The Invention of Paris (22 page)

With the notable exception of the Montagne Saint-Geneviève, Old Paris is low-lying and flat. The course of the new wall, on the other hand, followed a hillside route, taking its bearings from the heights above the valley hollowed out by the Seine. In today's Paris, it corresponds to the two lines of the overhead Métro – Nation-Étoile via Barbès, and Nation-Étoile via Denfert-Rochereau.
⁷
There was a raised covered walkway on the inside of the wall, and a wide boulevard on the outside. Ledoux, architect for the Ferme-Générale, conceived the fifty-five barriers. Whether modest or imposing, they seem to have been taken from a construction set based on models from antiquity or the Renaissance – the Roman Pantheon, Bramante's Tempietto, Palladio's Villa Rotonda – combined with a vivid imagination. In his
Essai sur l'architecture
(1753), Abbé Laugier regretted that the entry into Paris amounted to ‘a few wretched palisades erected on wooden foundations, rolling on two
old jambs, and flanked by two or three dunghills', to the point that foreigners found it hard to believe they were not still in some adjacent country town. Ledoux had promised something quite different: ‘I shall
de-village
a population of eight hundred thousand and give them the independence that a city draws from its insulation; I shall place trophies of victory at the closed exits of its tendential lines.' He justified his propensity to architectural hyperbole in these terms: ‘The artist has chosen to give these offices a public character, and so that the architecture was not dissolved by immense spaces, he deemed it necessary to employ the most severe and decisive style.'
⁸

To the west of Paris, the wall passed outside the built-up area, almost into the countryside. It enclosed the Champ-de-Mars and the École Militaire, the few houses of Chaillot village, and a broad zone, not yet constructed, which fifty years later would become the Europe quarter. To the north and east, however, where urbanization was already far more dense, the course of the wall had to take into account what was already there, both inside and out. Hence certain irregularities that may seem curious, salients to enclose the Faubourgs Saint-Martin and Saint-Antoine, and reentrants to exclude large estates such as Montlouis, the summer domain of the Jesuits, which would later become Père-Lachaise. There was even a case in which the resistance of the inhabitants forced the contractors to depart from the line that had been drawn for them, and make a reentrant between Boulevards de Clichy and de Rochechouart.
⁹

Contrary to the walls that preceded and followed it, the wall of the Farmers-General gave concrete form to recent extensions of the city rather than triggering new ones.
¹⁰
During the twenty years or so between the end of the military disasters of Louis XV's reign and the beginning of the pre-revolutionary crisis in 1785, the economy boomed and with it speculation in property. Moreover, the city centre was increasingly difficult to live in, with its overly tall buildings, crowded plots, and courtyards crowded with hovels. There is a noticeable difference in tone between Boileau's pleasant
Embarras de Paris
and Mercier's
Tableau
. For the latter:

The lack of pavements makes almost all the streets dangerous: when a man with a bit of credit is sick, dung is spread outside his door to dull
the noise of carts; that is particularly when you need to take care . . . Slaughterhouses are not outside the city or at its limits, they are right in the middle. Blood flows in the streets, congealing under your feet and reddening your shoes . . . The fumes given off by the tallow boilers are thick and diseased. Nothing spoils the air more than these crude vapours . . . Narrow and badly built streets, houses that are too tall and interrupt the circulation of air, slaughterhouses, fish markets, sewers, cemeteries, all corrupt the atmosphere, fill it with unclean particles, and this enclosed air becomes heavy and malign in its influence.

We have seen how the aristocracy deserted the Marais in the late seventeenth century for the Faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré. A century later, all those with the means to do so tried to leave the old centre. The pattern that was then sketched out was one of segregation between residential and plebeian quarters, and the formation of a Paris-West for the rich. Until this time, noble hôtels and hovels could be found side by side on the same streets. Even the royal palaces were surrounded by wretched dwellings:

Opposite the proud colonnade of the Louvre, which every foreigner admires, bundles of old rags can be seen, suspended from ropes to make a hideous display . . . Chinese umbrellas made from waxed cloth, ten feet tall, serve as shelter to a multitude of old-clothes dealers displaying their wares, or rather their rags. When these umbrellas are lowered at night, they give the appearance of two lines of immobile giants, looking as if they guard the Louvre.

