Book Read Free

The Other Paris

Page 5

by Luc Sante


  “You’re quite right, those who live in expensive houses aren’t the lucky ones.” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Les métamorphoses du jour, 1829

  On the other hand, you had the reformers and moralists and commission chairmen and preservers of the social order, who tended to confuse humans with the deleterious environment they were subjected to. Those voices were perhaps the loudest. The criminal turned cop Vidocq thought Paris was “a sewer and the emptying point of all sewers.” The reformer Henri Lecouturier, for his part, tended to equate the lower classes with air pollution:

  If from the heights of Montmartre or any neighboring hill one contemplates that congestion of houses piled atop one another at every point of an immense horizon, what does one notice? Above, a sky that is always overcast, even on the most beautiful days. Clouds of smoke, like a vast floating curtain, hide it from view … One tends to wonder whether this is indeed Paris, and taken by a sudden fright one hesitates to venture into that vast maze where a million people jostle one another, and where the air, tainted with unwholesome effluvia, rising in a noisome cloud, threatens to obscure the sun. Most of the streets of this wonderful Paris are nothing but intestines, filthy and permanently wet with pestilential water. They are narrowly squeezed between two rows of tall houses, so that the sun never manages to reach them and only visits the tops of the chimneys that rise above them … A sallow, sickly population endlessly traverses those streets, one foot in the gutter, their noses plunged in the stench, their eyes assaulted at every turn by the most repellent garbage. Those are the intact streets of the old city.

  It’s a matter of emphasis, of course. Louis-Sébastien Mercier had observed those sunless streets, that permanent cloud (“the sweat of the city”) some seventy years earlier, and though hardly a populist, he tended to sympathize with the victims rather than blame them. Lecouturier places the lower-class population in the center of a cycle of infection and rot—they may be victims, but they are also and more important carriers of the disease. In the same work, he wrote: “There is no such thing as Parisian society; there are no Parisians. Paris is nothing but an encampment of nomads.” This formulation was to echo through the urban reform rhetoric of his time (and beyond, if you recall that Margaret Thatcher said something rather similar, although not in reference to Paris*). Haussmann, for example, wrote in his memoirs that “Paris belongs to France and not to the Parisians who inhabit it by birth or by choice, above all not to the floating population of its furnished rooms, who corrupt the significance of the ballot through their unintelligent votes.”

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

  That was the basis of Haussmann’s justification for treating the city as undifferentiated matter in need of coldly rational organizational engineering, rather than as the accumulation of people’s homes and workplaces. Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891) was himself a native Parisian, but he did not hesitate to raze the house where he was born, when it stood in the way of what was to become Boulevard Haussmann. He was named prefect of the Seine, and awarded his mandate to remake the city, by Napoléon III in 1853, and served in that capacity until the Franco-Prussian War brought an end to the empire in 1870. (“Baron” was an assumed title; he was never actually ennobled.) It should be said at this juncture that Haussmann was neither the first prefect of the Seine nor the first to demolish neighborhoods in order to cut through streets. Gilbert Chabrol de Volvic, prefect from 1812 to 1830, and Claude-Philibert Barthelot de Rambuteau, who served from 1833 to 1848, made the initial forays into urban planning: designating maximum heights of buildings, laying out street patterns in parts of the city that had hitherto been farmland, and other such projects. Rambuteau undertook to recast Les Halles according to rational principles, although his most significant achievement was the cutting through of the street that today bears his name.

  “They’re right to leave that tower standing—you’d have to go up in a balloon to tear it down.” Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from Le Charivari, 1852

  Haussmann’s achievements were in any case remarkable. He built or rebuilt all the bridges, remade and vastly expanded the sewer system, established several of the world’s great parks: the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, as well as Parc Montsouris and the Buttes-Chaumont. He built a new morgue, improved street lighting, doubled the number of trees in the city. He installed public urinals and omnibus shelters, improved the quality of tap water and built new aqueducts to bring it in. He laid out the circular railway line (the chemin de fer de ceinture) that served the outer arrondissements for three-quarters of a century. His hundred-foot-wide boulevards and drastically broadened streets may have been intended principally to serve the military in repressing popular uprisings, but you could almost think he foresaw the coming of the automobile, a mode of transport the old, chaotically arranged city could never have sustained (although whether that’s a good or a bad thing is another matter).

