Her old home was bought by the city in 1866 to be used as a history museum, and was renovated and enlarged using architectural gems salvaged from the vandalism then being inflicted on Vieux Paris by the city’s greatest modernizer, Baron Haussmann (of whom much more in a moment).
Today, the museum may seem rather old-school (there are no interactive displays or smell-the-medieval-odours attractions), but it offers an excellent opportunity to stroll through several millennia of Parisian life, featuring not only the big names of history but also the forgotten everyday people.
Lunchtime at the Neolithic restaurant
Logically, the most forgotten people of all are the very first known Parisians. Recent excavations near the river at Bercy (now the site of a multiplex cinema and trendy food court) have unearthed traces of settlements dating back some 6,000 years, including long wooden canoes, and some smaller artefacts that seem to confirm all the stereotypes about food-obsessed Parisians. The Musée Carnavalet’s collection of prehistoric tools consists largely of different-shaped blades for cutting and scraping meat. There are also several grinding stones, probably used for crushing herbs and spices, as well as a large variety of jugs and a selection of clay spoons, plates and even a ladle. Now I have seen a lot of prehistoric exhibits in my time, but never before spoons and a ladle. I was almost surprised that the archaeologists hadn’t found a reindeer-skin apron and a tray, proving that the region once boasted a tribe of Stone Age waiters—ancestors of today’s Parisian waiters, some of whom do have a certain prehistoric bluntness about them. And in case this idea seems too far-fetched, the museum also possesses a pair of wild-boar jaws with holes drilled through them, apparently so that they could be hung on a tree or palisade. Yes, in 4,000 BC the Parisians were already putting up restaurant signs.
Nothing, it seems, has survived to give us an idea of what happened in Paris between prehistory and the arrival of the Romans in 52 BC, probably because the Gauls torched their own village there to prevent the invaders capturing it. But we can guess what the site by the Seine must have looked like, because according to Caesar, it was then known as Lucotecia, a local word for bog. And the Romans kept the name, calling the place Lutetia.*
It is not certain exactly where in this tree-covered, silty bog the Gauls had their main settlement—on the Île de la Cité, some say, or near the western suburb of Nanterre.** But the Romans decided to build their city on higher ground, up on the Left Bank, centred around the hill now occupied by the Panthéon. And they brought the ultimate symbol of their civilization to the boggy riverside—the baths, les Thermes de Cluny, that still stand on a corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel. These weren’t filled with bucketfuls of muddy Seine water, either—the Romans constructed a 26-kilometre aqueduct to link them up with much purer springs.
The Musée Carnavalet testifies to this quantum leap in sophistication. Gallo-Roman artefacts on display include a set of slim copper probes and scalpels that look much like the kind of instruments that a surgeon would use to nip and tuck modern flesh; intricate pieces of moulded plasterwork—reminders that the gypsum deposits in Montmartre are the origin of the name plaster of Paris; an effete-looking miniature bronze of the messenger god Mercury, who is sporting a winged hat that would be very much at home on a Jean-Paul Gaultier catwalk; and a ring-shaped earthenware drinking flask with inscriptions that show how the Romans were expanding the area’s culinary horizons—on one side, the lettering reads ‘Landlady, fill my bottle with beer’ (the Gauls’ crude brew), and on the other, ‘Landlord, do you have spiced wine?’ An indication, perhaps, that incoming Roman wine merchants were marrying local barmaids and setting up a new style of Gallo-Roman café.
Gladiators, lions and pétanque players
While much of Paris’s history is thrust upon you—Notre-Dame, the Sacré Coeur and the Louvre, for instance—some of its finest historic sights are hidden away. One of the best examples of this is (or are) Les Arènes de Lutèce, in the 5th arrondissement.
At the end of the first century AD, the Gallo-Roman Lutetians built themselves a vast stone Coliseum outside their walls, about 500 metres south of the Île Saint-Louis. At its peak, the amphitheatre held 15,000 spectators, who came along to be amused either by theatrical shows or wholesale massacres of animals and gladiators. Even 2,000 years ago, Paris offered a wide variety of entertainment.
However, when Germanic invaders came visiting in the third century, entertainment suddenly became less of a priority, and stone from the amphitheatre was pillaged to shore up the city’s defences. After this, the stadium fell into disuse. It was used as a cemetery, and then swallowed up when King Philippe Auguste built his city wall in the thirteenth century. A convent was subsequently built across most of the site.
What was left of the amphitheatre lay hidden for six centuries or so, even though the neighbourhood was still popularly known as Les Arènes, and Roman masonry was only stumbled upon in the 1860s, when a new street, the rue Monge, was ploughed through the area. The existence of an amphitheatre was noted by the builders, but apartments were constructed along its western edge and Paris’s transport company bought the land to use as a tram depot.
The writer Victor Hugo and a protection committee, La Société des Amis des Arènes, were prompted to begin a vigorous ‘save the Arènes’ campaign. Hugo wrote to the Président de la République, Jules Grévy, in 1883, reminding him that: ‘It is impossible for Paris, the city of the future, to abandon the living proof that
