Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  At the beginning of November, the capital was ringed with fire. From Clichy-sous-Bois, the inferno seemed to be heading for the centre of Paris along the Canal de l’Ourcq, through Bondy, Bobigny, Pantin and La Villette. On 6 November, civil disorder had spread to twelve other cities from Brittany to the Mediterranean.

  The Minister of the Interior talked of ‘extreme violence such as is rarely seen in France’, but the people at the centre of the eruption knew that they were witnessing something that was practically a speciality of Paris. The police intelligence service was preparing a confidential report: the troubles had nothing to do with religion, race or country of origin. No terrorists or gangs were involved. The violence was entirely spontaneous. This was not juvenile delinquency, it was an ‘urban insurrection’ and a ‘popular revolt’.

  The revolutionary spirit of the faubourgs was still alive, and old Parisian traditions were being upheld by the racaille. On 8 November, paying tribute to the City of Light, hundreds of towns and cities were in flames, from Perpignan to Strasbourg, and a state of national emergency was declared.

  Those unsightly quarters of Paris called the banlieue were proving themselves worthy of the capital. One day, perhaps, like other popular revolts, the riots would be seen as the birth pangs of a new metropolis. Paris had been expanding since the Middle Ages, pouring over the plains and flooding the valleys of the river system, as though it would eventually fill the entire Paris Basin. Each eruption had threatened to destroy the city, but each time, a new Paris had risen from the ashes. In the glowering hills that could be seen from Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower, a world was taking shape, and the millions of people who had known and loved Paris would have to return to discover the city again. Meanwhile, tour companies and hotels were reporting mass cancellations. From their concrete canyons and eyries, the inhabitants of the banlieue were sending out their electronic messages, which were translated by the world’s press from a banlieusard patois composed of French, Arabic, Romany, Swahili and American English.

  Their Paris was a rap litany of place names that only the most exhaustive guide book would have recognized as the City of Light: Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Bondy…This was the city that had grown from an island in the Seine until it stretched to the horizon in all directions. The racaille were marking their tribal territories in that great grey mass of buildings between the wooded massif of Meudon and the plains of the Beauce and the Brie. They, too, were children of Paris, and, like true natives of the city, they expressed their pride in angry words that sounded like a curse. And since, by some miracle, the world was reading their messages, they wrote of the perilous adventures and the unforgettable education that awaited anyone who dared to visit the wilds of the undiscovered city: ‘If you come to Bondy, you won’t get out alive!…’

  TERMINUS: THE NORTH COL

  WE REACHED BONDY on our touring bikes just as the sun was turning the Canal de l’Ourcq into a ribbon of grey steel. That morning, we had set off from the Col du Donon, which lies nine hundred and eighty feet below the highest peak of the Vosges mountains in north-eastern France. For centuries, the col was used by Celtic tribes and Roman legions passing between Germany and Gaul. Its importance as a crossing-point is marked by the remains of a temple to Mercury and, on the southern ascent, by a memorial to the passeurs who helped French prisoners to escape from the Nazis. From there, we had spiralled down through the pine forests, over the Grendelbruch Pass, to the valley of the Rhine and the city of Strasbourg, then crossed the plains of northern France. By the time we reached Paris, we had covered five hundred and eighty-one kilometres at an average speed of 92 kph, according to my GPS unit, which, in the excitement of reaching Strasbourg railway station on time, I had forgotten to turn off.

  A canalside bike path starts near the Gare de l’Est. It crosses the toy-town science park of La Villette, and passes under the baleful eyes of the neo-Gothic flour mills, the Grands Moulins de Pantin, which, until 2003, sucked in all the wheat of the Brie and the Beauce to feed the boulangeries of Paris. After Pantin, the piste cyclable wanders through a maze of half-demolished buildings, past the hulks of abandoned factories inexplicably ‘under video surveillance’, every window smashed and every surface covered by graffiti-artists as resourceful and determined as property developers. Then, rejoining the canal, it straightens out, and the speed picks up enough to change into the big chain-ring. Suddenly, approaching Bondy and the bridges that carry the Périphérique de l’Île-de-France, which marks the heliopause of the Paris system, we were pedalling alongside the Métro. A train was slowing down before veering into the Bobigny–Pablo Picasso station, and we could see the faces of passengers staring out at the open air.

