The Invention of Paris (41 page)

Between Rue de Charenton and the Seine, once the Lyon tracks are
crossed (no easy business), is Bercy, which is completely different. The park of the Château de Bercy was bordered by the Seine and Rue de Charenton:
⁹⁵

The Château de Bercy is a building of very regular shape, raised according to the designs of François Mansart, and under his direction. Its vistas extend very far in each direction, and make a very agreeable effect. It is endowed with singular and valuable paintings . . . The gardens are spacious, and have been improved since 1706 by a number of avenues, statues, and a long terrace along the river. This magnificent château belonged to Monsieur de Bercy, the former royal
intendant
of finances.
⁹⁶

Along the Seine, downstream from the domain of Bercy, financiers and great lords built country houses under the Regency, the most famous of these being that of the Pâris brothers, whom the people called the Pâté-Paris. There were also taverns specializing in fried fish and
matelote
, as at the Point du Jour at the other end of the city.

Bercy had two river ports, one for gypsum and timber, the other for wine. After the Revolution, the warehouses of the wine merchants gradually encroached on the Bercy estate, until the château was finally demolished in 1861. By this time, Thiers's fortifications had already cut the park in two (one part remaining outside Paris), and the tracks of the Lyon railway cut through in the other direction. That was the end of this place whose splendour was compared with that of Versailles – or perhaps more accurately with Christopher Wren's Greenwich on the banks of the Thames. The new Bercy park, on the site of the wine warehouses, has a rather awkward shape, but presumably the terrain did not allow anything better, and the elements preserved – cobblestones, railings, pavilions, old plane trees – have been integrated with tact. The high terrace that separates the park from the expressway along the Seine has been laid out well, and, on the other side of the river, the new housing blocks make it possible to measure the progress of architecture in Paris since the years of the Front de Seine and upper Belleville.

On 19 April 1919, a victorious France voted the ‘declassification' of the fortified walls of Paris, in other words their demolition. Like the wall of the Farmers-General, these had lasted for eighty years, but their military role had sterilized the land around them, making it into a
zone
, a non-place very different from the joyous bazaar along the wall of the Farmers-General. In Flaubert's
A Sentimental Education
, Frédéric enters the city in 1848, just after the fortifications had been completed:

He was awakened by the dull sound of wheels passing over planks: they were crossing the Pont de Charenton; it was Paris . . . In the distance, tall factory chimneys were smoking. Then they turned into Ivry. They went up a street, and all of a sudden he caught sight of the dome of the Panthéon. The plain had changed beyond recognition and looked like a town in ruins. The fortifications crossed it in a horizontal ridge, and on the unpaved paths edging the road stood small branchless trees protected by battens bristling with nails. Chemical factories alternated with timbermerchants' yards . . . Long-fronted, dull-red taverns displayed a pair of crossed billiard cues in a wreath of painted flowers between their first-floor windows . . . Workmen in smocks went by, and also brewers' drays, laundry vans, and butchers' carts . . . They stopped at the city gate for a long time, for it was blocked by poultry-farmers, carriers, and a flock of sheep. The sentry, his hood thrown back, walked up and down in front of his box in order to keep warm. The toll-clerk clambered on to the top of the coach, and a fanfare on a cornet rang out. They went down the boulevard at a brisk trot . . . and finally reached the iron gate of the Jardin des Plantes.
⁹⁷

Between this prehistory and the building of the ring of social housing in the 1920s and '30s, the zone gave rise to a populist literature that was somewhat conventional, and it is rather in photography that one should seek the traces of its melancholic poetry. Atget, above all, showed families of zonedwellers on the steps of their caravans at the Porte d'Italie, shacks made out of metal and wood perched on the bushy escarpments of the Poterne des Peupliers, the snowy banks of the Bièvre at the entry to the city, ragpickers pushing their barrows along Boulevard Masséna, the ditches by the Porte de Sèvres, the vegetable tangle at Porte Dauphine, a silent world in which nature is weary and no longer able to afford a welcome to the poor. Long
after the ‘
fortifs
' had disappeared, this sadness persisted. ‘
MUR de la MORT
': a clumsy inscription on a fairground caravan in the fog and mud of a waste ground near the Porte de Clignancourt – this is a photograph by Robert Frank dating from 1951, depicting the dangerous spectacle, since banned, in which motorcyclists climb and turn in a gigantic vertical cylinder, which they only adhere to by centrifugal force.

