Categories
Books History Museums

Out of This World Exhibition

Yesterday I popped along to the Out of this World exhibition at one of my very favourite places, the British Library. It’s a thoroughly diverting exploration of the history of sci-fi literature and well worth a visit. يورو 2023 مباريات Any serious exhibition that manages to work in a quote from Groundhog Day – “Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.” – gets my vote. Here’s a little visual sampler of some of the treats in store if you do make it along. اللاعب جريزمان And while you’re in the area, why not check out the beautiful, newly re-opened  St Pancras Hotel – one of the most whimsical, pleasing buildings in the whole of London. لويس سواريز

Here’s a Map of Utopia from Thomas More’s Libellus vere auerus… insula Utopia, 1518.

And here, rather wonderfully, is a design for a craft to take man to the moon by swan power, from Francis Goodwin’s The Man in the Moone, 1638.

And finally, there’s these hijinks from Albert Robida’s Le Vingtieme Siècle. La Vie Electrique. 1892. As the exhibition notes, “Robida’s 20th century is a century of air transportation for individual (aero-taxi), communications technology such as the ‘téléphonoscope’, (a device that is capable of transmitting visual information) and the emancipation of women. Discuss.

Categories
18th Century 19th Century Animals French History Historical Places Lost Paris Paris

Lost Paris: The Elephant on the Place de la Bastille

Lost Paris: The Elephant on the Place de la Bastille

Of all the strange monuments that ever appeared on the Parisian skyline (and there have been a few), one of the most outlandish is surely the Elephant that occupied the Place de la Bastille in the wake of the Revolution.

 

The Bastille prison had been despised by Parisians for many reasons, not least among them (as can be clearly appreciated from the zoomable 1730s map of Paris discussed in my last post) its hulking, mouldering, medieval physical presence. After the Bastille fell, there was some debate about what should become of it – after all, the place was a potent and potentially useful symbol, and for a few days the old prison looked like it could become a sort of shrine to that first, audacious act of the Revolution. In the end though, it was simply too much of an anachronism, too much a reminder of an old world to be allowed to exist in the new one. This thought process was certainly hurried along by Pierre-François Palloy, an opportunistic entrepreneur who quickly greased the necessary wheels and secured the rights to begin demolition of the prison. By November of 1789 the structure was largely demolished, and Palloy was doing a roaring trade in trinkets made from the stones of the Bastille (which were also used in the construction of the Pont de la Concorde).

But what could take the place of the mighty Bastille? This was a difficult decision that was not to be answered in the turmoil of the revolutionary years. But when Napoleon came to power, such sensitivity to the nuances of revolutionary history evaporated, and Paris found a new purpose – as a stage to celebrate the glories of his empire, and storehouse for its spoils. Napoleon was impatient to bend the city to these aims, and when the realisation dawned that changing the physical makeup of Paris was a long and difficult task, Napoleon resorted to any means possible in what now seems an urgent, if not desperate, attempt to assert his power and vision. He dreamed of building a 180-foot-high obelisk on the Île de la Cité, but when obstacles arose simply built a paste-board model and placed it on the site. He needed a triumphal arch for the entry of his new Empress, Marie-Louise, but when time ran short he had the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile built from wooden scaffolding and canvas instead.

And on the Place de la Bastille, birthplace of the Revolution, Napoleon’s fantasies settled on a great elephant – a statue so monumental that visitors could climb inside through a staircase in one of its legs, and up to a tower on its back. Presumably the choice of an elephant reflected his ambitions in the East, though one wonders if Napoleon was aware of the architect Charles Ribart’s 1758 plan to build a similar structure, complete with opulent rooms inside, on the site where the Arc de Triomphe now stands.

 

Charles Ribart’s plans for another monumental elephant, 1758.

Napoleon stipulated that the elephant was to be cast in bronze, melted down from cannons captured during his conquests. But as usual, Napoleon’s impatience meant that rather than waiting for this bronze to arrive, a full-scale model was created in plaster and placed on the site. I can find no record of what Parisians made of this strange new resident in their midst, but it seems as odd and alien a feature as ever the Bastille was, and yet what a wonderful vision – another of those peculiar, unexpected and unique sensory experiences Paris has always been so good at creating.

The copper to transform the elephant into a permanent structure never arrived, and as Napoleon’s rule descended into a spiral of defeat and disorder, the plaster structure was left to rot. Victor Hugo evocatively describes the state of the elephant in 1832 in Les Misérables, in which we find Gavroche living in the very belly of the beast.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a “member of the Institute, the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt.”

We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of Napoleon’s, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown, on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind, and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was a sort of symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and immense. It was some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. “The aediles,” as the expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814. There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns, it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There was something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out, and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated. As we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is the real element of everything that is dark. As soon as twilight descended, the old elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows.
Being of the past, he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.

The sick old elephant was only finally demolished in 1842, and legend has it that as the gigantic body crumbled, a plague of rats emerged from inside and, naturally unhappy at the destruction of their home, terrorised the neighbourhood for weeks.

