The Invention of Paris (3 page)

It might be objected that Montmartre is a special case, not just a quarter like any other, being both a district on the map of Paris and a historical–cultural myth, with a different boundary in each of these senses. But isn't this ambiguity the very mark of quarters with a strong identity? And if such an identity is lacking, can one even talk of a quarter? Such questions lead, as we shall see, to a more general one: what, fundamentally, is a Paris quarter?

The administrative divisions – twenty
arrondissements,
with four
quartiers
in each – give the beginnings of a reply
a contrario:
a list of this kind, quite abstract and without any ranking, is only useful for the tax office and the police. But it is by no means certain that more subtle procedures would be able to define a basic urban unit for Paris, where the term ‘quarter', despite its ancient roots in the language and its apparent simplicity, is far from denoting anything homogeneous and comparable. Saint-Germain-des-Près, the Plaine Monceau and the Évangile, for example, are all three of them Paris quarters – each has its history, its boundaries, its map, its architecture, its population and its activities. The first, developing over the centuries on the territory of the great abbey and grouping very ancient streets around the ‘modern' intersection of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue de Rennes, has kept nothing of the postwar years in which it was so celebrated, and has fallen into the sterility of a museum. The second, planted out by the Pereire brothers in the mid nineteenth century – a ‘luxury quarter sprouting amid the wastelands of the old Plaine Monceau' – is that of Nana, in her ‘Renaissance-style hôtel, with the air of a palace'. Marked by the memory of the academic ‘
artistes pompiers
' who were among its original inhabitants – Meissonier, Rochegrosse, Boldini, Carrier-Belleuse – this is a typical residential quarter, and the successors of the business bourgeoisie of the Second Empire still occupy its neo-Gothic and neo-Palladian
hôtels particuliers
today. The Évangile, at the end of the world between the railway tracks of the Nord and the Est, is built on a bit of the former village of La Chapelle, where the contractors who carted out the Paris refuse came to dump their load. (‘Tumbrils carry off muck and filth, which is spilled into the nearby countryside: woe to any who find themselves neighbour to these infected mounds', wrote Sébastien Mercier.
⁶
) The monstrous gasometers that lined the Rue de l'Évangile are no longer to be seen, but the Calvary photographed by Atget is still in place, and the covered market of La Chapelle is one of the most colourful in Paris.

The customary oppositions of east/west, Left Bank/Right Bank, or centre/periphery are too simplistic to account for this diversity, and sometimes out of date. We have to look elsewhere, especially in the city's particular mode of growth. Nowhere else in Europe has a great capital developed in the same way as Paris, with such discontinuity and in so irregular a rhythm. And what gave the city this rhythm was the centrifugal succession of its walled precincts. Cities without walls – apart from those strictly organized on a rectangular grid, like Turin, Manhattan, or Lisbon as laid out by the Marquis de Pombal – grew up any which way, like the tentacles of an octopus, or a bacterial plaque multiplying in its culture. In London, Berlin or Los Angeles, the city limits and the shapes of districts are vague and variable: ‘The rampant proliferation of the immense megalopolis that is Tokyo gives the impression of a silkworm eating a mulberry leaf . . . The form of such a city is unstable, its border an ambiguous zone in constant movement . . . It is an incoherent space spreading without order or markers, its limits only poorly defined.'
⁷

Paris, on the other hand, so often threatened, besieged, or invaded, has from the dawn of time been constrained by its city walls. This has always given it a more or less regular circular form, and it has only been able to extend in a succession of dense and concentric rings. From the wall of Philippe Auguste to the modern Périphérique, six different walls followed one another in the course of eight centuries – without counting reinforcement, retouching or partial correction. The scenario has always been the same. A new wall is constructed, with broad dimensions that afford free space around the area already built up. But this space is rapidly covered over. Available land within the walls becomes increasingly scarce, buildings are pressed together, plots filled up, and the growing density makes life difficult. Meanwhile, outside the walls, and despite the laws against it – a constant over many centuries and political regimes, but never respected (this is the zone
non aedificandi
, which Parisians little familiar with Latin quickly came to call simply the
zone,
a word still in use today
⁸
) – houses

with pleasant gardens are constructed in the faubourgs. When the
intramuros
concentration becomes intolerable, these faubourgs are absorbed into the city and the cycle begins again:

Philippe Auguste . . . imprisons Paris in a circular chain of great towers, both lofty and solid. For a period of more than a century, the houses press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their level in this basin, like water in a reservoir. They begin to deepen; they pile storey upon storey; they mount up on each other; they gush forth at the top, like all laterally compressed growth, and there is a rivalry as to which shall thrust its head above its neighbours, for the sake of getting a little air. The street grows narrower and deeper, every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The houses finally leap the wall of Philippe Auguste and scatter joyfully over the plain, without order and all askew, like runaways. There they plant themselves squarely, cut themselves gardens from the fields, and take their ease. Beginning with 1367, the city spreads to such an extent into the suburbs that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the Right Bank; Charles V builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetually growing . . . So Charles V's wall suffers the fate of that of Philippe Auguste. At the end of the fifteenth century, the faubourg strides across it, passes beyond it, and extends further.
⁹

Like the growth rings of a tree, quarters between any two walls are contemporary, even if space was not filled at the same pace at all points on the circumference – the west side and the Left Bank always lagging behind. The same era and the same conception of the city explains why Belleville and Passy have many things in common, both finding themselves in the same stratum, only belatedly annexed to Paris and both maintaining certain features of Île-de-France villages – the high street, church and cemetery, the theatre (now ‘municipal'), the lively central square where cakes are bought for Sunday. Analogies of this kind can be found not just in the faubourgs but at the very heart of the city, yet since the movement of Paris more often follows a radius than a circular arc, the diachronic diversity is more visible than the affinity between contemporary quarters.

Of Paris's two medieval fortifications,
¹⁰
the older, built under Philippe Auguste around 1200, has left its clearest traces on the Left Bank, where it circumscribed the ‘Université' on the north slope of the Montagne Saint-Geneviève (these ‘traces' are not old stones and archaeological remnants,
which can be found on both banks, but rather the still apparent urban consequences, as can be read on a map or noted on foot). This wall started from the Seine at the Tour Nesle, where the Institut de France now stands. Its counterscarp followed the line of what is now Rue Mazarine (formerly Fossés-Saint-Germain) as far as the Porte de Buci, the direction in which Paris faced the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The wall then continued along Rue Monsieur-le-Prince (formerly ‘Fossés-Monsieur-le-Prince'), which still marks, and not by chance, the boundary between the Latin and the Odéon quarters. It reached the top of the Montagne Saint-Geneviève, where the names of streets and squares still perpetuate its memory: Fossés-Saint-Jacques, Estrapade, Contrescarpe. It then descended towards the Seine in a straight line, following Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor (now Cardinal-Lemoine) and Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, reaching the river at the tower of La Tournelle.
¹¹

Despite breaches and destruction, eight centuries later the ghost of this wall still defines the Latin Quarter. It is in this semi-ellipse – the neighbourhood of the Cordeliers refectory, the ossuary of Saint-Séverin, the robinia tree of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, around the Rue de la Harpe, Place Maubert, and behind the Collège de France – that a medieval layout still survives on the Left Bank: one of narrow plots in a dense and unbroken tissue, a whirl of streets going in all directions. To experience this, you need only leave the Sorbonne and cross the precinct, climb Rue Saint-Jacques as far as Rue des Ursulines, Rue des Feuillantines beloved by Victor Hugo, Rue Lhomond and Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée. Here, the high walls, trees and gardens glimpsed behind fences, the calm and regular pattern of the plan, show that you are
extra muros,
in a relaxed space, on the lands of former convents, along the roads leading to Orléans and Italy.

