The Other Paris Read online

  A still from Marco Ferreri’s Don’t Touch the White Woman! (1974)

  There is a perennially recurrent Parisian identification with Native Americans, dating back to the 1820s and ’30s and the furor caused by Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, cited as a primary influence by Balzac and Hugo, among others. That is perhaps what prompted Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, the nineteenth century’s consummate flâneur, and himself a mixed-race native of Guadeloupe, to mourn the decline of Belleville in the 1850s by writing, “Civilization has acted here as in North America; in moving forward it has cast out all the savages in its path.” The Belleville he regrets was the one then outside the city limits, a rustic site of outdoor drinking places, dance halls, and the apparently enchanting Île d’Amour, “where so many fleeting liaisons began.” Very soon after that, Belleville became the bastion of the city’s working class, the heart of the Commune, sufficiently militant and volatile that nervous bureaucrats split it up among four separate arrondissements. It was “an ardent plebeian capital, as indigent and leveled as an anthill,” according to the revolutionary and novelist Victor Serge, who moved there in 1909, while the British historian Richard Cobb called it the “high citadel of l’esprit parisien,” which had emigrated from its former locus in the center, in the Cité and Rue Saint-Denis, having been relocated by the vast surgical enterprises of Baron Haussmann. In addition, Belleville over time became famous for taking in immigrants and refugees: provincials from the south and middle of the country; eastern European Jews crowded out of the ancient Jewish district in the Marais; North Africans, primarily from Algeria; West Africans from Senegal, Guinea, Gabon, the Ivory Coast; and Vietnamese and Cambodians, especially ethnic Chinese from those nations. To some degree it remains so, the only part of the city to which the term melting pot could be applied.

  “Stand still!”—Rue de Belleville, circa 1910

  The photographs by Willy Ronis of Belleville and Ménilmontant from the 1940s and ’50s look like the photographs of Montmartre from fifty years earlier, only more crowded: houses spilling down the hill, piled on top of one another; gardens and vacant lots and even patches of woods tucked into any available niches; streets turning into stairs and back again; bars tucked away in alleys; artisans’ workshops in tiny courtyards; lookouts from which you could see the whole city. The place was modest, a consequence of adaptation and making do; money and grand plans had never come anywhere near. One of the newest of the neighborhoods, historically, it kept faith with the spirit of the old city, and managed its limitations with maximum panache, as if it were a community of tree houses. A lot of this was regularized and normalized under urban renewal in the 1960s, and whole streets of ancient houses were razed, to be replaced by high-rise housing projects. You can still see the hammer and sickle on the entablature of the former cooperative La Bellevilloise, now a rock club, on Rue Boyer; and at the western end of that street, on Rue de Ménilmontant, observe the location of Prosper Enfantin’s Saint-Simonian cenacle, where members of the community in the 1830s wore garments that buttoned in the back, so that even dressing would be a communal enterprise.

  The cooperative La Bellevilloise, on Rue Boyer, circa 1910

  Under the métro aérien on Boulevard de la Chapelle, circa 1910

  Boulevard de la Villette, circa 1910

  Above Belleville was La Chapelle, “a kingdom rather than an arrondissement,” wrote Léon-Paul Fargue in the 1930s.

  This kingdom, one of the richest in Paris in public baths where you wait as at the dentist’s, is dominated by the aerial line of the Métro, which crowns it like the frontlet on a harness. Toward the north, Rue d’Aubervilliers shoots off like a long jamboree, filled to bursting with shops. Vendors of pigs’ feet, of lace by the pound, of caps, of cheese, of lettuce, of slumgullions, of cooked spinach, of rooms with secondhand air that sit atop one another, astride one another, inside one another, like a nightmare construction toy.

