This fascination with le flâning (the French are bound to call it this one day) may explain why so many of the picture rooms in the Musée Carnavalet,* Paris’s autobiographical history museum, are hung with street scenes. Men in top hats and ladies in bustles stroll along pavements, stream out of the theatre, and lounge on café terraces. There is even one painting of a sortie de lycée, with teenagers leaving school at the end of the day. Artists in every city paint street scenes, but in Paris it seems to have been an obsession. Life was, and is, dans la rue.
And even if you’re looking for nothing more artistic than the chance to fill your camera’s memory card with holiday snaps, walking is still an excellent way of getting around the city. Not only because Paris is so small that a day’s footwork can take you through dozens of very different neighbourhoods, but also because there are so many uniquely Parisian things to discover on or alongside the pavements.
What’s in a nom?
When I first came to Paris, I was completely bemused by the road names. Although I could read the signs, I often had no idea which street I was actually in, because sometimes the smallest, simplest junction of two roads would have several signs telling me completely different things.
For example, at one street corner in the Marais, there are three blue enamel plaques—two on the left, one on the right—informing me that I’m in the rue Charlemagne. So far so good. But on the same walls, there are carved-stone signs suggesting that I might be in the rue des Prêtres. And on one side of the street, there’s also a carved-out piece of wall where a name sign has obviously been taken down.
Meanwhile, in the small street leading off the rue Charlemagne/des Prêtres, there are more contradictions—the blue enamel plaques on either side of the street tell me it’s rue du Prévôt in the 4th arrondissement, while a stone sign says it’s rue Percée in the 12th. And on both sides there are hacked-out spaces where signs have been removed.
In all, then, at this one junction, within about 5 metres of each other, there are eight street-name signs and three mysterious spaces. The tourist or recent immigrant would be justified in wondering where the hell they were.
The same can be said if you sit outside the Bonaparte café in the street of the same name in the 6th. In front of the café, there are two modern-looking enamel plaques with street names, one above the other. The top one says rue de Rennes, the lower one Place Saint-Germain des Prés. Which one is it to be? Well, if you examine them very carefully, you can see that the rue de Rennes sign has what looks like two thin pieces of transparent sticky tape stuck in a cross over the name, as if this were enough to cancel it out.
Sometimes things are less contradictory, but just as bizarre. There are often two identical street signs (or signs of different shapes with identical names) on the same wall. Take the small section of street just along the rue Charlemagne from the junction I mentioned above. Here, on one apartment building that is about 10 metres wide, there are three signs emphasizing that, yes, I am in the rue Charlemagne. Two of the signs are about 2.5 metres above ground level, and one much higher, about 4 metres up.
It’s a similar scenario nearby, at the intersection of the rue du Roi de Sicile and the rue Pavée. On the corner of the rue Pavée, there are two blue enamel signs, set very close together just above head height, telling the passer-by twice, very legibly, what the name of the street is. In fact, the rue Pavée seems to have had an identity crisis at some time in the past, because if you walk along it, its short name is emblazoned at unnecessarily regular intervals until you get to the northern end where the system collapses with exhaustion, and there’s a sign with missing letters.
The explanations on the signs about who a particular street is named in honour of are equally inconsistent. When it’s a politician, like the totally forgotten Eugene Spuller in the 3rd, you get his full CV, telling you he was a local councillor, MP, senator and minister. A well-loved writer like Madame de Sévigné, on the other hand, merits nothing more than a femme de lettres.
Paris’s street corners would seem to be suffering from a deep-seated identity crisis.
Signs of the changing times
The fairly obvious explanation for the jumble of repetitive and contradictory signs is that the city keeps introducing new rules about how its street names should be displayed, and doesn’t always take the old signs down. After the Revolution in 1789, for example, most street names that were too religious or royal were changed, and some of the old stone plaques were defaced. The rue de Turenne, for example, used to be the rue Saint-Louis, named after a thirteenth-century man who was both a king (Louis IX) and a saint, which might explain why his name has been crudely chiselled away.
Similarly, at its intersection with the rue de Thorigny, the rue Debelleyme has a barely legible stone sign indicating that it used to be the rue Neuve François, presumably named after King François I, who is now one of France’s most fondly remembered royals, but whose reputation took a temporary nose-dive in the fiercely anti-royalist 1790s.
The reasons why there are so many street names scattered about
