MÉTFLO STOP PAFUS
ALSO BY GREGOR DALLAS
The Imperfect Peasant Economy:
The Loire Country, 1800-1914
At the Heart of a Tiger:
Ckmenceau and His World, 1841-1929
THE WAR AND PEACE TRILOGY
1815: The Roads to Waterloo
1918: War and Peace
Poisoned Peace: 1945—
The War that Never Ended
MÉTRO STOP
PARIS
AN UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF THE CITY OF LIGHT
GREGOR DALLAS
Copyright © 2008 by Gregor Dallas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Walker & Company, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.
Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York
Distributed to the trade by Macmillan
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dallas, Gregor.
Métro stop Paris : underground tales from the City of Light / by Gregor Dallas.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-802-71900-3
1. Paris (France)—Description and travel. 2. Paris (France)—History 3. Subways—France—Paris—Anecdotes. I. Title.
DC707.D18 2008
914.43610484 —dc22
2008001271
Visit Walker & Company's Web site at www.walkerbooks.com
First U.S. Edition 2008
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield
To my mother,
Marjorie Eileen Dallas,
in fond memory
CONTENTS
Map
Thoughts for the Trip
1. DENFERT-ROCHEREAU
2. GARE DU NORD
3. TROCADÉRO
4. MONTPARNASSE
5. SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS
6. PORTE DE CLIGNANCOURT
7. CHTELET-LES HALLES
8. PORTE DE LA VILLETTE
9. OPÉRA
10. PALAIS-ROYAL
11. SAINT-PAUL
12. PÈRE LACHAISE
Recommended Reading
Index
THOUGHTS FOR THE TRIP
Métro, n. m. (1891; de métropolitairi). Chemin de fer à traction électrique, partiellement ou totalement souterrain, qui dessert les differents quartiers d'une capitale (notamment Paris) ou d'une grande ville.
Petit Robert 1
Ask a few Parisians: each has his Paris. Each has his Parises, one might say, insomuch as Paris is multiple, changing, contradictory.
Paris: le Guide Vert de Michelin
A QUIET RVOLUTION is taking place in the capitals of Europe. Walk through some of the streets of Chelsea, in west London, and all you will hear is French, whereas the main language on Rue de Rivoli, in central Paris, seems to be English. There are quarters in Rome where you will hear French, English and German—anything, it seems, but Italian. And these are not tourists you hear; they are the permanent, working residents from all over Europe. With 250,000 French residents in London, the French are right to claim that London is now the fifth French-speaking city in the world. In the same way, Paris is a major English-speaking city; one estimate puts the number of English speakers in the greater Paris region at 300,000 (there are no official statistics because census takers in the European Union are not allowed to record national origin). Every weekend, aeroplanes and trains are filled with the weekly commuters traveling between London and Paris. And every weekday, in the evening, you will find—cycling along the quays of the Seine, strolling in the boulevards and chatting in the cafés —the English, so excited to discover their new city.
This quiet revolution has occurred in the last five years. I have witnessed it myself in the expansion of professional associations, publications, political meetings and the number of social events aimed at English speakers in Paris. Old national myths are crumbling. Old national barriers are collapsing. Despite what politicians and the popular press may say, Europe, as a cultural, political and economic entity, is waking up. The old Europe des patries has gone, and it will never return.
This necessarily changes what one looks for in a "tourist guide." The "tourists" are no longer the same. Many of them will be permanent residents, seeking to deepen their knowledge of their new city And for the majority of those travelling for pleasure, this will not be their first visit—they will want to know more than just the names and the dates of construction of the principal monuments. And even if they are first-time visitors, they will have read about the city, they will have seen it on television, and they will know what the place looks like. What they seek is the defining character of the town.
What gives Paris her character is not just her buildings, most of which are no more than two hundred years old, but also her rich history that goes back over two thousand years. There are many histories of Paris, but they won't fit in a pocket or a travelling sack. The following pages are designed for the new kind of tourist; it is a thinker's guide to Paris, made up of what Émile Zola—whom we will encounter in these pages—called "slices of life," little vignettes drawn from Paris's rich two-thousand year-history. I will take the traveller through the cheapest and most convenient system of transport: the city's underground, or "métro" as it is known in Paris, and stop at certain key stations where we will observe a building, a street, a statue, a tombstone or some other landmark that will spark off a story that tells us a lot about the character of the city. There are almost three hundred stations in Paris's sprawling métro system, not counting the express RER. I have selected just twelve.
A good friend of mine suggested that I make my selection by taking just one line—Line No. 1, because it crossed the centre of Paris—and tell my stories one station after the other. There are two reasons why this proved impossible. In the first place, it would have created a very disjointed sequence of tales. Secondly, it would have been utterly unhistorical. A brief history of the métro will explain why.
