French Places - the culture, history, monuments and art of Paris and France
Two Parises
The foreigner, enchanted with the pell-mell of the Latin Quarter on the left bank of the Seine, the narrow market streets around Les Halles and Rue Saint Denis on the right bank, and the alleyways wreathing the hill of Montmartre in the north, was dismayed to find that much of what surrounded these historical places was a sea of sameness, such as the dowdy 17th arrondissement where Lilo and I found our flat.
This was because there were two distinct Parises, an old one and a much less old - and much larger – one, almost entirely built in the brief but momentous epoch known as the Second Empire.
In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, three successive “constitutional monarchs” failed to provide France with the egalitarian society for which it yearned. After a bloody insurrection, elections were held for a new leader, in which, for the first time, all men regardless of condition were allowed to vote.
This enabled Bonaparte’s ambitious nephew, Louis-Napoleon, to return from exile and stand for President. For the country folk, his name alone brought back dreams of military glory, and he was swept to victory. A few years later he took the final step of proclaiming himself the Emperor Napoleon III.
Here, the foreigner might logically wonder what became of Napoleon II, and why he didn’t have an Empire of his own. And the Frenchman, with his own sort of logique, would explain that he was Bonaparte’s son. This sickly young man was bequeathed the Empire after Waterloo but had it quickly removed by the victors, before dying in exile. So he was an Emperor who never really had an Empire worth naming, or numbering.
The only “other Napoleon” who ever counted, Napoleon III, had lived in exile almost all his life, which made of him a progressive European technocrat rather than a reincarnation of his romantic uncle. One of his many projects for France was to make Paris the most modern city in the world, even if it meant destroying many of its antiquities. The totalitarian powers he wielded during the first, most dictatorial years of his regime gave him the unique chance of acting without regard for the huge cost and legal difficulty of expropriating thousands of buildings.
Thus it was that, between 1852 and 1860, Paris was torn apart and given a new face, the monumental one for which it became known around the world. The self-proclaimed Emperor ordered his city planner, the Baron Haussmann, to carve broad, straight boulevards through the tangle of ancient streets, gracing them with ostentatious buildings such as the new opera house.
The squalid outer districts were cleared and completely rebuilt in the massive, uniform style then in favour, which the French now condescendingly refer to as le style haussmannien. Buildings on a given block had to have the same height, the same shaped roofs, and be faced with stone rather than plaster. Paris began to resemble “a great palace” on the lines of Versailles.
But there were other, practical reasons for this colossal effort than just Napoleonic soif de grandeur. Like all the great cities of the time, Paris was ravaged by epidemics caused by the filth that gathered in the tortuous streets and alleyways. Several decades before Napoleon’s nephew took power, an outbreak of cholera had inspired the government of his predecessor, King Louis-Philippe, to cut through the pestilential market quarter an astonishingly wide new street, the now unastonishing Rue Rambuteau, to “ventilate the miasma”, as the hygienists of the day put it. But the good “citizen King” did not have the absolute powers of the Emperor to take his plans any further.
Last but not least was that overriding concern, in the explosive 19th century, state security. The government feared a replay of the insurrection of 1848, when workers and revolutionaries barricaded themselves into their slums and fought off the King’s soldiers – ironically creating the power vacuum into which Louis-Napoleon stepped. So it was considered imperative that the city’s new design should speed the movement of troops and artillery to every corner of Paris, and that a new police station should be built at the dead center of the city, on the Ile de la Cité. All of which stood the Emperor’s successors in good stead when it came to crushing the radical uprising of 1871, in the chaos which followed his ignominious defeat in the war with Prussia.
Villa Externa, village des Ternes
When the Latin Quarter was already mushrooming into a great city in the Middle Ages, the land to the west of the Louvre Fortress was meadows and suburbs, and remained so until the advent of Haussmann. So although the 17th arrondissement looked old to me, it was really newer than much of Lower Manhattan.
Near our flat was a round-about junction called Place des Ternes, where we took the Metro. In this place, history tells us, at a time when the schools of the Latin Quarter teemed with students from all over Europe, the grand seigneur who was Bishop of Paris built a farmhouse. It was given the prosaic name of Villa Externa, “outer farm”, because it lay outside the Bishop’s other domains. Later, a hamlet sprung up nearby called Estern, a vernacular abbreviation of the Latin externa.
This hamlet became a village which was engulfed by the city just 101 years before we arrived on the scene. It then became a neighbourhood which gave its once-more misspelled name, Quartier des Ternes - curiously pluralized in a phonetical transcription which mistook d’Estern for des Ternes - to the Place des Ternes, where we took the train, at Metro Ternes.
And to think that, like the good student with his bi-lingual dictionary, I used to imagine Place des Ternes meant “Square of the Sullen Ones”!
xxx