The Invention of Paris (34 page)

La Bédollière, writing the history of the twenty new arrondissements of Paris, urged his readers to go and contemplate the last vestiges of the countryside while there was still time. At Ménilmontant, between Père-Lachaise and the new fortifications,

On the graceful slopes facing the sun and richly cultivated by our rural Parisians of the 20
^th
arrondissement, you find the Ratrait, an earthly paradise, an oasis where the workers of the neighbouring faubourgs used to regularly come and spend their Sundays and Mondays, a place of country delights of which soon only the memory will remain.
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In the 1880s, Huysmans wept over the disappearance of the Bièvre:

Fundamentally, the beauty of a landscape consists in its melancholy. So the Bièvre, with its attitude of desperation and the thoughtful look of one who has suffered, charms me more than anything else and I deplore as the utmost crime the destruction of its gullies and its trees. This suffering countryside, this threadbare stream, these ragged plains were all that were left to us and now they're going to cut them to pieces. They're going to . . . fill in the marshes, level the roads, tear up the dandelions and briars, the whole flora of rubbish dumps and wasteland . . . Have they never ever looked at this strange river, that outlet for all kinds of filth, that bilge-water the colour of slate and molten lead, seething here and there with greenish eddies and spangled with cloudy spittle, which gurgles into a sluice-gate and disappears, sobbing, into a hole in the wall?
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The most recent stratum of Paris, that of the villages, was not built up in the same way as the earlier ones, for which the faubourgs served as mentors for a radial and centrifugal urbanization. Here there were communes that predated the annexation by many centuries. They formed a corona of satellites, some of which, such as Montmartre or Belleville, still maintain a somewhat distant relationship with the city. The Paris of villages was archaic by its rural origin, and modern by its industrial future, an ambiguity that still gives it in places a particular charm, even if the old factories are now few and far between, and if, to preserve their material traces and memory, a strange discipline had to be created, that of ‘industrial archaeology'.

Of its ‘modern' side, there persists in the ring of villages one element that has marked the landscape, drawn borders and defined quarters – that of the railway. The big Paris train stations were built in the years from 1835 to 1850 within the wall of the Farmers-General, some of them right up against it (Gare du Nord, Gare de Lyon), others closer in (Gare de l'Est, Gare Saint-Lazare). In order to leave Paris, the railway had in any case to cross the stratum of villages. Despite electrification, these metal crossings still survive as fragments of the nineteenth century in the city of today, whether you discover them from suspended balconies such as Rue d'Alsace above the platforms of the Gare de l'Est or the Square des Batignolles with its cantilever over the rails of Saint-Lazare, from high points such as the esplanade of the Bibliothèque de France, from where you look down on the immense steel plain of the Gare d'Austerlitz, or find yourself on an island surrounded by rails on all sides, such as the triangle of the Évangile
between the tracks of the Gare de l'Est, the Gare du Nord, and the old Calberson warehouses, a kind of world's end linked to the mainland by the bridge of Rue Riquet – and it is only right that this long metal gangway thrown over the rails was named after the engineer who built the Canal du Midi in the eighteenth century.

Between La Chapelle and Barbès-Rochechouart, the overhead Métro that shakes and sparks on its metal bridges offers a double vista of the rails below and the glass roofs of the stations. As Paul Fargue wrote: ‘The noise of the Dauphine-Nation line, like the sound of a Zeppelin, accompanies the traveller right to those quarters surrounded by factory chimneys, the lakes of metal into which Rue d'Aubervilliers hurls itself like a river of paint. The wails of lost trains are the foundation of the landscape.'
⁹
And what about those landscapes that are offered gratis to the passenger arriving in Paris by train? For those coming from Yerres or Choisy-le-Roi, you have the Entrepôts Frigorifiques, the Grands Moulins de Paris and, in the distance, just before the engine shed of the Gare d'Austerlitz, the dome of the Salpêtrière; for those coming from Villeparisis or Aulnaysous-Bois, it is the canals, the heights of Buttes-Chaumont and the slopes of Montmartre. And the train always insinuates a certain disorder into the city, with piles of debris behind metal barriers, little abandoned triangles around signal boxes, where plants still grow that Huysmans saw on the banks of the Bièvre: ‘dandelions and briars, the whole flora of rubbish dumps and wasteland'.

