The Invention of Paris (23 page)

At this time, the Champs-Élysées was still a marshy field, which had yet to be given a name:

This was formerly a plain to be seen on the right-hand side of the Cours-la-Reine, to which one crossed by a small stone bridge. In 1670 it was
planted with elms, which formed fine avenues up to the Roule, ending in the form of a star, at a height from which a part of the city and the countryside around could be seen; this was then named the ChampsÉlysées. The central avenue was more spacious than the others, and led at one end to the large esplanade facing the swing-bridge of the Tuileries, which has since been made into the Place de Louis XV [now Place de la Concorde], and at the other end to the Étoile.
¹⁷

Under Louis XV, the Marquis de Marigny, brother of La Pompadour and superintendent of the king's buildings (he and his sister made a fine minister of culture), ‘had all the trees planted in 1670 uprooted, and, in order to make the viewpoint more spacious . . . had the high ground that was close to the part known as the Étoile levelled, and the lower ground raised, so that the road was made gentler and more uniform, and in 1765 began to replant with trees this whole section of the Champs-Élysées, so that these trees today have the finest effect possible.'
¹⁸

It was said at the time that Marigny had undertaken this work to give his sister, who had just bought the Hôtel d'Évreux (now the Élysée palace), a clearer view of the promenade and the Invalides. That is possible, but at all events the beginning of the Champs-Élysées' fashionability dates from these improvements. As Mercier wrote:

The magnificent garden of the Tuileries is abandoned today for the avenues of the Champs-Élysées. One admires the fine proportions and design of the Tuileries; but the Champs-Élysées is where all ages and classes of people gather: the pastoral character of the place, the buildings decked out with terraces, the cafés, a wider and less symmetrical ground, all this acts as an invitation.

In the 1770s, when dance halls – known as
vaux-halls
– proliferated in Paris, Le Camus de Mézières, whom we saw at work on the Halle aux
Blés, built the Colisée – likewise a rotunda – between the Allée des Veuves (Avenue Matignon
¹⁹
), Rue du Colisée and the Champs-Élysées. This establishment, which included five rooms for dancing, fashionable shops for clothing and jewellery, a naumachia, cafés, and entertainments, was famed for its fireworks and masked balls, attended by no less than Marie-Antoinette herself. The best society frequented the Ledoyen restaurant, where in summer you could dine outdoors; the Café des Ambassadeurs; and the Restaurant de la Bonne-Morue in the street of the same name (now Rue Boissy-d'Anglas), where Grimod de La Reynière, Farmer-General and celebrated gastronomist, had a hotel built that was decorated by Clérisseau in the Pompeian style.
²⁰
On the wide expanse of waste ground in front of the Tuileries, which had long served as a storage site for marble, Gabriel finished the Place Louis XV, which must have been very pretty with its oval of floral ditches, sentry boxes, balustrades, and in the centre the equestrian statue of the king by Bouchardon, which would soon be replaced by the guillotine.

The gardens of the Champs-Élysées, before the ageing Blanqui came, unknown to anyone, to review his secret army,
²¹
or the young narrator of
À la Recherche du temps perdu
felt the first torments of love, were for the whole of the nineteenth century one of the great sites of Parisian pleasure. In 1800 already, Chateaubriand, arriving through the Étoile barrier and rediscovering the city he had left nine years previously, recalled in his
Memoirs
: ‘On entering the Champs-Élysées I was amazed to hear the sound of violins, horns, clarinets and drums. I saw halls where men and women were dancing; further on, the Tuileries palace appeared at the far end of its two great stands of chestnut trees.'

Later on in the century, the Champs-Élysées was, for Victor Fournel, ‘the centre of that flood of harmony which descends on Paris in the summer months. It is impossible to take a step, from the Rond-Point and as far as the Place de la Concorde, without receiving the full impact, like artillery fire, of a romance, a little song, and further on a great aria or an opera
overture.'
²²
In 1844, at the height of the polka mania, the Mabille brothers opened a ballroom in the Allée des Veuves, ‘which presented a charming aspect in the evenings, when its trees, flower baskets and ponds were lit up by gas lamps. The orchestra enjoyed a deserved reputation. It was here that successive choreographic celebrities shone who were more or less suspect, known to the public by such names as Reine Pomaré, Céleste Mogador, Rigolboche, etc.'
²³
Then, during the great vogue of cafés-concerts, it was in the Champs-Élysées gardens that the most luxurious of these were to be found, such as the Alcazar in summer, whose star was the famous Thérésa, and the Café des Ambassadeurs, immortalized by Degas and Lautrec.

