A Walk Through Paris: A Radical Exploration

By Eric Hazan

Eric Hazan, author of the acclaimed The Invention of Paris, leads us by the hand in this walk from Ivry to Saint-Denis, passing such familiar landmarks as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pompidou Centre, the Gare du Nord and Montmartre, as well as little-known alleyways and arcades. Filled with historical anecdotes, geographical observations and literary references, Hazan's walk guides us through an unknown Paris.
He shows us how, through planning and modernisation, the city's revolutionary past has been erased in order to enforce a reactionary future; but by walking and observation, he shows us how we can regain our knowledge of the radical past of the city of Robespierre, the Commune, Sartre and the May '68 uprising. And by drawing on his own life story, as surgeon, publisher and social critic, Hazan vividly illustrates a radical life lived in the city of revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Mar 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786632609

Eric Hazan

Eric Hazan is the founder of the publisher La Fabrique and the author of several books, including Notes on the Occupation and the highly acclaimed The Invention of Paris. He has lived in Paris, France, all his life.

Book preview

A Walk Through Paris

A Walk Through Paris

Eric Hazan

Translated by David Fernbach

This English-language edition published by Verso 2018

Originally published in French as Une traversée de Paris

© Éditions du Seuil 2016

Translation © David Fernbach 2018

This book is supported by the Institut français (Royamme-

Uni) as part of the Burgess programme.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-258-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-260-9 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-261-6 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hazan, Eric, author.

Title: A walk through Paris / Eric Hazan.

Other titles: Traversée de Paris. French

Description: Brooklyn, New York : Verso, 2018. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017048932 (print) | LCCN 2017052776 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786632609 () | ISBN 9781786632616 () | ISBN 9781786632586 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Paris (France)—Description and travel. | Paris (France)—History. | Hazan, Eric—Homes and haunts—France—Paris. | Publishers and publishing—France—Biography. | Surgeons—France—Biography. | Historians—France—Biography. | BISAC: TRAVEL / Europe / France. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban. |

HISTORY

  / Europe / France.

Classification: LCC DC707 (ebook) | LCC DC707 .H43713 2018 (print) | DDC 914.4/361048412—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048932

Typeset in Sabon by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the UK by CPI Group

For Cléo

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. From the centre of Ivry to the ‘Barrière d’Italie’, via the Porte d’Ivry and the Avenue de Choisy

2. From the Place d’Italie to the 85 bus terminus via the Place Denfert-Rochereau

3. From the Luxembourg garden to Les Halles via the Pont-Neuf

4. From Châtelet to Beaubourg via the battlefield of Saint-Méry

5. From the Rue Quincampoix to the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis crossroads via the Rue Saint-Denis

6. From the Porte Saint-Denis to the Place de la Chapelle via the Faubourg Saint-Denis and the Gare du Nord

7. From La Chapelle-Saint-Denis to the Porte de la Chapelle via three different itineraries: the Rue Marx-Dormoy/Rue de la Chapelle axis, La Goutte-d’Or, Rue Pajol and Rue de l’Évangile

8. From the Boulevard Ney to Saint-Denis along the A1 autoroute

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Valérie Kubiak and Arrigo Lessana gave this manuscript a critical reading that helped a great deal towards its present form. Françoise Fromonot replied very willingly to my questions about contemporary architecture. Thomas Bouchet, François Chaslin and Jean-François Cabestan contributed valuable clarifications. To everyone who encouraged me on this walk, fraternal thanks.

CHAPTER 1

In The Trip Across Paris, a film by Claude Autant-Lara from 1956, Jean Gabin and Bourvil walk through the night of the Occupation, made darker than usual by air-raid precautions that have put out the street lamps and covered the windows with blackout paper. The two rogues, carrying heavy suitcases filled with pork, proceed from the Rue Poliveau to the Rue Lepic – from the Jardin des Plantes to Montmartre. This was a very famous film in my youth, and even today Gabin’s ‘Poor bastards!’ has the ring of a popular phrase. The story may well have inspired my title for this book, and perhaps the entire project, even if it has nothing in common with the adventures of Gabin and Bourvil, in which encounters with policemen in cycle capes, black-market traffickers, German patrols and ladies of the night, all to the sound of sirens, are comic episodes whose backdrops make Paris the setting of a night-time dream.