In the more remote regions, the metal fences of goods-yards preserve spaces from another age. The Gare de Bercy, formerly the Gare de Rungis, the ends of Rues Bobillot, de Tolbiac, de Vaugirard, des Batignolles, d'Aubervilliers and de la Chapelle – all these urban hiatuses where pensioned-off locomotives pull stray wagons towards a flock of trains, or obscure instructions may be read on faded signs, you can pass without noticing, without seeing that they represent the stubborn survival of an age when the railway was one of the great bastions of the imagination. Far still from any kind of productivism, the Ceinture railway round Paris, built within the fortifications soon after the annexation of the villages, was for a long time both a great means of transport and a source of entertainment. During the 1870 siege, the Goncourt brothers took a tour round Paris and noted in their
Journal
: ‘An amusing spectacle, this vision rapid as steam, revealing, on emerging from the darkness of a tunnel, lines of white tents, lowered roads where guns are moving, the banks of a river with little crenellated parapets that have just been installed, canteens with their tables
and glasses open to the sky, with improvised waitresses who have sewn braid on the hem of their work jackets and skirts . . .'. Fargue, with friends at Auteuil, would take the train to return home: ‘We could make music all night after we missed the old boiler of the Ceinture train.'
¹⁰
And Dabit, when his parents took him as a child to an aunt at Belleville on a Sunday:

I gaily entered the station on Boulevard Ornano. A puffing engine arrived, pulling old carriages that struck me as splendid, even the thirdclass ones that we got into. The locomotive covered the landscape with smoke, and Mama told me to sit down: ‘You'll get black as a coalman.' Soon I asked her: ‘Are we getting near?' She replied: ‘Don't be silly, you know we have to go through the Buttes-Chaumont tunnel first.' . . . Suddenly, after the Belleville-Villette station, the train entered a cutting with a whistle, as if saying goodbye to the daylight. When we emerged from underground it was time to get up, we were reaching the Ménilmontant station.
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The remnants of the Petite Ceinture still punctuate village Paris – tracks in cuttings across the hills of Belleville and Ménilmontant, the metal struts of the bridges of Avenue Jean-Jaurès, Rue d'Avron or Rue de Vaugirard. Its stations have the look of the places it used to serve – pink and flowery Muette, down-at-heel Charonne with its café La Flèche d'Or, suspended over the tracks and frequented by the youth of the quarter. La Bédollière would be quite astonished, having written that, ‘if Charonne is poor in buildings, it possesses one establishment that is a guarantee of future prosperity for this part of the capital: I mean the Ceinture railway. This important line, which makes a link between Bordeaux and Lille, Marseille and Cherbourg, has a station at Charonne that has already attracted a number of industries.'
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All these welcoming spaces are threatened today. There is talk of covering them over and having the land this generates developed by semipublic companies. Such an operation has already been carried out above the TGV tracks at the Gare Montparnasse, constructing an ‘Atlantic garden' whose principal merit is to be almost undiscoverable. The operation ‘Seine–Rivegauche' considered covering the tracks leading out of the Gare d'Austerlitz. This process has already been begun a little further out: between the Entrepôts Frigorifiques and Le Corbusier's Cité de Refuge a ‘paved
garden' is currently being built above the rails. After so many horrors, one might think this very term would be proscribed, that for once the ‘duty of memory' would be put to some use. But nothing of the kind; multicoloured posters surrounding the construction site proclaim that, under the direction of Christian de Portzamparc, the regime's official architect, the firm of Bruno Fortier has been commissioned to build a ‘paved garden' that will crush everything that remains of the poor Rue du Chevaleret, its residences for African workers, its dilapidated flowering courtyards, its Doisneau-type charm. This is far from being the first assault on this sector in the name of town planning. The magazine
Potlach
, 3 August 1954: ‘Rue Sauvage is being destroyed . . . in the 13
^th
arrondissement, despite its offering the most striking nighttime perspective of the capital, between the tracks of the Gare d'Austerlitz and a region of derelict land on the edge of the Seine.'
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Just nearby, the cast-iron columns, steel beams and struts of the magnificent Rue Watt have recently been drowned in concrete. The principal arteries of the new quarter programmatically bear the names of Jean Anouilh, François Mauriac and Raymond Aron. Not Jean Genet, nor Samuel Beckett, nor Nathalie Sarraute, nor yet Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze. I recall the final catastrophic projects of Haussmann, which only the defeat of Sedan prevented: ‘Rue de Rennes is to be extended in a straight line as far as the Seine, and, with the help of a new bridge, will link up with the old Rue des Poulies, which will be extended right into the Halles. The centre of Paris will thus not only be linked with the
banlieue
, but also with a whole group of departments, of which the nearer ones contribute to its provisioning.'
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I also recall the great projects of Pompidou, the Vercingétorix radial designed to spill out at Denfert-Rochereau all the traffic from the south of Paris, the Left Bank expressway, the Canal Saint-Martin covered over and converted into a motorway. These follies were only avoided by illness and death. What disasters do we need in order to keep the Paris railways open to the sky?