Paris got its underground train service relatively late. The first line opened in 1900, while London had trains rolling beneath its streets in the 1860s, and New York's elevated rapid transit service dated from 1870. But the idea of a métropolitain railway system linking Paris's districts—or quartiers—goes back to 1845, when it was proposed to link the Gare de Lyon to the Gare du Nord by a narrow-gauge rail that would slide trains freely down a slope in one direction and haul them up by cables in the other. London and New York adopted steam trains. Paris's urban geography made the problem of evacuating the steam and coal fumes a difficult one. Many alternatives to steam were considered. It was proposed to make wagons in the form of pistons, propelled by compressed air like an air gun; they would be shot into the stations by force of inertia. An aquatic project had wagons floating by way of underground canals. A futuristic monorail system of "trains without wheels" was tested in Lyon in the 1870s. But it was only with the approach of the Universal Exposition of 1900 that heads got together to propose the practical solution: an underground system of trains driven by "electric traction."
The initial plan, presented in 1895, faithfully reflected the historic contours of the city: a circular line and two diagonal lines running north-south and east-west. The north-south axis would have paralleled the city's ancient long-haul trade, an axis that dom
inated traffic patterns until long after the French Révolution. The east-west axis would follow the main trend of traffic in the twentieth century. And the circular line would obey patterns set by centuries of urban fortification, reflected in the city's great boulevards.
But those contours soon disappeared with the actual construction. The circular métro was never built; for many years the Petite Ceinture—a steam track laid in the mid-nineteenth century—acted as a poor substitute, and by the late 1930s only a small western section was still operating. As for the initial plan for a north-south axis, it encountered the stiff opposition of the Institute de France, under which it was supposed to pass. The forty "immortals" of the Académie Française, whose job it was to decide what was and what was not French, could not countenance hollow ground beneath their solid feet. The first north-south line was thus distorted by two oblique turns under the Seine. The technical problem of building watertight caissons under the river caused further delays. Work only began on the winding north-south Line No. 4 in 1905; historically speaking, it corresponded to nothing.
Meanwhile, Line No. 1 had been opened in April 1900, on time for the Exposition. Its east-west orientation still dominates today's métro system, which, though it reflects the movement of twentieth-century traffic, is not in any way a historical guide: the main axis of traffic, for over two thousand years, was north-south.
To guide the metrostopper through the main historical routes of Paris, I have selected five lines: No. 1, which takes one through the centre of Paris; No. 3, which carries one out to the important eastern station of Père Lachaise; No. 4, which follows many of the sites on the ancient north-south axis; No. 6, which comes about as close as one can to the southern half of Paris's former peripheral frontier; and the important diagonal line of No. 7, which again cuts through the centre of the city and leads out to the site of the old slaughterhouses of La Villette. The trip through these five lines will carry the métrostopper from the old southern entrance of the city at the Barrière d'Enfer, or Hell's Gate, to the northern Barrière Saint-Denis, infamous in the travel literature of peripatetic Englishmen; then westwards to the Tro-cadero to discover the opening of the east-west axis, across to the artistic and literary quarters of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, into the central districts of the Opéra, the Louvre and the Marais. I have added a few diversions out into the periphery once more; the reasons for this will become clear in the text.
Writing history is like travelling, one of my professors at UC Berkeley used to explain. The more history I wrote, the more I realized that history is travelling: if you don't see the places where the major events of the past occurred, you get lost in the abstractions, system-building and theories that have so distorted our view of the past over the last few decades. The Battle of Hastings took place in Sussex, on the English coast, not in Westphalia; some historians write history as if the events they describe could have occurred anywhere on the globe. Paris is a cultural entity, a civilization that has been moulded by the swing of the Seine and the hills that surround it. If you want to understand the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, you must wander around some of those hôtels particuliers in the Seventh Arrondissement and see with your own eyes where modern philosophy was born. It is quite a thrilling experience, and your views on Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau will never be the same again.
This goes for all aspects of Paris's history. As you emerge from each métro stop, look up those alleys, stare into those old shops, pass your hands over the stones in front of you, you will discover what Parisians call, rather pretentiously, the "genius" of their civilization. But there is something authentic about it. Over many years of walking in Paris, and of writing about the French, I have become convinced that its essential feature is a link that has developed in the Parisian mind between birth and creativity. Parisian civilization is not erotic, as one could describe the arts in Rome or Vienna, say; it comes from the womb, from the origins of life: it is the civilization of Otto Rank rather than of Sigmund Freud and its possible source is seventeenth-century Jansenism and that very French notion of gloire, which dominates the plays of Pierre Corneille.
