The Invention of Paris (2 page)

Working-class Paris occupies the east of the city – the northeast to be precise. People often say that this is also getting gentrified, that the marginal, the poor, the immigrants are steadily being driven out by the irresistible advance of the ‘
bobos
' (‘bohemian bourgeois' – intellectuals, artists, designers, journalists, etc.) who cultivate their superficial nonconformism and benign antiracism in these quarters, while driving up the rents with the
help of property speculators. This opinion needs some shading. It is true that certain places which formerly were little visited at night have become meeting points for a more or less gilded youth: the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, the surrounds of the Place Gambetta, Rue Oberkampf at its intersection with Rue Saint-Maur. At that very point, some fifteen years ago, I witnessed the start of this phenomenon: in this hidden corner, an old-established
bougnat
– the name once given to alcohol outlets kept by Auvergnats who also supplied wood and coal to the storeys above – had been transformed into a smart café, the Café Charbon, and in the wake of its success bars mushroomed to the point of invading the Rue Oberkampf and the Rue Saint-Maur a hundred metres in each direction. It is also true that streets that were very poor and dilapidated some ten years ago, like Rue Myrha or Rue Doudeauville to the north of the Goutte d'Or, have been gradually renovated, which leads to the expulsion of their vulnerable African population, often without documents or work.

But working-class Paris is resisting rather better than people say. The Chinese at Belleville, the Arabs at the Goutte d'Or, backed by well-established Algerian traders who own their freeholds, the Turks at the market of the Porte Saint-Denis, the Africans of the Dejean market (recently threatened, it's true), the Sri Lankans and Pakistanis on the Faubourg Saint-Denis near La Chapelle – all these welcoming enclaves are holding their own, and even gaining some ground here and there. Besides, the presence in the same streets of Blacks, Arabs, and a precarious and proletarianized white youth, tends to create ties, particularly to face up to a police pressure that is much stronger than ten years ago. The expulsion by the police of the undocumented African hunger strikers who were occupying the Saint Bernard church at La Goutte d'Or aroused great indignation in 1996. Today it is lost in the flood of arrests, raids and expulsions that are the common lot of the working-class quarters of Paris. I am not claiming that these districts are in an effervescence like that of certain periods described in Part Two of this book. But solidarity and common action have gradually created a new situation, especially since the revolts of suburban youth in October–November 2005 forced the government to proclaim a state of emergency, for the first time since the Algerian war in the early 1960s.

These revolts had the effect, among other things, of raising once again the old question of how to put an end to the divide between Paris and its suburbs. This question will certainly seem very odd to English readers, long familiar with a Greater London that stretches almost to the sea. But Paris has always grown in a very different fashion from London: you will read how, from the wall of Philippe Augustus (1165–1223) to the Périphérique of Georges Pompidou (1911–1974), the city developed in concentric rings,
like an onion, to the rhythm of its successive defences. It is a city materially and administratively closed in on itself that has now to be opened up, as has always happened in its history when the latest of its walls became too tight a constriction.

In the last few years, this opening of Paris towards the
banlieue
has been broadly achieved to the west, on a wide arc that runs from Levallois – formerly the domain of secondhand car dealers, and rich today in the headquarters of showbiz and arms multinationals – through to Vanves and Malakoff. Along this arc, both geographical and social conditions were favourable. The transition zone (between the ‘boulevard of the marshals' and the Périphérique – see p. 223) is not disrupted, you can cross it on foot without risking your life. And the population on either side is homogeneous, white, and fairly well-off.