  At that time of evening, the north-eastern banlieue looked like a promotional film for home-buyers and investors. A Black African was walking along the tidy embankment with a friend who appeared to be Kurdish; a little girl was gleefully escaping from her parents on a tricycle. There was a startling absence of broken glass on the towpath; the only danger was a fast dog chasing the figures-of-eight of a fresh smell. After Bondy, where the canal swings north-east, in the cavernous gloom of yet another road bridge, three teenage boys were standing, looking tough and nervy, deep in some shared concern but obviously open to distractions. When they saw us coming, they moved to one side, and, with a shout of recognition, cheerfully saluted Margaret because she was wearing the red cap of a French cycling team, Brioches la Boulangère.

  We left the canal at a pedestrian bridge and rode for two kilometres through the streets of Aulnay-sous-Bois. The Hôtel du Parc was a five-storey concrete dormitory with a view of a car park. The Senegalese man at the reception desk sent us down to the cellar to store our bikes; then he asked us where we had come from ‘like that’.

  Every cyclist enjoys the chance to shrug off an epic expedition and to extol the miraculous efficiency of the bicycle, and so I told him, ‘This morning, we were on top of the Vosges mountains; we cycled down to Strasbourg and took the TGV to the Gare de l’Est.’

  The man looked slightly puzzled, his question evidently unanswered. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I mean, how did you get here from the Gare de l’Est?’ ‘We cycled out along the canal.’ His eyebrows shot up, and he almost shouted, ‘You came all the way here from the Gare de l’Est–on your bikes?!’–‘Yes…’–‘Oh lálá! C’est fort, ça!’ (‘Blimey! That beats everything!’) Shaking his head, he handed us our room key, and said again, ‘Ah! C’est fort, ça!’

  It was not the fact of having cycled seventeen kilometres that amazed him but the thought of actually traversing that solidified ocean of shunting yards, building sites, cemeteries, schools, hospitals, stadiums, advertising space and infrastructure that joins Paris to the banlieue. For some reason–personal challenge, GPS malfunction or an inappropriate foreign way of doing things?–we had spurned the merciful oblivion of the transport network to pursue our unimaginable course through the great abstraction.

  Next morning, with the rain bucketing down, the expedition may well have appeared to verge on the eccentric. We cycled across the canal and the unfenced railway tracks to Clichy-sous-Bois. After exploring the area around the EDF site where the two boys had died, we headed back towards Paris. During one of the heavier downpours, we stopped under a bridge where a dead smiley face in blue paint announced the supremacy of ‘The Canal Brotherhood’ and the boys of ‘North Bondy’, all of whom had sensibly remained indoors. We left the canal near the Périphérique de l’Île-de-France and splashed along the main street of Drancy to the hideous apartment blocks of La Muette. It was here that Jews from the Vel’ d’Hiv had been incarcerated in 1942. The buildings had been completed after the war as though nothing had happened. The U-shaped block around the central courtyard survived the demolition of the towers in the 1970s and is now used as ‘social housing’. Most of the five hundred people who live there are waiting to be moved to less squalid accommodation. Some of them were standing under the concrete awnings as
though they were ready to leave at any moment.

  On a photograph taken that morning in Drancy, a complex expression on Margaret’s usually sunny face suggests that this would never be counted among our favourite springtime trips to Paris. Fortunately, the visit to the banlieue was just a prelude: we were returning to Paris on a mission. Three months before, a chance discovery in a Paris bookshop had turned up a tantalizing trace of something that had been lost for many centuries. It had been one of the most important sites in Paris, and was in some ways the foundation of all the city’s future glories.

