Unlike the town planners of Louis-Philippe’s reign, or those of a hundred-odd years later, Haussmann’s huge schemes were not driven by benign views on urbanism or by the desire to launch a new social order, but by the simpler aim of creating a visibly wealthier and grander Paris and to ‘create wealth’ in so doing. He never appeared interested, either for good or ill, in the ancient patterns of streets through which he scythed his new boulevards, which is why many of them remained in place – truncated and dislocated, perhaps, but not eradicated. Quite often, only a portion of an old block of houses would be sliced off, leaving the rest intact, looming like a crippled grandfather over the new street alongside. Ironically, had Haussmann’s vision been of a more high-minded, socially aware variety, the resulting loss to Paris would probably have been far greater.
His grand plans for Paris did not – unlike the far less conspicuous plans then being carried out in London – include a comprehensive sewage system. He was against a main drainage scheme, maintaining that it would simply lead to all the filth ending up in the Seine. He had a point there, since, before Bazalgette designed his massive, coherent solution to London’s problem, London’s sewers had indeed been disgorging all along the Thames with disastrous effects on the water supply. But Haussmann, ever one for profits, also seems to have been influenced by the money in old-style latrines: for a long time, the pumped-out contents of Paris’s innumerable, individual house-privies had been spread out to dry, powdered and then sold for handsome sums as fertiliser. Indeed, the system continued in some antiquated districts well into the twentieth century. It is significant that at Haussmann’s fall, followed shortly by that of the Second Empire, very few working-class homes had yet acquired any source of running water at all. Many respectable blocks only had it in a ground-floor hallway tap or courtyard pump, and the water-carriers were still in business.
Another, very modern proposal, for an underground railway like the one being built in London at the beginning of the 1860s, was also rejected out of hand by Haussmann. He was not interested in how the ordinary workers, whom he had displaced from many old areas of Paris to the expanding suburbs, would now get about. It was to be almost another forty years before the Paris administration came to see that the Haussmann boulevards in fact provided the ideal conditions to build a ‘cut-and-cover’ subway system not far below street level.
Relatively, Haussmann had less effect on the Left Bank than on the Right, partly because he turned his attention to it later and did not complete so much there, but he changed the Latin Quarter for ever, all the same. He sliced the Boulevard St Michel through it from north to south as a prolongation of the boulevard he had already created on the Right Bank – in fact, Boulevard St Michel first appears on maps as ‘Boulevard Sébastopol, Left Bank’. This swallowed much of the old Rue de la Harpe, and just shaved past the ruined Roman baths under the Hôtel de Cluny – which antiquarians had to fight to preserve. How many Sorbonne students of today realise that their Boul’ Mich’, which they take to be the natural main artery of the Latin Quarter, is actually a late imposition, unrelated to most of the surrounding streets? Similarly, a few years later, the Boulevard St Germain swept through from west to east, turning the old route through St André des Arts into a backwater, destroying the intricate geography between St Germain des Prés and the Ecoles de Médecine, and reducing Place Maubert to a segment of its former self. A little later again the broad Rue de Rennes, running down from the new railway station at Montparnasse, cut across what remained of the old Abbey buildings on the south side to form the Place St Germain des Prés. There, it stopped short – though a high, blank wall left by demolition at the top of the narrow Rue Bonaparte remains like a tide-mark of its intentions. Initially, the idea had been to carry the Rue de Rennes right down to the Seine.
A minor poet, Charles Cros, absinthe-drinker, friend of Verlaine and Rimbaud but more enduringly known as an early pioneer of sound recording, which he named ‘the voice of the past’, left a piece of plangent light verse:
La maison est démolie,
Le petit nid en l’air
Où j’eusse ton cœur, et ta chair,
Ma maîtresse si jolie!
… Tombez pierres, ciment, fer,
L’amour jamais ne s’oublie.
(The house is torn down, and with it the airy nest
Where I possessed you, my pretty mistress, heart and flesh!
… Stones, cement and iron may fall, but love does not forget.)
A lost building, a lost love, both equally preserved in memory – a classic Latin Quarter lament. Student affairs with Left Bank working-class girls must have occurred long before nineteenth-century writers made them into the stuff of Romance. But more down-to-earth evidence of the effect of Haussmannisation in the Latin Quarter comes from a water-carrier and his family, who were interviewed by a journalist in 1869, the very year when Jules Ferry made his accusations about the Préfet enriching himself and his kind at the expense of the people of Paris.
Gérard and his wife both came from the Auvergne and had three surviving children. Gérard habitually collected his water in forty-litre loads, at the venerable fountain of St Michel at the top of the Rue de la Harpe near the Luxembourg Gardens. This fountain, and the space in which it stood, had by then given its name to the Boulevard St Michel, which confusingly was to beget a different Place St Michel several hundred metres north where the new boulevard met the river. Here, typifying the flamboyant spirit of the times, a grand new fountain was placed, ornamental rather than useful, complete with a Greek god, rocks, winged lions, and water apparently cascading directly out of the new baroque apartment block occupying one of those wedge-shaped spaces that the new road systems were everywhere creating.