Among the communes annexed in 1860, some, such as Auteuil and La Chapelle, have kept their name and their character. Other districts were simply absorbed and melted into the capital without keeping the traces of their village origins – in particular the intramural portions of those
communes cut in two by the ‘
fortifs
'. Not many people know that the Bibliothèque de France was built on a fragment of the old commune of Ivry, that the Parc Montsouris quarter belonged to Gentilly, or that the Ranelagh gardens and Rue Spontini were seized from the commune of Neuilly. Perhaps only the region between the Lion de Denfert and the Porte d'Orléans retained for many years the memory of its origins: ‘I have settled now in Petit-Montrouge, in the 14
^th
arrondissement', wrote Henri Calet,
¹⁵
a turn of phrase that would not have surprised my schoolfriends at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand who lived on Avenue d'Orléans in the 1950s.

But for one of the annexed villages to have kept a distinct identity, it is not enough that it was absorbed complete, as the examples of Vaugirard and Grenelle show
a contrario
, their past now being rather drowned in the monotony of the 15
^th
arrondissement. Another condition was necessary, this being geographical. Either it was bordered and insulated by steep slopes, like Montmartre, Belleville–Ménilmontant–Charonne or the Butte-aux-Cailles – and it was not by chance that these were the main points of final resistance during the Bloody Week of May 1871. Or it was united and organized by an artificial element, such as the Ourcq canal for La Villette, or the railways for the Batignolles. Or finally, it was in an extreme position in relation to the city, as was the long and narrow peninsula formed by the villages of Passy and Auteuil between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne.

On the Left Bank, for these reasons, the quarters formed from the stratum of villages – more or less the 13
^th
, the southern part of the 14
^th
, and the 15
^th
arrondissements – are not superimposed on the original communes, whose memory has been blurred. This region is a mixture of old quarters from the former
banlieue
(Javel, Plaisance, the Butte-aux-Cailles), recent nuclei formed around a pole of attraction (the quarter of Parc Montsouris), and phantoms like that of the Bièvre, today underground but in an earlier time terrible: ‘The night of Wednesday, 1 April 1579, the river of Saint-Marceau, in the wake of the rain of the previous days, rose to a height of fourteen or fifteen feet, demolishing a number of mills, walls and houses, drowning many people surprised in
their houses and beds, destroying a large quantity of cattle and causing tremendous damage.'
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For those unfamiliar with it, the 15
^th
arrondissement amounts to an interminable walk down Route de Sèvres (now Rue Lecourbe) or Route d'Issy (Rue de Vaugirard), reminding us that Vaugirard was a street-village that stretched from the wall of the Farmers-General to the slopes of Issy and its windmills. Many do not know where the border between Vaugirard and Grenelle is situated – though this ignorance is not without its historic reasons, since Grenelle was part of the Vaugirard commune until 1830. The southern part, which is still Vaugirard, was in the late eighteenth century a region for holidays, where Parisians of a certain class had their country houses in fine parks, surrounded by vineyards and market gardens. Grenelle, on the contrary, was a large agricultural plain bordered by the Seine. This is where Parmentier undertook his first experiments in growing potatoes. On a map of 1813 there is no house to be seen, and only two roads cross the wide expanse of fields, the ancestors of Rue de Lourmel and Rue de la Croix-Nivert. In 1830, Théophile Gautier could still write to Arsène Houssaye: ‘This morning I swum across the Seine to see my princess, who was waiting for me on the other bank, gathering cornflowers among the wheat of Grenelle.'
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