The Faubourg Saint-Honoré was ‘formerly relatively uninhabited and insignificant', wrote Piganiol de La Force in 1765, ‘but fifty or sixty years ago people began to build the most magnificent hôtels there, so that it is now one of the finest faubourgs of Paris'. The elegant hotels were on the odd-numbered side of the street, with gardens opening onto the ChampsÉlysées: the Hôtel d'Évreux or Élysée, the Hôtel de Charost that belonged to Pauline Bonaparte before becoming the British embassy, the Hôtel d'Aguesseau which Visconti transformed into a neo-Renaissance palazzo and would be one of Rothschild's hôtels. But at the same time, higher up, between the Rond-Point and the present Place de l'Étoile, both sides of what was still called Avenue de Neuilly remained almost deserted. In 1800, there were no more than six buildings on this stretch.
²⁴
Further up again, the land along Rue de Chaillot (now de Berri) belonged to the Oratory fathers, and the land on the left to the Sainte-Geneviève abbey, which ran the Sainte-Périne retirement home. Still further, the left side was occupied by the Marbeuf gardens, an ancient folly that the Convention had turned into a public garden. On the right, an immense estate was named after Beaujon, receiver-general of finances under Louis XVI, who had built there a kind of ‘charterhouse' for his intimate gatherings, along with a dairy and a home for eighty orphans, including six for children ‘who showed an early talent for drawing'.
²⁵
Under Louis-Philippe, new streets were built across these well-endowed lands, including Rue Fortunée, where Balzac
moved, after great labours, to receive Mme Hanska in a setting worthy of her.
²⁶

The Champs-Élysées in the present sense is thus a ‘recent' quarter, which has only really existed since the 1830s or '40s. Its development accelerated when Haussmann improved the Place de l'Étoile and Avenue de l'Impératrice (now Foch), thus opening the road to the Bois de Boulogne and the west. ‘It is frightening,' Delvau wrote in 1865, ‘the number of promenaders and carriages of all kinds – broughams and britzskas, flies and tandems, barouches and four-wheelers, cabs and wagonettes – that cross this square each day on their way either to the Bois de Boulogne or to Neuilly, which are both in this direction.'
²⁷
But despite this animation, Avenue des Champs-Élysées essentially dates only from the twentieth century. That is exceptional for a major Paris artery, and we should perhaps see it as one of the reasons that make it seem like a stranger in the city, even if in certain faraway countries it is seen as one of the main symbols of Paris.

In the 1950s there were still good reasons for visiting the ChampsÉlysées: a certain flashiness, an entertaining kitsch, Claridge's, Fouquet's, the chrome displays of De Soto and Packard – and above all the cinemas. To see the latest Hitchcock in its original version, there was no other choice than the magnificent theatres of the Marignan, the Normandie, or the Colisée (in the boulevard cinemas these films were only shown dubbed in French, and on the Left Bank the art and specialist cinemas only projected classics or avant-garde films). But today, especially after the recent ‘improvements', the Champs-Élysées is more like the duty-free mall of an international airport, decorated in a style that is a mixture of pseudo-Haussmann and pseudo-Bauhaus, as revisited by Jean-Claude Decaux.

At the time when the surroundings of the Champs-Élysées were still unpopulated and sometimes dangerous – in
Les Mystères de Paris
, the Coeur
Sanglant, an underground dive where the Schoolmaster tries to drown Rodolphe, is at the end of the Allée des Veuves, i.e., on the Place d'Alma – the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was in its heyday. Its turbulence was proverbial. When Madame Madou, a dealer in dried fruit in the Halles, broke in on poor César Birotteau to demand her money, Balzac wrote that she ‘bore down like an insurrectionary wave from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine'. The faubourg had gained this reputation during the Revolution, right from the fall of the Bastille. The sections of Quinze-Vingts and Montreuil had then played leading roles on 10 August – led by Santerre, the brewer from Rue de Reuilly, whom the insurrectionary Commune appointed commander of the National Guard – and on the
journées
of 31 May and 2 June 1793, which saw the fall of the Girondins. After Thermidor, it was still this faubourg that launched the hunger riots of Prairial in year III and suffered their terrible repression. As Delvau wrote, ‘the history of this faubourg is the history of Paris – written in musket fire'.
²⁸

