The Invention of Paris (18 page)

When the fortifications were demolished, the Porte de Buci was taken down and the ditches filled in to make what are now Rue Mazarine and Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, adding to a liveliness that remains after three centuries. Thus, on the site of 4 Rue de Buci, opposite Rue Grégoire-de-Tours, gastronomic and literary events were held at a restaurant named Landelle, attended by Piron, Crébillon (father and son), Duclos and Helvétius. This is also where the first Masonic lodge in Paris met, founded by the English. During the Revolution, the building housed the printing press of
Le Courrier français
, Brissot's newspaper. In 1860, its tenants were the painter Giacomelli and the publisher Poulet-Malassis, who had just had serious problems with the law after publishing
Les Fleurs du mal.
¹⁶⁹

The streets surrounding the École des Beaux-Arts, the Institut, and the Monnaie, are different from the rest of Saint-Germain. The shadows of these great buildings, a certain detachment, and the proximity of the river, lend them a silent dignity to which poets and visitors were always sensitive. Plaques that their habitués know by heart indicate that Saint-Amant, Racine, Balzac, Heine, Mickiewicz, Wagner and Oscar Wilde lived and worked here – as well as Picasso, if you press on to the hotel on Rue des Grands-Augustins where he painted
Guernica
, in the same building where Balzac wrote
An Unknown Masterpiece.

By an aberration of toponomy, the section of the 7th arrondissement between Rue des Saint-Pères and Boulevard des Invalides is known as the
Faubourg Saint-Germain. A curious faubourg, given that it lies inside Old Paris, lacks a dominating thoroughfare – Boulevard Saint-Germain is of course much more recent – and is also quite different from the other great aristocratic faubourg of Saint-Honoré. This anomaly is explained by the delay in urbanization: the quarter was built in an empty space, inside the old city but at the same time as the ‘real' faubourgs, which were already outside, and thereby acquired the same designation.

The Faubourg Saint-Germain, moreover, belongs to the realm of myth as well as that of geography, given how it recalls for many people the two great scenes for which it served as both backdrop and cast,
La Comédie humaine
and
À la Recherche du temps perdu
. Balzac:

The thing known in France as the Faubourg Saint-Germain is neither a quarter, nor a sect, nor an institution, nor anything else that admits of a precise definition. There are great houses on the Place Royale, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the Chaussée d'Antin, in any one of which you may breathe the same atmosphere of Faubourg Saint-Germain. So, to begin with, the whole faubourg is not within the faubourg. There are men and women born far enough away from its influences who respond to them and take their place in the circle; and again there are others, born within its limits, who may yet be driven forth forever.
¹⁷⁰

And Proust, apropos the Hôtel de Guermantes: ‘The presence of the body of Jesus Christ in the host seemed to me no more obscure a mystery than this leading house in the Faubourg being situated on the Right Bank of the river and so near that from my bedroom I could hear its carpets being beaten.'
¹⁷¹

The construction of this faubourg proceeded in two stages, with an interval of close to a century. In the early 1600s, ‘
la reine Margot
' – Marguerite de Valois, the first wife of Henri IV – bought an immense piece of land parallel to the river, opposite the Louvre. She had an hôtel built with gardens extending to Rue des Saints-Pères, and continuing from there, through a park that was not closed by walls, to occupy the entire space between Rue de l'Université and Rue de la Seine, with only countryside beyond.
¹⁷²

On Marguerite's death, Louis XIII sold off this land in plots to pay his debts. The long parallels of Rue de Lille, Rue de Verneuil and Rue de l'Université have marked for close to four centuries now the course of the avenues in the park of
la reine Margot.

Towards the end of Louis XIV's reign, construction began on a new Faubourg Saint-Germain, beyond Rue des Saints-Pères, for the aristocracy who were leaving the Marais. Rue Saint-Dominique, Rue de Grenelle with Bouchardon's splendid fountain of the Quatre-Saisons, and Rue de Varenne, were then drawn parallel to the streets of Margot's domain. The grid was completed by streets perpendicular to the river: Rue de Bellechasse and Rue de Bourgogne, and above all the commercial Rue du Bac, a major route connecting the faubourg with the Right Bank following the construction of the Pont-Royal. This was the route that duchesses took to pay court at the Tuileries. This very loosely patterned urban grid still marks out today the large blocks; their hôtels placed between a front courtyard and a back garden have passed from the hands of the aristocracy to those of the ministerial technocracy, but this has not made them more accessible than they were before, when it was possible to enter many noble dwellings without a badge or identity papers.
¹⁷³

