The Paris Metro: a Ticket to French History

By Susan L. Plotkin

The metro may be a mere hundred years old but it tells a tale of France twenty times as long. The story begins in the fifth century BC when wild Celtic tribes roamed the countryside of Gaul. Then Julius Caesar imposed a Roman rule that lasted five hundred years and forced the Celts to settle down. All that seems like only yesterday to a Frenchman because those Celts and Romans are close friends to every reader of the French comic book series Asterix. Asterix and his fellow Celts live quite happily in a small, fortified enclave in Brittany in northwestern France. Their idyllic, primitive existence is occasionally intruded upon by those nasty Roman conquerors, but the Celts always manage to get the best of the Romans despite great odds

Alsia - (Mtro Line 4). The Battle of Alsia (52 BC) is the oldest event commemorated in the Paris Metro. The Celtic warrior Vercingtorix managed to unite competing tribes against the Romans in one last attempt to save Gallic independence. It was not an easy task. It was difficult to live with, let alone lead, these autonomous, quarrelsome groups. Vercingtorix planned to wage hit-and-run guerrilla warfare- to starve the Romans into defeat by destroying the crops in their path as they penetrated deeper into Gaul in pursuit of the pesky Celts. In the town of Bourges the local population refused to allow the destruction of their wheat - a fatal mistake. Caesar descended on the town and confiscated it for his hungry troops. With renewed energy the Romans gave chase. The Celts retreated to a high plateau called Alsia, where they were quickly surrounded by Caesars forces.

The table was now turned. Caesar built a fortification around Alsia, twelve and a half miles in circumference. It consisted of a double row of spikes, one facing inward and the other outward, which prevented both escape and the re-provisioning of the rebels. The Celts had only a months worth of provisions but somehow they held out for two by which time the men were famished and exhausted. Vercingtorix surrendered. Few lives had been lost in battle but countless numbers died of starvation. Vercingtorix was imprisoned in Rome where six years later when he was all but forgotten Caesar had him strangled to death

Both the Celts who lost and the Romans who won have contributed much to French culture, so its a tricky thing for the French to say whether Alsia was a victory or a defeat. One thing is clear: in real life, the Celts did not always win.

In the end, it was most likely the mountains of horse manure that gave birth to the Paris Metro. During the last quarter of the 19th century, Paris did not lack the means of transport. What it patently lacked was a transportation system. There were competing omnibus lines, trams, trains and private conveyances, all overlapping, most taking roundabout routes throughout the city, hindering one another and certainly hindering business.

Forty lines of horse-drawn omnibuses traversed Paris in 1870 and ten thousand horses were required to pull them. The maintenance of the horses ate up fifty percent of the entire company budget. Each omnibus held about 20 passengers, half of them riding on top of the carriage. By the turn of the century the omnibuses carried as many as forty people each, still with many sitting on the carriage roof. The roads were made of cobblestones or wood planks or sometimes just hardened mud; there were no shock absorbers on the carriages; and the stench from the horse manure was overwhelming. One hundred million passengers used the omnibuses that year, probably half of them holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses to ward off the stench.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 14, 2001
• ISBN: 9781453594667

Susan L. Plotkin

Susan Plotkin lived in Paris for seven years during the 1990s, during which time she became fluent in French and enamored of the métro. Susan has a Masters Degree in Library Science from Rutgers University. She is first author of a book chapter on the history of vaccination, now in its third edition, and has other published works to her credit. She now resides in Doylestown, Pa. with her husband Stanley.

Book preview

The Paris

Metro:

A Ticket to

French History

Richard S. T. Francis

Copyright © 2000 by Susan L. Plotkin.

