The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps by Eric Hazan

Author:Eric Hazan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, France, History
ISBN: 9781844678006
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2011-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Montmartre

Of all the villages annexed in 1860, Montmartre is the one that has retained most autonomy, despite being always very closely bound up with Parisian life. It is the only one to have a street bearing its name at the very heart of the city (indeed one of the oldest and most important), running right to the Halles and the apse of Saint-Eustache. The abbesses of Montmartre owned immense estates stretching down to the walls of Paris. Several of them gave their names to streets on the slopes of the 9th arrondissement: Louise-Émilie de la Tour d’Auvergne, Marie de Bellefond, Catherine de La Rochefoucault, Marguerite de Rochechouart – and one of the strangest couplings in the names of the Métro stations is that between this great name of French nobility and the professional revolutionary Armand Barbès.43

Montmartre is also the Paris quarter whose name has the largest number of different connotations. There is the Montmartre of village folklore – the ‘Commune libre’, Poulbot, the Fête des Vendanges – which is included in, though does completely coincide with, tourist Montmartre, whose main attractions are the Sacré-Coeur and the Place du Tertre. There is the Montmartre of its heyday, whose story, told a thousand times, has its backdrops (the Moulin de la Galette, the Lapin-Agile, the Bateau-Lavoir), its heroes (Bruant, Apollinaire, Picasso), its chroniclers (Carco, Dorgelès, Mac Orlan, Salmon) and its painters (from Degas, Van Gogh and Lautrec to poor Utrillo). There is also Red Montmartre, its emblematic figure being Louise Michel, the schoolteacher from Rue Houdon, the inspiration behind the vigilance committee at 41 Chaussée de Clignancourt – I shall speak of her later on. And there is again, to take up the title of Louis Chevalier’s book, the Montmartre of pleasure and crime. On 21 July 1938, a few weeks before Munich, Le Détective carried the headline: ‘From the Drama of the Rat-Mort to the Cannes Vendetta’, announcing a report on the inexpiable hatred between the Foata and Stéfani clans. A world that was still very much alive in the 1950s – the Corsicans of Pigalle, Pierrot le Fou (the real one), the ‘front-wheel drive gang’ – evoked by one of the finest films on the underside of Paris, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur.

In certain parts, these different meanings have built up in successive layers, but today they have melted into an indistinct general memory, though this has kept a certain sparkle despite the decline. On the semicircle of Place Pigalle, the fountain occupies the site of the square building constructed by Ledoux for the Montmartre barrière. The Café des Omnibus and the no. 67 bus stand recall the famous line from Pigalle to the Halle aux Vins. ‘You find here’, wrote Delvau in the 1860s, ‘two temples to beer, the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, a meeting place for daubers and writers from the Breda quarter, and the Café de la Place Pigalle, a neighbour and competitor on this square widened by the demolition of the wall.’ On Sunday mornings a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.