Retour A Paris 2017

As my Facebook posts gave away, I managed to visit Paris again, albeit for a week.   Thanks to our friend Jean, ASP Class of ’86, we had a place to stay, and managed lunch at the US Embassy.  Thank you Jean, thank you Loni, and thank you Matt.

Background.  In January 1979 our family moved to Paris.  Our father was with the US Dept of Commerce and had a post at the Embassy which allowed us to remain there until 1990.  From February 1979 to April 1984 we lived at the US Embassy compound in Neuilly, then in April 1984 we moved into Paris itself, on Blvd. Malesherbes just up the street from St. Augustin.  In August 1990 we moved back to the US.  I had never had a chance to get back since then, so this was also my first visit as a tourist.  As my GF-companion Loni had never been, I also had the opportunity to play tour guide to an extent.  Fortunately the changes from 1990 are less significant than all the things which are pretty much the same.

Mandatory Sightseeing:  Eiffel Tower, for the first time since spring 1979; Versailles (again); the Louvre (first time since summer 1987); Notre Dame; Montmartre.  We did pass through Pigalle, Paris' red light district, without doing much more than observe its nature - the circumstances of our lodging prevented any subsequent appropriate activities in the same spirit.    

Charles De Gaulle Airport.  Terminal 1 still has its tubes.  Awesome.  Plus now it’s connected by the RER, which wasn’t the case back when I lived there.  Jean and I joked that Petain doesn’t have an airport named after him.

Fun stuff.  FNAC.  The Wagram location is gone, but now there’s one on Ternes down the street, on the Champs Elysees itself, and another at Passage du Havre near Gare St. Lazare and Galeries Lafayette.  The store’s music selection pisses all over Best Buy and Barnes & Noble, giving an in-store selection comparable to Amazon.  Brant Bjork?  Kadavar?   Awesome.  If I lived in Paris – again – I’d be there nonstop.

Metro.   I love the Metro.  Flat rate tickets.   Stops mere blocks from each other.   A comprehensive network.  Actually, we didn’t take cabs or Uber at all on our visit. The Metro and RER got the job done, plus our own feet.   Now the #1 line, La Defense (formerly Pont de Neuilly) to Chateau de Vincennes, has doors on the platforms themselves and automatic, driverless trains which presumably do not go on strike.  [To be fair, though, no strikes occurred during our visit.]

Food.   Convenience alone forced us to visit Evil Clown (McD) at least once.   I didn’t see Chipotle around.  The Burger King on the Champs seems to be gone.  KFC in Versailles was good.   No free refills, though, and what passes for “LARGE” in Paris would be “MEDIUM” back in the US.   We did enjoy Hippo and Relais de Venise, though.

Notre Dame.  As my readers know, I’ve been visiting the local cathedrals in the US.  By nature, they are recent additions, almost all built during the twentieth century.   Here was a big thing actually built in the Middle Ages, in fact taking about 200 years to build thanks to constant CGT strikes.  It’s big.  It’s dark.  It’s actually THE cathedral of the archdiocese of Paris and has two statues of St. Denis carrying his own head (which is pretty badass).   Now they have a cute electronic pen thing you can point to items on the map and it will tell you what they are.  Also, the crypt is good, as you see the Roman stuff that was there underneath.   What I didn’t realize was that even in Roman times, there was a substantial Left Bank development of Lutetia, so it wasn’t just on the Island. 

Left Bank vs. Right Bank.  We did not visit the Latin Quarter, so our sole Left Bank fun was the Eiffel Tower.   I also missed out on the Franco-Prussian War exhibit at the Musee de L’Armee – odd, as it was the only Franco-German war the Germans won.  We also missed out on The Bones, as Loni calls the Catacombs.  Well, put them down for next time along with Aquaboulevard and the full Versailles gardens. 

Napoleon III and Haussmann.  Now I know what role they had in redeveloping Paris from 1848-1870, so I saw much of the city with new eyes.  The current 20 arrondissement size, an absorption of the immediate suburbs, dates from their partnership.  Nowadays N3 is better known for his unsuccessful adventure in Mexico, colonizing Vietnam, and losing to Prussia in 1870, but his legacy in Paris itself is far more substantial in real terms today.  I also recognized Louis Phillippe, the last French King (1830-48) in many of the paintings.  

Baron Haussmann

As I promised, here is the scoop on Georges-Eugene Haussmann, better known as Baron Haussmann, part of the tag-team duo with Emperor Napoleon III who completely remade Paris in the third quarter of the nineteenth century between 1852 and 1870.  My source is Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris, by Michel Carmona.  It’s a fairly long and detailed book on his life and how he managed to remake Paris, but certainly an excellent source of information on France from his birth to death.

 Several generations before him, the Haussmanns moved from what is now Germany to France and became French.  From a relative with a noble title, GEH earned the title of Baron, though in practice his vocation was as a prefect (governor) of different parts of France before becoming prefect of Paris.  This was at a time when Paris had no mayor, the role essentially being filled by the prefect.

