The Invention of Paris (25 page)

In the mid nineteenth century the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Popincourt quarter and the Faubourg du Temple formed a region where the working and ‘dangerous' classes were concentrated to an alarming degree. This is why the region was the object of Haussmann's full attention. On any map of Paris you can see how brutally the immense Place de la République was implanted on an old and delicate urban fabric. And this brutality is equally manifest in the square itself, which was flanked by two monumental buildings: the Magasins-Réunis (still today a consumerist temple, combining Habitat, Go Sport, Gymnase Club and Holiday Inn), and the Prince-Eugène barracks built on the site of Daguerre's Diorama. The strategic importance of this barracks, with wide avenues converging on the square in a star, was clear enough at the time, even for a polemicist of the Catholic right such as Louis Veuillot:

There is also the Prince-Eugène barracks, which is a fine building, and the boulevard brings the barracks into communication with the Château de Vincennes, which is not a small castle. Vincennes is at one end, the barracks at the other, and alongside it the boulevard leading to the square of the former Bastille.
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This is a rectangular barracks able to house a few thousand men, who could fire in all four directions: a double crossfire. It would be a dangerous spot for any subversive ideas that might take their chance here.
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In the same way, the Reuilly barracks controlled the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, crosshatched by Avenue Daumesnil, Boulevards Mazas (now Diderot), du Prince-Eugène (Voltaire) and de la Reine-Hortense (Richard-Lenoir). Haussmann was quite explicit. When he explained to Napoleon III that it was possible to lower the water level of the Canal Saint-Martin, and cover it over so that Boulevard de la Reine-Hortense could cross it, he exulted: ‘I have rarely seen my august sovereign enthusiastic. This time he was so without reserve, so great an importance did he place . . . on the work by means of which I proposed to remove the permanent obstacle
. . . to the line of control from which one could, in case of need, take the Faubourg Saint-Antoine from the rear.'

Whilst the Faubourg Saint-Antoine stretched broadly across the plateau of eastern Paris, the Faubourg du Temple abutted the hill of Belleville, making this quarter a narrower one. The road to Meaux and Germany avoided the high ground, taking Rue du Buisson-Saint-Louis and exiting Paris through the Barrière de la Chopinette (‘where Parisians would go to celebrate St Monday, and drink like canons', says Delvau). You could also take Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, which led to the Pantin
barrière
, later commonly known as the Barrière du Combat:
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Since 1781 a circus like the one in Madrid has been held outside the Barrière de Pantin, on the corner of the present Rue de Meaux and opposite Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles . . . Its bulls were most commonly wolves, bears, deer, donkeys and bulldogs, which you could watch tear each other's guts out for the petty sum of 65 centimes for a third-class seat . . . At the beginning, people of fashion patronized this parody of the bloody games of the Madrid circus. Fine gentlemen and beautiful ladies were not afraid to brave the exhalations of this municipal Lake Stymphalos and would arrive to attend the authorized butchery.
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We may wonder which was the greater transgression, that of the elegant lady spectators at the Combat in the final years of the ancien régime, or that of the voters for Balladur who recently betook themselves just opposite, to the premises of the ‘Communist' party, to attend the Prada fashion parade in the famous Oscar Niemeyer building.

Between the Faubourg du Temple and the Faubourg Saint-Martin there is a border zone on either side of the canal, ‘the Versailles and the Marseille of this proud and strong district'.
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On the further bank of the canal, most of this space is taken up by the Saint-Louis hospital, one of the oldest in the city – it was on his way to inaugurate the chapel there that Henri IV was assassinated – as well as the finest, along with the Salpêtrière. Between the hospital and the Boulevard de la Villette a few little old streets, such as Rue Saint-Marthe and Rue Jean-Moinon, have strongly resisted destruction in an overall context of poverty and dilapidation. On the near side, there was the idea under the Restoration of building along the canal a ‘Place
du Marais', the site of which is today marked by Rue de Marseille, Rue Léon-Jouhaux (formerly Rue Samson and later Rue de la Douane
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) and Rue Yves-Toudic (formerly Rue des Marais-du-Temple). All that remains of this abortive project is the Douanes customs warehouse – rebuilt in the 1930s on the site of the old one, which stretched to the water's edge – and some very regular streets where the wholesale carpet trade recalls the customs activity of the previous century.

