Bridges of Paris: 1 Viaduc d’Austerlitz

While most Paris Métro lines (with the notable exception of line 6) burrow underneath the Seine, line 5 crosses over the Seine between Quai de la Rapée and Quai d’Austerlitz by courtesy of the graceful Viaduc d’Austerlitz, a single arch steel bridge built in 1904, slender in appearance but rich in decorative ironwork.  On the north bank the bridge approach is via a curving steel ramp that lifts the tracks to the required height. At the other end the bridge extends over the Quai d’Austerlitz and the roadway before plunging into the roof space of the Gare d’Austerlitz - the only terminal station in Paris where the Métro platforms are situated above the station rather than safely interred beneath.  The view from downstream includes glimpses of the clock tower at the Gare de Lyon and the offices of RATP, the nerve centre of Parisian public transport.  There are houseboats tied up alongside the Quai d’Austerlitz - in an early series of The Spiral, the stocky figure of the eternally compromised Gilou (aka Escoffier) could be seen there, going aboard for a critical meeting with an organised crime boss to whom he would offer his services as an informer from inside the police.

Jean-Camille Formigé (1845-1926) designed the bridge with the engineer, Louis Biette. Formigé is no household name but he left a distinctive mark on the city around the turn of century.  He designed the Pont de Passy (1905) and the extended viaducts that supported Métro line 2 on its aerial sections through northern Paris. His taste for decorative moulded reliefs can be seen on all these structures. The nautical themed coat-of-arms for the City of Paris with its anchor and trident, is stretched and extended and draped with fronds of seaweed and undulating fish, then repeated at intervals across the Viaduc from the main arch to the balustrades.  Robustly carved bulls’ heads surmount the stonework of the massive abutments to amplify the sense of structural strength.

 

Sacré-Coeur – the architecture of reprisal

Julian Barnes wrote about Paris in the Guardian last Saturday. Barnes has written extensively on France but sparingly on Paris (preface to Richard Cobb’s Paris and Elsewhere) so this was something for Paris-obsessives to look forward to, despite a lingering impression that Barnes is not a great fan of the city. He correctly advises avoidance of the great pomp and circumstance Parisian monuments and directs the visitor to seek lesser known but more rewarding alternatives. The tiny Montmartre vineyard in rue des Saules is recommended as an alternative to the overbearing religiosity of Sacré-Coeur – a little disappointing – I had hoped that he might divert to somewhere like Barbès-Rochechouart if only for the pleasure of reading this restless and raucous neighbourhood described in Barnes’s supple and felicitous prose.


I share Barnes’s aversion to Paris monumentale (with the single exception of the Tour Eiffel that still works for me as a demented memorial to the Early Machine Age) and the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur is the most obnoxious of them all. In order to escape the magnetic field of this vindictive Romano-Byzantine confection, like Barnes, I would sneak round the back, but my destination would be the water tower in rue du Mont-Cenis. It’s an unpretentious structure, honest and restrained in terms of ornamentation and quietly performing a rather more essential function than its vulgar neighbour.


The tide of visitors that arises from the Métro at Anvers into boulevard de Rochechouart swarms up the steps or funicular primarily to enjoy the panoramic views across the city and get a close-up sight of one of the most prominent features of the Parisian skyline. High visibility, especially in the north-eastern arrondissements (18 – 20) where the roots of the Communard insurrection of 1871 were to be found, was a prime purpose. It was planned to serve as a permanent reminder to the city’s working-class inhabitants of the debt of penitence they owed to the Catholic Church and the property owning class for the events of the Commune. Another theme, one that would be repeated in 1940, was the allocation of blame for defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870 to the moral permissiveness of the Second Empire. This climate of excess came to be personified in the eyes of moralists in the flamboyant and gilded Charles Garnier Opéra. The Opéra was still under construction when the Commune was crushed in 1871 and one proposal was to demolish the part built structure and replace it with a new cathedral as an act of contrition for the sins of the past. The troubled origins of Sacré-Coeur are of no importance to the crowds who come to stare and this monument to ecclesiastical vengeance has steadily ingratiated itself into Parisian iconography over the decades following its completion in 1914.

