the danger of having cutthroats like these so close to his residence, and had the damaged houses pulled down as well as a number of others. He later demolished the stalls and wooden barriers that closed off the Tuileries avenues,27 and had the triumphal arch of the Carrousel constructed as a gateway of honour to the palace. Demolition continued slowly until 1848, when the pace accelerated in order to make work for the National Workshops. ‘Three-quarters of the square was cleared in 1850. There only remained [on Rue Saint-Nicaise] the former building of the royal stables . . . and right in the middle of the new esplanade, the Hôtel de Nantes, which had resisted until the end all the offers of the expropriation assessors. The hôtel has since been demolished, and the royal stables as well.’28
The Carrousel today is a dusty steppe between the Louvre pyramid and the railings of the Tuileries gardens, crossed by a stream of cars – required by some odd notion to navigate a one-way roundabout – and by an underground tunnel whose concrete entrances give a final touch to the whole ensemble. As the triumphal arch makes no sense in the middle of this desert, the idea was conceived of linking it to the Tuileries gardens and the Napoleon III wings of the Louvre by little fan-shaped plantations over which the heads or thighs of Maillol’s fat ladies emerge: there are academic gardens just as there are academic painters. Happily, some very fine chestnut trees have been saved, which in summertime provide shade for the ice-cream and postcard sellers around Percier and Fontaine’s monument.
Tuileries-Saint-Honoré
In 1946, the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré was renamed Place Robespierre, a decision reversed in 1950 when the French bourgeoisie raised its head again. Their hatred towards Robespierre had never diminished since Thermidor. Beside the Incorruptible himself – who lodged with his sister Charlotte and brother Augustin in carpenter Duplay’s house at the end of Rue Saint-Honoré – other actors in the Revolution also lived in the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré quarter: Sièyes, Olympe de Gouges, Héron, and Barère whom Robespierre praised in the ambiguous words: ‘He knows everything and everyone, he is ready for anything.’ Not that this was a particularly revolutionary quarter, but Rue Saint-Honoré was the geographical axis of political life. Between 1789 and 1791, the club of La Fayette and the Moderates held its sessions in the former convent of the Feuillants, where Rue de Castiglione now runs. The Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality was remembered in history under the name of the Jacobins club, the buildings of the Dominican order (known as Jacobins in France) having occupied what is now the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré as far as Rue Gomboust. The Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and initially also the Convention, sat in the Salle du Manège in the Tuileries gardens, close to where Rue Saint-Roch comes out into Rue de Rivoli. After 10 August 1792, the Convention moved to the Salle des Machines, which Soufflot had transformed and where Sophie Arnould had previously triumphed in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux. The Convention tribune, which according to the specifications was a low construction painted in antique green, decorated with yellow pillars with bronzed capitals and three crowns in faux porphyry, was situated close to the present Marsan pavilion. The Committee of Public Safety met in the opposite wing, the south end of the palace.
After Thermidor, the Convention had the Jacobins’ premises demolished – Merlin de Thionville having denounced it as a ‘bandits’ lair’ – and the gap this created was known for a while as the Place du Neuf-Thermidor. But when royalist pressure became worrying, Barras secured the services of a young officer who was seen as a Robespierrist, Napoleon Bonaparte, and made arrangements to protect the Assembly during the royalist uprising of 13 Vendémaire in year IV (5 October 1795); the insurgents were crushed on the steps of the church of Saint-Roch, by grapeshot from an eight-pounder set up at the end of the Cul-de-sac Dauphin, today the part of Rue Saint-Roch between Rue Saint-Honoré and the Tuileries.
The two main squares in the Saint-Honoré quarter are the Place du Marché-Saint-Honoré and the Place Vendôme, and though quite different from one another, they have both experienced similar disfigurement in recent times. The former already suffered a town-planning assault in the late 1950s, when the market that Molinos had built under the Empire was demolished – four halls, and in the middle a fountain supplied by Chaillot’s steam pump – and in its place a concrete block constructed that doubles as a fire station and police precint. More recently, the Paribas bank commissioned Bofill to construct a new building there. Aware that his hollow columns and pseudoclassical fronts were beginning to look tired, the architect conceived a pseudo high-tech building, badly proportioned and completely foreign to the spirit of the place, with a chilling effect that the proliferation of restaurants fails to conceal.
The Place Vendôme, for its part, has been endowed by the architects in charge of public buildings and national palaces with an indescribable paving scattered with sheets of brushed steel, and bunker entrances to its underground car park. The chauffeurs dusting their limousines outside Cartier, the Ritz, or Crédit Foncier wear dark suits and dark glasses, and have the appearance of bodyguards. Whenever I pass that way, I think fondly of the National Guards, canteen-women, Gavroches, armed civilians and gunners at their posts, posing in groups for the photographer in front of the debris of the column in May 1871.
Bourse
Between the gardens of the Palais-Royal and the Boulevards, the district often known as the Bourse quarter is one of the most homogeneous and harmonious in old Paris. In these blocks that are called neoclassical for want of a better word, many buildings date from the reign of Louis XVI, others from the Revolutionary years – Rue des Colonnes, whose miniature neo-Grecian vocabulary, Doric columns without pediment, palm-leaf mouldings and strange windowed balustrades form such an original ensemble that great architects from all over Europe – Gilly, Soane, Schinkel – came to admire and draw it. Others in this style were constructed under the Empire, like Brongniart’s Bourse. The paradox of so grandiose a building devoted to so mundane an activity did not escape his contemporaries:
I vex myself every time I enter the Bourse, the beautiful edifice of marble, built in the noblest Greek style, and consecrated to the most contemptible business – to swindling in the public funds . . . Here, in the vast space of the high-arched hall, here it is that the swindlers, with all their repulsive faces and disagreeable screams, sweep here and there, like the tossing of a sea of egotistic greed, and where, amid the wild billows of human beings, the great bankers dart up, snapping and devouring like sharks – one monster preying on another . . .29
The Bourse quarter is crossed by three parallel streets with a more or less north-south orientation – Rue Vivienne, Rue de Richelieu and Rue Sainte-Anne – and two transversals. One of these is very ancient, Rue des Petits-Champs, which links the two royal sites of Place des Victoires and Place Vendôme.30 The other is Rue du Quatre-Septembre, one of the least successful of Haussmann’s cuttings. Under the Second Empire it went by the name of Rue du Dix-Décembre, commemorating the election of Louis Bonaparte as president of the Republic in 1848. The Society of 10 December, founded by the prince-president, recruited among the Paris lumpenproletariat caricatured by Daumier’s character Ratapoil, playing a role comparable with that of the Gaullist Service d’Action Civique in the 1960s.
For a very long time this quarter has been devoted to three activities that have resisted pretty well the changes in fashion and luxury goods: books, finance, and music. ‘Since the reign of Henri IV,’ Germain Brice tells us, the Bibliothèque Royale
had been maintained very negligently on a private house in Rue de la Harpe. In 1666 it was moved to another house on Rue Vivienne, on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Colbert . . . In 1722 it was decided to install it in the Hôtel de Nevers, or rather in the apartments that had been used for some time for the Bank, to which others had been added, built on neglected gardens that were close by, in such a way that the public would have the satisfaction of seeing it to better advantage than before,
