Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  Between the re-establishment of the Bourbons and the revolution of 1830, which sent them finally packing and placed on the throne the Orleanist and last king, Louis-Philippe, more than a hundred and thirty new streets were opened in Paris. These were mainly to accommodate the great increase in wheeled traffic, but for the first time pavements for pedestrians became a normal part of street construction. Then, in the eighteen years of Louis-Philippe’s reign, till he in turn was ousted by another clamorous revolution, one hundred and twelve more streets were opened. They were not particularly wide. The Comte de Rambuteau, Louis-Philippe’s Préfet in charge of the capital, who had been born and bred in the heart of Paris, was respectful of the old geography, but the new streets were useful in opening up new districts and making the old more navigable. Lighting was improved, and at last gas made its belated entry into many parts of Paris, though not yet into the houses. Trees were planted and small parks laid out, public benches were installed, many more public water points were constructed, and the very first public urinals appeared. Some attempt – though not a very coherent one – was made to deal with Paris’s famous lack of proper drains either for sewage or for surface water, and the accompanying smell of rotting cabbage ‘by which the Parisian, returning from a journey, recognises his city’, as Rambuteau himself nostalgically remarked.

  But the more that was done to air and beautify the Right Bank, particularly towards the west, the more the Left Bank seemed physically and therefore socially inferior. True, two short but significant new streets had been opened, leading respectively from the Rue de la Harpe to the Sorbonne and from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Panthéon, and others had been optimistically sketched out in the suburbs further off, among market gardens, builders’ yards, cow-byres, tanneries, garden-cafés, new gas-works and hospitals. But these signs of progress made the inward-looking maze of lanes between the Sorbonne and the river only seem more impenetrable and out of date. Something, it was declared, must be done, if Left Bank Paris was to keep up at all with her richer, more modern sister over the river, and that something was a prolongation eastwards of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, to be generally known as the Rue des Ecoles: the street leading to the schools.

  Although the Rue des Ecoles did not actually get itself built till after Napoleon’s nephew had become the new Emperor in 1852 – there never seemed as much money to spend on the Left Bank as on the Right – it was planned and promoted with almost messianic zeal in the second half of the 1840s. Initially perceived just as a through route for students, cutting out tiresome detours and thus promoting ‘health for studious youth’, it soon began to be seen as a necessary east–west cross route for the area, doing for the Left Bank what the street named after Rambuteau himself had done for the Right in opening up the old market area. But then a new note of high-minded town planning came in – the ‘slum clearance’ argument, which was to become familiar in other cities far from Paris as the century went by. When at last the demolitions for the new street began, cutting across the Rue des Carmes, carrying away the Mathurins, ancient churches such as St Benoît and St Jean de Latran, lanes of old houses and tiny walled cemeteries, one ponderous advocate for this, Eugène Cramouzaud, wrote: ‘The Rue des Ecoles, this “great ventilation shaft”, as one illustrious man of letters has called it, thrusting before itself a great gulf, has already begun a work of restorative justice: however, the opening of this street is more than an act of justice and decent administration, it is an act of humanity.’1

  One doubts if the tenants evicted from the houses to be pulled down saw it quite this way, particularly since no compensation was given then, or later under Haussmann, to anyone who was not actually the owner of the building. It was all very well to claim, as another contemporary pundit did, that ‘this street will bring air and light into a quarter that has been neglected for a long time’, but if you were someone whose dwelling was being sacrificed to create the air and light you were not likely to be grateful. There was no attempt at re-housing, and where could the dispossessed go? There were two answers to this. They could take themselves off to self-built shanties in grubby one-time villages, which an 1840s customs wall round Paris had now enclosed. Or they could crowd in ever-denser numbers into the buildings in their familiar quarter that the demolitions had left standing.

