The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  Sheet music for Berthe Sylva’s “Rôdeuse de barrière,” 1931

  Furthermore, in 1832 the guillotine was moved from its longtime emplacement on Place de Grève (now Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville) to the barrière Saint-Jacques (now the site of the Saint-Jacques Métro station). It was a convenient location, since prisoners condemned to death were then kept at Bicêtre, just a few miles southeast. Hugo complained of it as an “expedient of philanthropists for hiding the scaffold, a shabby and shameful Place de Grève for a society of shopkeepers and burghers who shrink before the death penalty, daring neither to abolish it magnanimously nor to impose it authoritatively.” In any event, in 1836 the city built the panoptic prison of La Roquette, near the Bastille, and both death row inmates and their instrument of termination were shifted there. Despite its brief term—only forty-one persons met their end there—the emplacement at Saint-Jacques nevertheless left a significant dent in collective memory as the execution site of the romantic murderer Pierre-François Lacenaire and the would-be regicides Louis Alibaud and Giuseppe Fieschi, not to mention the fictional Le Chourineur, antihero of Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (1842–43).

  The guillotine in an early nineteenth-century woodcut

  But the association of exurban wasteland with public executions was already cemented in the Parisian mind, as from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries the municipal gibbet had been located at Montfaucon, reasonably distant from the city then, now a bit west of the Buttes-Chaumont, roughly on the site of the Bolivar Métro stop. Hanging was the standard method of disposal at the time, and the edifice at Montfaucon, which was somewhere between two and four stories high, could accommodate as many as fifty gallows birds at once. It was situated on a rocky mount just off a road, assuring that no one in the surrounding region could miss the sight. Although the last executions were held there around 1629, the impression the place left on the Parisian mind was sufficiently indelible that, for example, Serge Gainsbourg could casually allude to it in his song “Laissez-moi tranquille” (1959).

  The gibbet at Montfaucon, a nineteenth-century representation of the fifteenth century

  Before the gibbet even existed, and long after it ceased to be, Montfaucon was the site of an immense garbage dump, which persisted after the city’s six other dumps were closed down by order of the king in the early seventeenth century. The site incorporated a knackers’ yard and a manufacturer of poudrette, a manure that combined excrement with charcoal and gypsum—the gypsum quarries were conveniently adjacent. Animal bones were burned and the ash was used in building walls; the hides were picked up by tanners. Soon, chemical plants were established to make use of other by-products, and their runoff flowed in the open a quarter mile or more toward the nearest sewer. Some twenty-five hundred cubic feet of human excrement were carted there every day; at any given time the carcasses of twelve thousand horses and more than twenty-five thousand dogs, cats, goats, and donkeys were left to rot. These along with miscellaneous trash covered the ground in heaps up to five feet high, and of course there were rats, “in such numbers that if the carcasses of quartered horses were left in some corner on a given day, by the following they would be completely stripped; the rats mined the nearby hills and brought down entire houses.” The ecosystem could be impressive: fish bait was produced by allowing carcasses to draw maggots; then the maggots drew flies; the flies drew large swarms of swallows; and these in turn drew hunters. In summer, the stink of Montfaucon could sometimes travel as far as the Tuileries. Complaints were lodged by the town councils of Belleville, Pantin, and Romainville, which depended on tourists from the city coming out to enjoy their fresh country air. Although a new dump farther away from the city was mandated in 1817, Montfaucon wasn’t finally closed until 1849.