Library of Congress Number:   00-193073

ISBN #: Hardcover    978-0-7388-5247-8

ISBN #: Softcover      978-0-7388-5248-5

ISBN #: Ebook          978-1-4535-9466-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on How to Use the Book

Introduction

Chapter One

The Metro System: Creating a Way of Life

Naming the Stations

Chapter Two

From Celts to Carolingians 52BC—987AD

Chapter Three

The Capetians Create a Kingdom 987-1515

Chapter Four

Religion and the Monarchy 1515-1643

Chapter Five

Louis XIV: The Sun That Never Set 1643-1715

Chapter Six

Louis XV and the Age of Reason 1715-1774

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

The French Revolution: Life Will Never be the Same 1789-1799

Chapter Nine

Napoléon Bonaparte: The Revolution Usurped 1798-1813

Chapter Ten

The Restoration Kings: France Flirts with Monarchy 1815-1848

Chapter Eleven

A Struggle between Republic and Empire 1848-1870

Chapter Twelve

Democracy Triumphs: The Paris Commune and The Third Republic 1870-1890

Chapter Thirteen

New Century/Old Problems: War Begets War 1890—1939

Chapter Fourteen

France in Peril: The Second World War 1939-1945

Chapter Fifteen

Post-War France: Survival and Success 1945 to the Present

Chapter Sixteen

Miscellaneous Stations

Postscript

Appendix One

The 14 Lines of the Paris Métro

Appendix Two

Kings, Emperors and Presidents of France

Selected Bibliography

TO STANLEY, THE LOVE OF MY LIFE

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Acknowledgments

Iam enormously grateful to my husband, Stanley, who has exhibited the patience of Job in the face of my frequent meltdowns while writing this book. His encouragement and advice were invaluable. Indeed, it was he who suggested that I rearrange the stations into chronological order, thus increasing the complexity of writing the book but making the work considerably more interesting. His sagacity in knowing when to just leave me alone was also greatly appreciated.

I would like to thank Connie Leisure whom I met in a writing class in Paris. Everything she wrote was so professional that her encouragement and suggestions made me believe that I really could do it.

There are many others who have helped me in countless ways and to whom I would like to express my gratitude: to Ellen Sussman Croen, my writing instructor in Paris; Linda Koike, a fellow ex-pat whose enthusiasm in helping me was only exceeded by her expertise as a librarian; to Polly Platt who was kind enough to meet with me, a total stranger, and answer my many questions; to Diane Johnson, who has also been very generous with her suggestions. I would like to thank my friends who have read various segments of this work and offered their critiques. Among these are Mike Rissinger, Susan Odell, Liesel Baker and her late husband Lester, and Foster Winans. I am forever endebted to Philippe Stoeckel who rescued me from innumerable computer glitches.

A very large Thank You goes to my wonderful family and friends for their continued interest, enthusiasm, suggestions and support.

Sonia Bignall of Andresy, France deserves a special merci beaucoup for generously allowing me to use her superb artwork in the cover design.

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A Note on How to Use the Book

Each metro station name is presented in bold face type at the beginning of the entry. There are some instances where a name consists of two or three distinct parts, none of which is related to the other chronologically. Each part will be discussed separately, in its historically relevant chapter. In such cases, only the name currently being discussed will be presented in bold face type. For example,

Place Monge(Jardin des Plantes; Arènes de Lutèce) . . . is discussed in Chapter 9 because Gustav Monge lived during the Napoléonic Empire;

Place Monge (Jardin des Plantes; Arènes de Lutèce) . . . is discussed in Chapter 6 because the Jardin des Plantes refers to the King’s Gardens, which have existed since the mid-17th century;

Place Monge (Jardin des Plantes; Arènes de Lutèce) . . . is discussed in Chapter 2 because the Arènes de Lutèce was a Roman arena dating from the 3rd century.

Each individual name of any metro named can be located through the index.

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Introduction

In the summer of 1990, my husband and I made the monumental decision to uproot ourselves from our happy, productive lives in sedate Philadelphia and move to the most beautiful of cities, Paris. Events moved quickly and within just a few months, having packed most of our earthly belongings and sent them off by boat, we found ourselves on an Air France flight to Paris, toasting our good fortune with French champagne.