  For the fact was that, though ‘lined with respectable houses’ and ‘opening up the façades of several university buildings’, the Rue des Ecoles does not seem to have raised the tone of the old district near Place Maubert through which it passed, but had rather the opposite effect. For, from then on, descriptions of Maubert and its lanes, of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève and of several other adjacent streets are always cast in a tone of disapproval – sometimes genuinely regretful that humans should be constrained to live in such slums, sometimes almost lip-smacking in condemnation. Cramouzaud (whose ideal of urban planning, by the way, was the Panthéon – ‘so vast, so monumental’) uttered a dire warning that, the way things were going, ‘the slopes of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève will soon shelter every vagabond that the streets of Paris conceal … [This quarter] will be like one of those thickly wooded patches that one finds in the middle of well-cultivated country which one cannot penetrate without being hurt by brambles and thorns.’ He rejected out of hand, however, the notion, already being voiced by more thoughtful commentators, that a wholly ‘modern, civilised Paris’ would leave nowhere for the poor to go. ‘Market forces’, he vaguely asserted, would take care of that.

  Since, in any case, thriving cities perpetually attract more poor from the countryside and the provinces, a capital composed entirely of respectable or well-to-do areas has never been either desirable or attainable. This fact is rediscovered at long intervals: it is indeed being rediscovered in Paris today, as the traditional working population that underpin the city’s services are pushed by market forces further and further out into the suburbs. But for a large part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the illusion prevailed that poverty itself could somehow be ‘solved’ by destroying the streets that harboured it. As early as the first cholera epidemic of 1832, a left-wing idealist called Perrymond was proposing the complete demolition of some of Paris’s oldest quarters: the Ile de la Cité, the Ile St Louis – and a swathe of Left Bank streets near the river including the whole Place Maubert area along with the one-time medical amphitheatre, St Julien le Pauvre, the St Séverin lanes and the Rue de la Huchette.

  Fortunately for the generations coming after him, only the Ile de la Cité destruction was carried out, but the mental label affixed to the most ancient part of the Left Bank long remained. Haussmann targeted it, but never quite got round to it, and nor did his successors. As late as the 1950s it was still theoretically scheduled for demolition as an ‘insalubrious pocket’, till fashion, rising Left Bank property values and the influence of André Malraux as Minister for Culture rescued this core of the old Latin Quarter before the bulldozers got there.

  A doctor,2 writing in the mid-nineteenth century, felt that over certain streets of the Maubert should be written, as above the Roman ghetto, ‘Here Lives Poverty’ – ‘These hovels are the nightly refuge of all that nomadic population consisting of hawkers, pushers of hand-carts, organ grinders, acrobats, glaziers, china menders, hands from the nearby wool and cotton workshops, and, above all, rag-pickers [chiffonniers]. It is here that these last empty their packs, their daily haul of filth.’ He noted the smell from these rubbish piles, and ‘irritating dust’ thought to cause lung disease, fever and rheumatism, and the fact that the ground floors of the houses were often damp with steam from washer-women plying their trade.

  But hadn’t Paris for centuries had hawkers, rag-pickers and washer-women? One never knows, with scandalised descriptions of poverty, whether the poverty itself had really got worse or whether a general slight rise in the living standards made the conditions in which poor families had always lived seem worse. Place Maubert had certainly gone down in the world since the days of Dan
te and Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps since those of Voltaire, but the rag-pickers who made their headquarters there had for centuries been an integral, if lowly, part of the urban scene.

  Till well into the nineteenth century paper was commonly made from recycled cloth, and so those who scavenged this material were very necessary. Later, as cheaper paper from imported wood pulp became the norm, the chiffonniers diversified their efforts, and when the Second Empire came to an end in 1870 there were twelve thousand of them operating in Paris. They pushed small barrows or carried hods on their backs, into which went everything that could possibly be sorted over for reuse. Clean rags were separated from dirty ones, but so were different types of glass for re-melting, and assorted old shoes that might be conflated into ‘new’ ones. Bones went to make buttons and dominoes; corks went to wine merchants; orange peel to juice-makers; old bits of bread were moistened and heated for resale, or dried and then ground down to make ‘coffee’; wool was unpicked to be respun into shoddy; tangled human hairs were picked out and matched for colour and length to be sold to wig-makers; cigar butts (and later cigarette ends) were unpeeled and mashed up for repackaging as ‘selected’ tobacco … Since municipal rubbish collections were unknown in Paris till Préfet Poubelle, who unwittingly gave his name to the dustbins, invented the idea in the 1880s, the chiffonniers were clearly as necessary to middle-class Paris as they were to those in the lowest social reaches.