  The corner of Boulevard Arago and Boulevard de Port-Royal, circa 1910

  He gave the city a shape, a dramatic reimagining of itself. Aside from the Eiffel Tower and a few other such details, most of what the tourist thinks of as the look of Paris is the work of Haussmann: the Champs-Élysées, the Étoile, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the Boul’ Mich’—the “wall streets” (rue-murs) of identically scaled, continuously aligned six-story houses, with their ornate second-floor balconies, unadorned fifth-floor balconies, and mansarded forty-five-degree roofs. He spent two and a half billion francs on his massive projects, which caused a scandal and is why action on his plan was barely resumed by the Third Republic, otherwise not unsympathetic. The defense of his fiduciary integrity is by far the most impassioned aspect of his memoirs.

  Rue Saint-Martin and the Tour Saint-Jacques, 1840s

  He was called Attila by the people, and eminent domain was his knout. His actions affected 60 percent of the edifices in the city; he condemned and demolished some twenty thousand houses. He wiped out entire neighborhoods, such as the Carrousel, just west of the Louvre, now only a name given to a square and an arch; Petite-Pologne, laid waste for the installation of Boulevard Malesherbes; Butte-des-Moulins, vaporized for the emplacement of the Avenue de l’Opéra; and Arcis, which once surrounded the Tour Saint-Jacques (the isolated remaining Gothic belfry of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, burned down during the revolution). He eliminated not a specific neighborhood but several neighborhoods’ worth of houses in cutting through his major north–south conduit, the axis formed by Boulevard de Sébastopol on the Right Bank and Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Right.

  He was said by his contemporaries to be possessed by the culte de l’axe, the “religion of the straight line.” The word that recurs the most in accounts of his activities is percements (piercings, in reference to the cutting through of thoroughfares), a word that sounds oddly delicate in its violence. He realigned Boulevard du Temple and imposed the charmless and windswept Place de la République to eliminate the “Boulevard du Crime,” the popular entertainment district, so called not because it was particularly dangerous but because of the blood-and-thunder fare of its theaters. He quadrupled the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville by demolishing all the houses in the immediate vicinity of its central edifice. He cut down the Tree of Liberty in the Luxembourg Gardens, the last living testament of the revolution. He stopped short of widening Rue de Rivoli and plowing it straight through to Place du Trône (now Place de la Nation), primarily because the plan would have involved razing Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. He was a Protestant; the church’s bells had allegedly given the signal for the massacre of Protestants on Saint Bartholomew’s Night in 1572; he did not want to be accused of seeking revenge.

  Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, 1840s

  The most enduringly notorious of his actions was the destruction of the Cité, the very heart of the city, possibly dating back to before the Roman conquest. The island today mostly presents a collection of official and monumental edifices,
not only Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle but also the ancient Conciergerie (a palace, then a prison, and now the Palais de Justice), the Hôtel-Dieu (the city’s first hospital, dating back per tradition to 651, although the current version was planned by Haussmann and completed in 1878), and the Préfecture de Police, popularly known by its address, Quai des Orfèvres. The few remaining residential streets cluster at either end of the island. What was there before can now be seen only in the photographs of Charles Marville (1813–1879), who in the 1860s was commissioned by the city to take archival pictures of places that were slated for demolition. His 425 plates include 23 of the Cité, its narrow snaking alleys, its gutters in the middle of the street, its ancient houses with their undershot ground floors, their stumplike bollards, their medieval details: a doorway built into a Gothic curved recess sliced off from a corner, or an arch cut into the ground floor, making the house a bridge; Rue des Marmousets, Rue des Trois-Canettes, Rue Haute-des-Ursins, Rue Cocatrix.