  “The border of the ville lumière.” An octroi gate, 1930s

  By then the city had moved much closer. In 1841, Louis-Philippe decreed that a new military wall should be built, and engaged Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) to carry out the work. The fortification was to be a belt some twenty-four and a half miles long, with fifty-two gates, which would be closed at night with iron grilles. Inside the wall was a 500-foot-wide buffer that in 1860 became the boulevards des maréchaux. On the outside, the wall projected a glacis, an artificial 100-foot-wide slope, and beyond that lay another buffer, an 820-foot-wide ribbon of terrain that was designated a zone non aedificandi, “not to be built upon.” The wall’s circumference included a number of villages that would not be incorporated until 1860, and also “amputated” parts of the villages of Clignancourt, Montmartre, La Chapelle, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Ouen. Its dimensions, which more than doubled the previous size of Paris, established the city limits as they still stand—the present Périphérique highway follows the inner border of “the Zone”—although initially the wall simply imposed itself willy-nilly across blameless farmland and assorted wastes, its circumference determined by calculating the safest range to shield the city proper from artillery fire. The Prussian army proved otherwise in 1871, and demolition of the wall began to be discussed a decade later, although the process wasn’t begun until 1919 and took another decade to achieve completion.

  “And to think we’re Parisians now.” Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from Le Charivari, 1852

  In the meantime the wall and its nimbus took on a life of their own. A lithograph by Daumier shows a peasant couple, standing outside their tiny shack, surrounded by undulating emptiness. In the far distance lies a dome: Panthéon, Val-de-Grâce, or Invalides. They look pleased with themselves. “And to think we’re Parisians now,” the woman says. Many improbable scenes and landscapes were now folded into the urban sphere: beet fields and vineyards, isolated folies and hunting lodges from the eighteenth century, railroad marshaling yards, rural villages that would not have looked out of place in Normandy or Champagne, wayside crucifixes, gypsy camps, scores of guinguettes that had thrived outside the tax wall just months earlier, overgrown cemeteries, the huts of rabbit trappers and beekeepers, and numerous stretches of unused land in various conditions of arability and desolation, of uncertain ownership.

  An old hunting lodge on Boulevard d’Italie, circa 1900

  Urbanization proceeded at different rates at different points of the compass. At first there were recognizable streets going right up to the wall only in a few places, in Montmartre and the Batignolles to the north and around the Point du Jour in the southwest, for example. Soon enough, many of the gates sprouted businesses catering to truckers, primarily wineshops, cafés, and brothels, and hodgepodge neighborhoods of tiny houses made of plaster, wood, brick, tin, clinker (residue from coal combustion), or stacked sardine cans filled with dirt, or any combination thereof. These coexisted with the parts of Belleville and the Batignolles that were being built up conventionally, using material salvaged from Haussmann’s demolitions in the center, and with clusters of the horse-drawn trailers used by the Roma and other travelers who migrated according to the seasons, and with wilder stretches inhabited by the sorts of people who preferred it not be known they were inhabited. There were few paved streets, no streetlights, no sewers or, for that matter, plumbing, and water had to be fetched from pumps or streams sometimes a considerable distance away. As construction and land speculation within the wall proceeded apace, the more impoverished or legally compromised or simply contrary of those who lived on its interior fringes began gradually to move out to the Zone, which was not to be built upon but did not remain so for long.

  The Outskirts of Paris. Painting by Vincent van Gogh, 1887

  Initially the Zone was a sort of tundra, empty grassland with the occasional lone tree, crossed by trails like deer runs, two-story buildings visible here and there on the far horizon. It was documented more by painters than by photographers. Vincent van Gogh’s The Outskirts of Paris (1887) shows a vast plain with a windmill and a few barnlike structures in the distance, in the foreground the confluence of two muddy paths, a tumbledown fence, and, incongruously, a cast-iron lampp
ost. Jean-François Raffaëlli made many paintings of the Zone as desolate farmland, featuring maybe a spavined horse and a few skinny chickens tended by an old woman in black, some unpainted hovels in the middle distance with wash lines strung between them, factory chimneys miles away, the scene perhaps interrupted by a man running past with a loaf of bread under each arm, looking back over his shoulder. Where the Zone was breached by the important roads bound for Italy or Flanders or the sea, there might be newspaper kiosks and perhaps an outdoor urinal plastered with advertising, on a tended surface with no neighboring structures.