Passages Couverts

Boulevard Montmartre in the 2e runs east-west between métro stations Richelieu-Drouot and Grands Boulevards. To north and south of the boulevard extend a network of shopping arcades (passages couverts). There are 4 such clusters to be found in Paris of which this is one, comprising the Passage des Panoramas, the Passage Jouffroy and the Passage Verdeau. These locations have long been a great source of fascination to Parisian intellectuals and flâneurs, valued for the strange and esoteric selection of goods on display as well as for the alternative routes that they offer through the city.


They are structures that lack any external facade (other than an entrance portico), thereby overturning some of the basic rules of architecture. In this sense they have as much in common with a tunnel as they have with a conventional building. Unlike a tunnel they possess cast iron ribbed, glazed roofs that even on a dull day of incessant rain can be depended on to admit a generous amount of daylight. With bright tiled floors and reflective glass facades, the light is doubled and redoubled. The noise and clamour of Parisian street life is left far behind and pedestrian progress is unimpeded by conflicting streams of traffic. It’s not long before you begin to suspect you may have entered a parallel form of existence.


Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant has appeared before in these notes and should be referred to sparingly lest one is accused of seeking an unearned note of intellectual respectability so caution is called for here. Aragon celebrated the idiosyncratic life of the Passage de l’Opéra at a time when it was due to be demolished to permit the inexorable advance of the boulevard Haussmann in 1924. For Aragon the passage represented an alternative universe of infinite possibilities, a closed world where bourgeois conventions had no force and a Surrealist playground where the absurd and the ridiculous, the bizarre and the pompous, the monumental and the trivial were continually colliding with one another.

Each of the arcades featured in these photographs has an individual flavour. Passage des Panoramas, on the south of bd. Montmartre has a simple pitched glazed roof and a floor of cracked paving stones. It starts brightly with a flurry of restaurants and dealers in vintage postcards, stamps, coins, medals and printed ephemera but at the extremities it peters out into two dark and neglected corridors where rainwater drips down the damp but perfectly tailored collar of the passing flâneur. The carefully preserved vintage signs for Stern Graveur supply a note of distinction.


Passage Jouffroy with an entrance on the north side of bd. Montmartre in the 9e is the longest of the three. There is a central section where it turns through two right angles and descends a short flight of steps before continuing in the same direction at a lower level. At this point are the entrance to the Hôtel Chopin and the exit from the Musée Grévin. The passage is broader and lighter than Passage des Panoramas with a vaulted roof and a more eclectic range of retailers. This is the place to purchase antique dolls and toys, dolls’ houses and accessories, walking sticks, canes and animal skins, movie memorabilia and vintage posters. The second (and shorter) section is narrower with shops on the left and false shop fronts to the right where a book seller (Librairie du Passage) displays a wide selection of reduced-price books on art and design. There always seem to be interesting books to be found here.


Walter Benjamin’s intimidatingly huge book (or 1,000 page collection of notes, clippings and drafts) published under the title The Arcades Project has many interesting observations based on the author’s heroic effort to comprehend the vast sweep of human history by means of intensive scrutiny of the cultural values of the 19th. century bourgeoisie but as a linear read, it’s a major challenge. Embedded in the aggregation of raw data are many real gems. For Benjamin, the Parisian arcades represented a focal point for the examination and understanding of the way that commerce shaped the history of the period.

The Neoclassical entrance to Passage Verdeau is just across the road (rue de la Grange-Batelière). This passage has a cooler, uncluttered look lined with galleries and rather forbidding dealers in water-colours, prints and old photographs. Of course, it being August, le congé annuel had brought the shutters down on a fair number of businesses. Even on a wet day traffic was light and the long and deserted perspectives began to assume a melancholy air.