  The rain eased off as we reached the edge of the eighteenth arrondissement. Patches of eggshell-blue sky appeared above the Sacré-Cœur. It seemed as though the conjunction of personal adventure and historical discovery would occur. Foolishly, I uttered the ritual phrase, ‘Paris will never look the same again.’ Almost immediately, as though the demon twin of Saint Christopher who accompanies every traveller had been listening, we were lost. The eighteenth arrondissement, where I had lived as a teenager, did not look the same, and the elementary GPS unit showed only a dithering line of dots on a blank background. The streets that were crammed in between the railway lines in the 1930s surreptitiously change direction whilst appearing to run straight. On what turned out to be the tiny, disproportionately confusing Place Hébert, I unfolded the flapping map of Paris, and, after a few more ritual phrases, we set off again in the direction of the Porte de la Chapelle.

  COMING FROM GRENOBLE, where the Alps rise up ‘at the end of every street’, Stendhal was ‘disgusted’ by his first sight of Paris in 1799: ‘The environs struck me as horribly ugly–there were no mountains!’ The capital of France was a geographical anti-climax, a city built on sand and puddles. One of its grandest quartiers was called ‘the Marsh’ (le Marais); its original name, Lutetia, was thought to be derived from a Gaulish word for ‘mud’ or ‘swamp’. Every thirty years or so, the Seine, suffering from senile amnesia, flooded half of Swampville in an attempt to get back to its old bed, which lies a kilometre and a half to the north of the Île de la Cité, along the line of the Grands Boulevards. The knobbly mounds of gypsum that rimmed the city were like a botched imitation of the Seven Hills of Rome. During the nineteenth century, some of them were even rounded off and flattened, as though town planners had taken Isaiah’s prophecy to heart: ‘Every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight’.

  In 1899, the popular geographer Onésime Reclus found some ironic consolation in the fact that the Paris meridian exactly bisects the peak of Mount Bugarach, six hundred and sixty-four kilometres to the south. He declared Mount Bugarach to be a Parisian Pyrenee, ‘the Metropolitan Pic du Midi’: Paris had a mountain after all…But a mountain that was invisible even from the Eiffel Tower on a clear day was a part of the Parisian landscape only in the most abstract sense. Pending future upheavals of the Paris Basin, the capital would have to be content with its grandly named little lumps: Montmartre, Montparnasse, Montrouge, Montsouris and the Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève.

  It was in January 2008, while browsing in a Latin Quarter bookshop, that I discovered what appeared to be a mountain in one of the most densely populated parts of Paris. It was such an unlikely discovery that I wanted to leave the shop at once, with the precious information stored away and preserved, at least for a few days, from the inevitable disappointment. Like every visitor to Paris, I had made ‘discoveries’ that were known already to millions of people–the mysterious little attic room on the south face of Notre-Dame overlooking the Seine, or the crenellated brick tower that hides in a shrubbery near the western foot of the Eiffel Tower (a chimney left over from the old hydraulic lifts). Then there were the discoveries that were purely archival–things that had vanished so completely that the imagination had no purchase on the present: the unmarked location of the guillotine that beheaded Marie-Antoinette, or the little-known Isle Merdeuse (‘Shitty Island’) that used to lie in the Seine in front of what is now the seat of the French parliament. And finally, there were all the discoveries that weren’t discoveries at all, because, despite plausible real equivalents, they existed only in a writer’s imagination: the seedy boarding house ‘in that vale of flaking plaster and streams of black mud’ behind the Panthéon where Balzac’s Le Père Goriot begins, or the curiosity shop on the Quai Voltaire where Raphaël de Valentin in La Peau de chagrin acquires the magical ass’s skin that makes his every wish come true.

  This time, I felt sure that something real lay behind the excitement, and that, for once, instead of simply hoarding the memory of its treasures, I would be giving something back to Paris. The clue was an engraving made in 1685 by an anonymous artist. It shows the village of La Chapelle (now part of the eighteenth arrondissement) strung out along a ridge, its little houses silhouetted against a white sky under billowing, rococo clouds. A hedge-lined road climbs up through neatly furrowed fields to a small church tower that stands at the highest point: it was there that the road from Paris crossed the main street through the village before dropping down on the other side.