Follow the sequence of stations I have outlined here and you will discover what I mean. The trip through Paris's underground takes you through a life cycle, beginning with death and ending with death. But in death there is of course rebirth: a very Parisian theme, I would say If we first clamber down into the catacombs of Paris we soon realize how this theme opens up into the life of the city: its saints, its struggle for birth—and the rights of children—and the process by which art is born, in sculpture, in music, in cuisine, in literature and even in philosophy.
The first three chapters address themselves directly to the problems of physical death and birth in Paris. The chapters on Montparnasse, Saint-Germain and Porte de Clignancourt explore that magical link between the hidden memory of birth, artistic creation and belief systems. The chapters on Les Halles and Porte de la Villette follow the city's food orbit, from the "belly of the beast" in the centre out to the old slaughterhouses at the periphery. The final leg of the journey, from the Opéra through to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, will take you through a series of stories about power, its corrupting influence and its fantastic creative potential—the finale at Père Lachaise, I think, bears full witness to both.
Will the métrostopper agree with me? You could decide to stay at home and merely imagine Paris as the book carries you from one station to another; you may well imagine other things than I. But it really would be better to take that trip and look for yourself. What I have sketched above is of course unabashedly schematic; what you actually see could be something different. But at least I will have opened your eyes—the main task, after all is said and done, of the walking historian.
Gregor Dallas
Le Vieil Estrée
2007
1
DENFERT-ROCHEREAU
THE BEST TIME to visit Métro stop No. i, Denfert-Rochereau, is in the morning of Paris's first day at work, which for most people in Paris is on a Tuesday Except for bankers, nobody in Paris works on Mondays because its citizens have been too busy enjoying themselves over the weekend. Throughout the provinces of France bankers work on Saturdays, but Paris has for the last thousand years always wanted to be different from the provinces—which is why bankers in Paris work on Mondays instead of Saturdays. Civil servants, on the other hand, do not like to work on the first day of the week—which is why all the National Museums, to the annoyance of foreign travellers, are always closed on Tuesdays. So pick a Wednesday. Everything will be open at Denfert-Rochereau on Wednesday.
A visit to the Catacombs of Paris awaits; that is, if you do not get lost. The map in the underground is based on a terror-control theory designed to mislead an enemy alien; following those directions will lead you to two locked green doors marked privé. The two oldest buildings in the square date back to the mid-1780s, just when everything happened here at Place Denfert-Rochereau. The only piece of decor is in the architraves below the roof, full of dancing Greek maidens, save the central figure. Who is that? An allegory of Life or of Death? This place was once called Hell.
Nobody knows exactly why they named that street running north the Rue d'Enfer, Hell Street; or the square itself the Barrière d'Enfer, Hell's Gate. Some writers believe it was a popular distortion of Via Inferiora, the old Roman road that ran southwards to Orléans. "Enfer" only appeared on the maps in the 1560s, at the beginning of the Religious Wars; but, like most place names, the term was probably used by a lot of people before that. "Hell," at any rate, turned out to be the right name for this place.
The two buildings on the south side of the square are remnants of Claude Ledoux's tollgates that pierced the Farmers General Wall of 1784-87.* Most of the tollgates were destroyed by city rebels who liked neither the tolls nor the way they were being walled in or out of their national capital. "Le murmurant Paris rend Paris murmurant," it was famously said of the Farmers Ge
neral Wall, one of the most hated pieces of masonry in all of Paris; in the popular mind of the 1780s it competed with the Bastille as a symbol of arbitrary authority. Indeed, it was the spontaneous attack on the barriers and wall during the weekend of 12 July 1789 by bands armed with kitchen knives and clubs that prepared Paris for the fatal riot of 14 July and the surrender of the Bastille. Forty of the fifty-four barrières built around the city were destroyed in the space of two days. But they forgot about those two buildings standing in a place called Hell, for nobody lived in Hell.
Yet only a hundred years earlier this desolate place was designated by the most powerful of all France's kings, Louis XIV, to be not just the centre of his national capital, but the centre of the entire world. The King had been visiting his cousin, the Due d'Orléans, at the Luxembourg Palace, when he looked out on to the vast empty prairie to the south and thought to himself that more was required here than lush royal gardens; what was needed was a vast monument, something to attract the eye. It so happened that the King's astronomers were at that time lobbying for an observatory to study the stars that sparkled above the kingdom; the King's chief stargazer, Giovanni Cassini, wanted the Observatoire built on one of the hills outside the city But he missed the point. All the King could see was the wasteland to the south of the Luxembourg Palace, a place called Hell that had to be filled. So in 1676 the King, by royal decree, announced that this spot was the centre of the world and ordered that the Observatoire be built here. You can see it through the trees two hundred yards to your right.
Metro Stop Paris Page 1
