The Invention of Paris (24 page)

This was the first time in the history of Paris that a crowd paraded with red flags at its head without being gunned down.

The present Faubourg retains few material traces of this glorious past, and only the friends of Red Paris mentally raise their hats when they cross Rue Charles-Delescluze and remember that at the crossroads of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine and Rue de Cotte they are on the site of the barricade where the representative of the people Alphonse Baudin was killed for twenty-five francs.
³³
But even if the proximity of the Bastille Opera now disagreeably contaminates the first few metres of the Faubourg, even if Rue de Lappe, long since deserted by the Auvergnats, is no longer the haven that it once was for modern art,
³⁴
still the Aligre market, the fountains on the corner of Rue de Charonne and in the square in front of the Saint-Antoine hospital, the courtyards where illustrators and computer buffs, Chinese artisans and photographers, work cheek by jowl – this unique mixture maintains the quarter's identity as plebeian and industrious. If, taking up Marcel Duchamp's idea, we should manufacture cans of Air de Paris, it is certainly that of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine with which I would fill mine.

To the south, Rue de Charenton separates the Faubourg Saint-Antoine from the quarter of the Gare de Lyon – one of ill repute since the late 1970s, specially the Chalon block famous for its squats, dope dealers, and Vietnamese restaurants where you could get a meal for 10 francs, now eradicated and replaced by an ensemble of underground streets, express-ways, and office towers with reflective curtain walls. The northern limit of the faubourg is rather more vague: we could choose either Rue de Charonne, which led to the
octroi
wall at the Fontarabie barrier (now Métro Alexandre-Dumas), or Rue de la Roquette, another old street with Auvergnat connections (the present Bastille theatre was still in 1965 a dance hall that preserved the culture of the
bourrée
, ‘Le Massif-Central'), ending up on the boulevard at the Aunay barrier, opposite the main entrance to Père-Lachaise.

Between the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and its northern neighbour, the Faubourg du Temple, is the Popincourt quarter.
³⁵
This old centre of Protestantism was – and still is – organized around two major transversals. One of these, leading from Temple to the Saint-Antoine abbey, is now Rues de la Folie-Méricourt, Popincourt, and Basfroi (the two latter, devoted to the wholesale fashion trade – now run by Asians – are like a second Sentier). The other, the road from Saint-Denis to Saint-Maur, now corresponds to the sequence of Rue Saint-Maur, Rue Léon-Frot and Rue des Boulets, extended eastward by Rue de Picpus. The grid was completed by three radials, more or less parallel to Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple: Rue du Chemin-Vert, Rue de Ménilmontant (now Oberkampf), and Rue d'Angoulême (now Jean-Pierre-Timbaud), which continued through Rue des Trois-Bornes and Rue des Trois-Couronnes until the barrier of that name (now Métro Couronnes). This was the site of the Delta gardens, whose great attraction was the Montagnes Françaises, ‘where so many fragile bonneted virtues came a cropper, alongside bold sellers of novelties commonly known as “
calicots
” [counter-jumpers]'.
³⁶

Industry in the Popincourt quarter only dates from the nineteenth century. More recent than that of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, it is also less specialized. On Rue Popincourt or Rue Saint-Maur alongside the Saint-Louis hospital, successive working-class courtyards, remarkably deep, are more reminiscent of the Berlin
Mietskasernen
of the late nineteenth
century than the passages of Rue du Cheval-Blanc or Rue de la Main-d'Or: ‘These courtyards shelter an entire population . . . The proprietor, a large manufacturer, installed a steam engine there for his factory; but, wishing to attract small workshops, he had all of his ground floors, i.e., a length of over a hundred metres, transversed by the axle of his machine, so that he could rent out to each of his tenants, along with accommodation, a belt to which they could fit a machine.'
³⁷