Since July 1789, when the Bastille was destroyed and its stones made into souvenirs – just as fragments of the Berlin wall would be sold exactly two centuries later – there is nothing left of the wall of Charles V: its curtain, its rampart walk, its fortress gates, its bastions used for evening strolls, its moats where people fished with rods. Nothing physical, at least.
¹²
But its route

along the ancient course of the Seine is still one of the fundamental lines of the city structure, completing in a wide circular arc the rectilinear plan inherited from the Romans. Between the Bastille and the Porte Saint-Denis, the noble curve of the boulevards that today bear the names of Beaumarchais, Filles-du-Calvaire, Temple and Saint-Martin precisely matches the line of the old wall. The design of the Grands Boulevards was already prefigured.
¹³

This wall would last a good while. Reinforced by great bastions under Henri II, doubled here and there to face up to the Spanish artillery, it defended a Paris ruled by the Ligue against the forces of Henri III and Henri IV. Half a century later it would challenge royal power for a final time, in the magnificent episode of the Fronde, when La Grande Mademoiselle – Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans – had the guns of the Bastille fired against Turenne's army, to cover the retreat of Condé's forces through the Porte Saint-Antoine.

Louis XIV, as a child, had to flee from Paris under the Fronde. In the 1670s, he ordered the old wall to be razed and an avenue of trees planted in its place, making a walkway more than thirty metres wide right round the city. Those in charge of this unprecedented project, François Blondel and Pierre Bullet, drew a line that followed the old wall from the Arsenal and the Bastille to the Porte Saint-Denis, continuing in a line that is now that of the Grands Boulevards up to the site of the Madeleine. The route then reached the Seine via the Rue des Fossés-des-Tuileries, passing the far end of the gardens and the present Rue Royale.
¹⁴
This was ‘an avenue planted in three lines, the one in the middle being sixteen yards wide . . . bordered by walls of dressed stone, thanks to the gentlemen provosts of merchants, who were also responsible for the conduct of all these ramparts and avenues that serve the public as a promenade. It has been ordered that ditches twelve yards wide will be left, as a course for the city sewer . . . and within the rampart a paved street four yards wide.'
¹⁵

Established on the former fortifications, Louis XIV's avenue received the
name
boulevard
, which entered current usage and was used for a number of Paris boundaries, with slippages that can cause confusion today. In the nineteenth century, the boulevard that took the place of the wall of the Farmers-General was called the ‘external' boulevard (Goncourt brothers'
Journal
, just after the destruction of the wall: ‘I walked along the external boulevards widened by the suppression of the rampart walk. The aspect is completely changed. The
guinguettes
have disappeared'). ‘External' is used here as opposed to the ‘internal' boulevard, that of Louis XIV, which, in its segment running from the Châteaud'Eau to the Madeleine, had become permanently known as the Grands Boulevards, or simply the Boulevards (‘The Boulevards may be compared to two hemispheres. Their antipodes are the Madeleine and the Bastille. The equator is the Boulevard Montmartre, where warmth and life flourish.'
¹⁶
). Later, in the 1920s, when Thiers's fortifications had been demolished, the label ‘external' came to be applied to the boulevard constructed in their place (Francis Carco: ‘In the scattered bars of the external boulevards, and the sloping streets that join them, he would enter with the air of waiting for someone unknown'
¹⁷
). The boulevard of the Farmers-General suddenly lost this name and never found a new one in the Paris vocabulary. In the 1960s, with the building of the Périphérique – and no doubt to avoid confusion between the ‘external boulevards' and this ‘external' Périphérique, dear to ladies who listen to the radio for news of Paris traffic jams – a new expression appeared to denote the boulevards that had taken the place of the ‘
fortifs
': the ‘boulevards of the marshals'.

It will be helpful if I use the term ‘Old Paris' for the part within the boulevard of Louis XIV, and ‘New Paris' for the part outside. This New Paris is itself divided into two concentric rings. Between the boulevard of Louis XIV and the wall of the Farmers-General is the ring of the faubourgs; between the wall of the Farmers-General and the ‘boulevards of the marshals' is the ring of the villages of the crown. But this is not just a matter of names. Whenever Paris advanced from one boundary to the next, this signaled a time of changes in technology, society and politics. The shift in stones and ditches was not the cause; it was rather as if the emergence of a new epoch led both to the obsolescence of the old walls and to transformations in the city's life.