It is a different matter to the east of the city. Around 2000, I wrote: ‘It would need a Hugo to make the comparison between the Porte de la Muette with its pink chestnut trees, a sumptuous embarkation for Cythera, and the Porte de Pantin, an unbridgeable barrage of concrete and noise, where the Périphérique passes at eye level, with the Boulevard Sérurier beneath it engulfed in a hideous cutting in which the scrawny grass of the central reservation is littered with greasy wrappers and beer cans, and where the only human beings on foot are natives of L'viv or Tiraspol trying to survive by begging at the traffic lights' (p. 224). The situation has hardly changed since then. The gulf between Paris and the
banlieue
remains a yawning one in this sector, for reasons that are political in the strong sense of the word. The present population of the former Paris ‘red belt' (from Ivry and Vitry in the south to Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers in the north) is now for the greater part ‘of immigrant origin', i.e., made up of Blacks and Arabs, the very people (or their relatives) who had been driven out of the city by renovation and rising rents. This process, moreover, is very much in line with the history of Paris, in which, ever since the great confinement of 1657 that locked up the poor, the deviant and the mad in the buildings of the Hôpital Général (p. 155), the combined action of town planners, property speculators and police has never stopped pressing the poor, the ‘dangerous classes', further from the centre of the city. In these conditions, what is the point of making a Greater Paris here, why risk retrieving on the periphery those whom it took so much trouble to evacuate from the centre? At the request of the president of the Republic, the
fine fleur
of official architecture recently presented their projects for a Greater Paris, rather along the lines of gyroscopes or centrifuges: the question was to make the poor revolve around the city at a distance, preventing them from returning for any longer than their work as cashiers or night watchmen required.

Fortunately, thanks to the economic crisis, none of these plans will be realized. Greater Paris will be limited to a reorganization of police forces: last week, it was decided that the Paris prefect of police will have his authority extended to all the surrounding departments. But administrative decisions are one thing in the history of Paris, and what actually happens is something else, possibly very different. Already some years ago a new osmosis began to operate between the working-class quarters of the city – from Montmartre to Charonne via Belleville and Ménilmontant – and the old proletarian bastions of the adjacent
banlieue
– Gennevilliers, Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, Les Lilas, Montreuil. On both sides of the line, for many young people, the way of life, the music and the struggles are the same. It is true that you have to take the Métro to get from one side to the other. But as Hugo wrote in
Notre-Dame de Paris
, ‘a city such as Paris is constantly growing', and the bureaucrats in power will be unable to stop this growth.

Eric Hazan
June 2009

 

Jean-Christophe Bailly, Dominique Eddé and Stéphane Grégoire had the patience to immerse themselves in the manuscript of this book at various stages. Their encouragement and suggestions contributed greatly to its final form. Sophie Wahnich and Jean-Christophe Bailly found in three minutes the title and subtitle (‘Il n'y pas de pas perdus', in the original French edition) I had spent months searching for. The authors of the books on Paris I have published in Éditions Hazan – Jean-Pierre Babelon, Laure Beaumont, Maurice Culot, François Loyer, Pierre Pinon, Marie de Thézy – will be able to recognize here and there all the borrowings I have made from them. Finally, Denis Roche of Éditions du Seuil showed confidence in me from the start, and welcomed this book into his own series – a surprise that I have still to get over.

The city is only apparently homogeneous. Even its name takes on a different sound from one district to the next. Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities. To know them means to understand those lines that, running alongside railroad crossings and across privately owned lots, within the park and along the riverbank, function as limits; it means to know these confines, together with the enclaves of the various districts. As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the void – as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs.

– Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
¹

If you cross Boulevard Beaumarchais and turn down towards Rue Amelot, you are conscious of leaving the Marais for the Bastille
quartier.
If you pass the statue of Danton and follow the high back wall of the École de Médecine, you know you are leaving Saint-Germain-des-Près and entering the Latin Quarter. The boundaries between the districts of Paris are often drawn with this surgical precision. Sometimes the reference points are monuments – the rotunda of La Villette, the Lion of Denfert-Rochereau, the Porte Saint-Denis; sometimes the contours of the ground – the fold of the Chaillot hill on the plain of Auteuil, the gap between the Goutte d'Or and Buttes-Chaumont that marks the roads to Germany and Flanders; sometimes again major arteries, of which the Boulevards Rochechouart and Clichy are an extreme example, forming such a firm demarcation between Montmartre and Nouvelle-Athènes that it is not so much two districts that face each other here, but more like two worlds.