We arrived on December 1st and one of the first things I did was buy a carnet of metro tickets—a packet of ten—as a starter kit for exploring the city. There were so many things I wanted to see and do and I knew from past trips that the Paris Metro was one of the best city transport systems in the world. We took it everywhere that first month and at the end of December I decided to do what the Parisians do: buy a monthly pass, a Carte Orange. It was a very official document, consisting of a permanent, orange-colored card with a serial number and a place for a passport-sized photo and a monthly ticket (orange as well) upon which to inscribe the serial number each month. With my Carte Orange I had unlimited travel throughout Paris. I felt that I belonged.

As I traveled to museums and monuments I could not help but notice the names of the metro stations I used to reach my various destinations. Unlike Philadelphia’s Market Street Elevated line, where I would count off 69th Street, 63rd Street, 52nd Street, 49th Street and onward down a series of equally uninteresting numerical designations, here I was blissfully wooshing along among stations with such exotic names as Javel, Bir Hakim, Duroc and Mabillon.

Riding the metro gave me a rush of nostalgia too. I grew up along the tracks of the old Erie Railroad in northeastern Pennsylvania, a small regional rail line that hauled freight and passengers from the Great Lakes to New York City. Both my dad and grandfather were railroad men. The sounds and smells in the metro were not that very different from what I had experienced as a child. I used to love to hear the rhythmic clackety-clack of the midnight freight train as it passed through town and echoed down the valley. Now I was enthralled with the slight tremors that the metro sent through our apartment building as it passed below from the station Exelmans to the station Porte Saint Cloud.

My sense of adventure had been palpable when my parents would put me on a train, armed with my dad’s company pass, to travel all the way to Hoboken—5 long hours—where my aunt and uncle would be waiting for me. Now in Paris I felt that same childlike sense of adventure with my very own metro pass.

It was the metro station Mabillon that initially piqued my curiosity and started me on the inquiries that resulted in this book. Mabillon is on the Left Bank in the Saint Germain des Prés area, not far from the Latin Quarter. We went there frequently to go to movies or restaurants, window shop among the art galleries on the rue du Seine or sit in our favorite café Le Dauphine and watch the world go by. I asked several people I knew—real Parisians—who or what Mabillon was and was quite surprised to find they had no answer. I inquired about some other station names and met with similar responses. I was intrigued. There are 293 stations and even Parisians didn’t know what they all meant. Here was unexplored territory, right in the heart of Paris!

Mabillon, I eventually learned, was a Benedictine monk and at one time the director of the Abbey at Saint Germain des Prés. He belonged to a specialized group of monks called the Maurists, who were authors and scholars and he wrote an important treatise on how to authenticate medieval manuscripts.

It soon became evident that most of the metro names had historical significance. Initially I researched only those stations that I used frequently but before very long I was hooked and this project was born.

It is difficult to imagine Paris without the metro. In 1993 one and a quarter billion trips were taken on the metro. That represented half of all the passenger traffic by public transport for greater metropolitan Paris, including all the buses and all the trains. When there is a strike or a mechanical problem that shuts the metro down, the entire region suffers. It is absolutely integral to the city’s functioning. It is, truly, a way of life.

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Chapter One

The Metro System:

Creating a Way of Life

In the end, it was most likely the mountains of horse manure that gave birth to the Paris Metro. During the last quarter of the 19th century, Paris did not lack the means of transport. What it patently lacked was a transportation system. There were competing omnibus lines, trams, trains and private conveyances, all overlapping, most taking roundabout routes throughout the city, hindering one another and certainly hindering business.

Forty lines of horse-drawn omnibuses traversed Paris in 1870 and ten thousand horses were required to pull them. The maintenance of the horses ate up fifty percent of the entire company budget. Each omnibus held about 20 passengers, half of them riding on top of the carriage. By the turn of the century the omnibuses carried as many as forty people each, still with many sitting on the carriage roof. The roads were made of cobblestones or wood planks or sometimes just hardened mud; there were no shock absorbers on the carriages; and the stench from the horse manure was overwhelming. One hundred million passengers used the omnibuses that year, probably half of them holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses to ward off the stench.

