Paris Revealed

by Stephen Clarke

  For a start, I am very likely to get a water cannon sprayed at me. This, I always feel, is a bit over the top. After all, my only misdemeanour is wanting to get a cup of coffee. But it is never the riot police who are trying to hose me back home again. It is a green-overalled city worker, gripping the long nozzle of a hose as if it was a small guitar, sluicing the previous day’s cigarette ends, litter and dog muck into the gutter.

  You would think that the residents of the neighbourhood would be grateful, but they often huff and moan at the cleaners, who have a habit of ricocheting a fine mist of watered-down detergent and assorted dirt particles on to the shoes and lower legs of anyone who gets in their way. Only when there are enough impatient pedestrians growling to get past will the cleaner turn away and squirt somewhere else, opening up a ten-second window during which people can scurry through to the wet-but-safe zone that has already been hosed.

  After this trial by water, there is a second barrier at the corner of the street, which gets flooded every morning by a minor tsunami of floating jetsam gushing along the gutter on its way to the drain. The speed and depth of the torrent is often increased by a green-uniformed man sweeping it along, making sure that no paper, plastic bottles or leaves are left behind.

  On some mornings, you have to be able to long-jump a couple of metres to get from the middle of the street to the kerb with totally dry feet. And if you’re half asleep and forget to leap, your shoes will be turned into shipwrecks.

  Every morning, people on their way to work will complain about one or other of these watery obstacles. But if the streets were suddenly dry, they would complain even more, and then begin to worry that something in the city had gone profoundly wrong. They may be obsessed with the prospect of a flood, but they’re even more scared of being deprived of their beloved eau.

  * For more on the Baron and his impact on Paris, see Chapter 5.

  ** Looking at the four caryatids—for example on the fontaine outside the Chez Clement restaurant in the place Saint-André des Arts—I personally can’t tell the difference between them. It is almost as if Wallace’s designers hoped to convince Parisians that goodness was exactly the same as sobriety. Idealistic, to say the least.

  *** Grève also means strike—it was on this sandbank that unemployed Parisian workers used to gather, or faire grève. Though they used to be hoping for an offer of loading or unloading work to come along—it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the word took on its modern meaning of the French workers’ favourite negotiating tool.

  **** For a full account of these riverside dance sessions, see my novel Dial M for Merde.

  ****** Neptune was also the name given to the seaborne operations during D-Day. Coincidence, or a symptom of how seriously Paris is taking the danger of flooding?

  Bastille’s original métro station, by Hector Guimard. Today his designs are seen as architectural gems, but in his lifetime, fickle Parisians thought his Art Nouveau style outdated, and many of his métro entrances were demolished.

  4

  THE MÉTRO

  On ne perd rien à être poli, sauf sa place dans le métro.

  (You lose nothing by being polite, except your seat in the métro.)

  TRISTAN BERNARD, FRENCH WRITER

  PARIS IS proud of its underground rail system, and so it should be. Travelling beneath some big cities can be a slow, hot experience, like being stuck in a hammam with a crowd of grumpy strangers. But outside of rush hours and strike days, the Paris métro can whisk you from almost anywhere to anywhere in the city in under forty-five relatively painless minutes.

  And it’s getting even better, with old trains gradually (and on some lines very gradually) being upgraded and refitted, which is why I personally always choose the métro over the bus. If you don’t have time to watch as a bus driver hoots at badly parked trucks, inches through roadworks, or terrifies cyclists, it’s far better to travel underground.

  I should stress that this chapter deals only with the métro itself, and not the RER (réseau express régional), the métro-like system that crosses Paris and stretches out into the suburbs. Parisians are inherently snobbish, and regard this system as a kind of slave ship transporting unfortunate chained-up workers away from their suburban homes and into the clutches of their cruel masters, with the cruelty even being doubled because in the evenings they’re transported back again in the same horrific conditions. It is actually quicker to travel between some parts of Paris on the RER, but no true Parisian ever takes the option, presumably for fear of being mistaken for a suburbanite.