My own path is rather a daytime one, with a different orientation: from Ivry to Saint-Denis, more or less following the dividing line between the east and west of Paris, or what you could call the Paris meridian. I chose this itinerary without much consideration, but later on it became clear to me that it was no accident, that this line followed the meanders of an existence begun close to the Luxembourg garden, led for a long time opposite the Observatoire, and continued further to the east, in Belleville, at the time I am writing, but with long spells in the meantime in Barbès and on the north side of the Montmartre hill. And in fact, under the effect of the peerless mental exercise that is walking, memories have risen to the surface street by street, even very distant fragments of the past on the border of forgetfulness.

If this journey begins at Ivry it is because of a bookstore. Envie de Lire is not simply a shop that sells books, it is also a place of browsing and discovery. The piles of books, often unstable, are not arranged by chance, but linked by a thread that takes a moment to discern. Perhaps you won’t find the title you’ve come to look for, but no matter, you will leave carrying a book of photography or philosophy, a Mexican novel or the memoirs of a forgotten revolutionary. These small premises on the Rue Gabriel-Péri are propitious for discussion, even argument. Readings from new books finish late, and groups on the pavement are in no hurry to disperse as the staff finally bring in the boxes of books open to all under the arcade. The business is a cooperative, so does not have an owner; but R., solidly built as Spaniards can be, is both the soul of the place and the representative of an endangered species, that of poetic communists.

Another reason for choosing Ivry as my starting point is its remarkable town centre, in which Envie de Lire is a lively presence. This is an architectural ensemble unlike anything familiar. Emerging from the Métro and looking upward, you are struck by a tangle of points, sharp corners, irregular polygons, gangways and planted terraces, all in raw concrete. Small apartment blocks, all designed to be slightly different, are linked by direct contact or by a network of stairways and overhead passages, creating a three-dimensional labyrinth. Enclosed in the general tangle, half a dozen small towers punctuate a landscape whose grey concrete is softened by the overflowing green of the planted terraces.

The architects, Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie, took thirty years to build this ensemble, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, at a time when, in the name of town-planning, the banlieue was falling victim both to ‘zoning’ – different activities pigeonholed into distinct zones – and to high-rise blocks and concrete slabs. Their aim, on the contrary, was to superimpose functions, mixing together shops, services, artists’ studios, crèches, schools, offices and housing, in an attempt at collective living made possible by the support of the communist municipality. Renée Gailhoustet herself lives in the quarter that she built. From her terrace planted with fruit trees, she shows me how, by way of these staggered spaces, superimposed and almost attached, connections are established between the tenants. She tells me how she designed the tower apartments to create duplexes with two aspects, and all the tricks she came up with to make this social housing as pleasant as that of the rich.

The exit from the Mairie-d’Ivry station opens onto a noisy avenue widened into a square. This does not continue eastward, towards the Paris cemetery and Villejuif, being blocked by a hill with a small medieval church on its summit and, behind it, a rural cemetery just a hundred metres from the flow of cars. Traffic is routed towards Paris on a road that bears the name of Ivry’s great man, Maurice Thorez. This is bordered with shacks, workshops, garages, small factories, low-rise apartment blocks – a landscape you cross without really looking at it, though not lacking in charm. From time to time, you have a view of lower Ivry and the Seine, marked out by the smoke from urban chimneys and the concrete spire indicating the red high-rise of the Cité Maurice-Thorez.

