arrived here from the west and north. At the centre stood a fountain and a pillory that was like an inverted Bentham panopticon, ‘an old octagonal stone tower with large windows at all sides of its upper level. In the middle of this tower was a rotating wooden device pierced with holes, for placing the head and arms of fraudulent bankrupts, extortionists and other condemned criminals of this kind. They were exposed there for three market days, two hours each day; and each half hour they were made to turn round in the pillory, exposed to the insults of the people.’44
The Innocents cemetery, the largest in Paris for a number of centuries, occupied the corner between Rue Saint-Denis and Rue de la Ferronnerie.45 Philippe Auguste also had this surrounded by a wall with four gates. The dead were cast into common graves several metres deep, which could accommodate up to a thousand bodies. When one grave was full, it was closed and a new one dug. In the fifteenth century, the interior of the surrounding wall was supplemented by arched galleries with spaces above, a charnel house where bones from earlier graves were piled up to make room. On the side of Rue de la Ferronnerie, the walls of the gallery were decorated with a danse macabre, a motive found throughout France in these years. In an age when people were only too familiar with death, the cemetery was one of the most frequented places in Paris, just as the Galerie Mercière of the Palace of Justice and the gardens of the Palais-Royal were later on. It was a place to find linen-maids, public scribes, clothes merchants, sellers of books and pictures, and various kinds of charlatans.
The market had been somewhat disorderly ever since the time of Louis IX, who had authorized ‘poor women’ to retail sea fish close to the main fish market, a privilege retained until its final destruction: these are the women with their large red umbrellas that the young Haussmann encountered on his way to the Faculty of Law. Along the cemetery wall, linen-maids and old-clothes dealers were also able to present their wares free of charge. To the north of the Innocents, near the church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles, Rue de la Grande-Truanderie well justified its name for a number of centuries: Sauval wrote that ‘it took its name from the rogues who formerly lived here, and was not just a court of miracles, but perhaps the earliest and largest one in Paris’.
The first great ‘reformation’ of the Halles was conducted under Henri II in the early 1550s, at the same time as construction started on the church of Saint-Eustache. ‘In 1551’, wrote Gilles Corozet, ‘the Halles of Paris were entirely knocked down and rebuilt, equipped with finely worked buildings, hotels and sumptuous houses for those townspeople who took the old sites.’46 The old wall of the Halles was then demolished, and future access was through regular streets. The allocation of space was more clearly defined. On the south side, where Rues des Bourdonnais, Sainte-Opportune, des Deux-Boules and des Lavandières now run, was the hall for linen and cloth. Butchers were also to be found there, though the greater part of their activity was in the quarter of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie – the Saint-Jacques tower is a vestige of this large church – where flocks were brought to the slaughterhouses on the hoof.
To the northwest, close to where the Bourse du Commerce now stands, was the Halle aux Blés, close to the hotel that Catherine de Médicis had built by Philibert de l’Orme (‘A modern writer’, stated Germain Brice two centuries later, ‘whom one can follow on this occasion, says that, after the Louvre, there is no more noble building in the kingdom than this hotel.’) On the northeast side, towards the Pointe Saint-Eustache, was the Carreau des Halles, extending to the market for poirées: ‘Throughout the year, and every day, all kinds of vegetables and herbs are sold here, including medicinal ones, and all kinds of fruit and flowers, so that this place is a real garden, where the flowers and fruits of all seasons can be seen.’47 This arrangement – textiles and meat to the south, grain, fish and vegetables to the north – would last until Baltard’s time.
At the end of the ancien régime, the Halles were once again transformed from top to bottom. The hotel of Catherine de Médicis – Hôtel de Soissons – was demolished, and in its place Le Camus des Mézières built a new Halle aux Blés, a large circular building that Molinos covered in the 1780s with an immense wooden dome, an innovation new to Paris. The halls dating from the Renaissance were replaced by new buildings. And above all, the buildings surrounding the Innocents cemetery were pulled down, on Rues aux Fers48 (now Berger), de la Lingerie and Saint-Denis.
This destruction did away with the church of Les Saints-Innocents, but spared the adjacent fountain, a monument much admired: ‘Signor G. L. Bernini, one of the most renowned architects of the last several centuries, always very sparing with his praise, and who affected to think nothing of all the beautiful things that he saw in this city, could not prevent himself from exclaiming when he inspected this incomparable work, and declaring that he had not noticed anything like it in France.’49 The fountain of the Innocents was then given a fourth arch, completing those that Jean Goujon had already sculpted, so that it no longer had to stand against a wall, but could be placed at the centre of the new Marché des Innocents. The cemetery, in fact, was closed. In an ecological vein, Mercier wrote that ‘in this narrowly enclosed space, infections attacked the life and health of the inhabitants. The knowledge newly acquired about the nature of air [Lavoisier!] had cast light on the danger of this mephitism . . . The danger was imminent; soup and milk spoiled in a few hours in the houses close to the cemetery; wine turned acid when it was poured; and the miasmas from the corpses threatened to poison the atmosphere.’ The skeletons were then removed to the quarries to the south of Paris that became the Catacombes: ‘We can only imagine the lit torches, this immense grave opened for the first time, the many beds of corpses suddenly stirred, the debris of skeletons, the sparse lights fuelled by the planks of coffins, the moving shadows of funeral crosses, this fearsome precinct suddenly lit up in the silence of the night.’50
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
