The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  Ambience units are collective, anonymous works achieved over long passages of time through accretion, accident, habit, juxtaposition, improvisation, endurance, and one or more inexplicable X factors—a sort of blend of theater and sculpture enacted upon the city and adapted to the longue durée. Who knows how many of them came and went in the centuries before ours and especially before Baron Haussmann’s depredations of 1853–70? In parts of the city without interfering large-scale landowners, where all building and alteration occurred through small-scale labor, the crop of ambience units was once so dense and profound that it seems incongruous to call them that. It is easy to imagine that every corner had its own distinct flavor, that such a thing would have been taken for granted the way every face is different. Ambience units begins to sound like a name given in an alienated time to the last isolated examples of a phenomenon that was once so widespread that it was the rule.

  They were habitats in which generations spent their entire existences, happily or not. People who lived there naturally gravitated toward the local commerce, trade, or practice the place was known for—associations owed to circumstances often lost in the mists of time. Hence the mystical phenomenon of unexplained recurrence. “There is always a certain public square or a certain intersection that, through mysterious and providential forces, seems forever devoted to a single specialty,” wrote a mid-nineteenth-century chronicler. “I don’t know what secret instinct impels the same classes or the same professions always toward the same places. Thieves, pickpockets, beggars, streetwalkers, street performers have still not left the haunts they have inhabited since the Middle Ages.” His subject was Rue Pierre-Lescot, which lay somewhere in the tangle of streets east of the Louvre, cleared by Haussmann a decade later. The name—that of the sixteenth-century architect responsible for the southwest wing of the Louvre and for the Fontaine des Innocents—was then reapplied to the street marking the eastern edge of Les Halles, formerly Rue du Cloître Saint-Jacques, so that, curiously, his observation applies today. The thieves, beggars, and streetwalkers may no longer live nearby, but they certainly exercise their trade on the block; shopping mall, fast food, fake Irish pubs, and cheap teenage clothing outlets have drawn their own sucker traffic.

  The dog pound. Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Scènes de la vie publique et privée des animaux, 1842

  In the 1950s the historian and redoubtable flâneur Louis Chevalier noticed a local anomaly around Place de la Bastille, which was never “a particularly criminal district and … not even a place of prostitution, except for one side street, Rue Jean-Beausire, where prostitution thrives.” There was no reasonable explanation, no matter of lighting or building stock or layout that could account for this street being set aside from all the others around it. Therefore, “from all the available evidence, circumstances beyond those of the present must be exercising an influence,” since the material reality of the current era is shaped by the past—by “the force of interests, habits, and beliefs, particularly if those habits and beliefs are negative, which … are more ineradicable than their positive counterparts.” And indeed, the street had been the site, long ago, of a cour des miracles, which was the name given in the Middle Ages to an encampment of beggars, whores, and thieves.

  A cour des miracles in the Middle Ages

  Today it is clean, neutral, and impersonal. But even now there remain streets and vicinities that draw prostitutes and their clients as they have for generations if not centuries. Rue Saint-Denis was until very recently the main stem, a virtually unbroken line of filles publiques on display at all hours, from Place du Châtelet to Porte Saint-Denis.* This had been the case since sometime during the Middle Ages, perhaps before. Rue Saint-Denis is one of the city’s oldest streets, going back to Roman rule in the first century. Until the royal palace moved to Versailles under Louis XIV—arguably the pioneering instance of suburban flight—it was the custom for newly crowned kings to descend its length as they officially proceeded from the basilica of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, to their residence at the Louvre (and they departed in the reverse direction after death). Perhaps the royal procession and the procession of harlots are not unlinked. For that matter, excavations for the Métro in 1903 uncovered the skeleton of a woolly mammoth, leading to the discovery of the pachyderms’ habitual path from their dwelling on the heights of Belleville down to the river to drink and bathe—their course descended obliquely via what is now Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, then joined the future Rue Saint-Denis at about the height of the porte, which is to say the top of the street’s miracle mile. Rue Saint-Denis remains to this day an unprepossessing, surprisingly narrow thoroughfare, but it was clearly consecrated to the pageantry of horizontal motion.

