when Haussmann was caught skimming funds from his enormous public works budget and fired. The work stopped, and perhaps as many as 100,000 workers who had been rebuilding the city were thrown out of work.

While much of the city starved, the new boulevards were packed with restaurants and cafés offering gaudy displays of gourmandism. This was especially true in 1867, when Napoleon hosted a universal exposition and threw almost daily galas for visiting dignitaries.

In 1858, when Zola as a young man returned to the Paris of his birth, the final touches were being put on the first six pavilions of the newly redesigned Les Halles Centrales, the central market. The market had already been there for seven hundred years. An irony for Zola, whose novel is so much about the connection between Les Halles and fat people, the market was started in the twelfth century under Louis VI, who was known as Louis the Fat.

Napoleon I had planned to redesign it but was defeated by the British before the plans could get under way. The look of the new pavilions was something no Parisians had ever seen. In the plans it was called “a veritable palace of iron and crystal.” Some disapproved, but others, like Claude the painter in
Le Ventre de Paris
, thought it was the only original building of the century that “has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times.”

It most definitely was a product of the times. In 1845, Victor Baltard, a leading Paris architect and son of a prominent Paris neoclassical architect and artist, Louis-Pierre Baltard, was commissioned along with his partner, Félix Callet, an older but less-known architect, to redesign Les Halles. Their plan called for eight pavilions of various sizes with stone walls and metal roofs. In 1848, construction was halted by the revolution. In 1851, the new president of the republic, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, laid the first stone. The Baltard-Callet stone buildings were massive in appearance, and Parisians sneeringly called the design the “Les Halles fortress.” In 1853, Bonaparte, now emperor, stopped the construction and searched for a new idea, which he said should be “vast but light, like the new train stations.” He called for buildings that resembled umbrellas. Amazingly, the winning design was by the rejected team of Baltard and Callet, with ten iron-and-glass pavilions (an additional two were not completed until 1936). It was a state-of-the-art innovation of the Industrial Revolution.

Les Halles were the first buildings in France—and among the first in the world—to display their metalwork; all of the struts and arches were clearly visible since the construction was an entirely
glass-covered metal frame. Almost no one in Paris, Zola included, had ever seen such buildings, and they were a sight to wonder at.

Baltard's Les Halles was one of the great successes of architectural history, a huge step forward in the development of metal architecture. It seemed so light and airy, even transparent, yet offered the strength of metal construction. Soon more train stations, the new phenomenon of department stores, and exhibition halls copied the idea. It became fashionable for buildings to have iron-and-glass roofs. It became the leading design for markets around the world.

In 1959, the government, after years of debate about the grubby market clogging traffic with trucks in the center of Paris, built a market in the southern suburbs of Rungis and La Villette. By the late 1960s only the meat market remained. In 1967, Janet Flanner, the celebrated American chronicler of prewar Paris, wrote a sad article in
Life
magazine, referring to
Le Ventre de Paris
and bemoaning that “the market smells of gasoline fumes. It used to smell of horses.” In March 1969, by order of President Charles de Gaulle, the market was officially closed over the protests of students, who by then had considerable practice protesting de Gaulle.
Life
magazine ran another article titled “‘The Belly of Paris,’ Les Halles, Closes Forever.”

By 1973, the market was completely gone and the emperor Napoleon's vision of a central Paris devoid of working-class neighborhoods began to be completed. Les Halles and its market people were replaced by a shopping mall and the surrounding neighborhoods were rebuilt to be expensive and fashionable and stripped of their charm. One of Baltard's pavilions, completed in 1854, was classified as a historic monument and moved up the Seine to Nogent-sur-Marne, where it is now known as the Pavillon Baltard.

This period of the empire, from the 1848 uprising to the 1871 uprising, is the setting of the Rougon-Macquart saga.
The Belly of Paris
takes place over one year from 1858 to 1859 and, like most of the other books, has a very strong sense of the political issues of the
time. So it is not surprising that the lead character is a
bagnard
, a convict from the newly established penal colony of French Guiana.

France has never known what to do with its possession on the northeast shoulder of South America. There was a widely circulated legend in sixteenth-century Europe that somewhere in the continent of South America was a huge city holding astounding quantities of gold and other mineral riches. The Spanish called this never-seen city El Dorado. In 1595, the British explorer Sir Walter Raleigh published a report on his visit to the South American coast,
The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana
, in which he claimed to have found El Dorado. This created considerable interest in the area. The French, the British, and the Dutch ended up with slices of the region, and although some gold could be panned in the rivers—and still is—no one has found anything comparable to the legend of El Dorado.

