Paul from Paris

If a requiem mass were a book, that book might be Paris perdu.

Paris perdu is a coffee-table book written by a collective and featuring hundreds of interesting photographs; as befits the funereal tone, all of the latter are in black and white.

The book’s title means “lost Paris”, although the title also is a pun on “losing bets” or “a lost wager”.

The book’s subject is the loss suffered by various Paris neighborhoods through urban renewal, renovation, and development.

This reader found the text militant and ultimately superfluous: Paris perdu makes a strong case through its use of photographs. All of the photographs were chosen carefully, and many of them are intriguing. They make Paris perdu a great book for leisurely, repeated viewing, for any lover of Paris. I was particularly captivated, and dismayed, by a treasure of photographs of the Halles before their demolition and replacement by a commuter train hub and shopping mall (whose renovation is pending).

Paris perdu has two weaknesses, both rhetorical. First, it overstates its case at times. From a safe remove (of fifty or a hundred years), poverty or squalor can seem charming, or at least photogenic. Subdivision, cramped living quarters, and tuberculosis are ills on which this book does not long dwell. Second, instead of resting its case by presenting what is no longer, the book too often makes a point by contrasting the past (authentic, rich) with the present (standardized, enriching only for developers).

Paris perdu was published in 1991 by Editions Carré. It is no longer in print, but can be found in used bookshops or in libraries.

Factory

This is a short detective story.

The city of Paris awarded architect Paul Friesé for the 1903 facade of the Métropolitain (subway) factory at 179 rue de Bercy. For the award jury, “This factory entrance is almost monumental.”

Viewed from the street, the factory brings to my mind the Museum of Natural History, in New York, or turn-of-the-century university buildings.

The facade was part of a large factory complex. To my eyes, what it most brings to mind is a mosque, complete with minarets. The entrance is a giant arch.

Factory

The Métropolitain factory has been demolished. The Paris transit authority has offices on the site, in part of a nondescript line of postwar office buildings that would be equally in place in Birmingham or Tulsa as in Paris.

Paris is receptive to industrial techniques –the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais, even the Grande Arche de La Défense– but not to actual industry. I’m left with the impression that Paris –city leaders, planners and architects, ordinary citizens– think factories and industry are embarrassments, better forgotten. What else could explain the oblivion into which the Métropolitain factory has fallen?

In addition to the factory on the rue de Bercy, the Métropolitain commissioned numerous electrical plants or sub-stations that are scattered throughout Paris. Some of these were also designed by Paul Friesé and are still standing. They bring to my mind armories, tiny forts.

Architect Paul Friesé was a remarkable figure. I’d recommend Hugues Fiblec’s Paris Friesé 1851-1917: Architectures de l’âge industriel, published by Norma; and the French architecture institute’s biography, from which I’ve borrowed the uncredited photo and illustration to show the Métropolitain facory.

Friesé was born in 1851 in Alsace. When he was 19, war broke out between France and Germany. Friesé enlisted, but France soon lost the war, and Alsace. Friesé moved to Paris and studied architecture. His architectural practice featured superb industrial buildings, few of which survive today. In keeping with his time, Friesé brought artistry to industry. He traveled extensively, and seems to have participated actively in architectural exchanges on design and materials.

France’s loss of Alsace to the Prussians nourished many hopes for revenge or re-taking. When war broke out in 1914, Friesé enlisted. He was 63 years old. From frequent visits to Alsace, Friesé had many contacts. He also had a command of German and equestrian skills. With this background, Friesé served as an interpreter. Paul Friesé died in 1917, while visiting his son, Jean-Paul, on the front. (I’m sure that there’s a superb story behind this fact, befitting of a W.G. Sebald tale, and I hope some day to look into it further.)

A hundred years ago, the city of Paris held a yearly contest, brought to a halt by the first world war. The contest chose the six best building facades built in a given year.

This was a brilliant contest. By celebrating the facade –what a passerby sees, from the street– the city celebrated citizens as much as architects. By critiquing the facade, the city also addressed, indirectly, ongoing social patterns: urbanization; democratization; social classes and disparities of wealth; tradition versus novelty. Since the time of Baron Haussmann, Paris building facades were regulated strictly; architects in 1900 used a limited vocabulary in surprisingly innovative and challenging ways. By choosing six winners, the city allowed for diverse schools and interpretations to shine.