  La Chapelle and its neighbor La Villette—and other such liminal areas to the northwest, the east, and all along the south—constituted the city’s backside, the parts you weren’t really supposed to see, although you couldn’t help doing so when you entered or left: factories, gasometers, slaughterhouses, and the cheapest jerry-built housing, wedged between canals and railroad lines headed north and east out of the train stations bearing the names of those directions. Beyond them, until 1919, was the last military wall, and beyond that in turn was the no-man’s-land called the Zone. Unlike most modern cities, sprawling in all directions, Paris was defined by its edges, where it set the limits of acceptability in utilities and the people who lived around them, propelling them out with a centrifugal force that has only increased over time but was already fully visible as early as 1850:

  As a result of the transformation of the old Paris, the opening of new streets, the widening of narrow ones, the high price of land, the extension of commerce and industry, with the old slums giving way each day to apartment houses, vast stores and workshops, the poor and working population finds itself, and will find itself more and more, forced out to the extremities of Paris, which means that the center is destined to be inhabited in the future only by the well-to-do.

  Thus you could say that Paris now is not only a creation of today’s economic and cultural imperatives, but was also willed into being by people who have been dead for more than a century. Haussmann himself might as well have built the Bastille Opéra and the arch of La Défense. When Victor Hugo was writing The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1830, he did not have to stretch to describe its fifteenth-century setting, since it still lay all around him. When he wrote Les misérables around 1860, evoking the Paris of thirty years earlier, he was peering across a gulf—a literal one, as he had been in exile for nearly a decade, but also a vast gulf of change. When Jean Valjean and Cosette arrive in Paris from the provinces, the neighborhood where their wanderings temporarily cease,

  located between Faubourg Saint-Antoine and La Râpée, is one that recent construction has transformed from top to bottom, disfiguring them according to some, transfiguring them according to others. The market gardens, the work yards, and the old buildings are gone. Today there are new broad avenues, amphitheaters, circuses, racetracks, train stations, and the prison of Mazas: progress, as you can see, and also its corrective.

  From his seat in Guernsey, Hugo could really only surmise how deeply those recent constructions had altered Paris. The Second Empire had more than a few points in common with our own time: the heady displacements of capital, its muscular display in architectural form, its frenetic display in mercantile form, the desperate embrace of entertainment as an analgesic, the pervasive collective distrust. A way of life was disappearing, and what was replacing it was easily grasped in its outer manifestations, much harder to pin down in its inner essence. A generalized anxiety gripped not only the bottom tiers of society, ejected from the neighborhoods that had been their family seat for centuries, but also people in the middle and even the top echelons. “I understand very well that the purebred Parisian misses all those old and noisy customs of his city, which are progressively disappearing every day,” wrote Privat d’Anglemont in the 1850s, around the same time that Baudelaire, in his poem “The Swan,” wrote, “The old Paris is no more (the form of a city / Changes faster, alas, than the heart of a mortal).” The Goncourt brothers knew their time was up as they gauged the noisy disruptions of the new middle class, who had too much money for their own good and not enough in the way of manners. Visiting the enormous new Eldorado café-concert in 1860, they experienced the vertigo that comes to all, even snobs, when they note that no place at the table has been set for them. (Although their works were joint, each brother wrote in the first-person singular.)

  My Paris, where I was born, the Paris of life as it stood between 1830 and 1848, is passing away. Social life is undergoing a great evolution. I see women, children, households, families in this café. The interior is doomed. Life threatens to become public. The club for the t
op rank, the café for the bottom: that is where society and the crowd will end up … I have a sensation of passing through, as if I were a traveler. I am a stranger to what is coming, to what is, as I am to those new boulevards, implacably straight, that no longer exude the world of Balzac, that conjure some American Babylon of the future.

  But their own Balzac had already foreseen as much: “The ruins of the bourgeoisie will be an ignoble detritus of pasteboard, plaster, and pigment,” he had written fifteen years earlier. And a decade before that, when Louis-Philippe installed Napoléon’s Egyptian trophy on the site that had held the guillotine during the revolution, Chateaubriand felt apocalyptic intimations: “The time will come when the obelisk of the desert will once again know, in that place of murder, the silence and solitude of Luxor.”