On the site of the demolished fortifications, the ‘boulevards of the marshals' and the blocks of social housing that border them have little to remind us of the
zone
of Flaubert, Atget or Carco, but a tour of Paris by this route does not have the monotony and homogeneity of the Périphérique. These boulevards are as varied as the quarters that border them. The desert of Boulevard Macdonald, in a straight line along the wasteland that has replaced the Claude-Bernard hospital, the disjointed space of Boulevard Ney between the Porte d'Aubervilliers and the great intersection of La Chapelle, the barracks on Boulevard Bessières continued by the grey concrete mass of the Lycée Honoré-de-Balzac, have nothing in common with the little
hôtels particuliers
on Boulevard Berthier, the clever use of polychrome brick by the Porte Champerret, or the apartment blocks along Boulevard de la Somme that seem to have been built by a pupil of Loos. Towards the Bois de Boulogne there is no more social housing. The Boulevards Lannes and Suchet display the luxury of 1910 on the city side – monumental masses, sculpted corner rotundas, colossal pilasters, stone balustrades – while on the side of the Bois there are the marble, bronze, and statues of the ‘return to order' of the 1930s. It would need a Hugo to make the comparison between the Porte de la Muette with its pink chestnut trees, a sumptuous embarkation for Cythera, and the Porte de Pantin, an uncrossable barrage of concrete and noise, where the Périphérique passes at eye level, with Boulevard Sérurier beneath it engulfed in a hideous cutting in which the scrawny grass of the central reservation is littered with greasy wrappers and beer cans, and where the only human beings on foot are natives of L'viv or Tiraspol trying to survive by begging at the traffic lights. A very Parisian antithesis, in the end.

 

1
Louis-Adolphe Thiers, cited by Karl Marx in ‘The Civil War in France',
The First International and After
(Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 191–2.

2
Jean-Louis Cohen and André Lortie,
Des fortifs au périf
(Paris: Picard, 1991). ‘The fortifications . . . comprised, from the inside looking out, a rampart road with a carriageway of six metres (the ‘‘military boulevard''), a continuous wall doubled by a ditch forty metres wide, a counterscarp and a glacis.'

3
The fortresses that would play a large role at the time of the Commune, as we shall see, were built on the southern heights.

4
The main communes totally absorbed were on the Right Bank, Auteuil, Passy, Les Batignolles, Montmartre, La Chapelle, La Villette, Belleville and Charonne; on the Left Bank, Grenelle and Vaugirard. The larger communes that remained partly outside the wall were Neuilly, Bercy, Saint-Mandé, Gentilly and Montrouge.

5
‘For some days the vintage had been harvested; the walkers from the city had already gone home, the peasants also were quitting the fields for the labour of the winter. The country, still green and smiling, but unleafed in part, and already almost desert, offered everywhere the image of solitude and of the approach of winter' (J.-J. Rousseau,
The Reveries of a Solitary Walker
, trans. Fletcher).

6
Privat d'Anglemont,
Paris anecdote
.

7
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
. The Ratrait (not ‘Retrait' as the street there is wrongly spelled) was the name of a vineyard.

8
Huysmans,
Parisian Sketches
, p. 94.

9
Paul Fargue, ‘Mon quartier', in
Le Piéton de Paris
(Paris: Gallimard, 1932).

10
Paul Fargue, ‘Maurice Ravel', in
Refuges
.

11
Eugène Dabit,
Faubourgs de Paris
(Paris: Gallimard, 1933).

12
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Paris
.

13
Potlach
, inspired in particular by Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord, was the ‘information bulletin of the French group of the Lettrist International'.

14
La Bédollière,
Le Nouveau Pari
s.

15
Henri Calet,
Le Tout sur le tout
(Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Avenue d'Orléans had not yet been given the name of Maréchal Leclerc, nor his unlikely image erected at the Porte d'Orléans.

