The Invention of Paris (9 page)

The Paris landscape can be understood from observing the development of the Halles site over the centuries. It is impossible to avoid a sense of regret for the ridiculous fate of this place, which, as Sauval wrote centuries ago, ‘is full of everything: vegetables, the fruit of gardens and fields, fish from river and sea, things that can assist the convenience and delights of life, and indeed all that is most excellent, exquisite and rare in land and air, arriving in Paris and taken there'. But despite such regret, we should not forget the circumstances that led to this end. Louis Chevalier observed it from the inside, hearing all the arguments brought up in bad faith in favour of destruction:

The economic argument, the most mysterious and obscure . . . was the one most often cited. And then public health. The legendary dirtiness of the Halles . . . I cite the words that I found in these speeches as they come, without trying to put them in order – as one might arrange goods for sale, vegetables for example, in harmonious constructions that, under the striking light of lamps, exude order, beauty, taste, and indeed, to be sure, cleanliness . . . To dramatize things still more, rats . . . And to complete this spectacle à la Gustave Doré, Villon's fat prostitutes, who
were certainly not very discreet, and some of whom even displayed their charms on the steps of Saint-Eustache.
⁵¹

Chevalier went to see his old fellow student from the École Normale Supérieure, Georges Pompidou, whom he had dinner with from time to time: ‘It seemed to me – pure illusion, perhaps – that Pompidou, knowing how my ideas on the matter were quite the opposite of his own, cast me an inflexible and facetious glance that undoubtedly meant that with people of my sort, Parisians would still be stuck in the huts where Caesar found them.'

Once the decision was made to transfer the market to Rungis, disaster was certain. The 1960s and '70s were an all-time low for French architecture. Major commissions went to members of the Institut de France, to whom we owe – among other things – the administrative building on Boulevard Morland with its pergola, the Palais des Congrès at Porte Maillot, the Tour Montparnasse, the Radio building, and the Faculty of Sciences at Jussieu. And in a detrimental scissors effect, corruption and collusion within semipublic companies, between the promoters and scoundrels of Parisian Gaullism, was at its height. It was not enough, therefore, to pull down Baltard's pavilions: to make the operation profitable, the destruction had to spread far wider. The space between Rue de Turbigo and what remained of Rue Rambuteau, and the whole region between what was Rue Berger and Rue de la Ferronnerie, were replaced by office blocks and flats so aggressive in their ugliness that you have to go a long way – the far end of the Italie quarter or the Front de Seine – to find their match. On top of all this, the ‘gardens' on the site of Les Halles also show what decrepitude French landscapists had reached in their art. Hemmed in by mutilated streets, decked out in the worst panoply of postmodernism, these ‘spaces' transform the old itineraries of Paris into assault courses, by their complex arrangement of metal barriers, ventilation columns, walkways overlooking ditches of wretched plantations, the orifices of underground roads, and fountains clogged up with empty drink cans. As for the underground shopping mall that goes by the noble name of Forum, the most surprising thing is that its author is still classed as an architect. But the whole ensemble is so badly constructed, with such poor materials, that its ruin in the near future is inevitable. One might even say it has already begun.

The Beaubourg plateau, between Rue Beaubourg and Rue Saint-Martin, bounded to the north by Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare and to the south by the church of Saint-Merri, is an outcrop of Les Halles, linked to
them – across Boulevard Sébastopol – by the very old streets of Rue de Leynie and Rue Aubry-le-Boucher. In the 1950s Doisneau photographed this ‘old rubbish-tip of the Halles where lorries park, where an entire nighttime population comes out to work – and sometimes to play – in the shadows, far from the pavilions dazzling with light, like actors warming up in the corridor before going on stage'.
⁵²
This immense paved promenade, this strange emptiness in such a dense region, was the work of Haussmann, though not finished until the 1930s. He assiduously destroyed the network of little streets – Rues Maubuée, de la Corroierie, des Vieilles-Étuves, du Poirier, du Maure – that had served as a tragic setting for almost all the insurrections of the first half of the nineteenth century. The minuscule Rue de Venise, opposite the Centre Beaubourg, is the sole remaining vestige of this group, which used to be known as the Cloître Saint-Merri, and which the
journées
of June 1832 made famous throughout Europe. Around the Centre itself, which is now part of the Parisian landscape – good architecture always ends up triumphing over whinging critics – , semipublic companies have wrought their ravages: the ‘Horloge quarter' with its gloomy passages, bankrupt shops, wretched gadgets and suspect smells, has the same relationship to a genuine quarter as a works canteen has to a traditional Paris bistro.