Every attempt to settle French Guiana has failed. A seventeenth-century effort was led by a man who appears to have gone mad and ruled with arbitrary brutality. The original colony of Cayenne, on the coast, was taken over by indigenous warriors, who, according to contemporary reports, ate the settlers. Slaves were imported from Africa for plantations, but they constantly rebelled and ran away to the interior. In the eighteenth century, Louis XV sent 14,000 settlers. Ten thousand of them died of disease so rapidly that their bodies were dumped into the sea because there was no longer manpower available for burial. The remaining settlers fled to three offshore islands, which they called the Iles du Salut, the healthy islands, because they had less malaria and other diseases.

When Louis-Napoléon came to power, he was interested in the problem of settling this territory. Slavery, which had never worked well in Guiana, was abolished in all French territories in 1848. So he sent several boatloads of indentured Chinese laborers to work the land. They were not farmers, and they moved to Cayenne and set up shops. Their descendants still operate shops in Cayenne. Once their labor had fled, many plantation owners, recognizing a good idea, abandoned their land, and they too moved to Cayenne.

Then the emperor had an idea: instead of spending a fortune having the navy maintain prison ships—the ships in which the prisoners provided oar power were outmoded anyway—why not ship convicts to Guiana and force them to develop the land? They would stay there and marry local women—or maybe female convicts could be sent—and they would settle Guiana. To make this plan work, the convicts, after serving their time, were required to spend an equal amount of time as “free men” in the colony. The government even sent prostitutes to marry the first prisoners released, but the women refused to marry any of the convicts and the angry officials shipped them off to labor in a prison camp. Some coupling did take place, but most of the children born of these pairings died in infancy, and many of the female convicts proved to be barren. A fertility expert, Dr. Jean Orgéas, was sent from France to study the problem. After a five-year study, he concluded in 1864 that white people could not reproduce in the tropics.

Convicts were required to spend their terms in hard labor chained to another convict or to an iron ball. If caught trying to escape, they were sentenced to an additional two to five years; if they were serving a life sentence, the penalty was two to five years with double chains.

But most prisoners tried to escape because the alternative was to labor in such misery that half would die of either fever or suicide. The prison system never was able to operate in the interior. The center of the prison was at the mouth of the Maroni River, and the rest of the prisoners were held in either Cayenne or the Iles du Salut. There were a few jungle camps where convicts were forced to work naked, their bodies eaten by insects and slashed by razor grass and thorny bushes. Only the convicts singled out for the harshest treatment, or those most likely to attempt escape, were sent to the islands. Florent, being a political prisoner, was one of them.

Zola, as always, did careful homework and seemed to understand much about the penal colonies. But his story of Florent escaping and returning to France was extremely improbable. Of the 70,000 men and women sent to Guiana between 1851 and 1947,
only a handful finished their sentences and returned to France. Almost no escapees made it back. Only 18,000 prisoners survived their sentences. Some did not even survive the initial voyage from France. There were many escape attempts, and some escapees succeeded and lived in South America, where they were called “Maroni boys” by those who knew. But there were no Cayenne boys in Paris.

In
The Belly of Paris
the gabby Les Halles shopkeepers who would have Florent and other characters sent to Guiana were thoughtlessly delivering them to a life sentence that many regarded as worse than death.

Cayenne was a growing French human rights scandal. Numerous exposés were written about it, and by 1939 the French government had banned the release in France of Hollywood movies on the subject. During World War II, France was unable to feed its Guiana prisoners, and an estimated two thousand died. Finally the prisons were closed in 1947, the prisoners released to sleep on the streets of the few coastal towns of French Guiana. For decades they remained, slowly dying off, lost and broken men with blank stares, “convict eyes,” as one woman said of Florent.

The interior to this day is inhabited only by the descendants of runaway slaves and indigenous tribes. For outsiders it is almost impossible to survive in this dense jungle that the French have named
l'enfer vert
, the green hell. The prisons are slowly being reclaimed by jungle growth and humidity. The only use France has found for French Guiana is for the European Space Agency's Europe's Spaceport, from which a handful of technicians and a great many military guards send rockets to outer space because Guiana has the logistical advantage of being near the equator.

It seems fated that Zola wrote about Guiana early in his career, because it turned up again toward the end of his life at the center of the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island, making it famous, so that many Americans referred to the whole penal colony as Devil's Island, just as the French, with equal inaccuracy, called it Cayenne. Devil's Island is a tiny island that can be crossed from shore to shore on foot in a matter of minutes. There were
never more than thirty convicts on the island at a time. Fewer than a hundred prisoners ever served on Devil's Island, so named because the waters around it are so wild and forbidding that it was said that the Devil lived there. Food and supplies were sent over in a basket by a cable from the mainland when the seas were too rough for boats.