But in 1869 the old fountain by the Luxembourg Gardens was still in place, and this was where Gérard and his kind congregated. By dint of his incessant labour, his ‘very robust’ constitution, and his wife’s home-work in the leather industry, the couple were able to live in ‘a very modest comfort’. Their near-illiteracy had put paid to their one attempt to branch out into the other traditional Auvergnat trade, that of supplying customers with wood and coal. Their housekeeping was rough and ready, but they ate decently of meat, vegetables and bread, some cider but ‘hardly any wine’. Understanding the usefulness of being able to read and write, they sent their children to one of the free schools by then established in Paris. They were lucky enough to rent, for one hundred and eighty francs a year (between £7 and £8), two rooms on the fifth floor of an old building. This lodging, though a tight fit, was ‘fairly healthy, being high up and south-facing, which allows for them to get air and sun’. The journalist added, however, a few lines later:
‘Lying right in the line of one of the large new arteries of communication now due to be built, the house is threatened with imminent compulsory purchase; one of the family’s biggest worries is whether they will be able to rent anything else so convenient and so reasonably priced.’
We hear in detail about their few bits of furniture, the wife’s cheerful disregard for tidiness, the family’s clothes, and their rare days out together, but of news from the long future there is none. Where, when the Boulevard St Germain made its inexorable way across their house, did they go? What, in any case, happened to Gérard, all the Gérards, when the Third Republic at last introduced modernity, and the long history of water-carriers in the French capital came to an obscure end?
Paris was, in any case, transformed out of all recognition, not only in aspect and architecture but also in extent. From a population of just over half a million in 1800, it had getting on for three-quarters of a million in the early years of the Restoration and over one million by the mid-century. But under the Second Empire, the surrounding lands and villages that had all been summarily enclosed by the customs wall of the 1840s now filled up like a reservoir with people, housing and small-scale industries. Skilled and semi-skilled men, drawn initially to Paris from central France to work on the acre
s of building sites, stayed on, and now that the railways were established their wives came to join them. The itinerant labourers, who for generations had crossed France on their bi annual migrations, like swallows in their white smocks, turned into Paris citizens. It was this much enlarged Paris of twenty arrondissements that clocked up a population of nearly two million by the early 1870s, and two and a half million by the mid-1890s. In this lighted, drained metropolis, a place of trams and gaslight and a network of rapid post tunnels that conveyed notes through pneumatic tubes, what did simple men do, men who had nothing but their manual strength to offer? It is much to be hoped that Gérard’s education of his children paid off, that they got respectable jobs, and were able to make room in their homes for their old peasant of a father.
Chapter X
‘A COUNTRY IN THE DÉPARTEMENT OF THE SEINE’
Under the Second Empire rents rose, as so many of the old tenements where the poor traditionally roosted were knocked down. Many working-class incomes also declined, relative to the booming cost of living that was driven by the wealth of the property-owning classes. There were pockets of abject poverty in central Paris in the late nineteenth century, left there like detritus by a moving tide.
Needless to say, the arrival of the Boulevard St Germain across the centuries-old Place Maubert did nothing to ‘improve’ the huddle of ancient streets between it and the river. Apart from one other piece of road building there – the Rue Lagrange, a prolongation of the Rue Monge – the old lanes were left much to their own devices. Now running at a different level from the alien, raised-up boulevard, the Rues Perdue, Maître Albert, Bièvre, Galande and the like retreated into themselves, sheltering a still poorer and more obscure life than they had a generation before. The small, old church of St Julien le Pauvre was by then semi-ruinous. Having been a morgue for the Hôtel Dieu, it was now the place to which were brought vagrants who died in the street or unidentified bodies from traffic accidents. Its one-time churchyard resembled a neglected farmyard, with rubbish, a well, vegetation and pecking chickens. At least it was a quiet spot.
Other streets nearby were home to a more urban degradation. According to Georges Cain, the curator of the Musée Carnavalet, they reeked of the cheapest sort of wine, and of more dubious ‘cognacs’ made in home distilleries with wood alcohol, molasses and caramel colouring to give tint and flavour. Drunks lay about at street corners and the police were often seen knocking on doors. There was a particularly notorious establishment in the Rue Galande, occupying the half-ruined premises of what had, four centuries before, been a grand house, reputedly the home of Gabrielle d’Estrées, the mistress of Henri IV. With hazy reference to popular revolutionary notions, with which the outcasts of society might fortify their self-esteem, this was called Le Château Rouge, The Red Castle – aka The Guillotine. There had been some attempt, earlier in the century, to turn its large rooms and courtyard into some sort of bal musette, with greenery, shooting galleries and musical entertainment, but by 1890 it was the resort of prostitutes of both sexes and of criminals. The novelist J.K. Huysmans frequented the place, initially to gather material for a book but by and by because he enjoyed the feeling of having an entrée into an underworld of danger. He made colourful acquaintances there and told stories to his friends about having narrowly escaped a plot against his own life – a tale which, like many of Huysmans’, was probably without much foundation.
