Paris Revealed

by Stephen Clarke

  Meanwhile, in the small street leading off the rue Charlemagne/des Prêtres, there are more contradictions—the blue enamel plaques on either side of the street tell me it’s rue du Prévôt in the 4th arrondissement, while a stone sign says it’s rue Percée in the 12th. And on both sides there are hacked-out spaces where signs have been removed.

  In all, then, at this one junction, within about 5 metres of each other, there are eight street-name signs and three mysterious spaces. The tourist or recent immigrant would be justified in wondering where the hell they were.

  The same can be said if you sit outside the Bonaparte café in the street of the same name in the 6th. In front of the café, there are two modern-looking enamel plaques with street names, one above the other. The top one says rue de Rennes, the lower one Place Saint-Germain des Prés. Which one is it to be? Well, if you examine them very carefully, you can see that the rue de Rennes sign has what looks like two thin pieces of transparent sticky tape stuck in a cross over the name, as if this were enough to cancel it out.

  Sometimes things are less contradictory, but just as bizarre. There are often two identical street signs (or signs of different shapes with identical names) on the same wall. Take the small section of street just along the rue Charlemagne from the junction I mentioned above. Here, on one apartment building that is about 10 metres wide, there are three signs emphasizing that, yes, I am in the rue Charlemagne. Two of the signs are about 2.5 metres above ground level, and one much higher, about 4 metres up.

  It’s a similar scenario nearby, at the intersection of the rue du Roi de Sicile and the rue Pavée. On the corner of the rue Pavée, there are two blue enamel signs, set very close together just above head height, telling the passer-by twice, very legibly, what the name of the street is. In fact, the rue Pavée seems to have had an identity crisis at some time in the past, because if you walk along it, its short name is emblazoned at unnecessarily regular intervals until you get to the northern end where the system collapses with exhaustion, and there’s a sign with missing letters.

  The explanations on the signs about who a particular street is named in honour of are equally inconsistent. When it’s a politician, like the totally forgotten Eugene Spuller in the 3rd, you get his full CV, telling you he was a local councillor, MP, senator and minister. A well-loved writer like Madame de Sévigné, on the other hand, merits nothing more than a femme de lettres.

  Paris’s street corners would seem to be suffering from a deep-seated identity crisis.

  Signs of the changing times

  The fairly obvious explanation for the jumble of repetitive and contradictory signs is that the city keeps introducing new rules about how its street names should be displayed, and doesn’t always take the old signs down. After the Revolution in 1789, for example, most street names that were too religious or royal were changed, and some of the old stone plaques were defaced. The rue de Turenne, for example, used to be the rue Saint-Louis, named after a thirteenth-century man who was both a king (Louis IX) and a saint, which might explain why his name has been crudely chiselled away.

  Similarly, at its intersection with the rue de Thorigny, the rue Debelleyme has a barely legible stone sign indicating that it used to be the rue Neuve François, presumably named after King François I, who is now one of France’s most fondly remembered royals, but whose reputation took a temporary nose-dive in the fiercely anti-royalist 1790s.

  The reasons why there are so many street names scattered about at different heights throughout the city are pretty similar.

  Ever since 1847, when the first complete register of house numbers was made, Paris has had its standard blue enamel street plaques, but it wasn’t until 1938 that a city regulation defined the size, colour, design and positioning of the nameplates once and for all.

  The rule is still in force today, and stipulates that ‘public street names must be inscribed on a rectangular sign of at least 35 centimetres by 40 centimetres and at most 50 centimetres by one metre … The number of the arrondissement may be written on a semi-circular plate of 17 centimetres in radius situated above the street name.’ The names too must be written in white letters on an azure background, ‘within a bronze-green border decorated with shadow effects in black and white’. That last clause includes the instruction for four little dimples, one in each corner, trompe-l’oeil circles made to look as if they were the nails holding the sign up.