My view of Thorez is mixed. A docile executor of Stalin’s policy, champion of productivism in the wake of Liberation, organizer of Moscow trials in Paris, and a thoroughly detestable character. But despite everything, despite himself, his name remains bound to the memory of a time when, for masses of young people of whom I was one, communism had nothing to do with the terrible system that repressed Eastern Europe. It was a world in which fraternal relations were forged by way of meetings, demonstrations, actions conducted joyfully in common, not to mention holidays. I owe a great debt to my communist comrades at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and then the PCB (physics, chemistry, biology) preparatory year for medical studies, held in a brick building opposite the entrance to the Jardin des Plantes alongside Cuvier’s house. It was due to them that I broke with the world for which, as the son of a good bourgeois family of assimilated Jews, everything marked me out – broke definitively, even if the professions I went on to practise, surgery and publishing, do not count among the most proletarian. Despite the likes of Garaudy, Kanapa and Thorez, I do not believe it right to treat everything concerning the communism of those years as ‘Stalinist’, nor to deny my own part in this. If truth be told, I am even rather proud of it.

Ivry, Avenue Maurice-Thorez.

At the Porte d’Ivry as elsewhere, the meeting point between banlieue and city is neither gentle nor pleasant. In 1860, when Paris annexed the immediately surrounding communes to complete its twenty arrondissements, the connection was formed quite naturally. Passing today from the Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple to the Rue de Belleville, you do not have the impression of crossing an obstacle, despite passing the site of a former city gate, the Belleville barrière in the Wall of the Farmers-General. Sometimes the transition is a little more awkward, as between the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière and the Rue des Poissonniers across the complicated Barbès intersection, or between the Avenue des Gobelins and the Avenue d’Italie across the Place d’Italie, but there is no real problem here.

Between the city of Paris and the outlying communes, however, things are quite different, particularly to the north and east, where crossing from Paris to the banlieue on foot may be quite an adventure. At the Porte des Lilas, despite the Périphérique being underground, you have to cross a great void between the last social housing blocks of the Boulevard Mortier and the first old houses of the Rue de Paris in Les Lilas, with a tiny green space to the left (the Serge-Gainsbourg garden which, according to a notice, is an example of ‘urban continuity’ – a fine denial of reality) and a cinema on the right – a gigantic black blockhouse next to a bus station. At the Porte de Pantin, after having left the Avenue Jean-Jaurès bordered on one side by a Hôtel Mercure and on the other by Jean Nouvel’s frightful Philharmonie, you find yourself in a no man’s land, passing beneath the Périphérique, crossing the slip roads and tram lines, bypassing an inaccessible green space planted with grass and little Christmas trees. This path is still possible without danger, but further on, at the Porte de la Chapelle, the landscape is indescribable: the Périphérique, the bridge where the railway from the Gare de l’Est meets that from the Gare du Nord, and the ramps of the A1 and A3 motorways together form such an obstacle that it is a rare bird who risks crossing on foot from the Rue de la Chapelle to Saint-Denis.

At the Porte d’Ivry where I stopped for a moment, the traffic flow is much weaker, and the dominant impression is not chaos but concrete housing. The poor but dignified buildings of the Avenue Maurice-Thorez open onto the Place Jean-Ferrat, a large square whose centre is marked by a tired larch tree (according to the notice, a liberty tree planted for the centenary of 1789). The right-hand side of the place still contains down-market shops – halal butcher, pizzeria, Lycamobile – while on the left, at the foot of the twenty-storey towers, life insurance and white goods are signs of modernity. To the Paris side, the place is bordered by the Périphérique. On the corner, a large building of concrete and faux brick triumphantly bears the omnipresent syntagm ‘BNP Paribas’. It is not enough for this banking establishment to have disfigured the Maison Dorée on the Boulevard des Italiens, a masterpiece of romantic architecture, or to have made countless Paris crossroads ugly with its greenish premises – it also has to impose itself in the banlieue, as here or at the Grands Moulins de Pantin, where it subjects a landscape worthy of Doisneau to its icy profitability.

Between the Périphérique and the Boulevard des Maréchaux, which bears here the name of Masséna, you cross the ZAC Bédier.¹ How did the respected medievalist Joseph Bédier come to be enlisted for this purpose? His name only appears on a tiny street, off the Place du Docteur-Yersin – the disciple of Pasteur who discovered the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis – another trace of medieval Paris. The pride of the ZAC is an immense office building on the Avenue de la Porte-d’Ivry. The signboard indicates that its architects are J.-M. Ibos and M. Vitart, former students and associates of Nouvel, known for creations that bear the same mark as their teacher, a concern for the façade. In this case, as represented on the signboard, the façade will have a uniform repetition of tall and narrow openings. This ZAC once again misses the opportunity for a harmonious junction between centre and periphery by way of a carefully woven urban fabric.