Quartier de l’Europe

To the north of Gare St-Lazare and south of the boulevard des Batignolles in the 8th. is a radial network of streets and boulevards named after European cities and centred on the Place de l’Europe. The Place de l’Europe is actually a bridge over the rail tracks leading into Gare St-Lazare. Constructed in the 1860’s as a speculative venture the blocks of apartments give the area a very distinctive feel in which deep perspectives converge dramatically on broad intersections. Artists attracted to the idea of contemporary living began to occupy the spacious studio apartments. In July 1872 Manet moved into the area when he took a studio at 4 rue de Saint-Pétersbourg. The family home of Gustave Caillebotte was nearby on rue de Miromesnil. In a few years both Manet and Caillebotte were to find their subject matter on the streets where they were living and in 1877 Monet would carry out his concentrated pictorial exploration of the hinterland of Gare St-Lazare. Manet’s painting The Railway, based on the street outside his studio was exhibited at the Salon in 1874. Caillebotte exhibited his two masterpieces, Le Pont de l’Europe and Temps de Pluie, in 1877 so this particular year represents a high point in the artistic significance of the neighbourhood.


So, what remains? The air of modernity is long since departed but the fabric is remarkably well preserved. The distinctive lattice-work girders of the Place de l’Europe were replaced by railings in the 1930’s and the Goods Depot to the north east of the bridge has given way to a PTT sorting office with a brutalist concrete profile. There is a Métro entrance in the middle of rue de Madrid but otherwise much is as it was. Paris traffic races through the streets between monumental facades that are little changed from over 130 years ago. The plunging perspectives are the most tangible reminder that this territory was the arena for modernist painting’s very first encounters with an urban environment conditioned by speculative building on an industrial scale. The impersonality of city life, the weariness and boredom of routine and the impact of mass transit all came under the painter’s gaze. For Monet it was the sight of an urban reality transcended by smoke and steam, soot and sun that engaged his interest. Manet and Caillebotte shared a taste for penetrating the soul of the city by profound engagement with the ordinary and the unexceptional. The question is, do these streets still echo, however faintly to the footsteps of these long deceased investigators of urban alienation? Further consideration of this and other related matters will follow soon.

Le Grand Palais

The Grand Palais is a grandiloquent structure combining engineering ingenuity with the decorative excess of the Belle Époque constructed for the Universal Exhibition of 1900 on the site formerly occupied by the Palais de l’Industrie (built for the 1855 exhibition). It was used to display exhibitions of both fine and applied arts during the fair and retained for a variety of uses thereafter. This may be the reason that an enormous amount of expense and energy appears to have been devoted to the provision of vast flamboyant sculptures and elaborate external decoration. Essentially it’s an iron and glass building that has been covered with classically decorated stonework up to the roof level to create an impression of monumental mass. The true glory is the interior where an immense glazed nave runs north and south of an enormous glazed central dome. These features are at present displayed to perfection thanks to many years of painstaking restoration, the final stages of which were concluded in 2007. The sheer scale of the nave and the visual rhythms created by the glazing bars are exhilarating. The painted and decoratively formed structural ironwork is equally impressive, enclosing the generous space with minimum effort. Further information on the restoration project can be found by following this link.





A team of architects was employed on the original building. Henri Deglane designed the main building and frontage, Louis Louvet designed the mid-section and Albert Thomas designed the back of the building on the Rue d’Antin (now Avenue Franklin D Roosevelt). Despite the efforts of a co-ordinating architect, Charles Girault (who also designed the Petit Palais opposite), there is an obvious lack of unity between the component parts. The nave has had a chequered history. In addition to hosting trade exhibitions and events, it served as a medical centre in the First World War and a truck depot in the Second World War. It sustained war damage from fire and explosives and the glazing was replaced with a solid roof. In 1993 the nave was closed to the public when a section of the roof fell to the ground and a programme of restoration was prepared. Over the following 12 years the entire foundations (formed of oak pilings) were replaced and the glazing was reinstated. Every element of the building was renewed and the nave reopened for business in late 2005.