Ten years later, tramway cars were introduced to link the city and the nearby suburbs. An additional two hundred and ten million passengers traveled around the Paris region in trams. Many of the tramlines went bankrupt but somehow they continued to operate anyway. Of course, there were other encumbrances on the streets as well: private carriages, bicycles, people on horseback, pedestrians carrying large loads or pushing carts, dogs and other animals, and in certain places, the national railroads crossed the city, spewing out ash-laden steam.

It was against this backdrop of chaos and horse manure that discussions began on the creation of a metro. A transportation system for Paris was talked about and fought over for twenty-five years before any plans saw the light of day. Like most projects in France, it became an affair of State. The French government wanted something that would feed people into the national railroad system; the City wanted to move people around Paris quickly and relieve traffic congestion in the streets. It took over two decades to resolve the conflict.

Discussions started in 1871 when the General Council for the Seine Department (a local government body, somewhat like a county) submitted a proposal for a city railroad that would transport passengers and supply the central food market at Les Halles. The government overruled the proposal and insisted that such a system could only exist as part of the national railroad line. The Seine Department persisted and later they justified their right to construct the city rail line without Federal approval by citing a national law passed in June of 1880 that outlined the rights of local communities. This attempt to bypass Federal authority annoyed the government even more and the battle lines were drawn.

The labor movement was a hot topic in France in the 1870s. So decisions about the metro even took on the dimensions of a socialist class struggle: the needs of the poor workers of Paris defended by local councilmen were pitted against the rich bourgeois railroad barons, supported by the State. The struggle continued until 1895, almost a quarter of a century. The Universal Exposition that was to be held in Paris in 1900, with its additional millions of visitors to the city, finally caused the government to capitulate. The possibility of total gridlock could not be tolerated. The Minister of Public Works wrote a letter acknowledging that the law of June 11th, 1880 was a legitimate basis for the construction of an urban mass transit system that was not directly linked with the national railway. Paris won. After an extremely long gestation period, Le Métropolitain was born.

*  *  *

Once the state-versus-city argument was resolved, plans moved forward quickly. The next problem pitted esthetics against practicality: should such a transport system be an elevated or an underground system? An elevated would be cheaper and quicker to construct; it would avoid the complication of tunneling beneath historic monuments and eliminate the complex problem of construction beneath the River Seine. A subway, on the other hand, promised a more rapid and unobstructed means of transport across an already overcrowded city; it would generate less noise and preserve the beautiful vistas of the city that an elevated would block.

Eventually, after much argument and the submission of numerous proposals, a plan for a predominantly underground system prevailed. In March of 1898 the same Minister of Public Works signed a law authorizing the creation of the first six lines of the Métropolitain, about forty miles of track.

Fulgence Bienvenüe:

Father of the Métropolitain

In France, the lines that separate power structures are seldom distinctly drawn. Despite having won the battle to construct an urban transit system that was not under the thumb of the national rails, the City of Paris chose their project leader from among the ranks of that same national rail system. The Director of Construction for the Métropolitain was an employee of the French national railroad, the SNCF, named Fulgence Bienvenüe. He was an accomplished railroad engineer and possessed a wealth of expertise on the construction of railway systems, though none on the design of urban transport. While working for the SNCF in the early 1880s, Bienvenüe was involved in an accident during which he lost his left arm. After that tragic event, he was transferred back to Paris and became Director General of Bridges and Roadways— a very prestigious post—where among other projects he designed a transport system to bring fresh water to the city. He next laid out the roadbed for the Avenue of the République and constructed the funicular (a sort of cable car) in the Belleville section of Paris. After these successes, he was approached by the City of Paris to direct the Métropolitain Project. He accepted with enthusiasm.

He may not have been able to actually dig in the trenches, but Bienvenüe went everywhere. The construction of the Metro represented the pinnacle of his career and he had no intention of allowing anything less than perfection. Bienvenüe worked on the metro until his retirement in 1934 at age eighty-two. By then the major portions of twelve of the planned thirteen metro lines had been completed. (A fourteenth line has since been added in 1998.) During his lifetime the station formerly known as Maine was re-named Bienvenüe in his honor (1933). The station was later joined together with the one at the Montparnasse train station to become one of the largest metro stops in the system. (See metro Montparnasse-Bienvenüe for more on his life.)