If you turn your back on the canal and set out towards the Grands Boulevards, neoclassical elegance soon replaces business wealth. Rue de Lancry, Rue des Vinaigriers, Rue de Bondy (now René-Boulanger) and the Cité Riverin offer a thousand and one variations on decorative themes that were fashionable when David was working on
The Oath of the Horatii
. Between Boulevard Magenta and the Passage des Marais, the Cité du Wauxhall, reached through a neo-Palladian portico, reminds us that

on the corner of Rue de Bondy and Rue de Lancry an Italian firework-maker called Torré opened a large theatre in 1764, where he put on pantomimes in which fireworks played a great role. In 1769 this theatre was rebuilt and given the name of the Wauxhall d'Été. In 1782 this Wauxhall, known now as the Fêtes de Tempé, enjoyed a tremendous vogue. It was a kind of love exchange, in which deals of
galanterie
were made, and marketable assets of this kind were cashed. This was where the Prince de Soubise made the acquisition of a very pretty girl, the niece of Mlle Lamy, who remained his mistress for many years.
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The two faubourgs of Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, false twins separated by Boulevard de Strasbourg, are each themselves divided in two – by the Gare de l'Est in the first case, and the Gare du Nord in the second. One
might believe it was the enormous footprint of the stations that broke their continuity, but in actual fact this break long predates the railway. It was made by two religious establishments whose remaining vestiges do not give any idea of their great size – Saint-Laurent and Saint-Lazare. The faubourg that today bears the name of Saint-Martin was for many years known as Saint-Laurent in its upper part, as far as the Barrière de La Villette (now Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad). In the same way, the present Faubourg Saint-Denis was formerly known as Faubourg Saint-Lazare, between the convent-hospital-prison and the Barrière de La Chapelle. And there is no doubt that it was precisely this old discontinuity that guided the siting of the stations.

In their oldest sections, between the triumphal gates and glass roofs of the stations, there is the same difference between the two streets as between the well-mannered Rue Saint-Martin and the violent Rue Saint-Denis. The Faubourg Saint-Martin is broad, flat, and rectilinear, only enlivened by the silhouette of the
mairie
of the 10
^th
arrondissement. It spills out in front of the station in a triangular place, where the ‘Armurerie Gare de l'Est', the brasserie ‘Au Triomphe de l'Est', shops selling work clothes, the apse of the Saint-Laurent church and the wall of the former monastery of the Récollets form a landscape that could be in Metz or Mulhouse – such mimetism often makes the surroundings of Parisian stations similar to those of the destinations of the trains that leave from them.

Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis begins, in the shadow of the Porte Saint-Denis, with a noisy and busy large market, Turkish for the most part, as is the gloomy Passage du Prado, an ‘L' shape between the Faubourg and Boulevard Saint-Denis, the domain of the sewing machine, including secondhand ones and repair shops. The Faubourg then climbs in a curve up to Boulevard Magenta. The square on the corner there marks the site of the Mission Saint-Lazare, a former leper colony transformed by Vincent de Paul, to become in the eighteenth century a prison for young offenders, then a Revolutionary prison, and eventually a hospital specializing in venereal diseases.
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The two faubourgs, nearly parallel before the stations, are linked by a series of arcades that are so lively and varied, so full of urban invention, that on some days you might prefer them to the historic arcades of Old Paris. There is first of all the Passage de l'Industrie, which on the other side of Boulevard de Strasbourg is known as Rue Gustave-Goublier, with the
same neo-Palladian motif at each end as you find at the Wauxhall – a porch with three openings, the central one of which is vaulted in an arch with caissons and columns, higher and wider than the two lateral lights. The next one is the Passage Brady, devoted to Indian and especially Pakistani cuisine between Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and the Boulevard, though on the other side, towards Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin, it maintains the old tradition of theatre costumiers. Further up still, opposite the Cour des Petites-Écuries, which was until the 1960s where leather traders gathered, is the magnificent Passage Reilhac, also the least frequented. As for the final one, the Passage du Désir, despite its name it is reminiscent of the calmness of a Flemish convent.

