Will Paris ever change? - Part 1
Illustration: Evie Heathcock
In 1939, French singer Maurice Chevalier sang ‘Paris sera toujours Paris’ (‘Paris Will Always be Paris’). Some 80 years on and it can often feel as though Chevalier’s lyrics were more than a mere ode to the French capital, ‘La plus belle ville du monde’ (‘the most beautiful city in the world’), and rather a prescient statement which indicates the latent stagnation lying at the heart of Paris. So, has Paris changed since 1939, and will Paris ever change?
A good place to start is the Tour Triangle, as construction is finally about to begin on this Herzog & de Meuron-designed 180-metre glass pyramid. Besides its rather ostentatious appearance, it is most noteworthy because it will become Paris’ first skyscraper since the completion of the Tour de Montparnasse in 1973, which notoriously led to a ban on buildings over seven stories high, such was its “ugly” incongruous with the historic grandeur of the Left Bank. Indeed, the city council initially rejected plans for the Tour Triangle in 2015 for the very same reason. Upon the rejection of his design, architect Jacques Rougerie said: ‘We risk becoming solely a city with a history. A museum piece with no outlook on the future.’ However, after a lengthy court battle, the Tour Triangle is finally going to be built. This debacle is very much indicative of the impervious premium Paris places on its skyline and its obsessive perpetuation of an architectural model relatively unchanged since the mid-nineteenth century.
Rougerie’s reference to the city becoming a museum has gained traction, and today there is growing concern that Paris is little more than a ‘museum city’, a playground for tourists, a ghetto for the rich, ensconced as it is in the grandeur of days gone by, but with little purchase on the realities and demands of working people. Indeed, the intransigency of Paris towards architectural change is similarly reflected in its topographical layout: Paris’ 20 arrondissements are delineated by the stringent parameters of the périphérique, the vast ring road that surrounds the city. Beyond this lies the banlieues, or suburbs, where the majority of working Parisians now live, driven away by extortionate rent prices. Nowadays, when central Paris does decide to build, it constructs corporate vanity projects, rather than much needed affordable, social housing.
The Paris we see today is largely the product of a vast public works programme directed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann between 1853 and 1870 (though his mark is present on building projects up until 1914). Previously, Paris was insalubrious, overcrowded, and dark, a labyrinth of cobbled streets relatively unchanged since the Middle Ages. Prone to outbreaks of cholera, crime-ridden and a volatile seat of discontent and insurrection, this was the Paris memorialised in the works of Balzac and Victor Hugo. Haussmann set about reconfiguring the map of Paris, destroying 19,730 buildings and constructing 34,000 new ones; old streets gave way to long, wide avenues characterised by regularly aligned and imperiously proportioned neo-classical apartment blocks; new railways stations appeared; squares, parks… For almost 20 years Paris was a building site.
Opinion on the legacy of Haussmann is fractured. Of course, his boulevards are beautiful. But many lamented the lost charm of ‘old’ Paris, and, indeed, much literature (Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin rank among the principal representatives of urban modernity) has been written on the fragmented, isolating existence within this radically new urban metropolis. Others saw the renovation as a form of architectural gentrification and the consolidation of the Second Empire’s bourgeoisie agenda: with rents increasing up to 300% and industry expelled to the periphery of the city, vast swathes of working-class families were forced to the east of the city, where the noxious fumes of factories would bellow, far removed from the city’s affluent havens in the west. Haussmann’s renovation therefore represents an inherent contradiction to the universalism espoused by the French revolution, and has inaugurated an enduring process of architectural gentrification.
That is, of course, not to say that Paris has not changed since Haussmannisation. During the Trente Glorieuses, the post-war period during which France experienced a period of unprecedented economic growth, parts of the city which didn’t bear the mark of Haussmann’s hand were developed: decrepit neighbourhoods, rail yards and remnants of industry were replaced. Most notoriously around the Place d’Italie in the southeast of the city, an entire neighbourhood was razed and replaced, once more forcing the poor to flee the city. The Centre Pompidou is another example of architectural incongruity. Indeed, the list can go on. However, despite these disparate bastions of postmodernity, Paris has largely felt complete for a rather long time – any new architectural projects must embellish the existing masterpiece, or at the very least not spoil it. Hence the polemics surrounding the Tour Triangle.
Fundamentally, Paris’ architecture can be seen to embody a city, and even a country, which no longer stands at the pinnacle of the world: its old architecture represents the sentimental time warp of a nation still enamoured with illusions of grandeur, of world-famous gastronomy, of political radicalism. Now most pertinent are a stagnating economy largely unacclimatised to globalisation, high unemployment, two popular far-right presidential candidates, atrocious conditions in the banlieues, and a dangerously obstinate approach to secularism. France, and Paris in particular, for so long at the forefront of everything, are not what they once were, and it is rather London, New York, Berlin and Tokyo which increasingly draw the world’s gaze. Yes, the Tour Triangle is being built. But it is anomalous, and equally serves no practical purpose. And as long as central Paris is defined by the constrictive parameters of a ring-road (unable to expand outwards nor upwards, pushing working class and middle class families away due to extortionate rent prices), and as long as history remains so ubiquitously present upon the face of the city, it feels as though Paris may be doomed to be a ‘museum city’, a relic of the past.
Part II of the article can be found here: https://www.thecambridgelanguagecollective.com/politics-and-society/will-paris-ever-change-part-11
