The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  “I was inspired by big containers,” he said flatly.

  Over lunch, Sophie Guillaume-Petit, a Le Havre native and the co author of a book of five hundred anecdotes about the city, answered my questions about how the river figures in the minds of the city’s inhabitants.

  “You don’t have the Seine here, not at all,” she replied. “This is not like Paris or Rouen, where the Seine cuts right through. You don’t see it. You don’t feel it.”

  I remembered Napoléon’s famous quote that Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris were part of the same town on Main Street—the Seine. And I found a line in Le Havre’s full-color, 172-page press package calling the Seine “the spine that unites Paris and Le Havre.” I was confused.

  I called on Luc Lemonnier, Le Havre’s deputy mayor. I had met him a few months earlier, when he came to Paris to promote the muchpublicized competition Réinventer la Seine, where I had entered my proposal for a Sequana statue.

  “The Seine is not a water route for us,” he said. “The port is what matters. We’re on the port.”

  “So how can you be part of a project to reinvent the Seine?” I asked.

  “The idea of reinventing the Seine is to construct partnerships, to reestablish a new rapport with water,” he replied. “When we talk of reinventing the Seine, it’s a small piece of our relationship with water.”

  I became more confused.

  Like Lemonnier, people in town talk about le port and la mer (the sea), but never la rivière or le fleuve. It’s as if the river didn’t exist.

  Finally, I found a Seine enthusiast: Annette Haudiquet, the director of the Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux. But it was an imagined river that excited her. The museum boasts the second-largest collection of Impressionist art in France (after the Musée d’Orsay) and some of the world’s most famous Impressionist and Fauvist paintings of the Seine. Monet, Raoul Dufy, Boudin, and Georges Braque began their artistic careers in Le Havre.

  She showed me Monet’s 1878 painting The Seine at Vétheuil, with its symmetrical reflection of trees and bushes in the still waters of a golden-lit late summer morning. Haudiquet said that in the summer of that year, Monet, who grew up in Le Havre, was too poor to stay in Paris, so he moved his family forty miles northwest of the capital to the village of Vétheuil.

  We viewed Albert Marquet’s Quai des Grands-Augustins, where fog shrouds the quays and monuments of Paris in muted grays, and the river shines like a dark silver mirror. Then we studied Jean-Baptiste Arnaud Guillaumin’s The Seine at Samois, a rendering of the river in shades of sugar-sweet lavender, blue, and pink. Haudiquet was mesmerized by the natural phenomenon created by the clash of river and sea waters in the Seine estuary. “This meeting of two different bodies of water, this mixture of the sweet and salty, it produces a unique light,” she said. “I find it fascinating.”

  Under the water of the estuary, the tide erodes and reshapes the river bottom, creating a huge fluctuating accumulation of sediment called a mud plug. When the tides rise, the mud mass moves east, upstream; when the tides fall, it moves back toward the sea. The closer to the mouth of the estuary, the deeper brown it gets. The mud color is deceiving—the mass carries nutrients that feed the estuary’s ecosystem and bacteria that filter pollutants.

  WHEN FRANÇOIS I, a Renaissance man, created the port of Le Havre in 1517, a habitable city was an afterthought. His priority was to create “un havre”—a harbor—that would serve as both a defensive military site to protect France from invaders and a commercial port to open Paris to the world.

  Militarily, the Seine was vulnerable, an opening into French territory from the sea used, as I had learned before, by invading Vikings in the ninth century, as a route to Paris, and by English troops as a landing site in the Hundred Years’ War. However, as a transport route, the Seine was also shallow and unreliable. Its existing international ports of Harfleur, on the north bank of the river, and Honfleur, on the southern side of the estuary, were continually silting up.

  The site chosen for Le Havre was an expanse of marshlands and mudflats riven with creeks. François I had to call in port-building experts to help drain the land. Several months after the king decided to build a port, he was persuaded to create a city to go with it.

  Trade exploded over time. Wealthy merchants built monumental homes in the coastal suburb of Sainte-Adresse, above Le Havre. The city itself became a showpiece of architectural grace and elegance. The nineteenth-century poet Casimir Delavigne, who was born in Le Havre and lived upriver in Les Andelys, had a soft spot for his hometown, saying that “after Constantinople, there is nothing so beautiful.”

