The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  But then those were the years, after Napoléon and the brief, tumultuous reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, when Paris was becoming a modern city. The bourgeoisie was rising, the aristocracy was dimming, the population was swelled by immigrants from all the regions of France, especially the arid south-central. Suddenly, a great many of the faces on the street were unfamiliar, and the narrow alleys and passages and culs-de-sac of the center, constructed for a much smaller population, were bursting with people, who were tucking themselves into every corner, filling the courtyards with workshops, butting ad hoc annexes onto ancient buildings, adding to the pileup of garbage, the cloud of stench, the overflowing gutters; and who, not to mention, were reproducing furiously—by 1830 one birth in three was illegitimate. Anyone who could remember the time before the Restoration was disoriented, even alienated. The city was no longer theirs.

  The crowd on Sunday morning, at the corner of Rue Saint-Médard and Rue Mouffetard, circa 1910

  Even so, the rabble had always been the city’s fundament. Cendrars evokes the crowd of the Middle Ages, the people drawn by the construction of Notre-Dame:

  A swarm of ordinary folk, vagabonds, pilgrims, some wealthy merchant who had taken a vow after eluding highwaymen, along with his servants and his employees who had like him come to work for a while as laborers, those were the people who overran the stonemason’s yard, a genuine Zone established in the heart of the city when a cathedral was being built, which generally lasted more than a century, with an influx of the mad, the sick, the illuminated, the devout, of preaching monks, criminals, drunkards, bourgeois, nobles surrounding the yard night and day because it is always entertaining to watch others work …

  He goes on to note how random members of this mob would be chosen by the stone carvers to pose for one of the myriad statues that crowd the portals and the façade: “… all those carved stones are portraits of people who had names (only those of the donors have endured), all those statues were carved on the spot, in real time, without cheating or faking, in the midst of life, with their attitudes, gestures, clothing, and accessories preserved, often with a huge sense of humor or cruel satire…” Thus the physical trace of the rabble is retained in the oldest, most august, most sanctified monument of the city.

  “What’s with the racket? What do you want?” “Your charity, please, my lord.” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Scènes de la vie publique et privée des animaux, 1842

  Rubberneckers—badauds—perhaps taking in a dramatic rescue from the Seine down below

  The names of the crowd are irrevocably lost—to the extent that they had been recorded at all, the documentation was destroyed in the fires during the Bloody Week that ended the Commune in 1871. Their occupations, general appearance, family relations, details of daily living can be guessed at only in the broadest ways. They do possess another monument: the Catacombs, the network of caves (former limestone mines) centered under Place Denfert-Rochereau in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, where beginning in 1780 the contents of the city’s graveyards were removed, following an incident in which people were asphyxiated by fumes in their cellars on Rue de la Lingerie, adjacent to one of the common trenches of the Innocents cemetery near Les Halles. The Catacombs contain the remains of somewhere between six and eight million citizens, all of them more or less poor, since the rich got themselves interred in crypts in their family church. Their bones are arranged in architectural formations in certain caves, piled any which way in others. You can examine the skulls and speculate: this one a laundress, that one a sneak thief, this one a monk, that one a rat catcher. They are the people who built the Louvre and the Bastille; who watched Templars and schismatics be burned alive and common thieves and murderers broken on the wheel; who stared at the first elephant, the first rhinoceros, the first giraffe to enter France; who withstood epic floods, disastrous freezes, devastating fires, sudden famines; who died in great numbers from the Plague, smallpox, typhus, syphilis, influenza, whooping cough; who rose up against tax collectors, heretics, foreigners, pretenders, Jews, Protestants, and supporters of Cardinal Mazarin; who ate tainted meat and were trampled during festivals and learned to drink coffee and never once left the city.

