The Invention of Paris (4 page)

We can take the example of street lighting and the maintenance of order, important both in terms of entertainment and in order to ‘discipline and punish'. In the Middle Ages, only three places in Paris were permanently illuminated at night: the gate of the Châtelet tribunal, where Philippe le Bel had
placed a wood-framed lantern filled with pig bladders to deter the criminal enterprises that were hatched right outside; the Tour Nesle, where a beacon marked the entry to Paris for boatmen coming up the Seine; and the lantern of the dead in the Innocents cemetery. Those heading into the dark of the city were advised to make use of an escort of armed torchmen, as one could hardly trust the protection of the watch, whether civic or royal.

At the same time as Louis XIV made Paris an open city, and launched the construction of his new avenue, he took two measures that marked the beginning of the modern age: he had nearly three thousand lanterns installed in the streets – glass cages protecting candles, hung from ropes at first-floor level – and he established the post of lieutenant-general of police, in command of a significant armed force. (It was the first of these officers, La Reynie, who emptied out the courts of miracles and embarked on the ‘great confinement', shutting up beggars and deviants in the new prison hospitals of the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre.)

A century later, in parallel with the building of the wall of the Farmers-General, the technical headway made in the Age of Enlightenment had its effects on street lighting: the old lanterns with their candles were replaced by oil lamps equipped with metal reflectors, with a longer range. Sartine, the lieutenant-general of the time, held that ‘the very great amount of light these give makes it impossible to believe that anything better could ever be found'. Sébastien Mercier was of a different opinion: ‘The lampposts are badly placed . . . From a distance, this reddish flame hurts the eyes; close up, it gives only little light, and below, you are in darkness.'

It was the 1840s, the time when Thiers's fortifications enclosed the city once again, that saw the general spread of gas lighting and the uniformed
sergents de ville
. Electric light replaced gas after the First World War, when the ‘
fortifs
' were demolished. In the 1960s, the construction of the Boulevard Périphérique – the latest of Paris's fortifications and not the least formidable – was accompanied by the replacement of incandescent lamps by neon lighting, the disappearance of bicycle police with their capes, known as
hirondelles
(swallows), and the proliferation of motorized patrols; the blessings of community policing were still to come.

It would be possible, therefore, to write a history of Paris in politics and architecture, art and technology, literature and society, the chapters of which would not be centuries – a particularly inappropriate division in this case – nor again reigns and republics, but rather the expanding city precincts, which mark a discontinuous and subterranean time. In the fifteenth of his ‘Theses on the Concept of History', Walter Benjamin remarked that ‘calendars do not measure time as clocks do'. The time of city walls resembles the time of calendars.

 

1
Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), p. 88.

2
Honoré de Balzac,
Ferragus
(trans. Wormeley). Perhaps Victor Hugo had this passage in mind when he described the surroundings of the Salpêtrière in
Les Misérables
: ‘It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it, then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert place where there was someone; it was a boulevard of the great city, a street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day than a cemetery' (trans. Wilbour).

3
Honoré de Balzac,
Old Goriot
(trans. Marriage).

4
Louis Chevalier,
Montmartre du plaisir et du crime
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980).

5
Benjamin,
The Arcades Project
, p. 416.

6
Louis Sébastien Mercier,
Tableau de Paris
(1781).

7
Yoshinobu Ashihara,
L'Ordre caché. Tokyo, la ville du XXIe siècle
(Paris: Hazan, 1994).

8
An ordinance of 1548, for example, cited in Pierre Lavedan,
Histoire de l'urbanisme à Paris
(Paris: Association pour la publication d'une histoire de Paris, 1975), stated: ‘From now on there shall be no more construction or building in the faubourgs, by persons of any station or condition whatsoever, under penalty of confiscation of funds and building, which shall be entirely demolished.' At the end of the eighteenth century, Mercier wrote: ‘The circumference of Paris is ten thousand yards. Several attempts have been made to define its boundaries; buildings have crossed these limits, marshes have disappeared and the countryside has retreated daily before the hammer and the set square.'