  In August 1944, the British encircled Le Havre and demanded that its German occupiers surrender. When they refused, the Allies rained bombs on the city and its inhabitants for seven days. By the time Le Havre was liberated on September 12, 2,000 civilians had been killed, 80,000 left homeless, and more than 80 percent of the city destroyed. At the ruined port, 350 ships lay on the bottom of the sea. The Havrais still ask why the English felt compelled to destroy their city after it was clear the war was over.

  When Julia Child and her husband, Paul, crossed the Atlantic to move to Paris in 1948—three years after the war’s end and long before her cooking made her famous—their ship arrived at Le Havre. A crane pulled their sky-blue station wagon from the ship’s hold and deposited it on the dock, and they set out along the Seine toward Paris. “We could see giant cranes, piles of brick, bombed-out empty spaces, and rusting half-sunk hulks left over from the war,” Child wrote in her memoirs.

  The French architect Auguste Perret, working with a tight budget and a short deadline, oversaw the master plan for the city’s reconstruction. He used liquid stone—precast concrete—to build identical modular frames, a rectangular grid system of streets, and wide sidewalks. The buildings on the 150 residential blocks were all the same height.

  From 1965 to 1995, Le Havre was run by Communist mayors and became the largest bastion of the Communist Party of France. Some French people branded it Stalingrad-on-the-Sea. In his 1994 memoir The Secret Life of the Seine, Mort Rosenblum called it “the ugliest city in France, possibly the world. . . . A gray Stalinist tower dominates a ragged skyline of boxy apartments and office blocks, factory stacks, port cranes, and silos, all jumbled together with no space to breathe.”

  Le Havre’s five hundredth anniversary celebration was an opération séduction. The city proclaimed itself a living museum of modern architecture, erecting several large-scale public art projects around town. It played host to the last leg of a tall ships race, welcoming thirty of the largest sailing ships in the world.

  As part of a press trip for the kickoff weekend, we toured a model 1950s high-ceilinged apartment in a Perret building featuring period furniture and design. At first glance, all the buildings looked alike; then we discovered that the concrete came in different shades—creamy beige, gray, taupe, khaki, terra-cotta, ochre—and that the geometric columns and beams were finished with varying patterns and textures of concrete. City officials pointed out that in 2005, Le Havre was the first example of French modern architecture to achieve UNESCO World Heritage status. The city is a model of urban experimentation and reconstruction, they said, studied in architecture schools the world over. Indeed, Perret’s geometrical architecture has aged well, and 1950s design is now chic. Saint Joseph’s Church, completed in 1957, three years after Perret’s death, soars to 350 feet and resembles a small-scale New York City skyscraper. Concrete columns rise to angled buttresses and an octagonal cupola. The steeple is lined with stained glass, and reflections from the colored panels dance on the walls.

  In the center of town, we visited Le Volcan, a partially underground complex designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. It consists of a volcano-shaped theater and a smaller crater converted into a library. At an inner dock area of part of the port, we saw Jean Nouvel’s Les Bains des Docks, a white-on-white swimming complex and spa with eleven swimming pools; inspired by the ancient
Roman baths, it is covered in thirty-two million tiny mosaic tiles. Nearby is the Docks Vauban, with a cinema, restaurants, and high-end boutiques.

  At the Port Center, French singer-songwriter Catherine Ringer appeared with an air of mysterious detachment, her hair in a waist-length braid. She is famous in France as part of a pop-rock duo whose song “Marcia Baïla” was a tube de l’été—a summer hit—in 1984. When it is played at parties, the song still inspires French people to jump out of their seats and dance. Ringer seemed bored and was abrupt in fielding questions from journalists. A radio reporter asked if she could capture the spirit of Le Havre in a few words. Suddenly she burst into a song, “Au fil du Havre,” an ode of love she had composed with a local musician. “It’s at the end of the world under the edge of the cliffs, / Where the Seine makes love to the sea,” she sang, her voice low and strong.

  “Voilà,” she said, smiling for the first time. “Other questions?”

  The journalists applauded and cheered.