  Almost anything, it seems, was sellable. Some scavengers specialised in collecting dog-dirt, which they sold by the pailful for use in the tanneries that still stood along the upper reaches of the Bièvre. There is also a record of a ‘filthy drunken person who works somewhere in a hospital’ selling dead foetuses round the Place Maubert to – who else? – medical students.

  Such was the life sheltered now in streets such as the Rue Perdue, the Rue des Rats and the Rue des Anglais. As for the Rue des Noyers on the other side of the Place, where the de Musset house still stood, and the Rue des Carmes running up the hill behind it, now crossed at one point by the Rue des Ecoles, these had long been a cut above Maubert and remained so. The curator of the Musée Carnavalet, Georges Cain, who had been born in the still-almost-countrified district north of the Panthéon in the mid-century, wrote near the end of his life, in an utterly changed city, that the Rue des Carmes seemed to him a perfect survival of the past. It was poor, and obscure, but in the old, large doorways of one-time convents and collèges it still had a remnant of grandeur:

  ‘Narrow and hump-backed, [it] climbs steeply up between shops whose coloured paintwork has been washed again and again by rains, tarnished by dust and wind, and yet this meagre street remains full of charm and poetry. It is crowned at the top by the august pile of the Panthéon while, at its foot, framed between the two rows of blackened houses, minimal hotels and bal-musettes, there rises against the clear sky the slim and elegant spire of Notre Dame.’3

  We shall return to the minimal hotels of the Rue des Carmes in other seasons.

  The municipal authorities were pleased with their Rue des Ecoles. There was even talk of prolonging it as far as the Jardin des Plantes and the new Gare d’Orléans which had been opened there by the river in 1840 (later re-baptised ‘Gare d’Austerlitz’, when Napoleonic memories came back into fashion again). Subsequent road building such as the Rue Jussieu and the Rue Monge, which carried away the walled gardens of George Sand’s old convent school, overtook this idea. But in any case it was not foreseen, at the beginning of the Second Empire in 1852, that within fifteen years such new, giant carriageways would be pushed through the old fabric of the Left Bank that the Rue des Ecoles would by then be perceived as simply inadequate as a cross route for the Latin Quarter.

  Perhaps that was why an odd bottleneck in it, at the junction with the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, was never tidied away. At the corner of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine and the Rue Hautefeuille stands a large, turreted dwelling, thought to have been home in the fourteenth century to a prominent Parisian, Pierre Sarrazin. The late-eighteenth-century designers of what is still the core of the medical schools had no plans to demolish this: the erstwhile Rue des Cordeliers remained narrow for its entire length. Not till the end of the nineteenth century did rebuilding change the façade of the medical schools, and this was when most of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine was widened to its present dimensions. But by this time some respect for antiquity had set in and no one liked to suggest demolishing the Hôtel Sarrazin, any more than they suggested demolishing another turreted mansion a few doors down the Rue Hautefeuille, next to where the long-established Baillière book-dealers now had their shop. Rue Hautefeuille, running as it did through one of the more prestigious parts of the Latin Quarter, had now been accorded a degree of status as ‘one of Paris’s oldest streets’. It was visible, in the way that the equally old but unregarded Maubert district was not, and its ancient vestiges, unlike those of Maubert, made apparent their aristocratic connections.

  So the Hôtel Sarrazin stands to this day, nicely cleaned up, with the outline of some long-ago arched windows picked out in the stonework, effectively confining the last stretch of the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine to its medieval dimensions. But didn’t some brisk prefectorial official decide to widen the street a little by demolishing buildings on its other side? Again, no. For on that side stood the elegant amphitheatre of the Royal School of Surgery, built under Louis XIV and later turned into the Royal School of Design. Evidently no one quite had the nerve to pull that down either. In any case, these premises were by then housing the Musée Dupuytren, much cherished by the powerful medical lobby in the street. Then, and for over a century, into the 1960s, murky windows displaying pickled dead babies, deformed spleens and unusual brain tumours enlivened the walk down that anomalous, narrow hundred metres, which has remained as it was in defiance of all town planning principles.