  Porte Saint-Denis, circa 1910

  The city’s principal constituent matter is accrued time. The place is lousy with it. Not everyone is happy about this, since the past is burdensome and ungovernable and never accords with totalizing ideologies or unified design theories or schemes for maximizing profit. The faceless residential and commercial units that conceal large parts of working-class northeastern and southeastern Paris were imposed over the past half century for reasons that include the wish to extinguish an unruly past. History is always in the gun sights of planners and developers, and of reactionaries, who in the absence of a convenient past are content to invent one, winding their fantasies around some factual nugget suitably distant and fogged by legend. Official appropriations of history, however ostensibly benevolent in intent and graced with accredited consultants, will always be chary of the actual mess and stink of the past, and as a consequence they always gravitate toward the condition of the theme park. Those paddle-shaped markers planted here and there throughout Paris are very nice, but they are like historical multivitamins, meant to be ingested and immediately forgotten. They are nagging footnotes to your shopping and dining experience, good for you but starchily dutiful, so that you tend to avoid them and feel obscurely guilty about it. And of course they are far less evocative of lived time than the most derelict building in any chosen neighborhood.

  The people of Les Halles, 1906

  What the flâneur sees while walking around is a tremendous expanse of time in compressed and vestigial form. The flâneur is in sympathy with time not from nostalgia but from an obligation to truth. The past is hardly a single era, after all, but the combined, composted layers of a thousand eras, and any given moment includes some proportionate blend of all those eras. The future is a threat or a sales pitch, the present flies around you like the landscape as seen from a moving car, but the past is what you stand on, lean against, breathe in. The very spark of the new that distinguishes an era will be fully visible only in retrospect. Each epoch may dream the next, in Jules Michelet’s formulation, but that dream will come while it is digesting its predecessor. The past is always in flux, surviving not in icily dust-free façade restorations but as a dynamic undercurrent—in the slope of hills, shapes of streets, breadth of squares; in lintels, shutters, courtyards; in habits and associations and prejudices; among working people and recent immigrants and the aged and a lot of youths who didn’t go through the career door; among what remain of vagrants and eccentrics and clochards; among a great many people lying low who remember things.

  Les Halles and Saint-Eustache, late nineteenth century

  To experience Paris as an organic entity is to absorb that great undulating panorama down below and forget what year it is, like Francis Carco looking south from the heights of Montmartre:

  He bore to the right to get to Rue Lamarck and suddenly, under the vast sky, heavy with rain, the whole of Paris appeared. He took in its receding immensity. Smoke coming from different points wove together and fluttered in sharp chorus. The wind blew through the acacias, their jumble of foliage blending with the fog. In the distance, thousands of fires flickered. Black holes indicated neighborhoods hidden below, from which crowds of shadows emerged: Grenelle and Montrouge. A necklace of stars marked the Great Wheel. Things gr
adually revealed themselves. Diffuse glimmers shone and then dimmed. Successive strings of lights rose tier upon tier, followed by an opaque and swelling wave of clouds. The belfries of Notre-Dame looked as big as thimbles, but you could make them out, and you could also make out the fluid coil of the river that snaked behind them and stretched out toward the red glimmer of the train stations. What a world! It wasn’t a city, but an ocean of swells and eddies. It was a living mass. It quivered, fluctuating like the sea, a rough gray sea barely heaved by the light wind, and he heard the acacias grinding drily above like rigging.