The ‘existentialist' Saint-Germain-des-Près also has its legend, fuelled largely by hate-filled articles in the ‘right-wing' press – the apostrophes are needed, as in the great years of the Tabou, the Rose-Rouge, the Bar-Vert and the Montana, between the Liberation and 1950, no one would say they were on the right, given that the term was at this time equivalent to ‘collaborator', and right-wing figures were often in prison or prudently living abroad. But what is certain is that Saint-Germain-des-Près was until the late 1980s the centre of French publishing. This certainly had its extensions elsewhere, in the Latin Quarter (Maspero-La Découverte by the Sorbonne, Hachette in its historic building on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel), in Montparnasse (Albin Michel, Larousse), and even on the Right Bank (Calmann-Lévy). But the bulk of publishers were grouped in the 6th arrondissement, until concentration, the search for economies of scale, and a contempt for history dispersed the large conglomerates and their controlling directors into air-conditioned
towers, sheltered from any contagion with actual books, readers or bookshops.
¹⁷⁴

Within the limits of Old Paris, the cuttings of the nineteenth century were fairly reasonable, though less from any archaeological scruple than due to a lack of time. It was thanks to the disasters of Metz and Sedan, thanks to the military talent of Mac-Mahon and Bazaine, that the complete gutting of Saint-Germain-des-Près was avoided, Rue de Rennes not pushed through to the Pont des Arts and the Marais ravaged by the extension of Rue Étienne-Marcel to the Bastille. The routes that were completed had clear town-planning reasons. Two east-west carriageways were connected perpendicularly to the great north-south axis Sébastopol–Saint-Michel, one on each bank: the extension of Rue de Rivoli, and Boulevard Saint-Germain (with Rue des Écoles an aborted first attempt). This orthogonal system was completed by transversals such as Rue Réaumur, and obliques like Rue de Turbigo and the Avenue de l'Opéra.

These cuttings certainly left their scars on the old quarters. On either side of the Place Saint-Michel, that paradigm of Haussmannism, Place Saint-André-des-Arts and the Saint-Séverin quarter form an intact frame, architecturally at least.
¹⁷⁵
‘Sue, Hugo, and of course Balzac, would recognize around them, unchanged, Paris of the Middle Ages, the same as we could find still alive, despite Haussmann, until not so long ago, in the bits of those streets that used to connect Rue Saint-Denis and Rue Saint-Martin, but which, pierced in the middle by Boulevard Sébastopol, had found a way to reconstitute at their two extremities their old and still unchanged glory.'
¹⁷⁶
What contributed to the peaceful character of this coexistence was the care taken by the nineteenth-century architects in connecting their cuttings with the old roads, as for example at the junction between Rue de Rennes and Rue du Vieux-Colombier, where Second Empire architecture repeats in a more modern vein the orders of the eighteenth century.
¹⁷⁷
The
two buildings on the Place des Victoires that frame the beginning of Rue Étienne-Marcel are also extraordinary adaptations of rhythms and proportions from the age of Louis XIV. This concern for integration sometimes even led to the reuse of a whole side of a street in the new openings – Rue Taranne partly integrated, as we saw, into Boulevard Saint-Germain, or entire sections of the old Rue Pélipeaux and Rue Thévenot absorbed into Rue Réaumur, near the Temple.

The Île de la Cité was an exception, as here Haussmann caused complete disaster. For him it was ‘a place obstructed by a crowd of shacks, inhabited by bad characters, and crossed by damp, twisted and dirty streets', a description that is repeated in a different form in certain of Meryon's engravings, such as
L'Hôtellerie de la Mort
or
La Rue des Chantres
, in which ‘the depth of perspective is augmented by the thought of all the dramas they contain'.
¹⁷⁸
Undoubtedly it was necessary to clean up this ‘labyrinth of obscure, crooked, and narrow streets, which extend from the Palais de Justice to Notre-Dame', as Sue describes it at the start of
The Mysteries of Paris
. But it was only a step from this to emptying out the quarter altogether, so that ‘the cradle of the capital, entirely demolished, now contains simply a barracks, a church, a hospital and a palace'.
¹⁷⁹
If this step was taken, it was for political and military reasons above all. During the June days of 1848, which so strongly marked the epoch, there was much fighting in the Cité and the adjacent part of the Latin Quarter (I shall return to this later), and this centre of insurrection had to be eradicated.

