The Paris landscape can be understood from observing the development of the Halles site over the centuries. It is impossible to avoid a sense of regret for the ridiculous fate of this place, which, as Sauval wrote centuries ago, ‘is full of everything: vegetables, the fruit of gardens and fields, fish from river and sea, things that can assist the convenience and delights of life, and indeed all that is most excellent, exquisite and rare in land and air, arriving in Paris and taken there’. But despite such regret, we should not forget the circumstances that led to this end. Louis Chevalier observed it from the inside, hearing all the arguments brought up in bad faith in favour of destruction:
The economic argument, the most mysterious and obscure . . . was the one most often cited. And then public health. The legendary dirtiness of the Halles . . . I cite the words that I found in these speeches as they come, without trying to put them in order – as one might arrange goods for sale, vegetables for example, in harmonious constructions that, under the striking light of lamps, exude order, beauty, taste, and indeed, to be sure, cleanliness . . . To dramatize things still more, rats . . . And to complete this spectacle à la Gustave Doré, Villon’s fat prostitutes, who were certainly not very discreet, and some of whom even displayed their charms on the steps of Saint-Eustache.51
Chevalier went to see his old fellow student from the École Normale Supérieure, Georges Pompidou, whom he had dinner with from time to time: ‘It seemed to me – pure illusion, perhaps – that Pompidou, knowing how my ideas on the matter were quite the opposite of his own, cast me an inflexible and facetious glance that undoubtedly meant that with people of my sort, Parisians would still be stuck in the huts where Caesar found them.’
Once the decision was made to transfer the market to Rungis, disaster was certain. The 1960s and ’70s were an all-time low for French architecture. Major commissions went to members of the Institut de France, to whom we owe – among other things – the administrative building on Boulevard Morland with its pergola, the Palais des Congrès at Porte Maillot, the Tour Montparnasse, the Radio building, and the Faculty of Sciences at Jussieu. And in a detrimental scissors effect, corruption and collusion within semipublic companies, between the promoters and scoundrels of Parisian Gaullism, was at its height. It was not enough, therefore, to pull down Baltard’s pavilions: to make the operation profitable, the destruction had to spread far wider. The space between Rue de Turbigo and what remained of Rue Rambuteau, and the whole region between what was Rue Berger and Rue de la Ferronnerie, were replaced by office blocks and flats so aggressive in their ugliness that you have to go a long way – the far end of the Italie quarter or the Front de Seine – to find their match. On top of all this, the ‘gardens’ on the site of Les Halles also show what decrepitude French landscapists had reached in their art. Hemmed in by mutilated streets, decked out in the worst panoply of postmodernism, these ‘spaces’ transform the old itineraries of Paris into assault courses, by their complex arrangement of metal barriers, ventilation columns, walkways overlooking ditches of wretched plantations, the orifices of underground roads, and fountains clogged up with empty drink cans. As for the underground shopping mall that goes by the noble name of Forum, the most surprising thing is that its author is still classed as an architect. But the whole ensemble is so badly constructed, with such poor materials, that its ruin in the near future is inevitable. One might even say it has already begun.
The Beaubourg plateau, between Rue Beaubourg and Rue Saint-Martin, bounded to the north by Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare and to the south by the church of Saint-Merri, is an outcrop of Les Halles, linked to them – across Boulevard Sébastopol – by the very old streets of Rue de Leynie and Rue Aubry-le-Boucher. In the 1950s Doisneau photographed this ‘old rubbish-tip of the Halles where lorries park, where an entire nighttime population comes out to work – and sometimes to play – in the shadows, far from the pavilions dazzling with light, like actors warming up in the corridor before going on stage’.52 This immense paved promenade, this strange emptiness in such a dense region, was the work of Haussmann, though not finished until the 1930s. He assiduously destroyed the network of little streets – Rues Maubuée, de la Corroierie, des Vieilles-Étuves, du Poirier, du Maure – that had served as a tragic setting for almost all the insurrections of the first half of the nineteenth century. The minuscule Rue de Venise, opposite the Centre Beaubourg, is the sole remaining vestige of this group, which used to be known as the Cloître Saint-Merri, and which the journées of June 1832 made famous throughout Europe. Around the Centre itself, which is now part of the Parisian landscape – good architecture always ends up triumphing over whinging critics – , semipublic companies have wrought their ravages: the ‘Horloge quarter’ with its gloomy passages, bankrupt shops, wretched gadgets and suspect smells, has the same relationship to a genuine quarter as a works canteen has to a traditional Paris bistro.
Sentier
The district marked out between Les Halles and the Grands Boulevards is underpinned and organized by Rue Montmartre, which plays the role of guardian to two successive enclaves, one on each side of Rue Réaumur. Previously, it was the Montorgueil quarter that approached Rue Montmartre via Rue Tiquetonne, Rue Bachaumont built on the site of the Passage du Saumon, and Rue Léopold-Bellan, which in the eighteenth century had the lovely name of Rue du Bout-du-Monde. Despite its new guise as a pedestrian zone, Rue Montorgueil remains lively by virtue of its market, which, even if not completely genuine, plays the same protective role as Rue Mouffetard or – increasingly less so – Rue de Buci. Further afield, between Rue Réuamur and Boulevard Montmartre, is the old press quarter, which long predates rotary printing. Lucien de Rubempré, when he ‘went out one morning with the triumphant idea of finding some colonel of such light skirmishers of the press . . . arrived in the Rue Saint-Fiacre off the Boulevard Montmartre. Before a house, occupied by the offices of a small newspaper, he stopped, and at the sight of it his heart began to throb as heavily as the pulses of a youth upon the threshold of some evil haunt.’53
In the heyday of the daily press, between the end of the Second Empire and the First World War, all the major newspapers, even the less major ones, had their editorial office and printing press one above the other in the same building. Le Petit Journal was on the corner of Rue de Richelieu and Boulevard Montmartre, which had been the site of the famous Frascati’s. The ground floor was occupied by a bookshop and an immense bazaar, where an aquarium of exotic fish jostled with the works of Corot and Meissonier. In the Rue Montmartre, at the end of the century, you had La Presse, La France, La Liberté, Le Journal des voyages, and the Paul Dupont printworks, whose building housed L’Univers, Le Jockey, Le Radical and L’Aurore. Rue de Croissant was the site of La Patrie, Le Hanneton, Le Père Duchesne, Le Siècle, La République, L’Écho de l’armée and L’Intransigeant. Le Soleil was in Rue Saint-Joseph, L’Illustration in Rue