Paris Revealed

by Stephen Clarke

  However, the greatest destruction of the city wasn’t caused by political upheaval—ironically, the demolition of most of Paris’s medieval core was done in an attempt to save the city from itself.

  It was in the mid-nineteenth century that Baron Haussmann, the man who gave his name to a boulevard and a whole style of Parisian achitecture, tore down so many medieval houses, churches and palaces that he gave Paris its nickname, the Ville Lumière or City of Light—there is a theory that the name is a reference, not to quaint streetlamps or philosophical enlightenment, as is often suggested, but to the sun shining through the gaps that Haussmann smashed in the ancient pattern of streets.

  Georges Eugène, aka Baron Haussmann (in fact, he had no right to the title), was a native Parisian, the son of one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s military attachés. He was also, some would say, the city’s biggest vandal.

  He was the Préfet de la Seine (Paris’s chief administrator) from 1853 to 1870, and the man entrusted with a mission to remodel the city along rationalist nineteenth-century lines.

  In fairness, much of the destruction he unleashed was well meant. During Napoleon III’s enforced exile in England, the French Emperor fell in love with Victorian London.***** He saw a grandiose city that had been reconstructed and much expanded in the centuries after the Great Fire of 1666, and began to think that he could do the same thing to Paris, but without all the smoke. He therefore conceived a grand plan entitled Paris embellie, Paris agrandie, Paris assainie (Paris beautified, enlarged and cleaned up), making trebly sure that people knew which city he was talking about.

  Napoleon III’s promise was to bring air, light and clean water to the Parisians. He also had a secret ambition, which was to make it more difficult for the city’s rebellious populace to barricade the streets, as they had done in 1830 (when King Charles X was booted out) and 1848 (when King Louis-Philippe was forced to flee). Napoleon III also thought it would be useful to have wide roads linking the city’s various army barracks, so that troops could move about freely to crush uprisings.

  Haussmann, a politician and friend of the Emperor’s Minister of the Interior, was chosen for the job, apparently because of his total lack of nostalgia. He was a great lover of straight lines, and quickly set about smashing them through the old city with no regard for the treasures that got in his way. He destroyed about half the buildings on the Île de la Cité (it was almost literally a stroke of luck that Notre-Dame was not in the way of the three new streets he drew across the map of the island), and even knocked down his own birthplace in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  To his credit, before launching his campaign of destruction, Haussmann had the old city preserved for posterity by a photographer. Le Baron commissioned one of the first exponents of the new art form, a Parisian painter called Charles Marville, to take hundreds of pictures of the neighbourhoods that were about to be toppled or built over. Though Haussmann wasn’t just being a romantic—he also got Marville to photograph his work in progress, like the piles of bricks that were to become the avenue de l’Opéra, and the similar mounds of rubble that would be cleared away to create the place du Carrousel, the roundabout that now lies between the Louvre Pyramid and the Tuileries.******

  The Musée Carnavalet’s collection of paintings records the trauma that the destruction caused. One picture shows a row of old buildings that look like bodies with their ribcages torn open, the victims of Haussmann’s charge through the Opéra district. A beautiful model of a gothic tower set into the fabric of an ordinary residential house is a poignant record of a corner of the place de l’Hôtel de Ville that was sacrificed so that the large square could be made squarer. Vast areas were redeveloped during this Haussmannian frenzy—it is estimated that about 20,000 buildings were destroyed, and around 40,000 built (many of those in the outlying areas annexed into Paris to increase the number of arrondissements from twelve to twenty).

  Haussmann was interested in the details as well as the general destruction. He dictated strict rules about the style and height of the buildings that would line his new streets—they were to be 20 metres high, with the different storeys of adjoining buildings closely aligned, and their facades had to be similar in style, even if they were designed by different architects. All of which explains the uniformity of so many of Paris’s streets today.

  The Haussmann era was also a turning point in the city’s social history. Before he began his clear-out, apartment buildings were a cross-section of Parisian society—shops on the ground floor, their owners on the first, the rich bourgeois on the second (known as l’étage noble), lower middle classes on the third and fourth, workers on the fifth, and servants, students and the miscellaneous poor at the top.