  Rue des Trois-Canettes. Photograph by Charles Marville, circa 1865–68

  Rue de Venise. Photograph by Paul Vouillemont, circa 1900

  Marville did not, unfortunately, photograph Rue aux Fèves, the dank and leprous criminals’ redoubt in Eugène Sue’s epochal Mysteries of Paris, or its nearby twin, Rue de Jérusalem, where stood the old police prefecture (Haussmann’s new police headquarters pointedly engulfed both streets); or Rue de la Licorne, site of the Cabaret de la Pomme de Pin, frequented by Villon and Rabelais. There is a single photo of narrow Rue de Glatigny, its houses seeming to lean over as if unsteady on their pins, but there is little sign that it was known as Val d’Amour for its profusion of prostitutes. On the basis of what he did photograph it’s tempting to think the Cité wasn’t actually so bad. The trickling gutters convey their nose-pinching reek, and the streets are indeed dark—although not so dark as to defeat the long exposures required by Marville’s equipment—but the overall impression is of piles of massive stone, with generously proportioned doorways and windows, and one or more delicately bracketed lanterns in every shot. We cannot, of course, see inside the houses; our only glimpses come from the often hyperbolic Sue: “Wretched houses, with scarcely a window, and those of worm-eaten frames, without any glass; dark, infectious-looking alleys led to still-darker-looking staircases, so steep that they could be ascended only by the aid of ropes fastened to the damp walls by iron hooks.” But while most contemporaneous testimony appears secondhand or otherwise suspect—“these dark, muddy, pestilential streets, which one would believe inhabited by frogs, owls, and bats”—the exact same tone is sounded by more generally reliable and humane narrators, such as Privat d’Anglemont, who refers to the “hideous, filthy, squalid misery … in the inextricable entanglement of little winding streets that the hammer of the magistrature has just happily eliminated.”

  Those little winding streets are cited again and again, well before Haussmann began his project, their lack of direct sunlight leading to permanent dampness, leading to permanent mud, leading to scrofula, scurvy, dropsy, rickets, arthritis, rheumatism. And the Cité was hardly the only part of Paris so afflicted. Balzac, writing in 1830, describes Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean,

  the widest part of which was its issue into Rue de la Tixeranderie, where it was only five feet across. In rainy weather brackish waters bathed the feet of the old houses that lined the street, carrying along the garbage each household had deposited in a corner by a bollard. Since the ragpickers’ carts couldn’t get through, the inhabitants counted on rainstorms to cleanse their permanently muddy street—how could it have been clean? When in summer the sun beamed its rays straight down upon Paris, a sheet of gold, sharp as a saber blade, momentarily lit up the shadows of the street without being able to dry the permanent damp that dominated those black and silent houses from the ground floor to the second. The inhabitants, who in June lit their lamps at five in the afternoon, never blew them out at all in winter. Even today, any brave pedestrian who wants to go from the Marais to the quays, and so passes from Rue de Chaume to Rue de l’Homme-Armé, Rue des Billettes, and Rue des Deux-Portes to Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, will feel that he has been walking through cellars the whole way.

  Not far away, around the other side of the Hôtel de Ville, was Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne—formerly Rue de l’Écorcherie (“Flaying Street”) and Rue de la Tuerie (“Killing Street”), because the blood from the abattoir that once stood nearby had flowed down the street’s gutter on the way to the Seine—which achieved immortality as the place where the poet Gérard de Nerval was found hanged from the grille of a cabinetmaker’s stall, coatless on a frigid January morning in 1855. Halfway through its short course the street abruptly dropped six feet, its two parts linked by a set of slimy, disjointed steps, on which, around that time, hopped a tame crow, cawing, and under which ran the sewer. Just past the steps an opening in a wall turned into a tunnel (narrow, dark, poisonous) that ran downhill to the river. Meanwhile, at the head of the street, on Place du Châtelet, a dealer in paints and varnish had installed as a sign, under glass in a box, a bona fide Egyptian mummy.*

  We are so used to considering the urban experience of overcrowding and vertical pileup as a relatively recent phenomenon that it is a bit disorienting to consider that in the center of Paris such conditions dated back to the late Middle Ages. People were crammed into tenements at a time when the countryside began a quarter mile away, or less. The streets were so narrow because landlords wanted to extract profit from every available inch. What had been courtyards and gardens were built upon; ad hoc constructions took root wherever there was an available corner. It is just possible to put together a rough mental image of what life was like inside the houses—straw beds, some kind of brazier with a pipe out the window, water in jugs brought up from a pump or maybe the river, livestock coexisting with humans in the darkness and damp—although there is a paucity of eyewitness accounts. You can extrapolate from this bit in Villon, that bit in Restif, some pages by Privat, a drawing by Daumier, but few who were capable of description seem to have ever entered the houses. That is where the flâneur’s task fell short. The poverty of Paris, as sensitively as it was often observed and portrayed, was almost always, until the late nineteenth century, observed from the outside.

  Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, 1840s

  When the adventurism of Napoléon III resulted in the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which terminated his empire, Haussmann’s work nominally ended. “Bismarck finished what Haussmann began,” observed Victor Hugo acidly, although he rather overstated the case. The Third Republic picked up Haussmann’s loose ends, but his project would wait nearly another century for Georges Pompidou and André Malraux to complete it in the heyday of urban renewal. In the interim, substantial areas of Paris remained much as they had been. Two areas of the city in particular managed to retain a medieval character well into the second half of the twentieth century: the combined Marais, Temple, and Saint-Antoine neighborhoods in the Third and Fourth Arrondissements, and the greater Latin Quarter, in the Fifth. That Haussmann failed to mop up those two sectors resulted in a considerable amount of notable architecture being saved, such as the Gallo-Roman amphitheater the Arènes de Lutèce, near the Jardin des Plantes, which had been slated for demolition but survives today. In both areas, ancient buildings, some of real distinction, continued to be inhabited by the poor, as they had for centuries, as late as the 1960s. The city had no money for much of that time, especially after two world wars, and there was little incentive for private developers to acquire properties, all owned by different and usually absentee landlords, that generally combined narrow street frontage with vast and sometimes lightless depths behind.

  Rue Taille-Pain. Photograph by H. Stresser, circa 1900

  Rue de Venise. Photograph by Paul Vouillemont, circa 1900

  Paul Juillerat’s sanitary commission, from 1894 to 1904, isolated sections of the Third and Fourth Arrondissements where the death rate from tuberculosis was particularly hi
gh, labeling them îlots insalubres, “unsanitary areas.” These included Saint-Merri, Sainte-Avoye, and Gravilliers, which ring the present site of the Pompidou Center; Saint-Gervais, behind the Hôtel de Ville (on the site of Balzac’s Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, in fact); and Saint-Paul, a bit farther east, at the head of Rue Saint-Antoine. These became prime exhibits for reformers of every stripe, from public health crusaders and charities with sundry agendas to Le Corbusier, for whom the area served as a textbook illustration of a problem that would be preemptively solved by his Ville Radieuse (1935; needless to say, it was never built). Even so, decades of hand-wringing and stirring pronouncements were unaccompanied by action.

  Rue Simon-le-Franc. Photograph by Paul Vouillemont, circa 1900

  Within the orbit of Saint-Merri was Rue de Venise, as narrow as any of the former alleys of La Cité, so that it was often photographed and became, at least in daylight, a magnet for slumming tourists. There as elsewhere in the area, seventeenth-century mansions had been turned into flophouses—with lanterns inscribed ICI ON LOGE LA NUIT (“lodging for the night”), exactly as in the 1830s—where a bed cost thirty centimes, which is to say, pennies. Georges Cain (1856–1919), a historical painter employed as curator at the Musée Carnavalet (the city’s historical museum, itself lodged in a sixteenth-century mansion in the Marais), wrote many guidebooks, walking tours of old Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, painstakingly researched and documented. He was not inhumane in his treatment of the misery he witnessed, but the conservator in him could barely suppress his emotions when for example he contemplated the Hôtel Chalons-Luxembourg on Rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier: “a wreck from the Great Century [the seventeenth] that looms above a miserable neighborhood” and itself housed grim dives, or when, on Rue des Jardins (today Rue des Jardins Saint-Paul), he saw “women in camisoles, hair in their eyes, working and chatting in front of massive doorways from the seventeenth century.” Around the church of Saint-Merri he noted “narrow Rue Taille-Pain, crisscrossed by blackened beams propping up dislocated hovels that otherwise would collapse one atop the other,” which led to

 

‹ Prev