Where Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple crosses the Canal Saint-Martin there are two facing statues, each going back to the years of Parisian Romanticism. On the right as you come down is the bust of the greatest actor of the day, Frédérick Lemaître, famous for the role of Robert Macaire in
L'Auberge des Adrets
, illustrious as Vautrin and Don César de Bazan, as much at home on the Boulevard du Crime as at the Ambigu or the Gymnase (‘Sublime gestures, in short', wrote Baudelaire. ‘Delacroix is only rivalled outside of his own art. I scarcely know any others except Frédérick Lemaître and Macready.'
³⁸
) On the other side of the street is the standing figure of a young woman with uncertain features, who offers the passerby the flowers that she holds in her turned-up apron. She is
La Grisette de 1830
, the term being defined by the Robert dictionary as ‘a girl of petty condition (generally a factory worker or employed in tailoring, fashion, lingerie . . .) with bold and easy manners'. In
La Caricature
for 6 January 1831, Balzac evoked ‘these little creatures nice enough to eat, with their mischievous air, turned-up nose, short dress and well-turned legs, who are known as
grisettes
'.

The date of 1830 is not a reference to the Trois Glorieuses, but rather to a regular event that took place on that site in these years: the
descente de la Courtille
.
³⁹
In the early morning of Ash Wednesday, from the 1820s until after June 1848, this parade marked the end of Carnival. It was a ritual whose apparent gaiety did not manage to conceal its latent violence. Privat d'Anglemont, a prince of the bohemian world, gave a nostalgic description of it:

Ah, the descent from the Courtille, that was a real bacchanalia of the French people! What a crowd, what confusion! What cries, what noise!
Pyramids of men and women clinging to carriages, hurling abuse at each other across the street, a whole city in the street . . . we might say, with no exaggeration, that
tout Paris
was there. Everyone said: ‘It's monstrous, depraved', but the most refined society, duchesses in domino masks and short-skirted women of easy virtue in their dishevelled finery, courtesans dressed up as bold fishwives, bourgeois as peasants or Swiss milkmaids, hastened at four in the morning to leave the salons of the Opera, the subscription balls, the theatres, and even, we have to say, official balls, to make their way there . . . There was no good Carnival without a noisy descent from the Courtille; every window was rented a month in advance, with crazy prices paid . . . People spilled out of the cheap dance halls, and were everywhere, even on the rooftops; all you could see were heads, all shouting, crying out, splashing each other with wine. Carriages arrived filled with masked figures, and took three hours to get from the boulevard to the
barrière
. . . People bawled at each other from carriage to carriage, from house windows to carriages, from the street to the windows; each group had its especially loudmouthed character, a kind of rasping corncrake with lungs of steel, whose job was to respond to everyone else.
⁴⁰

The voice of working-class consciousness was quite different. Benjamin Gastineau, a typographer and former colleague of Proudhon's, hated the Carnival and had a particular horror of the descent from the Courtille, in which he saw the brutalization of his brothers and the degradation of his sisters:

People expelled from the taverns who make their way there drunk and staggering, trampling over those who fall, women wearing policemen's caps over their ears and a broken pipe between their teeth, disguised as clowns, pierrettes, fishwives or urchins . . . women dishevelled, filthy, with disordered hair, the stupefied look of those exhausted by vice, green lips, crumpled breasts, stained clothes . . .
⁴¹

In terms curiously close to this proletarian moralism, Alfred de Musset expresses his hatred of the people through the character Octave in
The Confession of a Child of the Century
:

The first time I saw the people – it was a frightful morning of Ash Wednesday, near La Courtille . . . Masked carriages filed hither and thither, crowding between hedges of hideous men and women standing on the sidewalks. That sinister wall of spectators had tiger eyes, red with wine, gleaming with hatred . . . from time to time a man in rags would step out from the wall, hurl a torrent of abuse at us, then cover us with a cloud of flour . . . I began to understand the time and comprehend the spirit of the age.
⁴²

The construction of the wall of the Farmers-General turned the geography of the Courtille taverns upside down. Previously, from the Regency to the beginning of Louis XVI's reign, the quarter had been dominated by the Ramponeau phenomenon. This establishment, with the sign of the Tambour-Royal, occupied the corner of Rue Saint-Maur and Rue de l'Orillon.
⁴³
Its sign showed the landlord astride a barrel, and below this the lines: ‘See France run to the barrel [
tonneau
]/that serves as throne to Monsieur Ramponeau.' ‘The name Ramponeau,' wrote Mercier, ‘was a thousand times better known to the multitude than those of Voltaire or Buffon.' Almost a century later, Delvau still offered an amazed image:

Ramponeau! What a character! He created almost as much noise as a battle in his journey through this world. The people had adopted him, and wanted no one else . . . He was spoken of everywhere, from alleys to high circles, from the breakfasts of duchesses to the suppers of actresses, to the point that the entire world of fashion, so frivolous and idle, forgot the disgrace of M. de Choiseul [1770] and his exile, in their concern for
the Courtille that made such a row, and the rabble that flaunted themselves there in such good spirits.

