myth, with a different boundary in each of these senses. But isn’t this ambiguity the very mark of quarters with a strong identity? And if such an identity is lacking, can one even talk of a quarter? Such questions lead, as we shall see, to a more general one: what, fundamentally, is a Paris quarter?
The administrative divisions – twenty arrondissements, with four quartiers in each – give the beginnings of a reply a contrario: a list of this kind, quite abstract and without any ranking, is only useful for the tax office and the police. But it is by no means certain that more subtle procedures would be able to define a basic urban unit for Paris, where the term ‘quarter’, despite its ancient roots in the language and its apparent simplicity, is far from denoting anything homogeneous and comparable. Saint-Germain-des-Près, the Plaine Monceau and the Évangile, for example, are all three of them Paris quarters – each has its history, its boundaries, its map, its architecture, its population and its activities. The first, developing over the centuries on the territory of the great abbey and grouping very ancient streets around the ‘modern’ intersection of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue de Rennes, has kept nothing of the postwar years in which it was so celebrated, and has fallen into the sterility of a museum. The second, planted out by the Pereire brothers in the mid nineteenth century – a ‘luxury quarter sprouting amid the wastelands of the old Plaine Monceau’ – is that of Nana, in her ‘Renaissance-style hôtel, with the air of a palace’. Marked by the memory of the academic ‘artistes pompiers’ who were among its original inhabitants – Meissonier, Rochegrosse, Boldini, Carrier-Belleuse – this is a typical residential quarter, and the successors of the business bourgeoisie of the Second Empire still occupy its neo-Gothic and neo-Palladian hôtels particuliers today. The Évangile, at the end of the world between the railway tracks of the Nord and the Est, is built on a bit of the former village of La Chapelle, where the contractors who carted out the Paris refuse came to dump their load. (‘Tumbrils carry off muck and filth, which is spilled into the nearby countryside: woe to any who find themselves neighbour to these infected mounds’, wrote Sébastien Mercier.6) The monstrous gasometers that lined the Rue de l’Évangile are no longer to be seen, but the Calvary photographed by Atget is still in place, and the covered market of La Chapelle is one of the most colourful in Paris.
The customary oppositions of east/west, Left Bank/Right Bank, or centre/periphery are too simplistic to account for this diversity, and sometimes out of date. We have to look elsewhere, especially in the city’s particular mode of growth. Nowhere else in Europe has a great capital developed in the same way as Paris, with such discontinuity and in so irregular a rhythm. And what gave the city this rhythm was the centrifugal succession of its walled precincts. Cities without walls – apart from those strictly organized on a rectangular grid, like Turin, Manhattan, or Lisbon as laid out by the Marquis de Pombal – grew up any which way, like the tentacles of an octopus, or a bacterial plaque multiplying in its culture. In London, Berlin or Los Angeles, the city limits and the shapes of districts are vague and variable: ‘The rampant proliferation of the immense megalopolis that is Tokyo gives the impression of a silkworm eating a mulberry leaf . . . The form of such a city is unstable, its border an ambiguous zone in constant movement . . . It is an incoherent space spreading without order or markers, its limits only poorly defined.’7
Paris, on the other hand, so often threatened, besieged, or invaded, has from the dawn of time been constrained by its city walls. This has always given it a more or less regular circular form, and it has only been able to extend in a succession of dense and concentric rings. From the wall of Philippe Auguste to the modern Périphérique, six different walls followed one another in the course of eight centuries – without counting reinforcement, retouching or partial correction. The scenario has always been the same. A new wall is constructed, with broad dimensions that afford free space around the area already built up. But this space is rapidly covered over. Available land within the walls becomes increasingly scarce, buildings are pressed together, plots filled up, and the growing density makes life difficult. Meanwhile, outside the walls, and despite the laws against it – a constant over many centuries and political regimes, but never respected (this is the zone non aedificandi, which Parisians little familiar with Latin quickly came to call simply the zone, a word still in use today8) – houses
with pleasant gardens are constructed in the faubourgs. When the intramuros concentration becomes intolerable, these faubourgs are absorbed into the city and the cycle begins again:
Philippe Auguste . . . imprisons Paris in a circular chain of great towers, both lofty and solid. For a period of more than a century, the houses press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their level in this basin, like water in a reservoir. They begin to deepen; they pile storey upon storey; they mount up on each other; they gush forth at the top, like all laterally compressed growth, and there is a rivalry as to which shall thrust its head above its neighbours, for the sake of getting a little air. The street grows narrower and deeper, every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The houses finally leap the wall of Philippe Auguste and scatter joyfully over the plain, without order and all askew, like runaways. There they plant themselves squarely, cut themselves gardens from the fields, and take their ease. Beginning with 1367, the city spreads to such an extent into the suburbs that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the Right Bank; Charles V builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetually growing . . . So Charles V’s wall suffers the fate of that of Philippe Auguste. At the end of the fifteenth century, the faubourg strides across it, passes beyond it, and extends further.9
Like the growth rings of a tree, quarters between any two walls are contemporary, even if space was not filled at the same pace at all points on the circumference – the west side and the Left Bank always lagging behind. The same era and the same conception of the city explains why Belleville and Passy have many things in common, both finding themselves in the same stratum, only belatedly annexed to Paris and both maintaining certain features of Île-de-France villages – the high street, church and cemetery, the theatre (now ‘municipal’), the lively central square where cakes are bought for Sunday. Analogies of this kind can be found not just in the faubourgs but at the very heart of the city, yet since the movement of Paris more often follows a radius than a circular arc, the diachronic diversity is more visible than the affinity between contemporary quarters.
Of Paris’s two medieval fortifications,10 the older, built under Philippe Auguste around 1200, has left its clearest traces on the Left Bank, where it circumscribed the ‘Université’ on the north slope of the Montagne Saint-Geneviève (these ‘traces’ are not old stones and archaeological remnants, which can be found on both banks, but rather the still apparent urban consequences, as can be read on a map or noted on foot). This wall started from the Seine at the Tour Nesle, where the Institut de France now stands. Its counterscarp followed the line of what is now Rue Mazarine (formerly Fossés-Saint-Germain) as far as the Porte de Buci, the direction in which Paris faced the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The wall then continued along Rue Monsieur-le-Prince (formerly ‘Fossés-Monsieur-le-Prince’), which still marks, and not by chance, the boundary between the Latin and the Odéon quarters. It reached the top of the Montagne Saint-Geneviève, where the names of streets and squares still perpetuate its memory: Fossés-Saint-Jacques, Estrapade, Contrescarpe. It then descended towards the Seine in a straight line, following Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor (now Cardinal-Lemoine) and Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard, reaching the river at the tower of La Tournelle.11
Despite breaches and destruction, eight centuries later the ghost of this wall still defines the Latin Quarter. It is in this semi-ellipse – the neighbourhood of the Cordeliers refectory, the ossuary of Saint-Séverin, the robinia tree of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, around the Rue de la Harpe, Place Maubert, and behind the Collège de France – that a medieval layout still survives on the Left Bank: one of narrow plots in a dense and unbroken tissue, a whirl of streets going in all directions. To experience this, you need only leave the Sorbonne and cross the precinct, climb Rue Saint-Jacques as far as Rue des Ursulines, Rue des Feuillantines beloved by Victor Hugo, Rue Lhomond and Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Épée. Here, the high walls, trees and gardens