  After Haussmann, these distinctions disappeared. The new buildings were posher, with people of similar (mainly middle) class on every floor except the ground (still for shops and businesses) and the top, which was now reserved for the chambres de bonne or maids’ rooms. It was the beginning of the gentrification that has steadily evicted the poor from all but the far reaches of the city’s outer arrondissements.

  Haussmann did some good works—he created large ‘English-style’ parks—Monceau, Montsouris, and the Buttes-Chaumont. He laid out the Champs-Élysées, and built the Gare de Lyon and Gare de l’Est. More importantly, he renewed the water-supply system and oversaw the construction of the sewers, replacing the centuries-old system of simply dumping everything in the fetid unpaved lane in front of medieval houses, or sluicing it off into the Seine, from where the drinking water came.

  Predictably, such huge changes weren’t made without whiffs of financial wrong-doings, and the Prime Minister Jules Ferry was moved to publish a pamphlet called Les Comptes Fantastiques d’Haussmann—Haussmann’s Fantasy Accounts, a neat pun on Les Contes Fantastiques d’Hoffmann, Hoffmann’s Fairy Stories. And it was amid allegations of overspending and dubious dealings that the Baron lost his job in January 1870—just months before Napoleon III himself was deposed after an ill-advised Prussian war. All of which was followed in 1871 by yet another round of riots and barricades that even Haussmann’s boulevards couldn’t contain.

  A Parisian nightmare

  Fortunately, Haussmann’s destruction work inspired literary creativity—Émile Zola, that tireless transcriber of social changes, wrote a novel called La Curée (which could be translated as The Feeding Frenzy). It features a speculator who makes a killing out of Haussmannian insider trading, buying up land and buildings that he knows will be compulsorily purchased at a good price by the city.

  But perhaps the most interesting book inspired by the great clean-up is an early example of sci-fi, a story called Paris Nouveau et Paris Futur by Victor Fournel, a writer and journalist who, like Zola, spent much of his time documenting life in his city. Fournel’s books include Les Rues du Vieux Paris, in which he describes not only the streets but the people who lived in them in the Middle Ages, and Les Cris de Paris, a record of the calls used by street peddlers and buskers.

  Given his feel for history, it is not surprising that Fournel was horrified by Baron Haussmann’s plans to remodel Paris with the wrecking ball, and in 1865 he wrote Paris Nouveau et Paris Futur as a nightmare vision of how the city would look in a hundred years’ time. He foresaw Paris in 1965 stretching unbroken halfway to the sea. Fournel predicts ‘a century of hard work, a furious obsession for building and a delirium tremens of demolition’ that would produce ‘a typical capital of modern civilization … at its centre, a square one lieue [about 4 km] across, off which radiate 50 boulevards, each 50 metres wide, lined with buildings 50 metres high, a long series of gigantic cubes containing an equal number of equal-sized apartments’.

  These boulevards, just like Haussmann’s, are tools of military oppression—in the centre of the main square, Fournel envisages an enormous army barracks topped with a lighthouse to shine along the boulevards, preventing disorder.

  The city would be a giant wheel with spokes 15 kilometres long, Fournel says. It would
be perfect for tourists, who ‘wouldn’t need a guide—they could just go out of their hotel, turn left or right, walk around the circle and, in the evening, arrive back at the hotel.’

  Piling on the irony, he predicts that the city would at last get rid of ‘gothic monstrosities’ like Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois (the old church opposite the eastern façade of the Louvre). Meanwhile, Notre-Dame could be modernized so that it looks presentable, and other monuments like the Hôtel de Ville and Invalides would be displaced so that they stood in alignment with the new boulevards.

  Fournel’s dream ends when he is shaken awake by his concierge and warned to leave the building, which is about to be demolished to make way for the boulevard Saint-Germain.