  The light at the end of the métro tunnel

  What few Parisians know is that their métro very nearly didn’t get off the ground at all—or rather that it almost stayed overground.

  In the mid-1800s, every major city in the Western world was trying to work out how to transport its residents and incoming commuters around the increasingly jammed streets. Paris was actually ahead of the game, because as early as 1852 it inaugurated an overground urban railway that skirted the edges of the city—hence its name, the Petite Ceinture, or little belt. At first, it carried only animals being sent to the city’s abattoirs and freight, but gradually it was adapted to take passengers, and came into its own during the 1870–71 Prussian siege, when French soldiers were able to dash to defend different parts of the city on steam trains—one of the first examples of mechanized warfare.

  The Petite Ceinture was taken out of service in the 1930s, but much of it is still visible. The raised gardens near Bastille, the Coulée Verte, run along a converted section of the old network. The Parc Montsouris in the south and the Buttes-Chaumont in the north are both crossed by stretches of unused railway, and the Flèche d’Or music venue in the 20th is in an old Petite Ceinture station.

  Meanwhile, back in the nineteenth century, arguments about a bigger urban rail network raged on. London had opened its first city railway in 1863, connecting up its major train stations. New York, Berlin and Vienna followed, and even Budapest was jumping on the bandwagon. Paris was being left behind, and for a very Parisian reason.

  From 1856, when discussions about a large urban railway network for the city began, to 1890, every proposal hit the buffers. Some of the ideas put forward by Paris’s engineers were too insane to be taken seriously. One was a sort of funfair ride, with trains floating along on underground rivers. Another engineer called Arsène-Olivier de Landreville envisaged gigantic viaducts carrying steam trains above the Paris rooftops, thereby avoiding pollution from the smoke.

  There was also a strong lobby for a straightforward overground train system, an extension of existing rail networks beyond the mainline termini and into the heart of the city, but none of the regional railway companies could decide which one of them would build and run the system, and continually opposed each other’s projects.

  Amongst the most futuristic ideas was a plan to get rid of steam trains altogether and use the largely untested technology of electricity. This daring project was put forward by Paris’s Director of Works, Edmond Huet, in conjunction with the city’s Chief Engineer, Fulgence Bienvenüe, who had already invented a funicular tram for the hilltop quartier of Belleville. Bienvenüe was also an expert at building sewers—an excellent blend of qualifications for designing an underground train system.

  The difficulty was to get a decision. The existing railway companies were determined to manage the urban network, and entered into a prolonged power struggle with city officials who wanted control of their transport system. To cap it all, the national government was right-wing, whereas the city was à gauche, which created a whole new level of disagreement.

  In the end, minds were focused by the appearance on the horizon of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, which was to be a showcase for French innovation and technology. Exhibits were to include one of the first moving walkways and a big-screen projection of films by the Lumière brothers. And as part of the Expo, the city was also organizing the 1900 Summer Olympic Games. Not only were mill
ions of visitors expected, it was also hoped that many of them would want to travel from the main exhibition site around the Eiffel Tower to the sporting events out in the suburb of Vincennes, to the east of the city.*

  It was therefore urgent to build at least one métro line, and finally, in 1897, Paris began to get its plans on track.

  Rather predictably, the city opted for the project put forward by its own Director of Works—an electrically powered underground network (which, by now, wasn’t that futuristic, because London had been operating an electric system since 1890). It was an idea that had one huge advantage as far as Parisian officials were concerned—it made interference from the railway companies impossible, because as well as being electric rather than steam-powered, the trains would run in tunnels that were too narrow for a conventional train.

  The final barrier to building a Parisian underground was cleared in March 1898, when the national government voted through a law declaring that the project was ‘of public utility’, and thereby ceded control of the work to the city.