Another wine merchant created a dance-hall in his cellar – a forerunner of the many Latin Quarter ‘jazz-cellars’ of fifty years later. Huge cellars, probably older even than the ancient houses, ran and still run under the narrow streets of the Maub’, linking with those of the houses opposite as in a giant rabbit warren. This particular cellar, reached by a spiral iron staircase behind the bar, was large but so low-ceilinged that the double bass in the three-piece orchestra had to hold his instrument sideways. A more squalid retreat, in the old Rue des Lavandières that was soon to disappear, was Chez le Père Lunette, which offered no entertainment but the chance to get drunk cheaply in intimate company. Nearby in the Rue Maître Albert there were some of the cheapest lodging houses in all Paris, including an infamous one where it was said that, for a tiny sum, you could slumber on a hard bench all night with your head and arms resting on a rope. In the morning, the lodging-house keeper simply released the rope to precipitate his tenants out of sleep and onto the floor. Or did he? The story is often told but already, by the 1870s, an investigator into Parisian poverty1 maintained that, though he had seen such a place as a child in the 1840s, it no longer existed.
The detail is a telling one. So is Huysmans’ preoccupation with the underworld. So too is the fact that, by the 1890s, out-of-work men had taken to hanging round the gate of the Château Rouge and other dives offering to escort inside members of the bourgeoisie and foreigners in search of local colour. They also volunteered, on advance payment of a decent sum, to act as ‘guardian angels’ to see their probably drunk clients home at the end of the night. Poverty and squalor themselves were being commodified, a process which in the end extinguishes them in that particular place – just as all forms of tourism, in the long run, destroy the distinctive quality that is being sought. Two or three decades on, and journalists from across the Channel, or the Atlantic, would be writing books called How to Find Old Paris, recommending one-time medieval dungeons with names like ‘Le Caveau des Oubliettes Rouges’ (opposite St Julien), or warning ‘… in the summer of 1927 [the place] had become a little grasping and the air of spontaneity was lacking. I’m afraid it is becoming commercialised like the rest of the Parisian resorts.’
The same commodification had happened, in the course of the nineteenth century, to the long-established idyll of Latin Quarter life as something outside the constraints, the class structures and the family ties of the rest of Parisian and French society. For centuries before Balzac and Flaubert made the arrival of an innocent in Paris the emblematic theme of novels, young men of the provincial bourgeoisie were sent to study in Paris. But this period represented far more – or sometimes less – than the chance to acquire a professional qualification as doctor, lawyer or administrator. It was a rite de passage, a break from the heavy embrace of the French family and the scenes of childhood, a time for the sowing of wild oats before the serious business of adulthood had to be undertaken. Sometimes, if the student was very able or had a creative talent, this period of licensed freedom might be transformed into the stuff of a real-life career. Stendhal claimed that everyone who had ever achieved anything in the capital had arrived there from elsewhere at the age of seventeen. Victor Hugo said, ‘He who calls himself a student is also calling himself a Parisian. To study in Paris is to be born there’ – born into a new identity, it is implied.
But for the great mass of students the new identity was not really a long-term prospect. Some, becoming addicted to the student life rather than to studying, began turning the sheer mechanism of daily life on meagre funds into a full-time occupation. Many took to painting, with or without talent, as a pretext for staying where they were, and so the world of the student blurred into that of the ‘artist’. Poverty and art, the two great nineteenth-century icons of unworldliness, gave disordered lives a gloss of morality and romance, and indeed of the Romantic Movement. By the time of the Restoration a general reaction was taking place against the Enlightenment of the previous century. Imagination and feeling were now being prized above rationality; exaltation and excess above calm, order and even honesty. An awakening interest in the distant, medieval past, in Gothic architecture, folk tales and legends, provided in the 1830s a distinctive male style for those who wished to advertise their Romantic credentials. Long hair, wide-brimmed felt hats, velvet coats, floppy bows instead of high neck-cloths, were first nonconformist but eventually, as the years passed, fossilised into an artistic convention in themselves.
Guizot, Louis-Philippe’s austere Minister of Education, was under no illusions as to the physical and moral squalor into which so
me of the young men of the Latin Quarter descended once they were cut off from home influences for many months at a time. He attributed this degeneration partly to the fact that these enfants de la bourgeoisie took minimal lodgings in tenements alongside the poor and the rough, including, of course, working-class girls … Guizot’s dream, never realised, was to remove the Sorbonne to some quite other French town, far from the distractions and temptations of a metropolis, on the model of Oxford and Cambridge.
Most students, in practice, survived their time in the Latin Quarter unscathed. Henry Murger, author of Scènes de la Vie de Bohème which was first published in parts in the late 1840s, wrote, of the mass of young men from the provinces, that, though ‘they turn their backs abruptly on a decent living to chase after the adventures of a hazardous existence’, most of them were put off as soon as they began to experience the realities of cold and hunger. ‘They make haste to get out of this situation, setting off on foot for home and good roast meat. They abandon their large ideas also, settle down in marriage with the little cousin and become lawyers in mediumsized towns. In the evening, by the fireside, they enjoy talking about the poverty they lived in when they were penniless artists, rather as a traveller enjoys talking about the tiger-hunts he has been on.’
Footprints in Paris Page 12