Not all of Paris's inner boundaries are lines with no thickness. To pass from one quarter to another, you sometimes have to cross neutral zones,
transitional micro-quarters. These often take the form of embedded pockets: the Arsenal triangle between the Boulevards Henri-IV and Bourdon – the starting point of Flaubert's
Bouvard and Pécuchet,
on a bench with the thermometer at 33 degrees C – with its acute angle at the Bastille, and dividing the Saint-Paul quarter from the approaches to the Gare de Lyon; Épinettes, in the space between the Avenue de Saint-Ouen and the Avenue de Clichy, which ensures smooth passage from the Batignolles to Montmartre; or again, wedged between the Sentier and the Marais, the right-angled triangle of Arts-et-Métiers, whose apex is the Porte Saint-Martin and its hypotenuse the Rue de Turbigo, marked in the direction of the city centre by the bell tower of Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs.

These boundaries may be more vague, like the region of missions and convents centred on the Rue de Sèvres, which you have to cross in order to pass from Faubourg Saint-Martin to Montparnasse, and which old taxi-drivers call the Vatican. Or those streets beyond the Luxembourg that fill the space between the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse, between Val-de-Grâce and the Grande-Chaumière, between the allegory of quinine on Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée and the heroic figure of Marshal Ney in front of the Closerie des Lilas. Already at the end of
Ferragus,
when the former head of the Devorants spends his days silently watching the
boules
players and sometimes lending them his cane to measure their shots, Balzac noted this

space which lies between the south entrance of the Luxembourg and the north entrance of the Observatoire – a space without a name, the neutral space of Paris. There, Paris is no longer; and there, Paris still lingers. The spot is a mingling of street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue, high-road, province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be found there, and yet the place is nothing of all that, – it is a desert.
²

Like the background of certain Dadaist photomontages, composed out of jostling fragments of city photographs, the most commonplace transitions sometimes have the most surprising shocks in store. Leaving the greyness
of the Gare de l'Est along the former convent wall of the Récollets, what could be more surprising than to suddenly stumble on the sparkling water of the Canal Saint-Martin, the lock of La Grange-aux-Belles with its swing bridge and walkway hidden among the chestnut trees, and behind it the pointed slate roofs of the Hôpital Saint-Louis? And at the other end of Paris, the contrast between the bustle of the Avenue d'Italie and – just behind the Gobelins factory – the shady square marking the beginning of the Glacière quarter, with the stream of the Bièvre at its far end.

Certain quarters, even some of the oldest and most clearly defined, may contain an undefined part within them. For many Parisians, the Latin Quarter ends at the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, just as in Abélard's day. Balzac located the Pension Vauquer in Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève (now Tournefort), between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, ‘in the streets shut in between the dome of the Panthéon and the dome of the Val-de-Grâce, two conspicuous public buildings which give a yellowish tone to the landscape and darken the whole district that lies beneath the shadow of their leaden-hued cupolas'.
³
Today, however, on the southern slope of the Montagne, the École Normale Supérieure, research institutes and student residences, the historic laboratories of Pasteur and the Curies, along with the Censier university, may well justify extending the Latin Quarter as far as the Gobelins.

Differences over boundaries can be far more serious, putting in question the very identity of the district in question. Where does Montmartre begin, when you leave the city centre heading north? History – the boundaries of the village before its annexation to Paris – agrees with common sentiment that Montmartre starts when you cross the route of the no. 2 Métro line, whose stations Barbès-Rochechouart, Anvers, Pigalle, Blanche and Clichy precisely mark the curve of the former wall of the Farmers-General. But Louis Chevalier, in his masterpiece
Montmartre du plaisir et du crime,
places the Montmartre boundary much lower, on the Grands Boulevards, including in his book both the Chaussée d'Antin, the Saint-Georges quarter, the Casino de Paris and the Faubourg Poissonnière.
⁴
And quite apart from
plaisir
and
crime
, physical geography would support this dividing line, as the slopes of Montmartre begin well below the Boulevards Rochechouart and Clichy. The land starts to rise once you cross the ancient course of the Seine, a few dozen metres beyond the Grands Boulevards. Walter Benjamin, a peerless Paris pedestrian, noted how, when the flâneur has reached Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, ‘his soles remember: here is the spot where in former
times the
cheval de renfort
– the spare horse – was harnessed to the omnibus that climbed the Rue des Martyrs towards Montmartre'.
⁵