Some thought the entrances too erotic—the intertwining vines were too sensuous and the double lamps looked, one highly inventive critic said, like Fallopian tubes. Others felt that the designs were morbid, and that the green railings looked like stylized bones.
In 1904, a daily newspaper, Le Figaro, demanded that Paris get rid of ‘these contorted railings, these hump-backed standard lamps that point out the métro stations like enormous frogs’ eyes’. This was the same paper that, only five years earlier, had sponsored an exhibition by Guimard. The painful truth was that, like all extreme styles, Art Nouveau was going out of fashion almost as quickly as it had come in, and at the turn of the twentieth century, modernists were sneering at its twee végétalisme.
Guimard’s contract was terminated, no more designs were commissioned and when, in 1904, a prestigious new station was opened outside the Opéra Garnier, a classical stone entrance was chosen. Guimard’s existing designs were used for a few more stations until just before the First World War, but Art Nouveau had officially fallen from favour.
These days, the métro may be very proud and protective of its Guimard architecture, like the beautiful gold-tiled entrance at Porte Dauphine or the open-top versions at Cité and Louvre-Rivoli, but almost half of Guimard’s 141 station entrances have been destroyed, including two showcase pagodas at Bastille and Charles de Gaulle-Étoile. Fêted as a cultural hero today, during his lifetime Guimard was a victim of Paris’s fickle artistic tastes.
A Parisian accident waiting to happen
One thing that the rational engineer Fulgence Bienvenüe probably did not bargain for was Parisians’ behaviour when they were on the métro. And it was this behaviour that caused the métro’s first—and biggest—catastrophe.
It started with a technical problem. The first métro carriages were made out of wood, and the electric cables powering the engines passed right under them—a dangerous combination, especially if the system short-circuited, which it did on 10 August 1903, at Barbès-Rochechouart station on Line 2, causing a fire to break out underneath one of the carriages. Luckily, Barbès is an outdoor station, so the passengers were evacuated without any panic and the fire was quickly put out.
The following train was also evacuated, and began to push the damaged carriages through the tunnels towards the terminus at Nation, so that they could be taken out of service and repaired. Incident over, it was thought. The evacuated passengers got on the next train and continued their journey.
However, a few stops further on, at Ménilmontant, the fire started up again on the original damaged train. The driver of the train carrying the evacuated passengers was warned, and stopped at Couronnes, the station before Ménilmontant. Couronnes is an underground station, and the driver asked the passengers to leave the train yet again, and exit the station via the stairs.
At this point, one exasperated passenger demanded to know whether they were going to get a refund. The driver said he didn’t know, and an argument began. Tempers flared, the passengers refused to leave until they were guaranteed a refund, and the stalemate was broken only by the arrival of a dense cloud of smoke that had spread back along the tunnel from Ménilmontant. In a panic, passengers began to flee along the platform, only to hit a dead end. Couronnes station has only one exit—via the stairs they had refused to climb, at the other end of the platform. Tragically, in an attempt to stop the fire at Ménilmontant, the electricity along the whole section of line was cut, plunging Couronnes into total, choking darkness. By the time the smoke cleared, eighty-four people had died of asphyxiation.
The technical lessons were learnt—wooden carriages were phased out, and the electric circuit for station lighting was separated out from that powering the engines. The only thing that hasn’t changed since 1903 is that Parisians are still just as argumentative …
It’s just not cricket (probably)
New York has its subterranean albino alligators, and Paris has crickets. Many métro users swear that they have heard the chirruping of these communicative insects, especially on Lines 3, 8 and 9 (not the others—it seems that, like many visitors to Paris, the crickets can’t understand the signs at junctions telling them how to get from one métro line to another). I personally have never heard them—birdsong, yes, from sparrows that get in via overground stations, and the scurrying of mice and rats, but never the Mediterranean call of the cricket.
It is said that the insects migrated to Paris from the south of France, and originally took refuge in winter in boulangeries, where they would eat the wood used in the bread ovens. Then, in a piece of convenient serendipity, just when wood ovens were being converted to gas and electricity, the métro was built, and the crickets all hopped into the tunnels. Here they fed on discarded food, paper and cigarette butts, and managed to establish colonies on