  3

  Pantruche

  It was Lutèce, or Lutetia, under the Romans, and became Paris around 300 C.E. François Villon called it Parouart in his fifteenth-century thieves’ cant; Rimbaud called it Parmerde in a letter written in 1872. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, people started referring to it as Pantin—ironically, since Pantin was then a rustic village on the plain northeast of the city (the word also means “puppet,” which may have had something to do with its use)—and then around 1849 the name acquired an argot suffix and became Pantruche; the -truche may have derived from autruche, “ostrich.” The moniker survived well into the twentieth century, although somewhere near that age’s beginning it was overtaken in popular speech by Paname. Was that name inspired by the 1892 government swindle concerning the faltering Panama Canal project, described as the largest corruption scandal of the nineteenth century? That seems a likelier source than the Panama hat, cited by some, the object of a vogue after adorning the heads of workers returned from the isthmus. Paname stuck because it was sort of perfect: raffish, satirical, swaggering, and pointed all at once. Paname, like argot itself, has come to be most enduringly associated with chanson réaliste singers, midcentury crime fiction writers (Albert Simonin, Auguste le Breton, San-Antonio), and movie gangsters from Jean Gabin to Lino Ventura. Today it enjoys another life in hip-hop, employed by rappers as the local equivalent to the Rastafarians’ Babylon: the root of all corruption, racism, and malice.

  Sheet music for “Je revois Paname,” 1928

  The inhabitants, for somewhat more than a century, have been Parigots, with another pejorative suffix. (Parisien, meanwhile, was the slang term for an old horse about to be put down; it is also a loaf of bread.) Now and then you still hear the term titi, which comes from a word for street urchin (and ultimately from tirailleur, “sharpshooter”) and denotes a working-class Parisian of old stock, someone whose family had lived in the neighborhood for a century or more. There aren’t very many of those left. The titi was a creature of the city when it was composed of so many villages—quartiers with functional autonomy, ad hoc institutions, and unspoken codes; where everyone of a given age had been kids together and knew one another’s virtues and foibles intimately. The quartier was for centuries the basic local entity. When the city was a world, the quartiers were nations, and they correspondingly drew all the fervent loyalty and instinctual identification that cities or countries usually inspire—the larger entities generally went without saying, except maybe in times of war. In 1943, A. J. Liebling encountered a tattooed casualty, with a tricolor wrapped around his waist, in a field hospital on the North African front. “When I asked him where he came from he didn’t bother saying ‘Paris’—just ‘Nineteenth Arrondissement.’ That’s Belleville—the stockyards … He had a mouthful of gold teeth and a tough chin. I asked him, foolishly, what he had done in civil life. He said, ‘I lived on my income.’”

  An illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Dans la rue, vol. 2, by Aristide Bruant, 1889

  Nowadays, while the quartier hasn’t entirely disappeared, its cohesiveness has been destroyed. Administratively there are still eighty of them in Paris, four per arrondissement, but like the arrondissements themselves they were designated by bureaucrats armed with rulers and compasses. How many de facto quartiers were actually in place at any given time over the centuries is somewhat conjectural and elusive, but you might estimate that today there are somewhere between forty and fifty that continue to possess some kind of defining characteristic. The historian Éric Hazan divides these into three groupings, by age—which is to say, according to which of the successive walls of the city first contained them. The oldest, to which he assigns the name quartier, are the ones that were included within the first ring of boulevards, as established under Louis XIV. These include Les Halles, the Cité, the Sentier, the Marais, and the boulevards running from the Madeleine church to what would become Place de la Bastille, on the Right Bank, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Latin Quarter, the Odéon, and Saint-Sulpice on the Left. The next ring consists of the faubourgs, which occupy the space between the old boulevards and the wall of the Farmers-General, built in the late eighteenth century: the Temple, Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, Saint-Antoine and Saint-Honoré, Popincourt, Quartiers Poissonnière and de l’Europe, and three now-vanished neighborhoods: Porcherons, Nouvelle-France, and Quartier de Bréda; and on the other bank, Saint-Marceau, Saint-Jacques, and Montparnasse.