  BENOîT DUTEURTRE IS A NOVELIST who grew up in Le Havre and hosts a weekly radio broadcast on France Musique called Étonnez-moi, Benoît!—“Surprise me, Benoît!” His 2001 novel Le voyage en France won the prestigious Médicis Prize. We arranged to meet at his Paris apartment, which is filled with old books, engravings, and maps, including many of Le Havre.

  “When you live in Le Havre, sure, it’s near the Seine, but you don’t think of the Seine,” he said. “You think of the sea.”

  He recalled childhood visits on the luxury steamships heading to New York, the feeling of adventure. “We had the right to board the boats, so parents brought their children. We imagined going to the United States.”

  Maupassant, André Gide, Sartre, Balzac, and Zola wrote about Le Havre and inspired the young Benoît. “I fell under their spell,” he said. “And I might not have become a writer—at least not the same kind of writer—without such a magnificent and powerful setting.”

  When Duteurtre was growing up in Le Havre in the 1960s, he encountered the Seine on Sunday pilgrimages with his family to the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille. Duteurtre’s father had trained to become a monk before he chose marriage and had gotten to know the monks who lived and worked there. The family would drive from Le Havre, passing the industrial port along the estuary of the Seine, with its huge tankers and refineries.

  Duteurtre described the Seine estuary as being like a large wedge that cuts Normandy in two: “For people on either side, there is the world where one lives and the world one calls ‘on the other side of the water.’” The other side of the water . . . that was exactly what Frédéric Lefebvre, the museum administrator in Honfleur, had called the divide.

  Duteurtre gave me a copy of Le voyage en France, after first inscribing his name with a fountain pen. When I got home late that afternoon, I read what he had written.

  “To Elaine, the novel that takes the Seine from Paris to Le Havre, and that crosses the ocean from Le Havre to New York.”

  Perhaps the Seine really does come to Le Havre.

  PART FIVE

  River of Dreams

  Salsa dancers in the Tino Rossi, an open-air square and garden along the Seine in Paris’s Fifth Arrondissement. From late spring to early fall, people gather nightly for dancing. BÉRENGÈRE SIM.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Reinventing the River

  Citizens . . . today we are inviting

  you to invent our shared future

  together.

  —MISSION STATEMENT of Reinvent the

  Seine for Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre

  SEQUANA LOST.

  My proposal to build a statue of the ancient river goddess failed to win over the judges in the contest named Réinventer la Seine.

  Reinvent the Seine of Le Havre sent the first rejection. “Madame Sciolino, you were so kind to submit a proposal,” it read. “We want to thank you for the quality of your proposal and your contribution to the emergence of an identity for the Seine axis. The members of the jury were impressed with the quality of your work. . . . Please accept, Madame, our most sincere salutations.”

  A similar rejection followed from Rouen. The city of Paris didn’t even bother to write. I learned of the Paris rejection when I ran into Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor in charge of the Reinvent the Seine project, at a cocktail reception at City Hall. “Madame, your proposal was flawed,” he said. “You had no way to pay for it.”

  “Monsieur, I’m American, and raising money is never a problem for Americans,” I said. “Sequana—the Gallo-Roman Joan of Arc, Lady of Lourdes, and Marianne all wrapped into one. It’s just what France needs right now.” Missika was unswayed. He gave me one of those half-smiles French bureaucrats are so good at.

  Reinvent the Seine’s goal was to come up with new possibilities for living on the water and along the banks of the Seine in Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre. Sequana had been the healing goddess of an empire, presiding from an ancient temple at the source of the Seine. I had hoped to create a grand replica of the two-thousand-year-old Gallo-Roman bronze statue of her standing in a duck-billed boat, the representation that had so captivated me when I’d first seen it in a museum. I’d envisioned her rising as proud and tall as the quarter-scale Statue of Liberty that stands on an island in the Seine. I was sure she had the symbolic power to reconquer the river.