  Still, today, buses number 63, 86 and 87, travelling west across the Boulevard St Michel, which has replaced the old Rue de la Harpe, have to squeeze their way at walking pace between the amphitheatre and the Hôtel Sarrazin. There is barely room for pedestrians on either side, and at the tightest point the buses give the impression of sucking in their sides and effecting a sideways shuffle, before letting their breath out again in the relatively spacious section alongside the medical schools.

  Did Arthur Jacob, well on in life, visit his old and still entirely recognisable haunts, keeping in contact with the Baillières, and so have a chance to gaze on the new, hygienic Rue des Ecoles stretching eastwards? There are indications that he made a number of visits to France, once the steamships and the trains had transformed the old journey utterly. He was apparently in Paris several times during the early 1850s, for the well-used guidebook that survives in his book collection is of that period.

  Since his youth there kings had risen and fallen again, two more revolutions had swept Paris, and now a new emperor was in place. But the greater transformation of the Latin Quarter was still to come. Let us hope that Arthur, given his advancing age and his retreat, in widower hood, from such frivolities as travel, was spared that. In 1860 he was seventy, an age at which the landscapes of youth, and their association with a simpler, freer life, are so deeply internalised that their image cannot be modified, only destroyed. Evidence of the way the urban upheaval of the Second Empire brutalised the perceptions of the ordinary Parisians in the name of Progress was given a coherent voice by several writers of the time. Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, both younger than Arthur but old enough to belong to his world, deplored the march of the new, regimented highways and the fragmentation of a streetscape that was integral to their own experiences and memories. ‘Ce vieux Paris n’est plus qu’une rue éternelle …’ lamented Hugo. The Goncourt brothers, rather younger again, complained that the Paris Balzac had immortalised was disappearing before their eyes.

  Under the Emperor Louis-Napoléon’s extraordinarily determined and powerful Préfet, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Paris acquired her present
layout and her comprehensive road system, though much of the planning instigated then was not actually carried out till the Third Republic of the 1870s. It has been estimated that the demolitions undertaken to this end, during Haussmann’s rule alone, removed over seventeen thousand families from their homes. Almost by definition, these tended to be poor people who reaped no benefit from the extraordinary speculation in land and property that accompanied the Haussmann compulsory purchases, nor could they flock to inhabit the grandiose apartment blocks that lined every new street that was opened. Haussmann might well claim that he had demolished twelve thousand-odd buildings but had built five times that number: the majority of those blocks, with their ponderous street doorways, tiers of balconies and plaster decorations, were in entirely new areas. For the first time, a degree of social segregation was creeping into Paris. The old, vertical stratification, which had had a social mix of grand families on the first floor, modestly respectable ones on the upper floors and the poor in the attics, was replaced in the newer quarters by buildings inhabited solely by the middle and upper classes with their own servants lodged at the top.

  Because of this, Haussmann’s works have sometimes been written about as if he had a particular mission to drive out of Paris the less respectable classes. There is an accompanying myth that his broad new boulevards were designed that way in order that a cannon might shoot straight down them at a rioting mob. This hindsight misperception, however, confuses effect with intention. In the heady 1850s and ’60s, neither Haussmann nor his Emperor foresaw the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, still less the brief and bloody civil War in Paris (‘the Commune’) which followed it. To the moment of his own downfall in 1869, when he was publicly accused by Jules Ferry4 of ‘fantasy accounting’ and personal profiteering, Haussmann himself believed that he had decades ahead of him to continue his schemes. Till his death, felled by a sudden stroke, in 1891, he maintained that he had been sacrificed by Louis-Napoléon who was attempting to salvage his own role as Emperor.