 The Haussmann story cannot be told without mentioning Napoleon III, also known as Louis Napoleon.   Nowadays it seems N3 is more known as an unsuccessful dictator who messed around in the Crimea, Italy, Mexico, and Southeast Asia (French Indochina) and lost France to the Prussians in 1870 – he was even captured at Sedan.  But I believe this overshadows his far more significant achievement: rebuilding Paris with the help of his prefect, Haussmann.

 1848 was a busy and interesting time in Europe.  Several countries experienced revolutions; Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto.  N3 came back from exile to win the election in late 1848 and become president of France; in December 1852 he succeeded in a bloodless coup to become its emperor, establishing the Second Empire; the first was obviously Napoleon Bonaparte’s.  The latter was actually his uncle; N3 was the son of NB’s older brother Louis.  “Napoleon II”, NB’s actual son, never achieved power, dying in “captivity” in Austria.   Remarkably, N3 spent almost no time in Paris before becoming President.  Most of his life had been spent in exile in Switzerland and England plotting his return to France. 

Upon his return, N3 had brought with him a marked up map of Paris which described his plans.  At that time Paris was still a densely populated city with very few large, wide avenues, more medieval in nature than modern.  N3 had the idea of decompressing the city, allowing it to breathe with more park space and wide avenues cutting across the city and linking up the rail stations with each other; without this it was difficult to cross the city with any speed.  Critics argued the purpose of the wider avenues was to discourage and hamper the use of barricades, but the aesthetic and practical convenience alone of these changes reduces the force of such arguments.  As it was, N3’s colored map went up in flames when the Hotel de Ville was torched by the Communards (aka the Congressional Progressive Caucus) in May 1871.

 If N3 had the basic vision, it was the prefect, Haussmann, who figured out how to turn that vision into reality.  Haussmann was an expert administrator, a clever bureaucrat who know “how to get things done”.  He used eminent domain to condemn huge sections of town – though the owners were compensated – so the demolition and rebuilding could occur.  He managed the financial chicanery necessary to finance the construction, by bonds and finance companies.  He even threw in a few ideas of his own (e.g. the Etoile).  The Opera building itself and the district around it, the Bois de Boulogne, and Les Halles also date from this period under Haussmann’s direction.

 To be honest, I found this “political sausage-making” part of the story fairly dull.  What intrigued me was the way in which Paris changed.  Most of the work was done in the 1850s-1860s, mostly wrapped up in time for the World’s Fair in 1867 and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.  Another big issue is sanitation:  Haussmann was responsible for installing the sewer system.  This, combined with the larger avenues, dramatically improved the hygiene of the city.  Of course, this meant razing large areas formerly inhabited by less wealthy elements of Parisian society; the new buildings were much nicer and out of the price range of the former residents.  Part of the “financing” was that not only were the new blocks sold at a profit, the improved property values beefed up the real estate tax income of the city.  But this pushed the riff-raff further out.

 In fact, Haussmann presided over a substantial expansion of the city itself.  What had been immediate suburbs were urbanized and the city’s current 20 arrondissement size dates from this time.  With the major exceptions of the Eiffel Tower (1889) and the Paris Metro (1900), most of what we know of today as “Paris” was shaped and formed during Haussmann’s tenure.  This includes Blvd. Malesherbes, which opened in 1861.  This was the street I lived on from 1984 to 1990.  Considerable work was done in this part of town and around Gare St. Lazare, which was only minutes from where I lived, and the station I used most often (mainly to commute to school from spring 1984 to June 1986).

 Downfall.  By now we take Paris in its present form for granted, but back then these “grand travaux” (major works) involved destruction of much of “Old Paris”, which some misguided dolts treasured in its own right.  Moreover, the methods themselves opened up the arrogant and aggressive Haussmann to not merely aesthetic criticism, but outright allegations of corruption and self-dealing.  By mid-1870 this opposition had reached a critical mass so strong that even Napoleon III couldn’t protect his subordinate – and he was out.  But by then they soon had a far more urgent concern than urban renewal and shady real estate deals:  the Prussians had defeated the French Army at Sedan and were soon besieging Paris itself.  

 Modern impressions.  I’ve been to NYC several times over the last few years, and I’ve noticed a major contrast with Paris.  Below First Street, Manhattan has the more irregular streets we associate with European cities, but the buildings are still all different styles and heights.  Above First Street, the avenues are completely straight.  Looking south simply hits the brick wall of oddly-angled streets, but west you can see straight to New Jersey, east to Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx, and north uptown with Central Park in the middle.  But despite the regularity of the streets, the buildings are completely different. 

 Paris, on the other hand, has consistent heights of the blocks, block after block across the whole city.  It’s like it has a crew cut.  Moreover, the facades are consistent in style, none of the dramatic heterogeneity which American cities have.   The latter element was actually established in the late eighteenth century, but Haussmann can take credit for the former.  But the ultimate credit for Paris as we know it now goes to both Haussmann and Napoleon III.  None of the latter’s political and foreign policy failures mean nearly so much in 2012 as his impact on Paris today.