  Several months later, the juries announced twenty winners: thirteen for sites in Paris, five in Le Havre, and two in Rouen. None of the winning projects was strictly cultural or artistic; all involved making a profit. Among the winners in Paris were a floating art center with a library, bar, shared work areas, performance space, and workshops; a round-the-clock electronic cabaret for music, theater, dance, art, light shows, and dining; a craft brewery based on land and water; programs in public parking lots to educate people about the environment and transportation; a floating bakery that will deliver goods in small, electric-powered boats; and a sports center with a swimming pool that could eventually be filled with Seine water if the river ever gets clean enough.

  THE REINVENTION of the Seine didn’t begin with this contest and wouldn’t end with it. Since the 1980s, authorities in Paris have found new uses for the river and its banks, as the industrial and commercial Seine gave way to the recreational Seine. In 1983, the Port de l’Arsenal, once a commercial storage facility near the place de la Bastille, became a marina with a footpath and a garden. In 1992, a grand urban-renewal project replaced the André Citroën automobile plant in western Paris, with a modern park adjacent to what was then called the Quai de Javel. In 2012, the early-twentieth-century Austerlitz warehouses became the Cité de la Mode et du Design cultural center, with its popular nightclubs NUBA and Wanderlust.

  Environmental concerns in Paris led to initiatives that banned car traffic and encouraged walking and biking. It hadn’t always been that way. In 1967, Georges Pompidou, as prime minister, built an eight-mile-long expressway on the Right Bank. It was considered the height of modernity, a symbol of the public will to open the riverbanks to automobile traffic, and the fulfillment of Pompidou’s promise that Paris could be crossed by car from one end to the other in fifteen minutes. “Paris must adapt to the car,” Pompidou said. Eventually, more than thirty-five thousand vehicles used the expressway every day.

  Storage silos at the port of Paris located in Gennevilliers. © HAROPA—PORTS DE PARIS TERRE D’IMAGES.

  Then, in 2002, Mayor Bertrand Delanoë began to liberate the river from car traffic along part of its lower banks. In 2013, he closed nearly a mile and a half of road on the Left Bank and opened Les Berges, a riverside walk with floating gardens, restaurants, and playgrounds. In 2016, Anne Hidalgo, his successor, permanently banned all cars, trucks, and motorcycles from the most important stretch of the Right Bank expressway in central Paris. She called it “the reconquest of the Right Bank of the Seine.” The city spent about €9 million to rebuild the route for pedestrians and cyclists, install wooden walkways, and plant trees and shrubs. On the Left Bank, th
e city constructed small installations for sunbathing and exercise, a botanical garden and museum space, and a picnic area in front of the Musée d’Orsay.

  Creating the no-car areas was part of a larger campaign to curb a worsening pollution crisis in Paris. Cars manufactured before 1997 were banned from Paris streets except on weekends and weekday evenings. That rendered our elegant 1995 Audi 6, with fewer than fifty thousand miles and garaged throughout its life, hopelessly out-of-date. I was sad to see it go.

  Taxi drivers, commuters, merchants, restaurant owners, and booksellers along the river hated the carless Seine initiative. But City Hall stood firm. In 2018, Hidalgo promoted her crusade with the unveiling of a plaque near the place du Châtelet that celebrated UNESCO’s decision almost thirty years before to declare the Paris riverbanks a World Heritage cultural site. She used the words of a warrior. The “liberated banks,” she said, “symbolize my battle for Paris.”

  Art projects helped integrate the Seine physically and symbolically into the heart of Paris. Stéphane Thidet’s 2018 exhibition Détournement (“Diversion”) diverted water from the river near the Pont au Change through a pinewood roller coaster of braces and sluices and through the Conciergerie court building. The passage of the Seine’s waters across what had been the seat of power in the Middle Ages and the prison where Marie-Antoinette spent her last weeks during the French Revolution felt like a symbolic nourishing of the foundations of France’s past.

  The river’s reinvention became an ongoing activity. The Grand Palais complex of galleries and exhibition spaces launched a renovation that is expected to cost hundreds of millions of euros. It will feature a pedestrian street with ticket offices and restaurants linking the Champs-Élysées to the Seine. Mayor Hidalgo devised a plan to build three new pedestrian and bicycling bridges over the Seine away from well-trodden tourist areas. The bridges would be lined with gardens, cafés, shops, and small businesses, reviving the feel of centuries ago, when bridges were destinations, not just pathways to the other side of the river.