After Rue de Metz, Boulevard de Strasbourg itself, along with the adjacent section of Rue du Château-d'Eau, is the domain of African hair-dressing. All the equipment for this can be found here – hairpieces, dyes, tresses, and wigs in many colours. On weekend evenings, the salons are so lively, so full of pretty women, children, husbands and lovers, that hair-dressing is transformed into a festival largely open to the street – one of the most charming spectacles to be seen today in Paris.

Between the Mission Saint-Lazare and the Récollets monastery – today, in other words, between one station and the other – there was held in the eighteenth century the Saint-Laurent fair, which lasted from the end of June to the end of September. This was a site for games of all kinds, a dance hall, cafés and restaurants. Lécluse, a former actor with the Opéra-Comique, had a theatre built where the most lively plays of the time were performed. Lesage, Piron, Sedaine, Favart and many others worked for the Théâtre de la Foire. All the boulevard theatres, and even the OpéraComique before it was merged with the Comédie-Italienne, were obliged to give performances there. In the last years of Louis XVI's reign, a ‘Chinese Bastion' was constructed in competition with the Wauxhall d'Été. But the Revolution would soon bring an end to the Saint-Laurent fair. The land there remained unused until the building of the stations of the Strasbourg and Nord railways in the 1830s.

Beyond the stations the two faubourgs diverge, their roads respectively fanning out to the north and east. The Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin is relatively straight until it reaches the site of the former Barrière de La Villete, which has now taken – permanently, without a doubt – the name of Stalingrad. (Though Parisians adopt or reject the new names for old places: no one refers to the Étoile as the Place Charles-de-Gaulle, or says Place André-Malraux to mean Place du Théâtre-Français.) It was from this immense intersection of cobbles, water and steel that the Citroën coaches
used to leave, their terminus being below the overhead Métro. Some lines served the factories to the east of Paris. Others, which left in the evenings, carried cargoes of immigrant workers back to Spain, Portugal, or North Africa. In the 1980s the space around Ledoux's Rotonde was cleared, and the Métro line carefully shifted so that passengers can now see at the same time the Saint-Martin canal, the pool of La Villette, and the Sacré-Coeur.

Until the 1960s, Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis came into the Gare du Nord, and the Boulevard de la Chapelle was black with the coal of the trains. This was one of the toughest quarters in Paris. At the casualty ward of the Maison Dubois, each night brought its share of knife injuries, stomach shots and ‘criminal' abortions. Beneath the elegant galleries with their Doric colonnades, and in the avenues planted with lime trees, there were not many who remembered how this Maison, ‘very useful for those who cannot have themselves treated at home, and yet fear the forced promiscuity of the big hospitals',
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had in its day treated Nerval as well as Baudelaire's mistress Jeanne, or that two figures of the Romantic bohème, Murget and Privat d'Anglemont, had ended their days here. Today, the top of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis is the main South Asian colony in Paris, something of an overseas agency for India. Here you can buy saris, jewellery, spices, cloth, videocassettes, tin-plate cutlery and luminous sandals. You can sample the cuisines of Kashmir, Pakistan, Tamil Nadu, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Singapore. The smell of incense and spices wafts out as far as the former Barrière de La Chapelle, where the magnificent overhead Métro station overlooks two little squares, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, and Rue de Jessaint with its bridge over the railway to connect with Rue de la Goutte-d'Or.