  To anyone who has walked or cycled through France with a vision of the map’s lines and symbols superimposed on the landscape, the engraving is instantly recognizable as the picture of a col. Cols or mountain passes are a kind of international velocipedal currency: the difficulty of a ride–or a stage of the Tour de France–is measured by the number of cols it crosses, and even if the cols are only a few hundred metres above sea level, a rider who has crossed them is entitled to feel that mountains have been conquered. Often, they are marked by a chapel, a cross or a standing stone, and, if officially recognized as cols, by a special road sign. A col–also known as a pas (or a porte if it straddles a frontier)–is a gateway to another world. At cols, as at river confluences and tribal boundaries, human history and physical geography are in closest conjunction.

  Ever since hearing of a cyclists’ organization called the Club des Cent Cols, I had been keeping a list of the cols we had crossed on our travels, accidentally or on purpose. The Donon was number 215 on the list, and the Grendelbruch Pass number 216. A cyclist who has crossed at least a hundred different cols, ‘for personal pleasure’ rather than in a spirit of competition, can submit a complete list, and, provided that all the cols appear in the club’s catalogue, the new member receives a colourful diploma stating that the holder has, ‘on a cycle propelled by muscular force alone, climbed at least 100 cols, including 5 over 2000 metres’.

  As Stendhal might have guessed, Paris lies in the middle of a col desert. While the mountainous borderlands and the Massif Central have thousands of cols, there are barely ten between the Vosges mountains and the hills of Normandy, and only one within a day’s ride of Notre-Dame. This seems particularly sad since the introduction of the ‘Vélib’ self-service scheme in 2007. Every day, on lumpy grey bikes that might have materialized from a children’s cartoon, thousands of Parisians rediscover their city’s topography: the Avenue des Champs-É lysées is once again a hill, and ‘Montagne Sainte-Geneviève’ is no longer a misnomer. Yet there is no official recognition of the exploits of vélibistes, and nothing that allows pedalling Parisians to celebrate the eminence of their city.

  The hypothetical pass at La Chapelle seemed to promise reparation. If the summit of the road that climbs up from the Seine to cross the northern ridge was a col, then the hills on either side of it–Montmartre and the Buttes-Chaumont–could legitimately be counted as mountains…

  IN JANUARY, a preliminary investigation on foot produced some encouraging evidence. At the church of Saint-Denys-de-la-Chapelle, opposite the Hollywood Video shop and the Sex in the City club, the road slopes down on either side. The old Roman road from the south and the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis converged at what is now the Marx Dormoy Métro station. In the other direction, the road descends gently to the plain of Saint-Denis where the gigantic medieval fair of Lendit was held. Some historians believe that this convenient plateau above the marshes of Lutetia was the sacred
‘centre of Gaul’ where, according to Caesar, Druids came from as far away as the Mediterranean and Britannia to elect their supreme pontiff.

  La Chapelle still has the bustle and turbulence of a major crossing point. The main street is a continual two-way procession of cars and trucks. With its jostling crowds and tatty shops, it has more of the big city about it than the delicate stage sets of central Paris. Across the road from the church, at the end of the Impasse du Curé, there is a view through iron railings of the Sacré-Cœur on its ant-hill of roofs and chimneys. Far below, trains from Picardy, Flanders and the Channel coast rattle through the deep cutting towards the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord.

  In the whispering gloom of the church, a parish history in the form of a small brochure explained that this was the site where Saint Denis, who brought Christianity to Lutetia, was buried along with his severed head: a shrine was raised there in 475 by Saint Geneviève, the nun from Nanterre who had a genius for organizing military resistance and famine relief. Evidently, she knew that martyrs should be buried at places such as cols, through which travellers are forced to pass. Next door to the church, the Joan of Arc basilica marks the site where, in 1429, the Maid of Orleans spent the night before riding down to the gates of occupied Paris, and where she rested the following night after receiving a crossbow bolt in the leg. The parish history was offered as ‘a message of welcome and friendship’. We read it by the light of some votive candles. At the top of page two, we discovered that someone had been there before us: