The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  No eyes … could locate the exact place where the child had been swallowed up. The black water bubbled over an immense expanse. The bed of the Bièvre was covered by ten feet of mud at that spot. The child had to die; it was impossible to save him. At that hour on a Sunday, everyone was at rest. The Bièvre has neither boats nor fishermen. I could find no pole with which to sound the depths, and could see nobody at all in the distance.

  Marville’s photographs of the 1860s show a turbid canal barely wider than a sidewalk, its banks covered almost to their edges with sheds projecting from high factory walls and heaped with sacks, barrels, sawhorses, and everywhere men wearing long aprons pressing hides. Postcards of the Île des Singes made fifty years later show the same scenes, but much more broken-down and sordid, everything piled with trash and tumbling into ruin.* Joris-Karl Huysmans, writing in the late 1880s, saw

  in the air, thousands of dried rabbit pelts knocking against one another, spotted with blood and furrowed with blue veins … and through the windows you can see … workers skimming the horrible stew in the vats, or raking hides over a trench … The alley is completely white: the roofs, the pavements, and the walls are all rimed. Endless snow falls in the middle of summer, a snow made of the ambient scrapings of hides.

  What wasn’t thus whitened was stained red by tanners’ bark, the overpowering acrid stench of which filled the whole area.

  An alley by the Bièvre, circa 1900

  Tanneries on the Île des Singes, circa 1910

  The gates of a tobacco factory, Rue des Meuniers, circa 1910

  End of the workday at Delaunay-Belleville, in Saint-Denis, circa 1910

  End of the workday on Rue de la Haie-Coq, in Aubervilliers, circa 1910

  By the late nineteenth century, the industrial zones of the city had expanded, especially toward the northeast. La Villette contained not only most of the major slaughterhouses (except for the ones in the south, at Vaugirard and the horse butchery at Porte Brancion), but also soapworks, saltworks, glassworks, breweries, distilleries, chemical plants, and factories producing candles, perfume, matches, enamel, bone black, pianos, and freight cars. La Chapelle, with its gasworks and vast railyards, was not far behind. There were major industries along the Seine at both its eastern and western extremities within the city—Quai de Javel, in the Fifteenth, was named after the bleach industry, for example, and the Citroën plant long dominated the land behind it. Smaller factories were crammed into any available space in all outlying arrondissements except the Sixteenth and the southern reaches of the Seventeenth. And all those industries had their even larger analogues in the northern, eastern, and southern banlieue.

  That was a story repeated throughout the Western world as the consumer market expanded and transport became cheaper and more reliable. It was a gold rush for industrialists, who were not generally concerned overmuch with the safety or well-being of their employees, and it was further spurred by streamlining processes imported from the United States, such as the time management of Taylorism and the assembly-line techniques of Henry Ford. In America the price in human suffering was chronicled extensively by Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair, crusading journalists who earned the derisive label “muckrakers.” France had its own investigators, Maurice and Léon Bonneff, who were born two years apart in the early 1880s to a poor family of embroiderers in the Franche-Comté. They left school to go to work at the usual age of twelve or thirteen, and then in 1900 made their way to Paris, where a chance encounter with the old Communard historian Gustave Lefrançais and his secretary, the writer Lucien Descaves, encouraged their literary ambitions. Individually they tried their hand at writing plays, but within a few years found their true vocation as investigative journalists, writing for Jean Jaurès’s L’Humanité and jointly producing several major works: Jobs That Kill (1906), The Tragic Lives of Workers (1908), The Working Class (1910), and Merchants of Madness (1913). These failed to have the impact they should have, in part because they were refused by the major publishing houses and wound up being issued by small leftist presses, also because the brothers both died young. On their own they also wrote a novel apiece. Léon’s Aubervilliers, a diorama portrait of that city in the northern banlieue—“stinking from the exhalations of the fertilizer plants, renewed by the breath of the gardens and the fields … the city where dead animals are cooked and harvests are abundant … the cauldron of hell and the bounty of spring”—shows the influence of Sinclair’s The Jungle. It was partially serialized only after the war and not published in book form until 1949 (it alone of their works is in print today).

  “Get a move on, you lazy animal!” Illustration by J. J. Grandville, from Les métamorphoses du jour, 1829

  The Bonneffs’ purview was at once broad and intensely focused; no detail was too small for them. They noticed, for example, that if the ragpickers’ path was stony, the sedentary job of the women who sorted the rags was at least as dangerous:

  They work over rectangular grates around three feet long, perforated with little close-set square openings. The dust emitted by the rags falls through the openings of the grate, but it also spreads through the workroom. The ateliers of the major rag recyclers are generally spacious and the sorting rooms sufficiently large, with windows that allow for aeration. But the danger is no less for the employees, who inevitably inhale the noxious particles emitted by the rags … Ailments of the throat and lungs are common among the workers, and tuberculosis has claimed numerous victims among their ranks. In this business there are few elderly employees.

  Two decades before George Orwell got a job belowstairs in the Hôtel Lotti and subsequently chronicled his experiences in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the Bonneffs were alert to the fate of dishwashers in fancy restaurants:

  Restaurant kitchens are like the ovens of a bakery: because customers don’t visit them, the owners make the rooms narrow, low-ceilinged, airless, and ill-lit. They are generally basements where the gaslights are kept on around the clock. Ventilators, stingily perforated, allow only a feeble current of air. The heat emitted by the ovens—red-hot during business hours—the odors of oil, fat, grilling meat, smoking coals make breathing difficult. From 11:00 to 1:30 and again from 6:00 to 9:00—and often later—the constant temperature is 130°F … The dishwasher stands on a plank in front of the brazier that heats the water. The heat is such that his apron catches fire; he has to change it every two hours. And all day long, except for two hours’ rest in the afternoon, he stirs up evil-smelling water, hot and dense water the sight of which alone is nauseating.

  The Bonneffs chronicled trade after trade, not only in Paris but all over France: bakers, shop assistants, railroad workers, postal employees, construction workers. They cataloged the ailments specific to jobs, such as lead poisoning (painters, weavers, lacemakers, electricians), arsenic poisoning (florists, tanners, taxidermists), mercury poisoning (hatters), and respiratory illnesses of all kinds, from tuberculosis to black lung. They pursued their investigations by getting themselves hired, at job after job, with the help of confederates. By simply recording observed facts, in clear and chastened language with a total absence of rhetoric, they effectively damned hundreds of industries. You think as you read that the sheer accumulation of outrages could not have failed to affect readers and lead to social changes. But the Bonneff brothers weren’t as fortunate as their American analogues, in part because of the political climate, in part due to unfortunate timing. Jean Jaurès was assassinated on July 31, 1914; Germany declared war on Russia the following day; Maurice Bonneff died in combat on September 24; Léon succumbed to wounds suffered on the front line on December 24. Today they are mostly forgotten, their only memorials three streets named after them in Bezons, Limoges, and Champigny-sur-Marne, once “red” cities.

  7

  Le Business

  Prostitution, a phenomenon as old as commerce and travel, has been so long associated with Paris in popular culture that you could almost get the impression it was invent
ed there. The traffic in women was of course a harsh and often deadly commerce for those who were its merchandise. It was also for a very long time viewed (and not solely by men) as an essential part of the city’s fabric, of its ambiance, a signpost announcing that it was a place apart, exempt from the imperatives of labor, family, and fatherland that ruled the surrounding nation. For Maupassant’s Georges Duroy, Bel-Ami in the novel of that name, the culture of prostitution is fundamental to the pleasures of flânerie:

  His pocket empty and his blood boiling, he lit up upon contact with the streetwalkers who murmured, on the corners: “Come with me, pretty boy.” But he didn’t dare follow them, unable to pay, and also he awaited something else, other kisses, less vulgar ones.

  He nevertheless loved the places where prostitutes swarmed, their dance halls, their cafés, their streets. He loved to jostle them, to talk to them in familiar terms, to whiff their violent perfumes, to feel close to them. They were women, after all, women devoted to love. And he didn’t treat them with that contempt innate in family men.

  Forty years later, Francis Carco sang the same song: “It wasn’t so much the whores that I loved so much as the black streets, the shops, the cold, the thin rain on the roofs, the chance encounters, and, in those rooms, an atmosphere of harrowing abandon that clutched my heart.” Paris may have been the capital of the nineteenth century; it remains the capital of contradictions.

  On the turf, 1930s

  Prostitution in Paris dates back at least to the Gallo-Roman era, although we don’t hear much about it until the Middle Ages, and then mostly in connection with attempts to suppress it, such as by immuring whores in convents. The sainted Louis IX tried in vain to expel them from the capital in 1254; Parliament attempted with no greater success to close the brothels in 1272; a law of 1360 forbade prostitutes from wearing the same clothes as women not in the profession. Around the same time it was noted that thirty streets, in a city much smaller than today’s, were given over in whole or in part to the ambulatory trade. In the following centuries prostitution underwent vicissitudes of toleration and repression—the latter in particular by the Protestants and by the woman-hating Henri III (1574–1589)—until, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it emerged as a highly fashionable pursuit, with bordellos ever more richly appointed and exclusive. It was then, for example, that certain houses began publishing illustrated catalogues, so that finicky prospective johns could make their selection without mussing themselves.