  A still from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), starring Lon Chaney

  Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Illustration by Gavarni, 1853

  “Paris in the Future: The Panthéon,” circa 1910

  The Halle aux Vins—the wine depot—circa 1910

  Everything is always going away, every way of life is continually subject to disappearance, all who reach their middle years have lost the landscape of their childhood, everyone given to introspection feels threatened. Everything was always better before—and in many ways it probably was, since there were, among other things, fewer people, which made for more space and less competition for scraps, gave more room to chance and to nature. Eugène Dabit wrote in 1933 that “our time is hard, without beauty. We can no longer contemplate the sky, now hidden by tall buildings. We can no longer listen in silence to the delicate call of the wind. Our trees are strangled by iron grilles, planted in the earth as if in pots, prisoners in squares as dusty as museums.” But despite various fantasies by the likes of Le Corbusier, the depredations of technocrats over the decades after Haussmann were relatively small-scale and could be regarded as anomalous—until the 1960s. That was when the trio of Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, and André Malraux (the onetime novelist become minister of culture) gave their nihil obstat to ambitious young men, graduates of the top schools, who liked to imagine things on a grand scale, who liked acronyms and right angles, who wanted to make Paris into a power city keyed to the growth of modern money and the free flow of modern traffic.

  It was then that the fate of Les Halles was decided, that La Défense and the road tunnels under the Right Bank were planned, that the destruction of the Montparnasse train station was approved and the city’s first skyscraper was designated to replace it, a giant upended turd purposelessly dominating the Left Bank. Those managers cleaved and sectioned Belleville-Ménilmontant; chased the natives out of the Marais and the Latin Quarter and rezoned those areas for the convenience of money; razed La Glacière; eliminated the Halle aux Vins and the wine depots at Bercy, consented to the aggressively repellent Pompidou Center, and stopped just short of putting multilane highways through the center of the city—they were playing Haussmann, only with motor vehicles and mechanized means of destruction. And their successors have continued, erecting the Bastille Opéra, which looks like a parking garage, and the chilling Mitterand library, which looks like a housing project on the moon. The story is told, furiously, knowingly, and in great detail, in Louis Chevalier’s The Assassination of Paris (1977). Summing up the toll of destruction, he notes:

  Not one of these places, and so many others of which these are only a sample—theaters, streets, alleys, passageways, intersections, cafés, the quays of the Seine and those of the Saint-Martin canal […]—not one of these places, and other even more insignificant places, bewildering in their banality, failed to have its place in some great chapter of the history of literature, of performance, of art, of beauty. Not so much because beauty was created there as if it could have been created anywhere, but because it could have been created nowhere else, above all not in the places designated for its creation, where it is allegedly manufactured … no more than on the symbolic mountain where Hugo wants to make us think he sought inspiration, whereas he tells us plainly in Choses vues how he found his ideas by chance in the street.

  At the other end of the political spectrum from Chevalier, something of a conservative, was Guy Debord, who ended up making common cause, having a hand in reprinting Chevalier’s book after its first publisher dumped it, and who expressed similar views in similar terms: “Paris, a city then so beautiful that many people preferred to be poor there than to be rich somewhere else.” Since the early 1950s, the Lettrist International and its successor, the Situationist International, had been engaged in, among other things, reimagining the city. In 1955, for example, the Lettrist newsletter, Potlatch, featured a “Project for the Rational Beautification of the City of Paris,” which included such propositions as arranging, with ladders and footbridges, a promenade along the roofs of the city; putting switches on lampposts so that lighting decisions could be made by the public; redistributing works of art currently held in museums among local bars; and turning churches into either romantic ruins or haunted houses. By 1978, in the bitterly elegiac narration of his last film, Debord was moved to write, “We were, more than anybody, the people of change, in a changing time. The owners of society were obliged, in order to maintain their control, to desire a change that was the opposite of ours. We wanted to rebuild everything, and so did they, but in diametrically opposed ways. What they have done illustrates our project, in negative form.”

  A magazine advertisement, 1890s, offering the collected works of Victor Hugo on an easy-payment plan, with either a set of dishes or a Gladstone bag with a rack for toiletries thrown in absolutely free

  The Lettrists’ propositions were in the interest of laughter, of poetry, of ambiguity, of menace, of release, of intoxication. The plans that have been carried out are equally as radical, but they are in the interest of control and manipulation.