The lines of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and its neighbouring streets have not changed since the Middle Ages, when the Porte Saint-Antoine was the starting point for a number of different roads.
²⁹
The Faubourg in the strict sense led in the direction of the abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs, devoted to ‘mad women desirous of getting well again', and then on to the Château de Vincennes. The roads to Charenton, Charonne, Reuilly and Montreuil led to ancient villages that supplied a good part of the capital's wine, fruit and vegetables. ‘Montreuil is the finest garden that Pomona could glorify', wrote Mercier. ‘Nowhere has industry taken the cultivation of fruit trees further, and especially that of peaches. A Montreuil gardener is highly sought after throughout the Île de France.'

The rise of the faubourg began in the seventeenth century. ‘The Faubourg Saint-Antoine increased prodigiously', wrote Piganiol de La Force, ‘from the large number of houses that were built there, both because of the good air and because of the king's letters patent of 1657, which exempted from the qualification of mastership all artisans and tradespeople who lived there.' This favour of Louis XIV was not the only reason for the development of handicrafts in the faubourg. Wood that was brought downstream by barge was unloaded close by, at the Quai de la Rapée on the Louviers island, so that both firewood and timber for construction were stored in the faubourg. It was only a small step from this to carpentry, also
spurred on by the construction of the wall, as there was no longer any advantage in building up supplies of raw materials within the zone subject to
octroi
. Storehouses and barns were therefore turned into workshops, all the more so as a new and highly skilled labour force was available in the form of Flemish and German artisans who had arrived to profit from the Parisian economic boom (many of them were Protestants, hence the rise of the Charenton chapel in the eighteenth century). But perhaps ‘profit' is too strong a word. ‘I do not know how this faubourg survives', wrote Mercier. ‘Furniture is sold from one end to the other; and the poor population that live here have no furniture at all.'

The wood industry, which had begun with timber for housing, steadily developed into more delicate activities. The faubourg had cabinetmakers, carvers, gilders, polishers and turners. And wood was not the only material now worked: in Rue de Reuilly (not far from Santerre's brewery), where the barracks now stands, was the royal manufactory of mirrors, which Colbert had set up to compete with Venetian imports. In Rue de Montreuil, on a section of the demolished Folie-Titon, the Réveillon factory became under Louis XVI the royal manufactory of wallpaper – when this contractor decided to reduce the wages of his workers, the faubourg devastated the plant in April 1789, troops intervened, and this episode, in which several dozen people died, is often seen as a prelude to the Revolution. In 1808, the spinning works of François Richard and Lenoir-Dufresne employed 750 workers in a former convent on Rue de Charonne. The power for its machines was supplied by horses, and most of the workers employed were children.
³⁰

Like Belleville, another indomitable bastion that Haussman divided between two arrondissements in the interest of controlling it, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was partitioned between the 11
^th
and 12
^th
arrondissements. But to better mark its difference, it kept the old names for its cul-de-sacs, courtyards and passages: le Cheval-Blanc, la Main-d'Or, la Bonne-Graine, la Boule-Blanche, la Forge-Royale, la Maison-Brûlée. ‘The municipality has numbered the streets here, as in all other parts of Paris; but if you ask one of the inhabitants of this suburb for his address, he will always give you the name his house bears and not the cold, official number.'
³¹

After the night of the Second Empire, and after the Commune – whose final act, as we shall see, took place around the
mairie
of the 11
^th
arrondissement
– the Faubourg Saint-Antoine remained a red focus. ‘As long as the Dreyfus crisis lasted', Daniel Halévy related,

the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was our fortress . . . in this little room on Rue Paul-Bert, where we huddled together, workers and bourgeois, where we squeezed our chairs one against the other . . . One day in autumn 1899, we watched for hours the return of the crowd of workers who had been parading on the Place du Trône, before the
Triomphe de la République
, Dalou's bronze statue that had been unveiled that day. I doubt that 1848, with its famous festivals, or 1790, on the day of the Federations, saw a greater movement of the masses, or one so powerfully possessed by the spirit of the Revolution.
³²