  Passage Cottin, circa 1910

  The third ring, of nouveaux villages, dates from the later nineteenth century—the last batch of villages was annexed only in 1860. These include Grenelle, Montrouge, Vaugirard, Plaisance, Glacière, Maison-Blanche, and Butte-aux-Cailles on the Left Bank, and Passy, Auteuil, Clichy, Montmartre, the Goutte-d’Or, La Chapelle, La Villette, Belleville, Ménilmontant, Charonne, and Bercy on the Right. Within these at any given time might be smaller entities—for example, the district sometimes known as Croulebarbe and sometimes as Gobelins was often detached from Saint-Marceau; Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was once separate from both the boulevards and Montmartre; and in the southern portion of where the Buttes-Chaumont park was established in 1867 there were quarries called Mississippi, later called Amérique (perhaps because their product was exported across the ocean) around which a neighborhood by that name coalesced for a while.*

  The neighborhoods were self-contained and independent, each with its church, graveyard, main street, central square, range of shops and ateliers, as well as its own culture and ambiance, its folkways and politics. They were like the country villages of their time not just in their particular mix of atmosphere and occupation but also in that most people remained within their borders from birth until death, and many seldom ventured outside for any reason less momentous than a fair or an execution. Most things you would be likely to need were available right there in your vicinity, maybe right on your street, in your impasse or courtyard. Not only were the butcher, the baker, the stationer, and the haberdasher likely to be close at hand, but the minor aristocrat lived on the second floor, the crank toiled at his biblical exegeses in his mansarded aerie, the Italian political exile and family maintained a discreet presence on the fourth, the beggar sheltered in a hut attached to the courtyard, and the mayhem artist was on call in the dive around the corner. There was originally little hierarchy among neighborhoods. Every one of them carried the whole spectrum of status below the highest aristocracy; all of them had their dark alleys and their hôtels particuliers, their theater, their nunnery, their knackers’ yard, and their cour des miracles.

  Rue des Panoyaux, circa 1910

  An ambulatory vegetable seller on Rue du Surmelin, circa 1910

  The quartiers may have been rough equivalents to one another, at least before 1860, but on the scale of particular streets or clusters of streets the contrasts could be dizzying.* Privat d’Anglemont noted in the 1850s that “you turn a corner and the appearance changes, as does the population. Tastes, ways of life, jobs, industries—nothing is alike.” He cites Rue Mangin, in the Sentier, where the main industry was the fabrication of clocks and precision instruments—but just past the intersection at the end of the street was a maze of narrow lanes that twisted around, doubled back on themselves, seemed to have been cut through at random, and human activity there was correspondingly unbridled. He remarks that “the Parisian of Faubourg Saint-Antoine is no more like the Parisian of Faubourg Saint-Marc
eau than the Frenchman from Perpignan is like the Frenchman from Amiens.” Walter Benjamin, anticipating the Lettrists’ psychogeography, wrote that “the city is only apparently homogeneous. Even its name takes on a different sound from one district to the next. Nowhere, except perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities … As threshold, the boundary stretches across streets; a new precinct begins like a step into the void—as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs.”

  Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, circa 1910

  The idea that Paris was a plurality, a coalition of villages that were not so much rivals as cousins and trading partners, each with its own boasts and weaknesses, reaches back well before a written record of such things began. The perceived threat to this happy state was the first thing people held against Haussmann’s project. As Victor Fournel wrote in 1868, after celebrating the multiplicity of Paris, “… this is what is being obliterated … by the construction everywhere of the same geometrical and rectilinear street, with its unvarying mile-long perspective and its continuous rows of houses that are always the same house.” He also noted that the light and air of the new city came at the expense of “almost all the courtyards and gardens—which moreover have been ruled out by the progressive rise in real estate.” Then, too, a report prepared by the Chamber of Commerce and the police prefect in 1855, at the time of Haussmann’s changes, lamented the passing of leavening effects that were the result of the classes being jumbled together in the center: “A kind of solidarity developed among the tenants of a building. Small favors were exchanged and mutual aid given. In cases of illness or unemployment, workers received a great deal of assistance. Besides that, simply obtaining human respect imbued workers’ habits with a certain regularity.”