  The rule says that these signs must be placed ‘at the angle of two public streets, less than 2 metres away from the corner’ and ‘between 2 metres and 2.5 metres above the pavement’, although they can be placed higher if they would otherwise disappear behind a shop or café awning. Many of the signs are exactly 2.3 metres up, hence the defacement of some old stone signs, like the one in the rue des Petits Champs in the 1st arrondissement, where a carved plaque has been partially destroyed by someone screwing on a more modern-looking blue nameplate at the designated height. The old sign now reads ‘RUE DES PETITS PS’, which is a cute idea—to today’s Parisians that would read ‘street of the small Socialist Parties’—but one that is the result of vandalism by a workman blindly sticking to the rules.

  This French obsession with regulations can have bizarre consequences—for example, at the northern entrance to the rue du Prévôt in the Marais, a tiny alley too narrow for anyone wider than an average-sized American, there are two identical name plaques, one on either side of the street—so close together they could almost be a pair of earphones.

  And in the rue du Parc Royal, the nameplates on either side of the road are at the standard height … the only problem being that they are therefore completely hidden by the pedestrian-crossing lights in front of them.

  The multi-sign junctions survive quite simply because of municipal laissez-faire. Why bother to remove an old blue sign just because you’re putting a new one up at a different height? And there’s no need to chisel away an old stone street name because any fool knows that you’re meant to believe the new blue sign.

  There is flexibility in the system, however. These days, if a new building has, say, a glass facade that might explode into a million dangerous pieces if a workman started drilling holes in it prior to hanging up a heavy enamel street sign, the owners can use a lighter, adhesive plaque or even obtain permission to design their own. One of the most beautiful of these is the Art Deco mosaic in the rue Paul Séjourné (who was a railway-viaduct builder, by the way) in the 6th. There are many more, and if you come across one, it’s worth taking time to admire it, because you can be sure that the people who put it there devoted quite a few hours to form-filling. My favourite Parisian street nameplate, though, is one that has been hijacked as a playground for the city’s acerbic wit. In the rue des Prêcheurs (‘Preachers’ Street’) in the 1st arrondissement, some wag with a marker pen has crossed out the first R and changed the accent over the E to make it read Pécheurs, or sinners. And as if to rub in the anti-clericalism, someone at City Hall has ordered a sign to be placed just below the defaced word Prêcheurs declaring Défense de déposer des ordures, or ‘no rubbish here’.

  Writing on the wall

  Quite often, I stop to read a plaque on a building that reveals a painful detail about its past. Scattered around the city, there are some 1,060 signs commemorating victims of the Second World War. There are signs indicating that people who had lived, worked or studied in that building were taken away by the Nazis. Schools are often marked with a plaque saying how many Jewish children were removed, and the sign will usually specify that it was French policemen or militia men doing the dirty work. All over the city, small plaques next to ordinary street doors will bear the name of a man or woman who was arrested, deported or shot—or all three—and the date when it happened. And on the anniversary of that date, the arrondissement will often arrange for a small bouquet of fresh flowers to be hung from a brass ring in the plaque.

  Almost half of these plaques pay homage to people killed during the Liberation of Paris at the end of Au
gust 1944. In the centre of the city, and especially in the Latin Quarter, around the Hôtel de Ville and along the rue de Rivoli, there are beige marble plaques marking pretty well every spot where a Resistance fighter fell. At 1 rue Robert Esnault-Pelterie there’s even a memorial to the only French tank destroyed in the street-fighting—yes, compared to most occupied towns and cities, Paris didn’t see much heavy combat.

  This in part was thanks to one of the most important figures in recent Parisian history: Raoul Nordling, the Swedish Ambassador who can be said to have saved the city by persuading the Nazi Kommandant, General von Choltitz, not to blow it up before surrendering. Nordling has a well-deserved plaque at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in the 16th.

  Those buildings that did suffer in the fighting wear their battle scars with pride. If you look at the façade of the ultra-chic Hôtel Meurice, the old Kommandatur headquarters in the rue de Rivoli, or the Ministry of Defence in the boulevard Saint-Germain, the bullet holes have not been filled in. You can almost hear the machine guns strafing the buildings.