  * * *

  This book is not intended as a polemic, for which it’s much too late anyway. It might be something of a cenotaph—or catacomb, since it contains the skulls of vast numbers of people who lived and died in Paris but would be unlikely to find a home there nowadays. Instead, I mean it mostly as a reminder of what life was like in cities when they were as vivid and savage and uncontrollable as they were for many centuries, as expressed by Paris, the most sublime of the world’s great cities. Life was of course not all fun and games; the expression of every sort of behavior inevitably included a great deal that was unpleasant if not inimical and even murderous.

  Rue Saint-Antoine, circa 1910

  It was a city composed of myriad small undertakings, momentary decisions, fluctuations of enthusiasm, accommodations to fortune, which accrued and weathered and developed a patina, and were built on top of and next to and around in an endless process of layering. Even now, the layout of streets in some parts of town derives from ancient and forgotten circumstances—some course of water or farmer’s field or half-whimsical decision made in the Middle Ages or even earlier—and over time this curve and that angle, having no evident logical sense, developed, as it were, personalities. They colored the ideas and habits of those who lived on the street or used it every day, allowed for dark corners in which dark thoughts could be stored, and created off-kilter rhythms that prevented monotony. And then those subtle turns and nudges slowly and invisibly engendered all sorts of things: beauty, curiosity, ambition, skepticism, discontent.

  “When I feel down, I change eras”: Fréhel in Pépé le Moko, 1937

  Until not so long ago it was always possible to find a place in the city. There were cheap neighborhoods, and failing that there were places to roost, to hide away, places left unattended long enough to allow squatting and repurposing. Until not long ago, except in the most extreme circumstances, there existed the option, for those who wanted it badly enough, to thumb one’s nose at the directives of fashion and progress and authority and carve out an eccentric path of one’s own—this more so in Paris than anywhere else, because there willful ecce
ntricity was respected if not necessarily understood. Perhaps that remains an option, but it has been driven indoors, out of the social realm, and is progressively more difficult to pursue as the controlling interests of society have become ever more adept at shape-shifting and assuming the semblance of forces once opposed to them. Nowadays “anarchy” means conformity, “rebellion” means compliance, “revolution” is the seasonal rotation of dry goods, and “freedom” is the exercise of license by the powerful. Perhaps under the circumstances it’s asking too much to continue to believe or at least hope that the stubborn and perverse human capacity for disobedience will prevail in the end, the way worms can undermine a wall, but for now that’s all we have.

  2

  Ghosts

  Paris is sufficiently compact that you can cross it with ease, in a few hours, and it has no grid, forestalling monotony. It virtually demands that you walk its length and breadth; once you get started it’s hard to stop. As you stride along you are not merely a pedestrian in a city—you are a reader negotiating a vast text spanning centuries and the traces of a billion hands, and like a narrative it pulls you along, continually luring you with the mystery of the next corner.

  Paris contains some 3,195 streets, 330 passages (a term that encompasses both arcades and alleys), 314 avenues, 293 impasses, 189 villas (an enclosed mansion, or a grouping of houses not unlike a mews), 142 cités (a contained development, sometimes carefully designed and sometimes a slum), 139 squares, 108 boulevards, 64 courts, 52 quays, 30 bridges, 27 ports, 22 galeries (arcades), 13 allées, 7 hameaux (literally “hamlets”), 7 lanes, 7 paths, 5 ways, 5 peristyles, 5 roundabouts, 3 courses, three sentes (another variation on “path” or “way”), 2 chaussées (an ancient term more or less cognate with “highway”), 2 couloirs (literally “hallways”), 1 parvis (an open space in front of a church, in this case Notre-Dame), 1 chemin de ronde (a raised walkway behind the battlement of a castle), and 11 small, undefined passageways. At least those were the figures in 1957; since then quite a number of the smaller entities have been obliterated by urban renewal, while others have been confected by those or other means. A count made in 1992 gives the total number of Parisian thoroughfares as 5,414, which is 133 more than there were twenty years earlier and nearly 1,700 more than in 1865, when the city’s present limits were fixed.