But when the Farmers-General's wall increased the duties on wine in Paris, the taverns migrated to the other side of the
barrière
, at the foot of Belleville. On the night of Mardi Gras, before the descent from Courtille, revellers would get drunk at Favié's or Desnoyers', the fashionable establishment of those years:

The great
guinguette
of the immortal Desnoyers, and a number of others whose gigantic saloons filled up in winter with thousands of families, and their gardens in summer, with dancing men and women who had not received their lessons from conservatory professors. No one gave any heed to the Greeks, or the 3 per cent stocks, or the Jesuits, or the Holy Alliance, or the republic of Haiti. All they had in mind was having a good drink, a good feed, and a good dance.
⁴⁴

Even those most strapped for cash could try their luck at Guillotin's. As Vidocq wrote:

The Guillotin I refer to here was simply a modest adulterator of wine, whose establishment, well known to thieves of the lowest level, was situated opposite Desnoyers' filthy dive, which the tipplers of the
barrière
called the ‘Grand salon de La Courtille'. Even the scum of the earth thought twice about crossing the threshold of Guillotin's tavern, with the result that the only people you saw in this receptacle were prostitutes and their pimps, hoodlums of all kinds, a few low-class swindlers, and a good number of disturbers of the night, intrepid denizens of the faubourgs, who divided their existence into two parts, one devoted to rioting, the other to theft.
⁴⁵

These famous establishments disappeared without leaving any other trace than some street names, but as if to prove that there is indeed some such thing as the spirit of a place, Rue Oberkampf, Rue Jean-Pierre-Timbaud and Rue Saint-Maur have seen in recent years the birth of a new generation of cafés, restaurants and bars that are often characterized as
branchés
[cool], a vague term that also says something of the character of the times. Fortunately,
the working-class population of the quarter (‘working-class' today meaning ‘immigrant') contains and waters down this phenomenon. Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple remains one of the most ‘amalgamated' in Paris, just as in Privat's time. You can eat Turkish and Chinese food – ‘Planète Istanbul' standing cheek-by-jowl with ‘Les Folies de Sin-Wang' – as well as Pakistani, Malian, Tunisian, Greek or Cambodian. You can buy halal meat, all the spices of the East, every kind of rice, mysterious African vegetables and Chinese wedding cakes a metre and a half tall, topped by dancing couples in a tender embrace, their various tiers each bearing a gaggle of children. The garment factories are at work in every courtyard by eight in the morning. In the Pakistani shops you can find Korean toasters and paper flowers, plastic stools, bundles of mats, and imitation Italian
cafetières
. Above Rue Saint-Maur, ‘Mabel' offers a choice of holy statuettes from all religions, along with bath oils, love potions, hairpieces, incense, and a liquid that protects against magic spells. The very narrow shop fronts have multicoloured signs that offer cut-price phone calls to the Comoros, Ethiopia, Paraguay or Togo. Not to mention the countless shops for mobile phones and trainers, suitcases with wheels and socks at ten francs for three pairs. Rue Faubourg-du-Temple, often dirty, always noisy and busy, boasts two theatres, the Palais des Glaces with its gigantic wooden elephant, and a tiny stage on the corner of the Passage Piver that has taken the name of Tambour-Royal in homage to Ramponeau, as well as a hammam, two dance halls, and five tobacconists. ‘It's a whole little world in itself,' as Privat d'Anglemont already said a hundred and fifty years ago, ‘this great rise that starts at one boulevard and ends on another. It is a kind of free zone, the Latin Quarter of the Right Bank. Everyone there lives just as they please, without being bothered by their neighbours.'