  To prevent jealousy amongst French railway companies, the construction contract was given to an outsider, a Belgian industrialist and amateur archaeologist called Édouard Empain. He founded a company called the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitan de Paris and, in October 1898, set Fulgence Bienvenüe to work digging.**

  Sticking to a route that allowed him to dig along existing roads (he hadn’t worked out how to tunnel under apartment buildings without making them fall down), Bienvenüe had soon turned the street running the whole length of the Louvre and the Tuileries into a gigantic trench. Work progressed with remarkable speed, though there were a few hold-ups—in December 1899, a tunnel underneath the Champs-Élysées collapsed, creating a crater 15 metres wide and 20 deep, swallowing up trees and lampposts, and fortunately injuring only two passers-by. And no one had foreseen the sheer quantity of earth that would be dug up. A flotilla of barges carried debris away down the Seine, and at night, the city’s trams were requisitioned to pull wagonloads of earth out to dumps.

  But on 19 July 1900, at 1 p.m., after only twenty-two months of work, Line 1 of the Paris métro was opened to the public and began to carry Expo visitors from the Porte Maillot, just beyond the Arc de Triomphe, to the Olympics at the Porte de Vincennes. The locals also started to use the métro straight away, and it was so popular that the three-carriage trains had to be lengthened to eight carriages—though, sadly, this slowed the trains down so much that the benefit was lost.

  In any case, the project had worked, and Bienvenüe was commissioned to go ahead with the plan to build five more lines, including one, Line 4, that would require him to tunnel under the Seine.

  This difficult and dangerous task was accomplished with two ingenious pieces of engineering. It was impossible to drill into the silty riverbank around Saint-Michel without damaging an existing overground railway line, so Bienvenüe pumped in ice-cold salt water and froze the ground solid. Even so, it took ten months of digging to complete 14.5 metres of tunnel through the silt, and this was without even starting to dig under the Seine itself.

  For the actual river crossing, he put the work out to tender. More than thirty projects were put forward, and the most innovative and daring was chosen—a plan conceived by a company called Chagnaud, who had already built a three-tunnel métro interchange at Opéra. They proposed to sink a tunnel into the Seine that would be like a permanently parked submarine.

  Starting in 1905, metal lengths of tunnel were constructed on the riverbank beside the Tuileries, and then simply dropped into the water and on to the riverbed. The water was pumped out of a hollow chamber built in underneath the length of tunnel; and into this chamber men were sent, via a chimney, to simply dig downwards beneath that section of tunnel until it was far enough underground and underwater. The crossing required two years’ labour and five segments of tunnel. The horrific working conditions can only be imagined, and five men lost their lives digging in the fetid gloom. Line 4 was finally opened on 9 January 1910, just days before the Seine decided to show that it had not been tamed after all—the river broke its banks on 20 January, almost immediately flooding Châtelet station, and then gradually reclaiming the tunnels that had been dug through its territory. Line 4 had to close, and was not fully re-opened until April.

  Art Nouveau grows prematurely old

  Paris wanted everything to do with the 1900 Exposition Universelle to look spectacular. The Eiffel Tower had been built for the 1889 Expo, but now the Grand Palais and Petit Palais were to be constructed on the Right Bank of the Seine, and the new métro had to be just as impressive.

  A competition was launched to find a designer for the station entrances. Twenty architects applied, but, typically for Paris, the job went to a man who hadn’t even entered the contest. Hector Guimard was already known for his Art Nouveau houses, and had a highly influential fan—a banker called Adrien Bénard,*** the Président du Conseil d’Administration (the equivalent of the CEO) of the métro. Bénard asked Guimard to submit some designs, which he did—glass and green-metal forms that were a stark, and highly modern, contrast to the classical columns proposed by most of the other applicants. Not everyone liked them, but Bénard’s influence won the day, and when Line 1 opened, its first users must have been startled to have to descend into tunnels through what looked like a tangle of vines, guarded by towering twin lamps that resembled praying mantises. The jungle/insect metaphor was deliberate—Guimard said, for example, that the glass roofs of his covered entrances were meant to look like dragonflies spreading their wings. Today, his street furniture is one of the highpoints of any architectural tour of Paris. Difficult to imagine, then, that there were people who wanted to get rid of them almost immediately.