Construction

The construction of the metro was an immense project. It got off to a late start and was built under the Sword of Damocles of the impending Universal Exposition that was to open in the spring of 1900. More than a few politicians ranted that Paris would be nothing but a gigantic mud hole when the tourists arrived.

The project was divided into two sections. The City of Paris, under Bienvenüe, was responsible for the tunnels, trenches, viaducts, bridges and quays of the stations. The rest of the work, installing electricity, providing access to the stations and running the trains on time, was put out to bid. The contract was ultimately awarded to a Belgian engineer named Baron Empain, who created the Company of the Metropolitan Railroad of Paris (CMP), to carry out the project. The two men worked closely together to accomplish their joint task.

Figure 1. The original logo of The Paris Metro: CMP

for Companie Métropolitain de Paris

Construction of the first six lines was begun in February 1899. Bienvenüe decided to have the metro easily accessible from the streets of Paris and not deep underground, as was the case in London. This meant that instead of boring deep tunnels throughout the city, a time-consuming, difficult and costly process, workmen dug trenches to the required depth and laid the track and built the stations in the open-air trenches. Then they enclosed the track and stations with walls and reinforced ceilings, creating tunnels. When that was completed, the tunnels were covered over with dirt up to the street level. This process enabled Bienvenüe to put the Métropolitain into operation quickly and relatively inexpensively. Without such a technique, the first line never would have been ready in the summer of 1900, only 16 months after the project began.

It must be admitted, however, that sections of the city did indeed look like gigantic mud holes or mining pits for the better part of a year, giving politicians plenty of fodder for criticism.

*  *  *

Line #1 of the Paris metro system, with 18 stations from Porte Maillot on the west side of Paris to Vincennes on the east, opened on July 19th, 1900, several weeks after the start of the International Exposition without any fanfare. It was, nevertheless, an instant success. Thirty thousand tickets were purchased on the first day; at the end of 1900 after only six months of operation, over 16 million passengers had ridden the metro. However, there were still sixteen thousand horses pulling omnibuses across Paris, adding their distinct aroma to the city—but that number declined quickly thereafter.

*  *  *

The trench plan and surface construction did not eliminate the need for all underground drilling; how to build tunnels beneath the river remained a challenge. Most lines were constructed piecemeal, with the cross-river link often being the last part completed, usually with bridges instead of tunnels. Line 4 was the first to attempt construction beneath the Seine. Thirty-three designs were examined before the plan for the tunnel was chosen and then it took four years to complete. A tunnel under the river was drilled from St. Michel to the island of Cité and then on to Châtelet. The stations of St. Michel and Cité were each enclosed in a huge caisson because they were so far beneath the waterline.

Tile was used throughout the interior of the metro stations because it was relatively easy to clean and to maintain. White tile predominated because it reflected and enhanced what dim light there was. The CMP used a beautiful blue contrast tile for decorative trim.

Within only a few years Bienvenüe’s metro had competition. A private subway line, the Companie Nord/Sud (North/South Company), was started in late 1909 under the direction of two engineers named Berlier and Janicot. The N/S Line consisted of two north/south tracks, each of which intersected with Line 1 of Bienvenüe’s metro, one at Concorde and the other at Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau. In general Bienvenüe’s lines had an east/ west orientation and did not serve the northern and southern parts of Paris very well, so the competing Companie Nord/Sud attracted a lot of business.

Ultimately, the Companie Nord/Sud could not compete with the heavily subsidized Paris Métro. The lines were taken over by the Métro system in 1929 and became Lines 12 and 13 of the Métropolitain. The green contrast tiles that were used to identify the stations of the N/S Lines (as opposed to the blue tiles of the CMP), some with the original N/S logos intact, can still be seen in many of the stations of Lines 12 and 13.

Figure 2. Green tile in a metro station with the initials

N and S, indicating the old North/South metro line,

a competitor of the Companie Métropolitain de Paris.

