I personally like Beaubourg, and am consoled by the fact that Les Halles sits astride road tunnels that syphon traffic away from the Louvre and spit it out several hundred metres to the north, but all in all, with a bit of self-respect, the Marais could have remained about twice as big as it is today, and Les Halles shopping centre would have been housed in nineteenth-century market halls.
Not only this—throughout the 1960s, Paris tried to out-Haussmann Haussmann and slice motorways through its surviving medieval streets. The Plan autoroutier pour Paris was a scheme dreamt up by road planners who were apparently upset that Paris got in the way of their nationwide motorway network. They therefore drew up plans to channel high-speed traffic straight through or under the city.
True, it would have been great for truck drivers to be able to admire the place des Vosges in the middle of their Calais–Bordeaux marathon, and coach parties wouldn’t have had to stop to visit Père Lachaise cemetery—the guides would have been able to point out the most famous graves as the tourists cruised by on their way to a toilet break at the Tuileries services, followed by a high-speed drive through the legs of the Eiffel Tower.
If the plan autoroutier had been implemented, Paris would have had not only the périphérique around its borders and an inner ring of grands boulevards, it would also have been criss-crossed by eight four- or six-lane highways, with both banks of the Seine being converted into trunk roads.
In the event, only the périph’ and part of the riverbank road were built. Which is why today, if you mention les berges (the banks) de la Seine to a Parisian, they will picture not cobbled walkways and a stroll along the Île Saint-Louis but charging traffic. The Right Bank is a honking highway from opposite the Eiffel Tower pretty well all the way to Bercy on the southeast edge of the city, and the Left Bank was only saved thanks to the intervention of President Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s.
To the city’s residents, this constant demolition is all a bit traumatic. It’s as though there’s a permanent threat hanging over Paris’s neck, like some giant municipal guillotine—who knows when someone will unveil a plan to turn Notre-Dame into a multi-storey car park or flatten Montmartre to create a city airport?
For me, though, it is this constant spirit of change that is the unchanging thing about Paris. Life itself stays the same—it is only the setting that changes. Take La Coupole, for example, the classic brasserie at Montparnasse with its wonderful Art Deco murals that are a monument to Parisian café culture. In the 1980s, the owners plonked a glass-fronted tower block on top—architectural vandalism par excellence, you might say. But the brasserie’s interior, and the life going on inside it, didn’t change at all. Today, you can sit and eat oysters beneath the jazz-age frescoes and not care how many modern storeys are piled up over your head.
You can’t say the same of Les Halles and Beaubourg, of course, but even they have matured and been sucked into Parisian life. Students queue to study and chat each other up in the Beaubourg library, while the pedestrian streets around Les Halles are where suburban kids come to escape their depressing new towns, and the underground shopping centre now houses the second-biggest cinema complex in the world,******* with a dozen screens, over 3,000 seats, and 120 staff. Similarly, there were howls of protest when the Louvre courtyard was ‘desecrated’ with a glass pyramid in 1989, but these days it’s impossible to imagine the museum without its futuristic entrance. The Pyramide du Louvre was one of President Mitterrand’s departing gifts to the nation, and he definitely wouldn’t have said that he was ignoring Paris’s history by commissioning the shockingly modernist building. On the contrary, he was writing himself into that history.
So, oui, Paris is a beautifully preserved historical city, although by no means as well preserved as it could have been, and is, one could argue, much more interesting for it.
To redeem themselves for their past acts of destruction, though, it seems that the powers-that-be want to restore some of Paris’s lost beauty, because there are now plans afoot to reclaim the riverbanks from the cars. At last, the wheel may actually be turning the other way.
* It wasn’t until the fourth century AD that the city got its modern name, an abbreviation of the Latin civitas Parisiorum, or the town of the Parisi, the Gallic tribe who had previously governed the region.
** Which would have been appropriate, because it was partly the bogginess of the badly built university campus at Nanterre that sparked off the student riots in May 1968.
*** Interestingly, Hugo signed off his letter, ‘Je vous serre la main’—‘I shake your hand’—perhaps a reference to Grévy’s membership of the Freemasons. Hugo’s father, General Joseph Hugo, had been a mason. In Paris, it’s always easier to lobby friends of the family.
**** For more details of Paris’s role in the martyrdom of France’s teenage patron saint, see my book 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.
***** Napoleon III was also inspired to rebuild Paris by a stay in Southport, on the northwest coast of England, and some say that Paris should therefore be nicknamed the Southport of the South.
****** Some 350 of these pictures of pre-Haussmann Paris, alongside new photos of the same spots today, are reproduced in a book called Paris Avant/Après: 19e Siècle–21e Siècle by Patrice de Moncan.
******* The biggest is in Korea. South, of course.
It’s behind you … Many visitors come to Paris to meander from the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre to Notre-Dame, and ignore them