I am aware that this last sentence goes counter to contemporary historiography. By an amalgam that is characteristic of the spirit of our time, the (useful) reappreciation of nineteenth-century architecture has led to a positive revaluation of Haussmann, to the point of a ridiculous minimization of his anti-insurrectionary concerns, just as it is good form to present Napoleon III as a philanthropic Saint-Simonian.
¹⁸⁰
But Haussmann was explicit: at the time when the opening of Rue de Turbigo and the widening of Rue Beaubourg led to the disappearance of Rue Transnonain,

he exulted: ‘I read, in a book which enjoyed great success last year, that the streets of Paris had been enlarged to permit ideas to circulate, and, above all, regiments to pass. This malicious statement (which comes in the wake of others) is the equivalent of saying that Paris has been strategically embellished. Well, so be it . . . I do not hesitate to proclaim that strategic embellishments are the most admirable of embellishments.'
¹⁸¹

Leaving the Cité by the Pont Saint-Michel, you find yourself face to face with a depiction of the strategic triumph of order:

For how many people crossing the Place Saint-Michel today do the figures on the fountain, surrounded by beer and Coca-Cola cans, still have something to say? Who is able to decipher historically this allegory for tourists, to recognize that the archangel with his spear stuck into the back of Satan was supposed at the time to represent the triumph of Good over the Evil people of June 1848? But in the era of insurrections, on the threshold of the rebel arrondissement, this statue had a meaning that was in no way ambiguous. Everyone knew that this Saint Michael symbolized the Second Empire crushing the demon of revolution, and that Rue Saint-Jacques and the Latin Quarter could recognize their own image in the infernal beast hurled to the ground.
¹⁸²

 

1
These two bridges were the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-Royal.

2
E. G. Haussmann,
Mémoires
(1890–3).

3
Chevalier,
Montmartre du plaisir et du crime
.

4
Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont,
Paris anecdote
(Paris, 1854; republished by Les Éditions de Paris, 1984).

5
Francis Carco,
De Montmartre au Quartier Latin
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1927).

6
Jean-Paul Clébert,
Paris insolite
(Paris: Denoël, 1952).

7
A decree of Louis XIV dated December 1702 defined twenty quarters, fifteen of these being on the Right Bank. These were the Cité, Louvre, Palais-Royal, Montmartre (around the Place des Victoires), Saint-Eustache, Halles, Sainte-Opportune (around Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois), Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie (Châtelet), Saint-Denis, Saint-Martin, Saint-Avoye (Rue de la Verrerie, Rue Vieille-du-Temple, Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie . . .), Marais, Grève (Hôtel de Ville, Saint-Gervais), Saint-Antoine and Saint-Paul. The five quarters on the Left Bank were Maubert, Saint-Benoît (the Écoles quarter – there is still an Impasse du Cimetière-Saint-Benoît behind the Collège de France), Saint-André-des-Arts, Luxembourg and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which had only recently become part of Paris.

8
Eugène Briffault,
Paris à table
(1846).

9
So that his new quarter would be within the Paris walls, Richelieu had the fortification slightly moved (as mentioned above, this ran in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Denis to the Place des Victoires and the Louvre), more or less along the line of the boulevards from the Porte Saint-Denis to the Madeleine. This was the precinct ‘des Fossés jaunes', from the name of the colour of the shifted earth. Its existence was brief, as the contractor went bankrupt and the walls were soon knocked down.

10
Richelieu's palace was then demolished. All that remained were the Galleries des Proues, between Rue de Valois and the Cour d'Honneur, with columns installed by Buren. The nautical trimmings recall that Richelieu was also superintendent-general of shipping. The buildings on the fourth side, towards Rue Saint-Honoré, were a later addition. Richelieu made a gift of the Palais-Cardinal to Louis XIII, and Louis XIV then gave it to his brother, Monsieur, the Duc d'Orléans. Renamed the Palais-Royal, it remained in the Orléans family until 1848, except for the interruption of 1789 to 1815.