Architecture and Design

As part of the promotion for the Métropolitain, the CMP sponsored a competition in 1899 for the architectural design of the entrances to the metro stations. There would be hundreds of metro entrances all over the city, so it was crucial to have something esthetically pleasing and unobtrusive. About twenty architectural and engineering firms submitted plans and the CMP awarded first and second place prizes; however, the company was not sufficiently enthusiastic about any of the submissions to implement them. The designs were shelved and the decision was put off for several years.

In 1902 the President of the CMP suggested that the architect Hector Guimard be given the project. Guimard, whose name in France was synonymous with the Art Nouveau movement, had recently finished the Castle Beranger, an exquisite Art Nouveau home in the 16th arrondissement. It had already been classified as a national monument by 1898. Art Nouveau was extremely popular at the turn of the century and was very pleasing to the eye. Guimard was awarded the commission for the metro and he designed all of the entrances for the underground stations until 1913.

His sinuous floral designs in forged iron were produced in sections so that they could be adapted to the conditions of each station. Many entrances were on the grand boulevards of Paris; they were quite elaborate with glass roofs and walls and some even included drainage systems. Only two of those are still in use, one at Porte Dauphine and the other at Abbesses (a transplant, the entrance at Abbesses was originally placed at the Hotel de Ville.) Other metro entrances were constructed on smaller, narrower streets; these were more modest but equally elegant. Large or small, they were easily identifiable and instantly recognized as uniquely Parisian. The Métropolitain quickly became part of the French cultural heritage.

Figure 3. The metro Philippe Auguste, an example of

the easily recognizable Art Nouveau entrances of

Hector Guimard.

Naming the Stations

Stations with names like Filles de Calvaire and Pigalle simply had to have interesting stories. How were those names chosen?

At the very beginning of the construction project, the CMP decreed that for reasons of convenience the designation of each metro station must contain the name of at least one of the cross streets where the station was located. Later, this process was somewhat subverted, especially after the Second World War when many stations were renamed to honor French war heroes. For the most part, however, the metro station names reflect the names of the streets of Paris, which themselves memorialize significant people, places and events in French life. Many streets bear very old names, held for centuries; others, more recent, honor contemporary events. To walk the streets of Paris is to live France’s history.

And so it is with the Metro. As you ride from station to station, you are really taking two trips: one across Paris and another across time. Purchase a ticket and take your own historical tour of France.

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Chapter Two

From Celts to Carolingians

52BC—987AD

The metro may be a mere hundred years old but it tells a tale of France twenty times as long. The story begins in the fifth century BC when wild Celtic tribes roamed the countryside of Gaul. Then Julius Caesar imposed a Roman rule that lasted five hundred years and forced the Celts to settle down. All that seems like only yesterday to a Frenchman because those Celts and Romans are very close friends to every reader of the French comic book series Asterix. Asterix and his fellow Celts live quite happily in a small, fortified enclave in Brittany in northwestern France. Their idyllic, primitive existence is occasionally intruded upon by those nasty Roman conquerors, but the Celts always manage to get the best of the Romans despite great odds.

The Germanic Franks invaded next and provided France with its name and its first dynasty of kings: the Merovingians. The next kingly crew, the Carolingians, brought some class to the concept of kingship. They took over the good old-fashioned way: through back-room politics instead of bashing in heads.

All these diverse groups simmered and blended over ten centuries to form a savory, spicy bouillabaisse we now call the French.

*  *  *

The Celts were talented and fractious people who dominated large stretches of pre-Christian middle Europe. They were gifted metal workers and goldsmiths, though it seems that the majority of their metallurgical skills went towards making armaments. France was home to numerous Celtic tribes who seldom cooperated with one another except to wage war against a common enemy. It appears that they very much enjoyed waging war and this caused them to start a conflict with Rome that ultimately led to their own demise. The Celts pillaged their way down the eastern Italian coast during the fifth century BC. In 390BC they sacked Rome and later terrorized Bologna before retreating north into their own German and Gallic lands.