  But, even if he meant to exaggerate, he did get a few things uncannily right. For a start, he gives a vivid description of armies of workers being transported into the centre of the city by train. Rush hours today at Saint-Lazare and the Gare du Nord are far worse than his nightmares. And even more accurately, Fournel’s Paris Futur seems to be an exact model for the post-war French new town, a concept so soulless that it has turned many of the city’s poorer suburbs into drug-dealing, rioting no-go areas. In a way, his nightmare vision of the future is actually more humane than these real banlieues because, being a typical Parisian, Fournel couldn’t resist imagining that his futuristic boulevards would at least have plenty of cafés.

  Paris exposes itself

  The 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle brought more light to the city. The exhibition was a hymn to modernism, with electrically illuminated fountains, floodlit galas and glowing glass pavilions. The Expo site was spread along the largely empty banks of the Seine to the southwest of the old city, and featured some spectacular architecture. In front of the École Militaire there was the enormous Galerie des Machines, the grandest of Paris’s Art Nouveau glass palaces, bigger and more striking than the Grand Palais. It was flattened in 1909 so that the army could reclaim its parade ground, the Champ-de-Mars. And the centrepiece was, of course, the Tour Eiffel, the world’s tallest tower until it was knocked off its pedestal by the Chrysler Building in 1930.

  There are famous photos of the Tower at different stages in its construction, but the Musée Carnavalet has one of the earliest paintings of Paris’s new tourist attraction, made shortly after its completion in 1889. It is a night-time scene showing the Tower as a giant beacon, attracting admirers in a procession of river cruisers and a hot-air balloon. Even the crescent moon seems to be smiling down on it. Strange, then, that the Eiffel Tower was almost immediately declared by a committee of Parisian artists to be a ‘useless, monstrous tower in the heart of our city’ and came very close to getting the chop when its management contract ended in 1909.

  It’s almost as if the city planners were as frivolous as the newly emerging haute couture designers—they just couldn’t bear to see last year’s buildings any more.

  The end of a century

  In the brief spell between the end of Haussmann and the time when the métro builders would start ripping up his boulevards to lay underground railway lines, Parisians had a brief opportunity to get out and enjoy themselves without inhaling too much demolition dust.

  The end of the nineteenth century was the Belle Époque, and the mellow mood is reflected in the Musée Carnavalet’s gallery of fin de siècle paintings, in which crowds of Parisians promenade up and down their airy new boulevards. Apart from the fashions, the beards and the horses, the street scenes are very similar to modern Paris—the trees lining the pavements already have iron sheaths protecting their trunks and the benches look like the ones you can still see today—wide green slats of wood set in a grey iron frame.

  Café tables dominate the landscape, and the museum takes you inside one of the old grand boulevard brasseries. A private salon has been salvaged, a beautiful Art Nouveau boudoir with carved, plant-inspired furniture, including a very inviting couch. This was where a Parisian gentleman or well-to-do tourist would entertain his lover or paid companion, cajoling her from table to divan with seductive words and a few coupes de Champagne. A thick velvet curtain ensured total privacy, and the room even had a back door for a discreet exit. Yes, in the 1890s, the Parisian culture of adultery was part of the city’s architecture.

  And this is the great thing about the Musée Carnavalet—thanks to the quirkiness of its collection, it manages to conjure up the atmosphere in the city at each period in its long, turbulent history, from the time when Paris was little more than a small settlement on a riverbank to the days when it became the most sophisticated, seductive city in Europe. Spending a couple of hours wandering through the museum, you will be able to feel the direct link between those Stone Age men and women making their earthenware plates and the secretive lovers enjoying a crystal coupe before stretching out on their velvet couch.

  The (n)ever-changing city

  After a century of almost constant devastation, you’d think the city would have wanted to savour its surviving architecture. But no, the one constant about Parisians seems to be that they can’t resist abusing their own skyline.