On the Boulevard Masséna, at the corner between the Avenue d’Ivry and the Rue Nationale, I discover a kind of relic, the former Panhard & Levassor works. The essentials of this three-level structure have been preserved, solid stone below and brick on the two upper floors. A plaque indicates: ‘Here the automobile industry was born in 1891.’ These are the walls from which so many marvels emerged, such as the large Dynamic saloon of 1937, with its headlights protected by a grille, three seats in front and the steering wheel in the middle. Or the little Dyna whose engine made a strange noise like a saucepan cooking, but which won the prize at Le Mans each year for its ‘performance’. During the First World War, Panhard & Levassor, like Citroën and Renault, employed workers brought from Indochina, or recruited in China, to replace Frenchmen sent to the front. This is said to be the origin of the Chinese quarter in the 13th arrondissement, which grew in the 1970s with the arrival of the ‘boat people’.

La Dynamic Panhard-Levassor, 1937.

The Avenue d’Ivry runs along the eastern side of this Chinatown, which continues across the Dalle des Olympiades. It is less busy than the neighbouring Avenue de Choisy, but there are several red and gold restaurants, and Chinese supermarkets in front of which old women sell bunches of aromatic herbs on upturned crates. It ends at the junction with the Rue de Tolbiac, the segment of a long ring road which leaves the Seine at the Pont de Tolbiac and returns at the Pont Mirabeau – or, if you prefer, from Léo Malet to Guillaume Apollinaire. Its aim was to link and open up the communes annexed in 1860 – Ivry, Gentilly, Montrouge, Vanves, Vaugirard and Grenelle. It bears the names of forgotten battles, not all of which are reliably attested: Tolbiac (victory of Clovis over the Alamans), Alésia (Vercingetorix’s defence against Caesar’s siege), Vouillé (victory of the Franks over the Visigoths). The municipal authorities of the 1860s probably intended to assert the Gallic and Frank origins of the country (only later, under the Third Republic, was the final segment of the road named Rue de la Convention). If it works perfectly well for traffic, it has

Reviews for A Walk Through Paris

[vpfluke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a very descriptive tour through Paris, by a resident, who is a also a surgeon and publisher. You feel that you are walking with him as he feeds you all sort of observations and tidbits in the neighborhoods and train stations of Paris. I think perhaps the drawings, maps, and photos were by the author.

[jon1lambert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I soon realised that to get the most out of this book, one needs to have a pretty much in-depth knowledge of Paris and its streets or at least have a map of Paris open by one's side or on screen while reading it. it is nevertheless fascinating as much about the architecture and the loss of character due to poor planning and design as about the migration and changing nature of the inhabitants of cosmopolitan Paris. Very interesting too were the numerous more general remarks that could apply not just to Paris, for instance, the interesting observations Hazan has on the Centre Pompidou and its adjacent plaza from original plans to current practice. The original intention was to provide a free and open place for the people. The reality is that this has become a controlled environment. Hazan describes this change as follows (pages 88/89)‘The great building, inaugurated in 1977, was for a long while a place for the people. There was no control on entry, in the hall you met all kinds of characters, sometimes with a can of beer in their hand, and guys from the banlieue could take the escalator to admire the view over Paris from the fifth floor. This was in line with what the creators intended: “In the end, it’s not that important for the Centre Pompidou to contain a museum or a library. The main thing is for people to meet here, in a certain everyday way, without having to pass through a gate and being checked like in a factory. It was to promote contact, to mix genres, to mingle different activities, that we imagined a giant Meccano construction overlooking the city”. When the Centre was renovated in 2010-12, all this was brought to order: the Vigipirate security system helped sort out entrants, the hall was redesigned to discourage loafers, the escalator is now accessible only with a ticket for the exhibitions, and the dishes on offer in the fifth-floor restaurant cost around 30 euros. We’re now with the right class of people’.