  Faubourgs parisiens. Painting by Jean-François Raffaëlli, 1880s

  The ragpickers were the first to colonize the space. Ragpickers had been an integral part of city life since its unrecorded dawn, but they had never had an easy time of it. Besides the financial precariousness of the trade, there were successive waves of persecution by the authorities. In 1635 the sale of old clothes was prohibited in Paris, forcing ragpickers to work clandestinely or outside the walls. In 1701 heavy fines and corporal punishment were imposed on ragpickers found on the streets at night. In 1828 the city began licensing ragpickers, but in 1832 it attempted to institute municipal trash collection, impinging on their trade. In 1835 a new police prefect allowed ragpickers a permanent market within Les Halles, but a few years later the order was rescinded, and by 1860 they were actively being chased from even their traditional corners. The final blow came in 1884, when Eugène Poubelle, prefect of the Seine, decreed that all houses be supplied with lidded containers for refuse, their contents to be collected by municipal authority; poubelle soon became, and remains, the word for “garbage can.” Fifty thousand ragpickers demonstrated, but to no avail.

  A ragpicker, 1840s

  There was a hierarchical caste system among the ragpickers, who might be hereditary members of the professional tribe, or bohemians, or miserable, homeless alcoholics who slept under bridges or in abandoned houses and drank casse-poitrine (chest breaker) or tord-boyaux (gut twister). The highest-ranked of them, called placiers, drove horse carts and were often allowed to skim the trash in houses before it was put out on the street. They generally earned about ten times as much as the ordinary pickers, who collected not only rags and paper but also dead animals. The rags and paper were used for making paper and cardboard; bones went toward the manufacture of charcoal and blacking; broken glass was remelted; animal hides were tanned and the hair bought by wig makers. The placiers, however, might find valuable discards, which they would bring directly to market, either at the biannual fairs (the ham fair at Place de la République or the scrap iron fair at the Bastille) or else at the street market on Place d’Aligre or at the ancient Marché des Patriarches on Rue Mouffetard, which according to legend was sanctioned by the church after beggars saved the life of the bishop of Paris around 1350, in return being given the right to sell “untraceable goods and objects.”

  A flea market, circa 1910

  Vendors awaiting the opening of the Marché du Temple, circa 1910

  Although these markets endured for another century (and the one on Place d’Aligre in some fashion still exists), around 1860, ragpickers began moving out to the Zone, where they were generally free from police harassment and enjoyed unlimited space to spread their wares. At first the pickers set down their bundles directly off the path through the Plaine de Malassis, where strollers would come by and bargain. Professionals began organizing markets in the 1880s, charging rent to newcomers, who built shacks from available litter, such as old wagons. Saint-Ouen, bordering on the Zone to the north, had been renowned for its delicate white wine, which could not be exported, so that it became a resort of wineshops and guinguettes, but after phylloxera (plant lice) destroyed the vines in 1900 the space was entirely given over to what was just then beginning to be called the “flea market.” Soon it grew so large it merged with the neighboring market at Clignancourt, while others opened at Les Lilas and Quatre-Chemins (La Villette) in the northeast, Montreuil in the east, Bicêtre in the southeast, and Vanves in the south.

  Police Magazine, July 1935

  Of these, Montreuil, Vanves, and Saint-Ouen/Clignancourt still exist, the latter grown enormous. Over time the bourgeoisie came in search of antiques; painters such as the young Picasso bought old canvases they could scrape clean and reuse; Apollinaire and later the Surrealists sought peculiar and poetic objects; revivals of bygone styles were initiated through flea market finds. But the inventory of a vendor in the 1890s suggests a more typical display: two fragments of Turkish carpet, some bracelets made of hair, a lot of watches and chains in need of repair, three portraits of Napoléon, a compass, a tobacco grater, a shell box ornamented with a picture of Louis XVI inspecting a pot of lilies, a bust of L’Intransigeant editor Henri Rochefort, a chromo based on a painting by Édouard Detaille, and two meerschaum pipes, heavily colored and garnished with “immodest” nymphs.