  At the entrance to a gambling den in the Palais-Royal, 1815

  It was then, too, that the sport of estimating numbers began in earnest. A police report in 1762 guessed there were between six hundred and seven hundred prostitutes in the capital. Restif de La Bretonne in the 1780s thought there were twenty thousand. In 1802 the minister of police suggested thirty thousand, whereas in 1810 the police prefect estimated eighteen thousand, although half of those were kept women. Around the same time, it was believed there were between six hundred and nine hundred working women in the Palais-Royal alone. In 1812 around nine hundred prostitutes were formally registered with the police; twenty years later the number had jumped to thirty-five hundred—but only women working in brothels were then required to register. “In the 1850s it was estimated that London had about 24,000 prostitutes but Paris, with almost half the population, was said to have 34,000.” A couple of decades later Maxime du Camp claimed there were one hundred twenty thousand working women in the city, although du Camp was an end-of-society hysteric whose statements should generally be handled at arm’s length. Meanwhile, from the late 1850s to the late 1870s, between six thousand and fifteen thousand prostitutes passed every year through the Dépôt, the medical dispensary to which working women were dispatched for inspection by the sanitary police. Those numbers are actual, not speculative.

  The women who walked the streets, whose status was tolerated rather than strictly speaking legal, were only a percentage of the population. They fell into two broad categories: respectueuses, who worked for a pimp, and insoumises (“rebels”), who didn’t—the latter often tended to be very young, although some were so young they were pimped by their mothers. Many women worked legally in houses, of which there were hundreds at any given time. And then there were the more ambiguous sorts: the actresses and dancers and models, the kept women, the courtesans, the grandes cocottes, the demimondaines, the horizontales, the amazones, the lionnes, the “marble girls,” the “man-eaters.” Around the parish of Notre-Dame de Lorette, just south of Montmartre, were the lorettes, an elastic designation for courtesans and kept women whose relative fortunes could be determined by their address: the ones who did well lived as close as possible to Rue de Provence to the south, whereas the less successful were scattered northwest toward the Batignolles. Delacroix in his journals recalled that when he was a hot-blooded new arrival, around 1822, “the first thing that assaulted the eyes of my virtue was a magnificent specimen of a lorette, all dressed in satin and black velvet, who in descending from her cabriolet, and with the insouciance of a goddess, allowed me to view her leg up to the navel.”

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

  Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, first holder of the chair of medical hygiene at the University of Paris, who wrote De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836), the first systematic study of the phenomenon, noticed a great many things, such as the class division in the profession as epitomized by the women’s noms de guerre. In the high-toned houses, they tended to sport such floral-scented labels as Aspasia, Sidonia, Azelina, Calliope, Lodoiska, Olympia; at the other end of the spectrum, among the women who worked the pavements around Les Halles or the Quartier de Bréda, you might find Belle-cuisse (Nice Thigh), Faux-cul (Fake Ass), La Ruelle (the Alley), Le Boeuf, Crucifix. It should be noted that the two groups were not mutually exclusive. Members of the first could all too easily wind up in the second as they aged or after they suffered illness or injury.

  “Of course the upper half is more beautiful than the lower half, but it’s also more expensive.” Illustration by Gavarni, from Les lorettes, 1841–43

  From time immemorial there had been whores around Les Halles, along Rue Saint-Denis and its dependencies, near Place de Grève, and in the Cité, especially on the long-gone Rue Glatigny, known as Val d’Amour. What these places had in common was that they were common ground—markets, squares, arteries where the classes were most likely to mix, this as distinct from purely working-class neighborhoods, such as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where street prostitution was rare and whorehouses were relatively few. With the opening of the new neighborhoods beyond the boulevards in the early nineteenth century, the landscape expanded. Notre-Dame-de-Lorette may have been noted for its better class of entraineuses, duly ensconced in plush apartments and seen primarily on their way to the theater, but it overlapped considerably with the Quartier de Bréda (centered on Rue de Bréda, since renamed Rue Henry-Monnier), which became the byword for basse prostitution, hard-up women living in poverty and working for small change, the two extremes coexisting so thoroughly that only class-ridden habits of mind can explain why the areas were thought of as distinct. Zola observed the phenomenon: “On the sidewalks of Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, two rows of women brushed the shop fronts, their skirts trussed up, their noses down, all business, hurrying toward the boulevards without glancing at the window displays. It was the famished descent of the Quartier de Bréda in the first glow of the gas lamps.”

  Sheet music for “Sur le trottoir” (On the pavement), by Fréhel, 1929

  Soon enough, as the city expanded yet again and another set of boulevards was opened, the Quartier de Bréda was absorbed by the larger and more robust nexus centered on Place Pigalle, which opened onto Boulevard de Clichy just one block north. (Even today, Pigalle presents the most visible face of the Parisian sex trade.) Not long after that, the lowest rung moved to the exterior boulevards, now the boulevards des maréchaux, which were co
nvenient to the Zone, the slaughterhouses and gasworks and factories, and were generally beneath the notice of the vice squad. Zola again, decades later, sets the scene:

  For almost twenty minutes they had been there, in the murk of the outer boulevard where prowled the lowest prostitution, the obscene vices of the poor neighborhoods. Drunks had jostled them, and the shadows of whores had grazed them as they came and went, chattering, under the curses and blows of their pimps. Sordid couples sought the darkness of the trees, stopped along benches, tucked themselves into recesses of indescribable filth. It was like that in the whole neighborhood, with dives all around and vile flophouses with their miserable assignation rooms, with no glass in the windows and no sheets on the bed.