The district marked out between Les Halles and the Grands Boulevards is underpinned and organized by Rue Montmartre, which plays the role of guardian to two successive enclaves, one on each side of Rue Réaumur. Previously, it was the Montorgueil quarter that approached Rue Montmartre via Rue Tiquetonne, Rue Bachaumont built on the site of the Passage du Saumon, and Rue Léopold-Bellan, which in the eighteenth century had the lovely name of Rue du Bout-du-Monde. Despite its new guise as a pedestrian zone, Rue Montorgueil remains lively by virtue of its market, which, even if not completely genuine, plays the same protective role as Rue Mouffetard or – increasingly less so – Rue de Buci. Further afield, between Rue Réuamur and Boulevard Montmartre, is the old press quarter, which long predates rotary printing. Lucien de Rubempré, when he ‘went out one morning with the triumphant idea of finding some colonel of such light skirmishers of the press . . . arrived in the Rue Saint-Fiacre off the Boulevard Montmartre. Before a house, occupied by the offices of a small newspaper, he stopped,
and at the sight of it his heart began to throb as heavily as the pulses of a youth upon the threshold of some evil haunt.'
⁵³

In the heyday of the daily press, between the end of the Second Empire and the First World War, all the major newspapers, even the less major ones, had their editorial office and printing press one above the other in the same building.
Le Petit Journal
was on the corner of Rue de Richelieu and Boulevard Montmartre, which had been the site of the famous Frascati's. The ground floor was occupied by a bookshop and an immense bazaar, where an aquarium of exotic fish jostled with the works of Corot and Meissonier. In the Rue Montmartre, at the end of the century, you had
La Presse
,
La France
,
La Liberté
,
Le Journal des voyages
, and the Paul Dupont printworks, whose building housed
L'Univers
,
Le Jockey
,
Le Radical
and
L'Aurore
. Rue de Croissant was the site of
La Patrie
,
Le Hanneton
,
Le Père Duchesne
,
Le Siècle
,
La République
,
L'Écho de l'armée
and
L'Intransigeant
.
Le Soleil
was in Rue Saint-Joseph,
L'Illustration
in Rue de Richelieu,
La Rue
and
Le Cri du peuple
in Rue d'Aboukir. Some newspapers had crossed Boulevard Montmartre:
Le Temps
was in Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre,
La Marseillaise
in Rue Bergère, and
Le Figaro
at 26 Rue Drouot, in a fine neo-Gothic building. Léon Daudet recalled:

This is where I made a start in 1892 under Magnard. I signed short pointed moral tales and rather acerbic snippets as ‘a modern young man'. At the same time, Barrès, a young man himself, and as lively and fond of a joke as I was, was a contributor to this illustrious house. We were Magnard's darlings, and he kept us in his private office while more important figures kicked their heels on the floor below, decorated with a bust of Villemessant. One day we noticed Verlaine in the cashier's office, with his face of a retired satyr. He'd come for his money, not very much – a group of us had given him a little pension. Naturally he was drunk, and raising a fat and dirty finger in the air, he laughed and repeated with a malicious and indescribable air: ‘notwithstanding . . . however'.
⁵⁴

It is not so far back that you could not even imagine driving by car along Rue du Croissant, where lorries were constantly discharging spools of paper for the Imprimerie de la Presse. The crisis of the written press, the merger of titles, and the migration of printing works to the suburbs, have left behind only pale vestiges of this glorious age: the
Figaro
building on the corner of Rue du Mail, the
Tribune
building, the fine caryatids of the building of
La France, journal du soir
, and the plaque on the Café du Croissant recalling that ‘Jaurès was assassinated here on 31 July 1914'. Along Rues du Croissant, des Jeûneurs and Saint-Joseph, the neighbouring Sentier quarter has infiltrated into the gaps left by the press.