9
Victor Hugo,
Notre-Dame de Paris
(trans. Hapgood),
chapter 2
, ‘A Bird's-Eye View of Paris' (1832).

10
There were two walls before the thirteenth century, but they have been lost in the depths of time.

11
On the Right Bank, the wall of Phillipe Auguste began at the Louvre (its keep forming part of the wall), and followed a route corresponding to Rues Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, Montmartre, and Réamur. It then turned southeast, as far as Rue de Sévigné, and reached the Seine in the middle of the Quai des Célestins, close to Rue de l'Ave-Maria.

12
Except what was discovered when work was under way for the Grand Louvre, and incorporated into the décor of the underground shopping centre, as well as a small pile of stones from the Bastille that decorates the square at the corner of the Boulevard Henri-IV and the Quai des Célestins.

13
After the Porte Saint-Denis, the wall of Charles V turned straight towards the Louvre, following a line that today runs through the Rue d'Aboukir and the Place des Victoires. It reached the Seine close to what is now the Pont du Carrousel. On the Left Bank, which had scarcely developed in the meantime, this wall followed the earlier one of Philippe Auguste.

14
On the Left Bank, the route more or less followed the Boulevards des Invalides, Montparnasse, Port-Royal, Saint-Marcel and de l'Hôpital, but building on this side, along what are known as the ‘boulevards du Midi', would get under way later, and on maps from the late eighteenth century you can still see the boulevard proceeding through open fields, well beyond the most outlying buildings of the city.

15
Henri Sauval (1620–70),
Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris
, posthumous edition (Paris, 1724).

16
Émile de La Bédollière, in
Paris Guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France
(1867). This guide, written for the benefit of visitors to the Éxposition Universelle, had a preface by Victor Hugo.

17
Francis Carco,
L'Équipe, roman des fortifs
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1925).

Whilst the triumphal arch of the Porte Saint-Denis and the equestrian statue of Henri IV, the two bridges,
¹
the Louvre, the Tuileries and the Champs-Élysées all equal or surpass the beauties of ancient Rome, the city centre – dark, enclosed and hideous – stands for an age of most shameful barbarism.

– Voltaire,
The Embellishments of Paris
(1739)

Alas, Old Paris is disappearing at terrifying speed.

– Balzac,
The Lesser Bourgeoisie
(1855)

After many detours, I first reached Rue Montmartre and the Pointe Saint-Eustache; I passed the square of the Halles, then open to the sky, through the great red umbrellas of the fishmongers; then Rues des Lavandières, Saint-Honoré and Saint-Denis. The Place du Châtelet was quite wretched at this time, the fame of the Veau Qui Tette restaurant overshadowing its historical memories. I crossed the old Pont-au-Change, which later I had to have rebuilt, lowered and widened, then followed the line of the former Palace of Justice, on my left the sorry huddle of low dives that then dishonoured the Île de la Cité, which I would have the joy of razing completely – a haunt of thieves and murderers, who seemed able there to brave the correctional police and the court of assizes. Continuing my route by the Pont Saint-Michel, I had to cross the poor little square that the waters of Rues de la Harpe, de la Huchette, Saint-André-des-Arts and de l'Hirondelle all spilled into, like a drain . . . Finally, I sunk into the meanderings of Rue de la Harpe before climbing the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and arriving – via the Hôtel d'Harcourt, Rue des Maçons-Sorbonne, Place Richelieu, Rue de Cluny and Rue des Grès – on the Place du Panthéon, at the corner of the École de Droit.
²

Such was Haussmann's itinerary as a law student living on the Chauséed'Antin in the early years of the July monarchy. At this time, the city centre had changed little in the past three hundred years. Paris as circumscribed by the boulevard of Louis XIV, a square with slightly softened angles that could be seen as a figure of density and constraint, was still a medieval city. Like the famous knife of Jeannot, which sometimes had a new handle and sometimes a new blade, but always remained Jeannot's knife, the streets of Paris, though their buildings were replaced over the years, remained medieval streets, crooked and dark. ‘Victor Hugo, summoning up the Paris of Louis XI, only needed to look around him; the streets bathed in shadow into which Gringoire and Claude Frollo disappeared were not so different from the streets of the Marais, the Cité, even the boulevards that he wandered in the 1830s and later described to us, in sentences similarly weighted with darkness and danger – in a word, of night – in
Things Seen
.'
³