  Although Parisians are justifiably ashamed of some things that went on under the Occupation, they don’t want today’s flâneurs to forget the city’s proudest moment in August 1944.

  ‘Excusez-moi, où est le …?

  Amongst the most prominent features of Paris’s pavements are the kiosques. And as visitors to the city struggle to work out which street nameplate is actually correct, many of them assume that the kiosk selling maps, postcards and newspapers is a mini tourist-information office. Big mistake.

  The kiosquier will almost certainly know the area inside out, because the kiosks in the centre of Paris are awarded by a city commission to the most experienced newspaper sellers, who have worked in the city’s streets for years. Even so, he (and it’s rarely a she) will probably not want to share his knowledge with a lost tourist.

  Sales of daily newspapers are suffering because of the rise of the freebies, and Paris’s 300 or so kiosquiers have seen their income fall drastically over the past few years. They’re paid on a commission-only basis—they get 18 per cent of each sale, which is eroded away by the French tax and social security system to roughly 10 per cent net profit. Out of this they have to pay a rent for their kiosk of about 500 euros a year. And they earn nothing from the adverts on the sides of their kiosks, unless the poster is promoting a magazine that will boost turnover. They are generally not full of the joys of spring, even in spring.

  Asking directions of a kiosquier is therefore a bit like asking Karl Lagerfeld to sew on a button or a lion tamer to catch a mouse. It’s an insult to his vast knowledge of the neighbourhood and its inhabitants, and he has about a million better things to do to earn his living.

  And rather like Karl Lagerfeld and lion tamers, the kiosquiers often have strong personalities. Standing alone in a cabin in the street from dawn till long after dusk breeds a special sort of person. The kiosquiers express themselves not only in the way they serve their customers but also through the positioning of certain lesser-known papers and magazines. The big-selling publications will obviously be prominently displayed, but look carefully and you might see more obscure publications sharing space with Le Monde or Paris Match. These will often be political, anarchist even, and are usually satirical, with the kiosquiers using their public location to take a swing at the establishment. My local kiosquier cuts out the most viciously anti-government cartoons and sticks them above the display of daily newspapers.

  The kiosquiers are loners, like truck drivers, except that it is more difficult for them to take rest stops. They can’t just lock up and take a toilet break (which, incidentally, is why so few women choose to do the job). A friend of mine once tried to buy a newspaper just after the morning rush, held out her money to the kiosquier, and was asked to ‘wait just a moment’. Looking into the kiosk, she saw that the newspaper seller was taking a pee in an Évian bottle. Needless to say, she told him to keep the change.

  All of which explains why it is probably best to ask a passer-by for directions rather than going for the obvious target. Unless, of course, you notice a big advertising poster for Paris Match revealing some huge scandal concerning Carla Bruni, Johnny Hallyday or another big-name celebrity. Then the kiosquier might just be in a good enough mood to point you in the right direction.

  A clean machine

  According to my city map, Paris has 5,975 streets. This means that it has twice as many pavements. Or more than twice, because some bigger roads also have gardens down the middle, or a wide central reservation where markets are held, with a pavement either side.

  Paris employs approximately 4,950 workers to keep all these pavements clean by emptying bins, sweeping out gutters, spraying the ground, collecting bottles, picking up dumped furniture, clearing market-day debris, and generally making sure that the city’s densely packed population doesn’t turn Paris into a landfill site.

  According to city statistics, these workers sweep more than 2,400 kilometres of pavements every day, and empty the 30,000-odd transparent plastic sacks that have replaced the opaque green bins that used to hang on streetlamps until Paris decided that non-see-through bins were ideal hiding places for a terrorist bomb.