  Miraculously, the First World War and even the Nazi Occupation swept over the city without doing a great deal of damage. In 1914, the fighting came within a few kilometres of Paris before its taxi drivers rallied to the national cause and ferried thousands of troops out to the front line, where they valiantly held off the invaders and accidentally invented trench warfare. There were occasional air raids throughout the Great War, and artillery shelling, including bombardments by Grosse Bertha, the giant cannon firing from over 100 kilometres away. In all, about 500 Parisians were killed by bombs and shells, though compared with the way the rest of northeastern France was flattened, Paris suffered relatively little architectural damage, except for the destruction of the métro station at Corvisart, and a large hole in the roof of Notre-Dame des Victoires church in the 2nd arrondissement.

  For most of the Second World War, things were much quieter—the city surrendered without a fight, and it wasn’t until 1944 that the Ville Lumière came close to having its lights put out once and for all. This was when Hitler famously ordered his Governor of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, to destroy the city before it was liberated—‘Paris must not fall into enemy hands,’ the Führer said, ‘or, if it does so, only as a field of rubble.’ The General had his troops torch the Grand Palais, but, as mentioned in Chapter 2, disobeyed the order to set off explosives under Paris’s key monuments. Choltitz was probably acting in self-defence rather than expressing a fondness for architecture, because if he had flattened the city, he wouldn’t have survived very long after the French caught up with him. Even so, Paris breathed a sigh of relief when it was liberated almost intact, with most of the scarring limited to the Grand Palais, some bullet-spattered streets, and its conscience.

  For a short period in September 1914, it was actually easier to get a taxi in Paris. You just had to put on a uniform and say, ‘Take me to the Marne.’ And for the only time in history, Parisian taxi drivers were happy, because they were paid what was on the meter for the fifty-kilometre trip to the battle front.

  Bizarre, then, that after the two World Wars, the city set about mutilating its historical centre once more. In 1963, a scheme was announced to ‘renovate’ (that is, demolish) an immense segment of the unfashionable Right Bank, from the Seine up to the Gare de l’Est. In 1968, the demolition balls began to swing, smashing down the crystal palaces that had housed Les Halles, Paris’s vast food market. A major chunk of the Marais was also destroyed, along with its priceless medieval staircases, stone fireplaces, carved beams and other period features that get estate agents excited.

  In their place, Paris was given the underground shopping mall that has rather blasphemously hijacked the name Les Halles (which is a bit like calling a new motorway Leafy Lane); the plastic city called the Quartier de l’Horloge (a complex of apartments and photocopying shops that is very central but cheap to live in because everyone hates the build
ings); and the multi-coloured modernist toaster that is Beaubourg (or the Pompidou Centre as tourists call it. Rightly so, because it’s its official name.)

  I personally like Beaubourg, and am consoled by the fact that Les Halles sits astride road tunnels that syphon traffic away from the Louvre and spit it out several hundred metres to the north, but all in all, with a bit of self-respect, the Marais could have remained about twice as big as it is today, and Les Halles shopping centre would have been housed in nineteenth-century market halls.

  Not only this—throughout the 1960s, Paris tried to out-Haussmann Haussmann and slice motorways through its surviving medieval streets. The Plan autoroutier pour Paris was a scheme dreamt up by road planners who were apparently upset that Paris got in the way of their nationwide motorway network. They therefore drew up plans to channel high-speed traffic straight through or under the city.

  True, it would have been great for truck drivers to be able to admire the place des Vosges in the middle of their Calais–Bordeaux marathon, and coach parties wouldn’t have had to stop to visit Père Lachaise cemetery—the guides would have been able to point out the most famous graves as the tourists cruised by on their way to a toilet break at the Tuileries services, followed by a high-speed drive through the legs of the Eiffel Tower.

  If the plan autoroutier had been implemented, Paris would have had not only the périphérique around its borders and an inner ring of grands boulevards, it would also have been criss-crossed by eight four- or six-lane highways, with both banks of the Seine being converted into trunk roads.

  In the event, only the périph’ and part of the riverbank road were built. Which is why today, if you mention les berges (the banks) de la Seine to a Parisian, they will picture not cobbled walkways and a stroll along the Île Saint-Louis but charging traffic. The Right Bank is a honking highway from opposite the Eiffel Tower pretty well all the way to Bercy on the southeast edge of the city, and the Left Bank was only saved thanks to the intervention of President Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s.