And on the other side of the palace, in the Carrousel quarter, ‘a maze of houses is surrounded by a marsh on the side of Rue de Richelieu, an ocean of rolling cobbles on the side of the Tuileries, sinister booths on the side of the Galleries, and wastes of cut stone and demolitions on the side of the old Louvre'.
¹¹
Paris mingled rich and poor in close proximity, but also in a vertical order. The same building would house shops on the ground floor – the shopkeeper living on the mezzanine – apartments for the aristocracy on the second storey (the ‘noble' floor before the invention of the lift), and workers in the attics. This mix had not yet completely disappeared even in the early 1960s, when for example on the Montagne Saint-Geneviève, or on Rues Laplace, Lanneau, and Valette, lodgings under the roofs were still occupied by workers – even if now with water on the landings.
American-style zoning by income was never really established until the era of de Gaulle, Malraux and Pompidou, at the time when the old quarters, massively renovated, were reoccupied by the bourgeoisie.

At the start of the eighteenth century, the belt between the Grands Boulevards and the region where the wall of the Farmers-General would be built saw a new style of construction: instead of taking place in dense and close-packed nuclei, urbanization advanced in a centrifugal fashion through the faubourgs, which radiated out in an extension of the major arteries of the old city. The major barriers of the
octroi
wall were constructed at the edge of these faubourgs. (This was when the word
barrière
acquired its metaphorical sense: ‘Hardly has the last vibration of the last carriage coming from a ball ceased at its heart before its arms are moving at the barriers and Paris shakes itself slowly into motion.' And as if an echo of this: ‘The dawn, shivering in her green and rose garment,/Was moving slowly along the deserted Seine,/And sombre Paris, the industrious old man,/Was rubbing his eyes and gathering up his tools.')
¹²

And yet this first stratum of New Paris should not be conceived along the lines of a wheel with spokes regularly spaced around its whole circumference. To the north and east of the city, the old faubourgs of working people had long formed a tight band. The land surrounding them, which was still agricultural, was rapidly built up, from the centre to the periphery. To the west, on the other hand, as we have noted, the wall passed at a certain distance from the city, the only road bearing the name of a faubourg being Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. In the whole of this immense sector urbanization advanced only slowly, in wide developments, and it was only in the late nineteenth century that these came together to create a continuous fabric. As for the Left Bank, New Paris developed there with scarcely any resort to the radial system of faubourgs.

The growth of the capital, in both surface and population, made a new division necessary. To replace the districts of Louis XIV, the Constituent Assembly established in 1790 twelve municipalities, each including four
sections. This organization would last until the demolition of the
octroi
wall: simply that in 1805 the municipalities became arrondissements and the sections – a term charged with too many Revolutionary memories – became
quartiers
.
¹³
But it became hard now to find one's way in this greater Paris. Choderlos de Laclos, who invented the system of street numbering, presented this in June 1787 in
Le Journal de Paris
:

It seems to me that it would not be useless to provide all the inhabitants of this immense city with a means of crossing it and knowing where they are; with the result that each person could be sure of arriving where he intended to go. I also believe that there could be no more favourable moment for this operation than the one at which the limits of Paris seem to have been fixed for a long time by the new wall that has just been constructed.