In the 1850s, Privat d'Anglemont described ‘behind the Collège de France, between the Sainte-Geneviève library, the buildings of the old École Normale, the Saint-Barbe college and Rue Saint-Jean-de-Latran, a large block of houses known by the name of Mont-Saint-Hilaire . . . a whole quarter made up of narrow and dirty streets . . . old, dark and crooked'.
⁴
And the trades practised there – worm sellers, vegetable steamers, meat lenders, cheap illustrators, pipe seasoners – also went back to the depths of the Middle Ages.

Twenty years later, under the Second Empire, gas lighting, the great cuttings of the new boulevards, plentiful water and new sewers transformed the city's physiognomy more than the three previous centuries had done. (‘Take any good Frenchman, who reads
his
newspaper each day in
his
taproom, and ask him what he understands by “progress”. He will answer that it is steam, electricity and gas – miracles unknown to the Romans – whose discovery bears full witness to our superiority over the ancients', Baudelaire wrote in 1855 in
L'Exposition universelle
). Yet Paris did not completely leave the Middle Ages behind in the nineteenth century. Just before the Great War, Carco could still describe a Latin Quarter where Villon would not have felt so out of place: ‘The Rue de l'Hirondelle, a couple of steps from the Seine, which you reach via the narrow and stinking corridor of Rue Gît-le-Coeur, its clientele made up of anarchists, prowlers, students, oddballs, tarts, down-and-outs, regaling themselves on the cheap . . . If there are places in the world, quarters reserved for human perversity, that surpass in ignominy these bordering on the Seine and stretching around the Rue Mazarine, where are they?'
⁵
And until the late 1950s, the alleys between the Place Maubert and the river – Rue de Bièvre, Rue Maître-Albert, Rue Frédéric-Sauton – the Saint-Séverin quarter and Rue Mouffetard, were still filthy and wretched. In his itinerary among the Paris poor, Jean-Paul Clébert described in Rue Maître-Albert, ‘this dog's leg of an alley that outsiders avoid, kitchens invisible from the main road, and which you enter from the side, taking the corridor that leads to the upper floors; you push open a door chosen at random and step down into a room as big as a chicken coop, in the midst of a family.'
⁶
The Place de la Contrescarpe had more tramps than Situationists, and there were some cafés that were hard to enter if you were not a ragged alcoholic. There were no tourists, restaurants or shops to be seen. Hotels rented rooms by the day to immigrant workers, without asking to see their papers. The offices of Messali Hadj's Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties were on Rue Xavier-Privas, a couple of steps from Notre-Dame. Contrary to a widespread idea, the final eradication of the Middle Ages in Paris was not the work of Haussmann and Napoleon III, but rather of Malraux and Pompidou, and the emblematic literary signal of this disappearance was not Baudelaire's ‘The Swan' but rather Perec's
Les Choses
.

The character of Paris as a town formed in the Middle Ages is still visible in the way that its quarters are assembled. The Right Bank has four large and compact nuclei, that of Palais-Royal being the most recent, with satellites in the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré and Bourse quarters; Les Halles is the oldest of the four, and has been treated worst; the Sentier is changing now before our eyes; and the Marais is not so much a single quarter as several. Between these main regions there are transition zones that fill the gaps. This is the most densely built region of Paris.
⁷

It is easy to imagine that the centre of the world was once where the ruined columns of Athens and Rome now lie, precisely because these are ruins. At the Palais-Royal, on the other hand, in the avenues of its gardens or under the colonnades where stalls selling tin soldiers with their crosses and ribbons, pipes, soft toys and needlepoint form an old-fashioned backdrop, nothing allows you to imagine that for fifty years this place was the agora or forum of Paris, its fame spreading right across Europe. When the Allied forces entered the city after the battle of Waterloo, ‘What was the first thing they asked for in Paris? The Palais-Royal! A Russian officer entered the building on horseback. What was the first thing in the Palais-Royal that they wanted? To sit down in one of the restaurants, whose glorious names had reached even their ears.'
⁸