  “Necessity obeys no law.” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Cent proverbes, 1845

  The Parisians for a long time were a Nordic people, blond and blue-eyed even after a considerable interval dominated by Romans. Louis Chevalier insisted on a continuity of affinities that stretched across the centuries, basing this perhaps questionable claim on a protracted study of documents high and low going back to the Middle Ages: their wit, he thought, was a permanent trait, along with their subtle irony, their gift for repartee, their need for pleasure, their insistence on being released from all constraints, as well as their deep investment in romance, covering the span from idealistic love to frank carnality. And Victor Hugo introduced the urchin Gavroche as his capsule model of the essential Parisian:

  When it comes to the people of Paris, even the mature adult remains a kid. To depict the child is to depict the city, and that’s why we have chosen this sparrow as a subject by which to render the eagle.

  It is especially in the faubourgs, let us insist, that the Parisian race is made manifest. They are where you’ll find its undiluted blood, its true features. They are where that people works and suffers, and work and suffering are the two faces of humanity. There are enormous numbers of unknown beings; the place is aswarm with the strangest creatures, from the stevedore of La Rapée to the knacker of Montfaucon. Fex urbis, cried Cicero; mob, added the indignant Burke; rabble, multitude, populace. Those words fall from your lips … That abject sand you trample, throw it into the furnace; let it melt and boil: it will become a splendid crystal, and through it Galileo and Newton will discover the stars.

  As the nineteenth century drew on, that abject sand became ever less timid about asserting its merit. Already it had mastered the art of seizing and reclaiming insults flung its way. The French language is rich in words for the lower classes that signify dregs, scum, residue, bottom: la racaille,* la crapule, la vermine, la fripouille, la tourbe. Perhaps the most frequently employed was canaille, which derives from the Latin word for “dog.” It was a sign of the times when in 1865 Joseph Darcier and Alexis Bouvier wrote the song “La canaille,” which was a resounding hit four years later for Rosa Bordas. Its many verses are rhetorical and uninteresting (“In an old French city / there is a race of iron / … / All its sons are born on straw / Their palace is nothing but a shack…”), but every time La Bordas, on the stage at a café-concert, engaged the chorus, “C’est la canaille!,” the audience would join its second line en masse: “Eh bien, j’en suis!”

  Three-card monte players, circa 1900

  This act of self-identification with the riffraff was occurring on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War and just two years before the Commune. You could argue that the socioeconomic structure of the Second Empire precluded vertical mobility and class-jumping aspiration; you could also make the case that those of the menu peuple who didn’t actually live in misery were more concerned with their homes and families than with social status. If they were lumped they would spit in the eye of the lumpers.

  A precedent of sorts had occurred a quarter century earlier, with the publication of Eugène Sue’s epochal novel The Mysteries of Paris. Sue (1804–1857) was hardly a man of the people—his father was surgeon to the Imperial Guard and he himself was a godson of Empress Eugénie—but, spurred by a bet, he was determined to write the great epic of the people, and disguised himself and hung around the dives of the Cité, collecting material. He started writing right away after his initial immersion, having found two of his main characters brawling in the very first deadfall he checked into. The writing proceeded serially, installments appearing regularly in the Journal des Débats from June 1842 to October 1843 and eventually filling ten volumes. The result is a sprawling tableau of lower-class Parisian life, presented melodramatically and as it were ope
ratically, with each of the characters embodying some trait, some station, some principle rather than attempting to impersonate individual humans. Le Chourineur is a knife fighter and ostensibly a brute, although not lacking hidden virtues; Fleur-de-Marie, alias La Goualeuse, is a pure flower of the slums, around whom the entire plot revolves; Rigolette is the very image of the grisette, the emblematic young Parisian working woman, allegedly charming and lighthearted at all times; the Schoolmaster is a brutal ex-con; La Chouette (the Owl) is a vicious old woman; Ferrand is the notary who enriches himself at the expense of the vulnerable—and so on through the archetypes. The central figure, though, is Rodolphe, something of a superhero. He is secretly grand duke of a Ruritanian principality, but disguises himself as an ordinary workingman in order to solve the problems of one and all, since he is of such flawless essence he feels obliged to parcel out his inherent gifts.