The spirit of these years and of this contest is captured by an observation from the city of Paris:

No one disputes that Paris is the most beautiful capital in the world. It owes this supreme glory not only to the magnificence of the Seine, its avenues, its parks, its gardens, its squares –whose aspects are in all points admirable– not only to the varity and number of its sumptuous monuments; but also to the felicitous line of its broad streets, which offer profound perspectives that give it the cachet of opulent originality, for which there is no equivalent, anywhere abroad.

The quotation is from a publication by the city of Paris, Les concours de façades de la ville de Paris, 1898-1905, published in Paris by the Librairie de la construction moderne (the quoted passage is on p. 23; the translation is mine). The passage struck me, partly because it’s so triumphantly chauvinist, but especially because it places the heart of what makes a city great and beautiful at and in the street.

Les concours de façades de la ville de Paris was published in two volumes, one for the years 1898-1905, the other for the years 1906-1912. I located and read a copy at the historical library of the City of Paris. The contest offered a public reward and recognition for architects, and I regret that the slender volumes have gone out of print. The contest reports, and the drawings or photographs of award-winning facades, are priceless. In the coming days, I’ll comment on some of the winners that especially marked me.

A student recommended a pair of good books I read recently: Marc Augé’s Un ethnologue dans le métro (published in 1986, translated into English as In the Metro) and Le métro revisité (published in 2008, not translated into English). I enjoyed both and recommend them.

This pair of slender works –each best read at one sitting, in a train or on a plane or over a tranquil weekend afternoon– lets the reader spend some time with a writer who is intelligent and insightful, even if not always easy to follow.

Marc Augé is an anthropologist and very much a French intellectual. He has a lot to say, about many things, including about the Paris metro, which he defines (my translation) as “togetherness without festival, and solitude without isolation”. Augé explains, lucidly, what he means by each of these words. But Augé does not write only, or even mostly, about the metro. He instead uses the metro “as a metaphor of individual and social life, with its directions, its life lines, its changes and connections.”

Augé’s writing turns, suddenly and unexpectedly, from fascinating musing on religious faith to analysis of how Paris has changed. Augé develops, then expands on, a typology of beggars. Other parentheticals seem never to close: Augé’s discussion of the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss leads to a gloss on the latter’s examination of the work of another anthropologist, Marcel Mauss.

If you’re a French-reading English-speaker who liked the film “My Dinner With André”, then I expect that you’d enjoy reading Augé. Lots of big ideas and smart insights.

I met Mademoiselle George in a cemetery. While visiting Père Lachaise, I passed by a marker that read “GEORGE”. This probably wasn’t a first name, which the French write “Georges“, with an “s”. I thought George was Mr. George and tried to look him up. Then I found that George was actually Miss George, a woman who led a remarkable and fascinating life.

Mademoiselle George was born on 23 February 1787, in the  French city of Bayeux. Her father was German; her mother was French. Drawn to (or into) the theater as a child, Mademoiselle George made her début at the prestigious Comédie Française while she was a teenager. Her career as an actress spanned a remarkable length, from the revolution (1790s) to the Second Empire (1850s). Hers was a household name, known to all literate society.

Mademoiselle George’s exceptional good looks overshadowed her acting abilities. Comparing her to another actress, a contemporary wrote, “Mademoisele Duchensois is so good that she seems pretty; Mademoiselle George is so pretty that she seems good…” (quotation in Roselyne Laplace’s biography, Mademoiselle George, published by Fayard in 1987).

Her beauty won Mademoiselle George a lot of attention from men. In a manner reminiscent of French first lady Carla Bruni today, she had many boyfriends. The men in her life tended to be wealthy and powerful, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, whom she described as the “master of the world”.

Mademoiselle George fascinates me particularly because, towards the end of her life, she wrote her memoirs, which are today in the public domain and easy to consult (in French) on the web. I’m struck by her theatrical tone. Mademoiselle George’s recollections always mention clothing and jewelry (costumes), settings and furniture (sets). She writes stunning set pieces about intimate meetings with her lovers –often described as playful (in other words, as I read her, they were equally actors in their public lives)– but manages to preserve some privacy while exciting or toying with her reader’s imagination (one lover kisses her hand, she spends a night with another “talking”).

Mademoiselle George also intrigues me because she sought out independence, and wrote insightfully about this quest. She was attached to her family but remained unattached (and childless). Her career as an actress gave her the freedom to travel throughout Europe and brought her into proximity of people –artists and political leaders– who interested her, but kept her at the margins of society. She sought out and enjoyed the company of master-of-the-world class men, but fretted about becoming a “toy” or “plaything” (which leads me to ask who was playing with whom). Huge sums of money travel across her orbit, and sometimes passed through her hands, but always had a casino-chip unreality, here today and vanished tomorrow.