In 1779 a German by the name of Marin Kreefelt undertook a systematic numbering at his own expense. ‘I placed the first number on Rue de Gramont,' he wrote, ‘on the small door of the police station, now the wet-nurses' office' – the corner with Rue Saint-Augustin.
¹⁴
The Parisians gave a cold welcome to this initiative. On 15 Frimaire of year IX (6 December 1800), the prefect of police reminded the minister of the interior: ‘The disquiet aroused by this operation, which was seen as the precursor to new taxation, placed such obstacles on it that it had to be carried out at night; these hindrances gave rise to a number of mistakes.' The aristocrats and haute bourgeoisie had other reasons for their hostility. As Sébastien Mercier asked:

How can the hôtel of M. le Conseiller, M. le Fermier-Général, or Monseigneur the bishop be given a common number, and what is the object of this proud marble tablet? Everyone was like Caesar, not wanting
to be second in Rome: but a noble carriage gate would be found after a mere shopkeeper's premises. That would stamp an air of equality, which was to be carefully guarded against.

Kreefelt had envisaged numbering the entire left side of a street in one direction, then the right side in the opposite sense, so that the first and last numbers would be face to face – as can still be seen in certain London streets. The Constituent Assembly abolished this marking and set up a system designed purely for taxation, with continuous numbering of all streets in a section, one after the other. The beginning of each street thus received its number by chance, which no doubt made the search for any particular address as difficult as it is today in Tokyo. The present system was then inaugurated in 1805, with numbers painted in black (odd) or red (even) on an ochre ground. The porcelain plaques with figures that stood out ‘in white on a dark blue base' date from 1847, and are still to be seen on many Parisian buildings.

It is clearly not by chance that the two faubourgs whose names are most weighed down with opposite connotations, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, are situated at opposite extremes of this New Paris. And yet the major east-west axis today, leading from the Château de Vincennes to the towers of La Défense by way of the Bastille, the Louvre, and the Étoile, and served by Métro line no. 1, the axis on which one can see the sun set beneath the Arc de Triomphe, does not pass through the Faubourg Saint-Honoré but along the Champs-Élysées, and this is such a well-established Paris topos that it is quite hard to remember how recent it is. Until the 1860s, when Haussmann improved Avenue de l'Impératrice (Avenue du Bois in Proust's time, then Avenue Foch), the road out to Neuilly and Normandy passed through the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
¹⁵
This was the itinerary on which Des Grieux set out to attack the escort leading Manon Lescaut into exile (‘I learned, by the soldier's report, that they would go out towards Rouen, and that it was from Le Havredu-Grâce that they were to sail for America. We at once went to the gate
of Saint-Honoré . . . We assembled at the end of the faubourg. Our horses were fresh.').

The wide hilly stretch between the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Seine has undergone extraordinary transformations from the time when the young Louis XIII hunted fox there. At that time, he would have already left Paris on crossing the stone bridge built across the moat of the Tuileries. What would later become the Cours-la-Reine, the elegant promenade of the age of
Le Cid
, was thus outside the city when it was improved in the 1620s:

A new word and a new thing, the invention of Marie de Médicis. Until her regency, no other way of promenading was known in France except on foot and in gardens, but she brought from Florence to Paris the fashion of promenading by carriage at the coolest hours after dinner . . . With this object, she had avenues of trees planted along the Seine, to the west of the Tuileries gardens. The queen then gave her name to this way, which she modelled after the
corsi
of Florence and Rome.
¹⁶

Following the old Chaillot road, the Cours-la-Reine was divided from the river by the Versailles road that followed the Seine. It was planted with four ranks of elms, with ditches on either side and closed off with fences at each end. At the midpoint, a roundabout (now the Place du Canada) enabled carriages to turn. In
Le Grand Cyrus
, where Paris is called Suze and Princesse Mandane has the golden hair of the Duchesse de Longueville, one of the beauties of the Fronde, it is said that

Along this fine river [the Choaspe, as the Seine is called here], four avenues are to be found, that are so wide, so straight, and so shaded by the height of their trees that it is impossible to imagine a more pleasant promenade. This is also the place where the ladies all come in the evening, in little open-top cars, the men following behind on horseback; with the result that, free to go either in one direction or the other, the promenade serves for both promenade and conversation, and is without a doubt most entertaining.