It’s almost as if the city planners were as frivolous as the newly emerging haute couture designers—they just couldn’t bear to see last year’s buildings any more.
The end of a century
In the brief spell between the end of Haussmann and the time when the métro builders would start ripping up his boulevards to lay underground railway lines, Parisians had a brief opportunity to get out and enjoy themselves without inhaling too much demolition dust.
The end of the nineteenth century was the Belle Époque, and the mellow mood is reflected in the Musée Carnavalet’s gallery of fin de siècle paintings, in which crowds of Parisians promenade up and down their airy new boulevards. Apart from the fashions, the beards and the horses, the street scenes are very similar to modern Paris—the trees lining the pavements already have iron sheaths protecting their trunks and the benches look like the ones you can still see today—wide green slats of wood set in a grey iron frame.
Café tables dominate the landscape, and the museum takes you inside one of the old grand boulevard brasseries. A private salon has been salvaged, a beautiful Art Nouveau boudoir with carved, plant-inspired furniture, including a very inviting couch. This was where a Parisian gentleman or well-to-do tourist would entertain his lover or paid companion, cajoling her from table to divan with seductive words and a few coupes de Champagne. A thick velvet curtain ensured total privacy, and the room even had a back door for a discreet exit. Yes, in the 1890s, the Parisian culture of adultery was part of the city’s architecture.
And this is the great thing about the Musée Carnavalet—thanks to the quirkiness of its collection, it manages to conjure up the atmosphere in the city at each period in its long, turbulent history, from the time when Paris was little more than a small settlement on a riverbank to the days when it became the most sophisticated, seductive city in Europe. Spending a couple of hours wandering through the museum, you will be able to feel the direct link between those Stone Age men and women making their earthenware plates and the secretive lovers enjoying a crystal coupe before stretching out on their velvet couch.
The (n)ever-changing city
After a century of almost constant devastation, you’d think the city would have wanted to savour its surviving architecture. But no, the one constant about Parisians seems to be that they can’t resist abusing their own skyline.
Miraculously, the First World War and even the Nazi Occupation swept over the city without doing a great deal of damage. In 1914, the fighting came within a few kilometres of Paris before its taxi drivers rallied to the national cause and ferried thousands of troops out to the front line, where they valiantly held off the invaders and accidentally invented trench warfare. There were occasional air raids throughout the Great War, and artillery shelling, including bombardments by Grosse Bertha, the giant cannon firing from over 100 kilometres away. In all, about 500 Parisians were killed by bombs and shells, though compared with the way the rest of northeastern France was flattened, Paris suffered relatively little architectural damage, except for the destruction of the métro station at Corvisart, and a large hole in the roof of Notre-Dame des Victoires church in the 2nd arrondissement.
For most of the Second World War, things were much quieter—the city surrendered without a fight, and it wasn’t until 1944 that the Ville Lumière came close to having its lights put out once and for all. This was when Hitler famously ordered his Governor of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, to destroy the city before it was liberated—‘Paris must not fall into enemy hands,’ the Führer said, ‘or, if it does so, only as a field of rubble.’ The General had his troops torch the Grand Palais, but, as mentioned in Chapter 2, disobeyed the order to set off explosives under Paris’s key monuments. Choltitz was probably acting in self-defence rather than expressing a fondness for architecture, because if he had flattened the city, he wouldn’t have survived very long after the French caught up with him. Even so, Paris breathed a sigh of relief when it was liberated almost intact, with most of the scarring limited to the Grand Palais, some bullet-spattered streets, and its conscience.
For a short period in September 1914, it was actually easier to get a taxi in Paris. You just had to put on a uniform and say, ‘Take me to the Marne.’ And for the only time in history, Parisian taxi drivers were happy, because they were paid what was on the meter for the fifty-kilometre trip to the battle front.
Bizarre, then, that after the two World Wars, the city set about mutilating its historical centre once more. In 1963, a scheme was announced to ‘renovate’ (that is, demolish) an immense segment of the unfashionable Right Bank, from the Seine up to the Gare de l’Est. In 1968, the demolition balls began to swing, smashing down the crystal palaces that had housed Les Halles, Paris’s vast food market. A major chunk of the Marais was also destroyed, along with its priceless medieval staircases, stone fireplaces, carved beams and other period features that get estate agents excited.
In their place, Paris was given the underground shopping mall that has rather blasphemously hijacked the name Les Halles (which is a bit like calling a new motorway Leafy Lane); the plastic city