To prevent future Celtic raids, as well as other invasions, the Romans set up a string of fortified colonies along the northern Alpine border of the Italian Peninsula around 300BC. Things went smoothly for about fifty years. Then the Carthaginian Hannibal started his campaign to crush the Roman Empire. He crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa to Spain and there he gathered a large force of men and elephants for an invasion. Then he traversed the southern part of France and crossed the French and Italian Alps to invade through northern Italy. The Celts in France, having been unable to break the Roman fortifications on their own, joined up with Hannibal in the hope that they could partake of his success and the booty.

Although Hannibal succeeded in crossing the Alps, he lost many men and animals in the harsh terrain and arrived in Italy considerably weakened. When Hannibal was finally defeated by the Romans in 218 BC, it marked the beginning of the end for the Celts. The Romans were no longer occupied with war on another front, and so they began to conquer the territory of Gaul incrementally, pushing the Celts further and further north with each victory. The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar documents these incursions into the Mediterranean towns of pre-France. Gradually the Romans penetrated as far north as Narbonne and installed Roman rule everywhere.

The Celts continued to revolt whenever they could but it was a lost cause. The last hurrah was a battle fought under the leadership of Vercingétorix, after whom the comic book hero Asterix was modeled.

*  *  *

Alésia—(Line 4). The Battle of Alésia (52 BC) is the oldest event commemorated in the Paris Metro.

The Celtic warrior Vercingétorix managed to unite competing Celtic tribes against the Romans in one last attempt to save Gallic independence. It was not an easy task. It was difficult to live with, let alone lead, these autonomous, quarrelsome groups. Vercingétorix intended to starve the Romans into defeat by destroying all crops in their path as they penetrated deeper into Gaul in pursuit of the pesky Celts. However, in the town of Bourges the local population refused to allow Vercingétorix to destroy their wheat—a fatal mistake. Caesar descended on the town and confiscated it for his hungry troops. With renewed energy the Romans gave chase. The rebels retreated to a high plateau called Alésia, where they were quickly surrounded by Caesar’s forces.

The tables were now turned. Caesar built a circular fortification around Alésia, twelve and a half miles in circumference. It consisted of a double row of spikes, one facing inward and the other outward, which prevented both escape and the re-provisioning of the rebels. The Celts had only about a month’s worth of provisions but somehow they held out for two months by which time the men were famished and exhausted. Vercingétorix surrendered. Few lives had been lost in battle but countless numbers died of starvation. Vercingétorix was imprisoned in Rome where six years later when he was all but forgotten Caesar had him strangled to death.

The exact location of Alésia was disputed for centuries. There were several contenders, usually located near some fortified old Roman town. Napoléon III ordered excavation at the site of Alise-Sainte-Reine, near Mont Auxois in the Côte d’Or (Burgundy)—the generally accepted locale. Fortification remnants, weapons, coins and human bones were found that seem to confirm this site as Alésia.

Both the Celts who lost and the Romans who won have contributed much to French culture, so it’s a tricky thing for the French to say whether Alésia was a victory or a defeat.

While I doubt that Vercingetorix ever made it to Paris, it seems clear that the Celts were there long before the Romans arrived.

Cité— (Line 4). Cité is a French administrative term used to describe the oldest part of a city or large town—similar to saying old town. In Paris, Cité refers to the large island in the Seine where the first inhabitants lived. One barely realizes that the part of the city where Notre Dame is located is an island because it is connected by so many bridges to the rest of Paris. But if you take the time to walk upon the broad elegant footbridge called the Ponts des Arts, you will be afforded the best view of the Cité Island with the River Seine curling around it to the north and south.

Figure 4. The Pont Neuf, oldest bridge in Paris, and

the western tip of the Isle de la Cîté.

Cité has been inhabited since about 250 BC, long before the Romans arrived. When they did take over, the Romans continued to call the village by its Celtic name, Lutèce, which referred to a place connected with water, either a habitation surrounded by water or a muddy place. The local Celts of Lutèce were