The difficulty was to get a decision. The existing railway companies were determined to manage the urban network, and entered into a prolonged power struggle with city officials who wanted control of their transport system. To cap it all, the national government was right-wing, whereas the city was à gauche, which created a whole new level of disagreement.
In the end, minds were focused by the appearance on the horizon of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, which was to be a showcase for French innovation and technology. Exhibits were to include one of the first moving walkways and a big-screen projection of films by the Lumière brothers. And as part of the Expo, the city was also organizing the 1900 Summer Olympic Games. Not only were millions of visitors expected, it was also hoped that many of them would want to travel from the main exhibition site around the Eiffel Tower to the sporting events out in the suburb of Vincennes, to the east of the city.*
It was therefore urgent to build at least one métro line, and finally, in 1897, Paris began to get its plans on track.
Rather predictably, the city opted for the project put forward by its own Director of Works—an electrically powered underground network (which, by now, wasn’t that futuristic, because London had been operating an electric system since 1890). It was an idea that had one huge advantage as far as Parisian officials were concerned—it made interference from the railway companies impossible, because as well as being electric rather than steam-powered, the trains would run in tunnels that were too narrow for a conventional train.
The final barrier to building a Parisian underground was cleared in March 1898, when the national government voted through a law declaring that the project was ‘of public utility’, and thereby ceded control of the work to the city.
To prevent jealousy amongst French railway companies, the construction contract was given to an outsider, a Belgian industrialist and amateur archaeologist called Édouard Empain. He founded a company called the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitan de Paris and, in October 1898, set Fulgence Bienvenüe to work digging.**
Sticking to a route that allowed him to dig along existing roads (he hadn’t worked out how to tunnel under apartment buildings without making them fall down), Bienvenüe had soon turned the street running the whole length of the Louvre and the Tuileries into a gigantic trench. Work progressed with remarkable speed, though there were a few hold-ups—in December 1899, a tunnel underneath the Champs-Élysées collapsed, creating a crater 15 metres wide and 20 deep, swallowing up trees and lampposts, and fortunately injuring only two passers-by. And no one had foreseen the sheer quantity of earth that would be dug up. A flotilla of barges carried debris away down the Seine, and at night, the city’s trams were requisitioned to pull wagonloads of earth out to dumps.
But on 19 July 1900, at 1 p.m., after only twenty-two months of work, Line 1 of the Paris métro was opened to the public and began to carry Expo visitors from the Porte Maillot, just beyond the Arc de Triomphe, to the Olympics at the Porte de Vincennes. The locals also started to use the métro straight away, and it was so popular that the three-carriage trains had to be lengthened to eight carriages—though, sadly, this slowed the trains down so much that the benefit was lost.
In any case, the project had worked, and Bienvenüe was commissioned to go ahead with the plan to build five more lines, including one, Line 4, that would require him to tunnel under the Seine.
This difficult and dangerous task was accomplished with two ingenious pieces of engineering. It was impossible to drill into the silty riverbank around Saint-Michel without damaging an existing overground railway line, so Bienvenüe pumped in ice-cold salt water and froze the ground solid. Even so, it took ten months of digging to complete 14.5 metres of tunnel through the silt, and this was without even starting to dig under the Seine itself.
For the actual river crossing, he put the work out to tender. More than thirty projects were put forward, and the most innovative and daring was chosen—a plan conceived by a company called Chagnaud, who had already built a three-tunnel métro interchange at Opéra. They proposed to sink a tunnel into the Seine that would be like a permanently parked submarine.
Starting in 1905, metal lengths of tunnel were constructed on the riverbank beside the Tuileries, and then simply dropped into the water and on to the riverbed. The water was pumped out of a hollow chamber built in underneath the length of tunnel; and into this chamber men were sent, via a chimney, to simply dig downwards beneath that section of tunnel until it was far enough underground and underwater. The crossing required two years’ labour and five segments of tunnel. The horrific working conditions can only be imagined, and five men lost their lives digging in the fetid gloom. Line 4 was finally opened on 9 January 1910, just days before the Seine decided to show that it had not been tamed after all—the river broke its banks on 20 January, almost immediately flooding Châtelet station, and then gradually reclaiming the tunnels that had been dug through its territory. Line 4 had to close, and was not fully re-opened until April.
Art Nouveau grows prematurely old
Paris wanted everything to do with the 1900 Exposition Universelle to look spectacular. The Eiffel Tower had been built for the 1889 Expo, but now the Grand Palais and Petit Palais were to be constructed on the Right Bank of the Seine, and the new métro had to be just as impressive.
A competition was launched to find a designer for the station entrances. Twenty