  Meanwhile, the Zone was still, as in Aristide Bruant’s song “À Saint-Ouen” (1908), a field “where the harvest was of broken bottles and shards of china.” The titular heroine of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s 1865 novel Germinie Lacerteux takes a trip outside the walls, along “little gray trampled paths” through grass “frizzled and yellowed,” across the railroad bridge, where she shivers at the “evil ragpickers’ encampment and the stonemasons’ quarter below Clignancourt,” where the houses are built of stolen construction materials, “sweating the horrors they concealed.” She feels they hold “all the crimes of the night.” But she is able to relax on the mound of the fortifications themselves, since there are children, and a brass ring game, and cafés and wineshops and fry joints, and a shooting gallery, and flags. Sixty years later the tireless flâneur André Warnod went to Montreuil on a Sunday, where

  surrounded by an attentive audience, a blindfolded man predicts the future. Peddlers hawk their junk, probably the same trash travelers try to bribe Africans with—but they, too, are doing a roaring business … Behind canvas banners depicting grand tragic hunt scenes, for five sous you can see a live eagle, king of the beasts, poor fallen monarch who has a terribly hard time fitting his beak and his clipped wings into a horrible little cage.

  He drinks “rude” red wine at the guinguette Aux Petits Agneaux, which is painted red like the wine. Wine-red or blood-red buildings keep recurring in accounts and reminiscences of the Zone. In Zola’s L’assommoir the miserable hotel where we meet Gervaise and Lantier, a two-story hovel next to the Poissonnière gate, is painted “wine-dregs red.”

  Sheet music for Damia’s “La guinguette a fermé ses volets,” 1935

  On the private side the Zone had many faces, most of them hidden. It was a community of squatters, after all, who never knew when some political decision might result in their being rousted. And then there were those who preferred to remain anonymous anyway, because of bank robberies or incendiary leaflets or incendiary devices or religious or sexual persuasion or embezzlement or morals charges or skin disease. You had to know your way around. Blaise Cendrars took Fernard Léger to a gypsy camp in 1924:

  I took a path that zigzagged between the tarps, the farmyards, the henhouses, the little gardens, the vacant lots of the zoniers, enclosed in walls topped with broken bottles, delimited with barbed-wire fences and old railroad crossing gates, filled with furious dogs with nail-studded collars, their chains running along a strung wire that allowed them to go crazy from one end of their bare hutch to the other, leaping, barking, drooling with rage, among the empty, dented, crumbling tin cans, the stoved-in barrels, the jagged bits of sheet metal, the bed springs poking up from the slag, broken china and pottery, split soup cans, piles of obsolete household appliances, cannibalized vehicles, disemboweled trash bags, all surrounded by spruces, by scant tufts of lilacs, or else dominated like a Golgotha by the skeleton of a tree, a stunted elder, a tortured acacia, a diseased runt of a linden tree, the stump of its branch capped by a chamber pot, its pollarded top crowned by an old tire.

  All sorts
of people hunkered down in the Zone, which could resemble the streets of the old Cité spread flat across a gnarled ring of dead ground, and forecast the bidonvilles and favelas and refugee camps of a later era. By the time it was fully incorporated into the Parisian imaginary around 1900, however, the “Zone” evoked in potboilers and the popular press had a radius that extended back into the city itself, annexing big chunks of Belleville and Montmartre and the nebulous neighborhoods in the far south. It became a catchall slum where everything sensational and sleazy and prurient could be relegated. The Zone was frequently cited as the home of the criminals who were called apaches at the beginning of the twentieth century, and is nostalgically evoked in Jacques Becker’s 1952 film Casque d’Or, the romantic apotheosis of fin-de-siècle criminality—although there were apaches all over the city, and the actual story behind the movie occurred in Belleville, around the Bastille, near Les Halles, and in the southern suburb of Alfortville. The mature prostitutes photographed by Eugène Atget in the 1920s standing in front of their doorways are often described as denizens of the Zone, although they lived and worked in Fort-Monjol, a flesh market on a street that no longer exists southwest of the Buttes-Chaumont, a considerable distance from the wall. But the Zone, besides the shadowy menace implicit in its very name, was indisputably a convenient place for people to go to ground when they were wanted by the cops, and the fortifications, with their elevation and unobstructed views, presented an ideal neutral spot for knife fights.