16
Pierre de L'Estoile,
Journal pour le règne de Henri III
. The Bièvre entered Paris through the postern of Les Peupliers, crossed Rue du Moulin-des-Près (there was a large water-mill there), and circled the southern slope of the Butte-aux-Cailles in a meander full of willows and poplars, before reaching the intersection of Rue Brillat-Savarin and Rue Vergniaud; it then bent again to the north, crossing the wall of the Farmers-General near Métro Corvisart, and enclosing the Square René-Le-Gall in two separate arms before reaching the Gobelins.

17
Cited in Lucien Lambeau, ‘Grenelle', in
Histoire des communes annexées à Paris en 1859
(Paris: Leroux, 1914).

18
Martin,
Promenades dans les vingt arrondissements de Paris
.

19
26 Rue Vaugirard, now between a Chinese butcher and a discount store, in a courtyard two sides of which have been demolished.

20
This was in fact the second Vel' d'Hiv'. The first occupied the Galeries des Machines on the Champ-de-Mars, after the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Both were the work of Henri Desgranges, holder of the first recognized one-hour record and creator of the Tour de France.

21
Rue Vandamme – which was called Chemin de la Gaîté until it was given the name of a general – still exists, but no longer runs as far as Rue du Château. Its last section has been replaced by Rue du Commandant-Mouchotte, the Sheraton-Montparnasse hotel, etc.

22
The third side was Route de Transit (now Rue d'Alésia). Rue du Château, originally known as Rue du Chemin-de-Fer, took its name from the Château du Maine, an estate occupying a large site between Rue de Vanves (now Raymond-Losserand), Rue du Château and Rue Didot. The present Rue Asseline corresponds to its entrance drive. Avenue du Maine takes its name from the Duc du Maine, who had it opened as a route from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to his residence at Sceaux.

23
Catherine Bruant, ‘Plaisance et les Thermopyles', in
Montparnasse et le XIVe arrondissement
(Paris: Action artistique de la Ville de Paris, 2000). Some of these individuals – Bénard, Boyet-Barret – gave their names to streets in the quarter. They were successful enough to extend their operation eastward and open up Rues Didot, des Plantes, Hippolyte-Maindron, etc.

24
No. 54 has disappeared, buried beneath the false columns and frontages of Ricardo Bofill on the Place de Catalogne.

25
Calet,
Le Tout sur le tout
.

26
Ibid.

27
There certainly were some horrific buildings constructed in the expensive quarters from the 1960s through to the '80s, but they most often respected the line of the street and the general scale. Besides, the materials used were generally of good quality.

28
Fargue,
Le Piéton de Paris.
In his striking preface to Jacques-Émile Blanche's
Propos de peintres
, Proust recalled: ‘As my parents spent spring and early summer at Auteuil, where Jacques-Émile Blanche spent the whole year, it was easy for me to go each morning to pose for my portrait.'

29
Jacques-Émile Blanche, ‘Passy', in
Visages de Paris
(Paris: Éditions Pierre Lafitte, 1927).

30
This house, located near the top of Rue Paul-Doumer, should not be confused with that on Rue Raynouard where Balzac actually lived. Balzac has Corentin, the great policeman of
La Comédie humaine
, ‘who was known there as a retired merchant passionately devoted to gardening', not very far from his own house, in ‘one of the quietest and prettiest nooks of the little town of Passy' (
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
).

31
Guillaume Apollinaire,
Le Flâneur des deux rives
(Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1918).

32
Across this quadrilateral, Haussmann drove two parallel roads towards the Bois de Boulogne: Avenue de l'Impératrice (now Foch) and Avenue de l'Empereur, today partitioned into Avenue du Président-Wilson, Avenue Georges-Mandel and Avenue Henri-Martin.

33
Blanche, ‘Passy'.

34
Though there are two famous buildings, Perret's apartment block at 25
bis
Rue Benjamin Franklin, and the Malet-Stevens fire station on Rue Mesnil.

35
Henri Auguste Richard,
Le Véritable Conducteur parisien
(Paris, 1828).

36
The house still stands, at 67 Boulevard de Montmorency, now the premises of the Académie Goncourt.