  The Mysteries of Paris, directed by Charles Burguet, 1922. The second of six films—and two TV series—based on the novel

  Eugène Sue

  For all the book’s shortcomings, the people of Paris saw themselves represented in it. It’s true that much of its subject matter might have been familiar to literary consumers from the Memoirs (1828) of Eugène-François Vidocq, the convict turned policeman turned detective, or from Victor Hugo’s novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). But unlike either of those books, Mysteries featured addictive, suspense-filled plot construction, and Sue’s direct appeals to the emotions and his partisanship on behalf of the poor, which became more explicit with each passing chapter, broke through class barriers and seized the imagination of the whole city. It had hundreds of thousands of readers; long lines of people appeared every week outside the offices of the Journal des Débats to snag the first copies; the illiterate demanded it be read to them. Readers thought that Rodolphe was a real person, and many letters were addressed to him asking for his intercession. According to his friend Alexandre Dumas, Sue to the end of his life received letters, often anonymous, enclosing money for the poor. But somehow the novel also acted as a genuine agent of social change, inspiring investigative journalism that tallied wages paid to factory workers and compared them with the cost of living—something unheard of until then.

  The bread-crust market. Illustration by José Belon for Paris anecdote, by Privat d’Anglemont, 1885 edition

  The industry of the serial novel, or roman-feuilleton, began in 1836 with the publication of The Duchess of Salisbury, by Dumas, in La Presse and right away became a sensation, the focus of a three-way rivalry among La Presse, Le Siècle, and the Journal des Débats, the field of combat of such unstoppably prolific novel-extruding machines as Dumas, Balzac, Paul Féval, and Pierre-Alexis de Ponson du Terrail. The Mysteries of Paris was the form’s first truly major success—Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, to name one of many, was deliberately conceived as an attempt to top it. The serials and the newspapers that printed them were aimed at the petite bourgeoisie, newly literate and possessed of leisure time. There was an understanding that the upper classes might stoop to slumming in those pages as well, but Mysteries in addition opened the door to an unexpected new audience: the working class.

  A rally in support of the United Front, Place de la Nation, 1934

  Thus was born the concept of the populaire, which for all its ups and downs and sundry mutations has never since ceased to be a major component of French culture. It is congruent with the English-language notion of popular culture only up to a point, since the French version is not just a bit older but also much more self-conscious and politicized. It covers a broad terrain: the café-concert, the detective novel, the sports industry, blood-and-thunder plays, six-day bicycle races, comic strips, popular science, true crime magazines, lotteries, sidewalk demonstrations by muscle men and patent medicine vendors, soft porn, torch singers, street purveyors of fried potatoes and roasted chestnuts, neighborhood carnivals, postcards, romance novels, self-help nostrums, fumetti, and a great swath of the movies. Historically it has often been subject to attempts by the left to mold it, but in the twentieth century and beyond it has more often inclined toward the right, from the Action Française of the 1930s to the Front National of the present day. The art historian and cultural critic T. J. Clark defined its nub: “Popular culture provided the petit-bourgeois aficionado with two forms of illusory ‘class’: an identity with those below him, or at least with certain images of their life, and a difference which hinged on his skill—his privileged place—as a consumer of those same images.”

  When class is a determining factor in society, an ostensibly class-spanning phenomenon puts all the parties into uneasy relationships. The petit bourgeois consumer is squeezed between authenticity on one side and aspiration on the other. The bourgeois always has the option of s’encanailler (slumming)—but then she might be encouraging behavior that will later prove a threat. And the lower classes might profit from the situation, but at the cost of being permanently patronized, pursuing their pleasures in a sort of diorama.

