Faces of Paris

eric hazan FACES OF PARIS ow has Paris changed over the past decade? To answer that, one would ideally need to have returned to the city after a long absence; I have only been away for short peri- ods over the last ten years, and so I see its progress as one Hdoes the wrinkles on a beloved face that one observes every day. The inner city is now changing only slowly. Time is needed for a quarter of Kabyl cafés to be transformed into fashionable bars, for the Chinese rag trade to advance a street or two, or for what is called renovation to press the poor a notch more towards the Périphérique.1 The physical transformations of Paris may be read as a ceaseless strug- gle between the spirit of place and the spirit of time. Take, for example, the nameless spot formed by the widening of Rue Mouffetard below the church of Saint-Médard, in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau on the eastern edge of the 5th arrondissement. The ancient food shops, the market stalls, the immense trees that cast their shade onto the porch of the church, the remains of the little cemetery where the ‘convulsionaries’ danced on the tomb of a popular priest in the reign of Louis XV,2 the two large cafés facing each other across the road—this whole panoply of eras, styles and events gives this place a spirit that cannot be compared with any other. Older Parisians are aware that under their feet flows the River Bièvre in its descent towards the Jardin des Plantes, and that this district was crossed by the main road towards Italy. The riotous tradition of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau extends far into the past: in the sixteenth century it was a bastion of popular Protestantism; later it was involved in all the great revolutionary journées.3 A spirit of place, therefore; but the spirit of the time has also succeeded in making itself felt. The centre of this space is now occupied by an enormous floral parterre, with a fountain in the middle. The combined new left review 62 mar apr 2010 31 32 nlr 62 action of the Voirie and Espaces Verts departments has attempted the impossible—to transform this place into one of the thousands of round- abouts that punctuate roads the length and breadth of France. Respect for the spirit of place has nothing to do with the sad idea of ‘heritage’, any more than distrust of the spirit of time means rejecting the contemp- orary. Over the last twenty or thirty years, some innovations have indeed managed to create a new spirit of place. I. M. Pei’s pyramid, for example, gave life to Napoleon III’s Louvre courtyard, formerly a dusty parking place for the museum staff, and not far away is a whole new quarter, with its good points and bad, organized around the Beaubourg Centre. (I never say ‘Centre Pompidou’, as the late president had deplorable artistic taste—his office decorated by Agam—and besides he was opposed to the Piano–Rogers project, which was only adopted thanks to the stubborn- ness of the jury chair, the great Jean Prouvé.) Conversely, the charm of certain places has evaporated without the his- torical décor having changed. On the Place Saint-Sulpice, the Café de la Mairie used to be a pleasant spot to drink coffee in the first rays of the morning sun; this was where Georges Perec wrote his ‘Attempt to Exhaust a Parisian Space’, noting its police station, cinema, publishing house, undertakers, travel agents, newspaper kiosk, beauty parlour ‘and much else’.4 The setting is the same, but I avoid it now because of its 1 These extracts are drawn from Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps, published this spring by Verso: hardback, 402 pp, 978 1 84967 411 4. 2 The young deacon, François de Pâris (1690–1727), was known for his popular sympathies and left his worldly goods to the poor. His grave was acclaimed as a site for miracle cures, attracting large numbers; some fell into convulsions. Scandalized by reports of ‘pretty girls, their throats and chests bare, their skirts thrown back, their legs in the air, shaking in the arms of young men, who might thereby satisfy certain passions’, the authorities closed the cemetery in 1732. Popular graffiti soon sprang up: De par le roi, défense à Dieu/De faire miracle en ce lieu—‘By order of the King, it is forbidden for God to perform miracles on this site’. 3 Balzac described the quarter in The Commission on Lunacy (1836) as the poorest in Paris, ‘that in which two-thirds of the population lack firing in winter, which leaves most brats at the gate of the Foundling hospital, which sends most beggars to the poorhouse, most ragpickers to the street corners, most decrepit old folks to bask against the walls on which the sun shines, most delinquents to the police courts’. This passage, like a number of others, shows the degree to which Balzac, despite his defence of throne and altar, differed from Tocqueville, Du Camp or Flaubert: you never find in him the least expression of contempt for ordinary people. 4 Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, Paris 1975. In homage to Perec (1936–82), I wrote the pages on the Place Saint-Sulpice in The Invention of Paris at a table in the same café. hazan: Paris 33 clientele: smart tourists and elegant ladies taking a rest after doing their shopping in the haute-couture boutiques nearby. Easy to avoid, but then where to go? The answer is difficult, given how few café terraces on the historic Left Bank are now worth a visit. Among the active agents of urban deterioration in these last ten years, I would give top marks to the Service des Espaces Verts. What they call végétalisation runs rampant in every quarter, afflicting places that ask only to be left in peace. Between Barbès and Place Clichy, the Boulevard de Rochechouart and the Boulevard de Clichy used to be divided by a central reservation that was used partly for parking, partly by the local kids as a football pitch, partly as somewhere you could drink a can of beer on a bench, but above all by Eastern European tourists emerging from the neighbouring sex shops and kebab joints. In sum, an undefined space, just what is needed to give the city some air. But the mairie is not fond of such spaces. Right along the length of these old boulevards, the Service has established plantations hemmed in by metal grilles, with plants of a particular ugliness that are now found throughout Paris, selected so that they never flower and rapidly get covered with an unpleasant dust. Sometimes this végétalisation is effected by shrubs in tubs or enormous pots, as for example in the Rue des Rosiers in the old Jewish quarter of the Marais: in combination with the newly laid paving and its central gut- ter, these sickly stems have given the coup de grâce to this street which, ten years ago, still kept something of its Ashkenazi-proletarian past. Mapping metamorphoses But I should not exaggerate. These last few years have not known any disaster comparable to the destruction of upper Belleville in the 1960s, or the ravaging of the Bastille by the installation of Carlos Ott’s opera house twenty years later. They have even seen a number of successes, like the walkway on the old viaduct leading to the Bastille station, or Marc Mimram’s footbridge, which cleverly links the Orsay museum with the Tuileries gardens. In point of fact, the very widespread impres- sion that Paris has changed a great deal in recent years is quite correct, but what has changed is not so much the mineral and vegetable setting as the way in which the city is inhabited. On the Left Bank there has been scarcely any change since the 1990s. Apart from the great Chinatown of the 13th arrondissement, the population 34 nlr 62 has remained almost uniformly white and bourgeois. For centuries Paris had mingled rich and poor in close proximity, if also in vertical order. The same building would house shops on the ground floor—the shop- keeper 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 Sainte-Geneviève, or on Rues Laplace, Lanneau and Valette, lodgings under the roofs were still occupied by workers. 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. In today’s Latin Quarter, the Blacks are street sweepers, the Arabs are grocers, the police are rarely seen and the historic streets are as clean as in the pedestrianized zones of the provinces. Everything is just a little older: the friendly beggar whose pitch has always been the five metres between the La Hune bookshop and the newspaper kiosk at St-Germain-des-Près now has grey hair and wears glasses to read the volumes the bookshops give him. Nothing happens anymore on the Left Bank, whereas in my youth we hardly needed to cross the Seine: the Right Bank was like a faraway desert. The Right Bank today is no more homogeneous than it was back in the insurrectional days of June 1848 or during the Commune.

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