  Some thought the entrances too erotic—the intertwining vines were too sensuous and the double lamps looked, one highly inventive critic said, like Fallopian tubes. Others felt that the designs were morbid, and that the green railings looked like stylized bones.

  In 1904, a daily newspaper, Le Figaro, demanded that Paris get rid of ‘these contorted railings, these hump-backed standard lamps that point out the métro stations like enormous frogs’ eyes’. This was the same paper that, only five years earlier, had sponsored an exhibition by Guimard. The painful truth was that, like all extreme styles, Art Nouveau was going out of fashion almost as quickly as it had come in, and at the turn of the twentieth century, modernists were sneering at its twee végétalisme.

  Guimard’s contract was terminated, no more designs were commissioned and when, in 1904, a prestigious new station was opened outside the Opéra Garnier, a classical stone entrance was chosen. Guimard’s existing designs were used for a few more stations until just before the First World War, but Art Nouveau had officially fallen from favour.

  These days, the métro may be very proud and protective of its Guimard architecture, like the beautiful gold-tiled entrance at Porte Dauphine or the open-top versions at Cité and Louvre-Rivoli, but almost half of Guimard’s 141 station entrances have been destroyed, including two showcase pagodas at Bastille and Charles de Gaulle-Étoile. Fêted as a cultural hero today, during his lifetime Guimard was a victim of Paris’s fickle artistic tastes.

  A Parisian accident waiting to happen

  One thing that the rational engineer Fulgence Bienvenüe probably did not bargain for was Parisians’ behaviour when they were on the métro. And it was this behaviour that caused the métro’s first—and biggest—catastrophe.

  It started with a technical problem. The first métro carriages were made out of wood, and the electric cables powering the engines passed right under them—a dangerous combination, especially if the system short-circuited, which it did on 10 August 1903, at Barbès-Rochechouart station on Line 2, causing a fire to break out underneath one of the carriages. Luckily, Barbès is an outdoor station, so the passengers were evacuated without any panic and the fire was quickly put out.

  The following train was also evacuated, and began
to push the damaged carriages through the tunnels towards the terminus at Nation, so that they could be taken out of service and repaired. Incident over, it was thought. The evacuated passengers got on the next train and continued their journey.

  However, a few stops further on, at Ménilmontant, the fire started up again on the original damaged train. The driver of the train carrying the evacuated passengers was warned, and stopped at Couronnes, the station before Ménilmontant. Couronnes is an underground station, and the driver asked the passengers to leave the train yet again, and exit the station via the stairs.

  At this point, one exasperated passenger demanded to know whether they were going to get a refund. The driver said he didn’t know, and an argument began. Tempers flared, the passengers refused to leave until they were guaranteed a refund, and the stalemate was broken only by the arrival of a dense cloud of smoke that had spread back along the tunnel from Ménilmontant. In a panic, passengers began to flee along the platform, only to hit a dead end. Couronnes station has only one exit—via the stairs they had refused to climb, at the other end of the platform. Tragically, in an attempt to stop the fire at Ménilmontant, the electricity along the whole section of line was cut, plunging Couronnes into total, choking darkness. By the time the smoke cleared, eighty-four people had died of asphyxiation.

  The technical lessons were learnt—wooden carriages were phased out, and the electric circuit for station lighting was separated out from that powering the engines. The only thing that hasn’t changed since 1903 is that Parisians are still just as argumentative …

  It’s just not cricket (probably)

  New York has its subterranean albino alligators, and Paris has crickets. Many métro users swear that they have heard the chirruping of these communicative insects, especially on Lines 3, 8 and 9 (not the others—it seems that, like many visitors to Paris, the crickets can’t understand the signs at junctions telling them how to get from one métro line to another). I personally have never heard them—birdsong, yes, from sparrows that get in via overground stations, and the scurrying of mice and rats, but never the Mediterranean call of the cricket.