  There are also some 380 green machines of various sizes and shapes sucking, sweeping and squirting rubbish off the streets and pavements. The machines come in a dizzying variety of models. There are, for example, the tiny one-person modules that crawl along like a hunched robot, sweeping up rubbish with twin brushes. Then there are the water tanks on wheels that allow a green-uniformed, hose-toting Robocop to stride along a street spraying Parisians’ ankles.** There are also truck-sized vehicles that perform both of these functions simultaneously. All of them are cursed by Parisians for holding up traffic or soaking their new shoes, but without them the city would be uninhabitable.

  I am always amazed by the scene when my local food market winds down at about 2 p.m. on Sundays and Thursdays. The crowds have dispersed, the awnings have been collected, the stallholders have packed up or abandoned their unsold goods. Meanwhile, a small army of green uniforms gathers and gets to work. The cardboard boxes are fed into a crusher. The wooden crates are stacked and collected. The non-recyclable refuse is swept by machine and human hand into piles and thrown on to waiting trucks. Less than an hour later, you would never even know that there had been a market, apart from the gleam of the still-wet tarmac on the square. The market itself probably hasn’t changed much in a century or more (except for the presence of exotic fruit and non-native fish), but the clean-up is pure twenty-first century. And this goes on at over seventy outdoor food markets once or twice every week.

  It’s the same whenever there’s a political demonstration—tens of thousands of militants will converge on Paris to march through the streets, scattering leaflets, water bottles, balloons, placards and food wrappings, and will do so for several hours, turning the boulevards into snowdrifts of litter. But as the last stragglers are chanting their way along the pre-arranged procession route, they will be followed by a full selection of the city’s green machines and dozens of fluorescent-jacketed sweepers-up. The mess is cleared away even more quickly than it was made.

  The old cliché is that the French never do any work, but I’ve never seen people work harder than when they’re cleaning up on the day of a general strike.

  I pee therefore I am

  Much of the mess on the streets comes from less honourable sources than a market or protest march, however.

  I have probably written more than anyone on the subject of dogs doing their business on Paris’s pavements. Even more shocking, to me at any rate, is that fact that Parisian men are just as active as the dogs. I’m not only talking about drunks, who have little control over any part of their body, let alone their bladder. I mean the sober adult bourgeois Parisian male, of almost any age, who will find a quiet corner, even in a relatively crowded street, have a quick peek over his shoulder to see if anyone in authority is watching, and unleash a stream
of urine against a wall, a tree or one of the countless green-and-grey metal fences set up around roadworks and building sites. He will then zip up and leave the scene of the crime while his steaming river flows gently out across the pavement to wet the soles of unsuspecting passers-by. That Le Parisien commercial in Chapter 1 was no exaggeration.

  Parisians have an excuse for this anti-social behaviour, as they do for everything else, and blame their bad toilet-training on the loss of the old metal urinoirs where men could pee in the street. These were called vespasiennes, after the first-century Roman emperor Vespasian, who introduced a tax in Rome to pay for the collection of urine (yes, trust the French to know a historical fact like that). The vespasiennes were introduced in Paris in 1834, though there had long been a law in the city against ‘satisfying one’s natural needs’ in the street. Before the vespasiennes, the only public toilets had been barrels, 478 of which were placed on the streets of Paris, probably making the city much more attractive to rats and flies than tourists.

  The vespasiennes were purely stand-up toilets, some of them almost completely open to the gaze of the public. Others were more enclosed, either hidden away in the tall green columns covered in theatre posters, the Colonnes Morris (named after the printer who got the concession to paste up his posters there in the 1860s), or grouped in an open-air compound surrounded by a head-high metal partition.

  Very quickly, the larger enclosed vespasiennes became gay hangouts, and, this being Paris, they inspired a minor literary genre, with writers like Jean Genet and Roger Peyrefitte telling stories of the encounters to be had there. The police also took a keen interest, regularly raiding them. During the Second World War, they were used as meeting places by the Resistance, but after the Liberation, the desire for a moral clear out turned against the vespasiennes, and they were slowly phased out. The only survivor I have seen is on the boulevard Arago in the 14th, outside the walls of the Prison de la Santé,*** though temporary plastic vespasiennes are craned into the Bassin de la Villette during Paris Plages.