  An illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Dans la rue, vol. 1, by Aristide Bruant, 1889

  The populaire can be seen as a mechanism, if unintentional, for keeping the classes in their place. As Clark writes, “It is above all collectivity that the popular exists to prevent.” The culture of the lower classes is maintained in its private plot, branded for immediate identification—there is little danger of its overstepping its bounds and turning into something more ambiguous, let alone incendiary. The products of the music hall, the penny press, and the vaudeville theater are kept in a different aisle from those of the Comédie Française, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Opéra; it is made clear that the former are diversions while the latter constitute culture. Not only did this discourage consumers from finding an excess of meaning in the songs and plays of the working class, but it also kept the classes from making common cause. The best-known example of this sort of cultural policing was, and remains, the Académie Française, which in obsessively tending the French language like a heritage garden, preserving the vocabulary and syntax of Racine and Corneille and extirpating creeping foreign influences, has also scrupulously weeded out all traces of argot, which might be employed on a daily basis by a majority of the population but would not find its way into respectable print.

  * * *

  The blue-eyed descendants of the Parisii were not the only Parisians, had not been for ages. People had been filtering into the capital from other parts of France in significant numbers since at least the seventeenth century, Normans and Auvergnats and Gascons and Savoyards, who were welcomed because—as is always and everywhere the case with immigrants—they were willing to take on the hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs scorned by the natives. They soon became identified with specific trades, which they monopolized, so that successive generations of newcomers were assured of jobs; the Savoyards, for example, long had a lock on chimney sweeping. Privat d’Anglemont wrote in the 1850s that “the first Auvergnat in Paris must have picked up some change selling scrap iron, likewise the first Norman by selling old clothes. Since that time—time immemorial—all the Auvergnats are scrap metal vendors and all the Normans deal in secondhand clothes.”

  “The black man of tomorrow”: an Auvergnat, because he is in the coal business. Interesting racial politics from André Gill in La Petite Lune, 1878

  The Auvergnats, hailing from the Cantal and Puy-de-Dôme departments in the arid Massif Central, have arguably left a mark on the city more indelible than any other group of immigrants. They were first known as water carriers; in the days before indoor plumbing, somebody had to carry buckets up to the seventh floors of houses. In the 1780s Louis-Sébastien Mercier estimated that twenty thousand Auvergnats were so occupied, but by then their sense of enterprise had already granted them many royal letters of patent. The Auvergnats came to dominate the scrap metal trade and the trade in wood; they were tinkers and braziers and knife sharpeners, repairers of china and parasols. Before long they had amassed suffi
cient capital to begin opening cafés and wineshops and restaurants and hotels, and that is what they are still known for today. The epicenter of Auvergnat settlement had from the beginning been the area around the Bastille. On Rue de Lappe they opened dance halls featuring their indigenous music, based on a bagpipe instrument called the musette. The dances attracted outsiders and changed over the decades; the musette itself disappeared in favor of accordions and clarinets, but the term bal-musette remained fixed in the language and in Parisian culture, and the spiritual home of the music remains Rue de Lappe. Somehow, unlike most other groups of immigrants from the Hexagon, the Auvergnats have maintained a distinct identity.*

  “These are no brave messengers, who wander through strange lands.” The Roma as seen by Jacques Callot, in Les bohémiens en marche: L’arrière garde, 1621

  The experience of groups from outside the country has been somewhat more vexed. The Roma—“the poorest creatures ever seen coming to France within living memory”—arrived, headed by twelve men on horseback, in 1427, with tales of being persecuted by the Saracens for their Christianity. They were denied entry and forced to camp in Saint-Denis. When they were allowed to attend a fair, their women began reading palms, which proved very popular and very embarrassing, both to the public (numerous were the imputations of cuckoldry) and to the church, which sent a friar to excommunicate them all, after which they were shown the road out. They would reappear throughout the centuries—they were a significant presence in the Zone—but their relations with the French authorities were always contentious, and so they have remained to the present day. That is not a matter confined to Paris or to France, of course. The poor Roma suffer the unhappy fate of eternally being cast as the world’s stepchildren.