The Sentier is today the only Parisian quarter whose name denotes both a territory, an economic activity that was exclusive to it until recent times – the garment trade – and a social type. The recent establishment here of ‘new technologies' has increased property prices, but has not yet shattered the Sephardic monopoly or reduced the bottlenecks, which are the worst in Paris. Other names of quarters also used to have this ability to characterize their inhabitants. From the ancien régime to the era of
Les Misérables
, coming from the Faubourg Saint-Marcel meant, for Sébastien Mercier, belonging to ‘the poorest section of the Paris population, the most rebellious and refractory'. Through to the 1950s, coming from Belleville and even Montmartre was almost equivalent to stating one's skin colour. These particularisms have disappeared, except for the Sentier, which remains a quarter difficult to enter, physically isolated, socially removed, little studied or visited, famous but poorly known.
⁵⁵

It is often believed that Jews who arrived in France at the end of the Algerian war took over the rag trade from East European Jews, who had arrived in successive waves between the great pogroms of the early twentieth century and the 1930s. In reality, the Sentier's textile tradition goes back much further. In the eighteenth century, the Compagnie des Indes, which imported cotton among other things, had its premises near Rue du Sentier. Local manufacturers and dyers were unhappy with this competition, and waged a veritable ‘battle of cottons' against it. The Marquise de Pompadour, who had been born in the quarter on Rue de Cléry, and lived at 33 Rue du Sentier when she married the farmer-general Le Normant d'Étioles, backed the promotion of local cloth by using it for her interior decoration. The development of the textile industry then led to the construction of a particular kind of building, many examples of which are still to be seen. In the details, their vocabulary is that of neoclassicism, but what is unusual, and gives Rue de Cléry, Rue d'Aboukir and Rue d'Alexandre their particular physiognomy, is the density of buildings and their great height: the same building had to house the shop, the warehouse on the courtyard, the production workshops on the upper floors, as well as family accommodation. This combination of density and height is a characteristic of immigrant quarters in big cities everywhere: the Sentier's buildings recall those of the Venice Ghetto, as well as those of another historical textile district, La Croix-Rousse in Lyon.

In the twentieth century, each historical period saw the arrival of new immigrants here. In the last twenty years, it has been Turks (often Kurds), Serbs, Southeast Asians and Chinese, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Senegalese and Malians who have come to offer their labour-power as packers or finishers, when they are not simply employed by the hour or the day to unload a lorry or clear a warehouse.

The Sentier is shaped like a square, its boundaries being Rues Réaumur and Saint-Denis, Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle and Rue du Sentier. It is divided in two by the diagonal of Rue de Cléry and Rue d'Aboukir, stretching between the Porte Saint-Denis and the Place des Victoires along a segment of the walls of Charles V whose traces are still very clear: Rue de Cléry is built on the counterscarp of the wall, and Rue d'Aboukir, very clearly lower, takes the line of the moat (it was formerly known as Rue du Milieu-du-Fossé, before being changed to Rue de Bourbon-Villeneuve, then to Aboukir in 1848).

Of the two triangles divided by this diagonal, the more frenetic is on the side of Rue Réaumur and Rue Saint-Denis. This is Paris's ‘return from Egypt' quarter.
⁵⁶
The street names (Rue du Nil, Rue d'Alexandrie, Rue
de Damiette, Rue du Caire), and above all the extraordinary façade that frames the entrance to the arcade from the Place du Caire – columns with lotus capitals, incised frieze in the Egyptian style, the three heads of the goddess Hathor – are evidence of the enthusiasm of Parisians for Egypt at the time of Bonaparte's expedition, an enthusiasm that remains today.