In case you’re wondering (as I did), this plaster pachyderm is not the origin of the phrase ‘white elephant’ – for that story you have to go much further than the Place de la Bastille.

Traces today

Sadly, no trace of the glorious elephant has survived, but it stood where the July Column stand today, in the centre of the Place de la Bastille. Special paving stones in the area mark the outline of the Bastille and a couple of sections of the foundations survive, which can be found in the park on the Square Henri-Galli off the Boulevard Henri IV (see map below) and, rather wonderfully on the line 5 platforms of the Bastille metro station. The marina that runs off the Place de la Bastille was once part of the fort’s ditch.

Bastille/Sully-Morland

Boulevard Henri IV – Vestige of the foundation of the Bastille (see map below). By FLLL on Wikimedia Commons.

[cetsEmbedGmap src=http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?t=h&lci=org.wikipedia.en&ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=48.851543,2.363241&spn=0.012792,0.033023&z=16&msid=206789533026697120059.0004a5467ddd9dd591622 width=598 height=400 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 frameborder=0 scrolling=no]

 

Categories
18th Century French History Historical Places History Lost Paris Paris Uncategorized

Lost Paris: A snapshot of 1730s Paris

This wonderful, 33 megapixel, zoomable marvel is known as the Turgot Map of Paris, and it’s a remarkable document in all sorts of ways. I like to imagine that were you to be offered the chance to drift above Paris in a hot air balloon in the 1730s (disregarding the fact that this was impossible, the Montgolfier brothers being still but a twinkle in their parents eyes) the scene before you would look very like this. Or maybe it’s more like what it would be like to be some all-powerful God, with the world laid at your feet and called to attention for your inspection. The map was commissioned Michel-Étienne Turgot, then prévôt des marchands de Paris (roughly equivalent to the city’s mayor) and created by Louis Bretez. And Turgot certainly got his money’s worth. The completed map was huge, filling 21 sheets and reproducing the city in incredible detail. I recommend you switch the widget to fullscreen mode, scroll and zoom around, and get lost inside it for a while. The map strikes us as odd in several respects. Firstly, it’s oriented very differently from any map of Paris we’re used to, with the viewer facing east. Then there’s the birdseye perspective, technically known as perspective cavaliere, this means that buildings of the same size are shown at the same size on the map, no matter how far away they are. Then there’s the fact that what we see is recognisably Paris, but not Paris as we know it. It’s a stark reminder of the scope and scale of the changes made to Paris under Haussmann and Napoleon III, which have changed so fundamentally the essence of the city. Mostly though, it’s the sheer detail of the thing that startles- enough to give you the slightly eerie sense that you’re looking at a city captured in some crystaline lava flow, and preserved for all time. Turgot set out to record the city as it was, without a window or a leaf out of place, and on one level he succeeded admirably. During his two years drafting the map, he was granted extraordinary access to the city, even being allowed inside the aristocratic hôtels, normally cut-off from public view by their fortress-like walls. As a result, the map is full of vivid and authentic detail, and examining it is as addictive as Where’s Wally (Waldo). There are views of sights such as the Louvre, then flanked by the Tuileries Palace, surrounded by a hodgepodge of medieval housing, and forming the western boundary of developed Paris, with nothing beyond but trees subjected to ever-decreasing levels of manicure, and then waves of green fields. Montmartre is still nothing more than a village, its windmills still real and none rouge. The massive, unforgiving Bastille dominates its neighbourhood. Individual boats are depicted on a river teeming with activity. And there’s a reminder that Haussmann was not the only man who ever dreamed of reshaping Paris – already Henry IV’s Place Royale and Louis XIV’s Place Vendôme stand out from the muddle of streets that surround them – harbingers of the orderly, picture-perfect Paris of the future. Perhaps the reason the map feels slightly disconcerting is because of what’s not there. There’s so much detail and reality in the buildings, and yet slicing through them are clean, white roads. Not only do these streets seem in many places far wider, straighter and clearer than they almost certainly were in real life, there’s also something lifeless and sterile about them. The streets of Paris in the 1730s were many things, but clean was not one of them. Turgot clearly had a political purpose in commissioning the map, and aimed to show Paris as a modern, well-governed, well-maintained city under the control of the authorities. Even the very act of completing such an extraordinary work was testament to the resources available to the city’s elite. Consequently, the Pont Neuf is recorded in exacting architectural detail, but we get no sense of the raucous street life that thrived there. Eagle eyes can spot the Cimetière des Innocents near Les Halles in the centre of the city, but there’s nothing to suggest the supreme squalor of the place, the ground so full of corpses that they frequently burst out into the cellars of nearby buildings. And only when you look at the banks of the Seine, with the streaks of mud that intrude onto the clean white paper of the riverside, do you get a hint of the dirt and filth, the all-pervading brown that would have been the colour of Paris, and the stench that would have ruined that anachronistic balloon ride. The map is at once a tantalising and rare glimpse of a lost Paris at a precise moment in its history, and a fantasy – a Paris that never, quite, was. Incidentally, you can buy huge reproductions of this map in the UK here and in the US here. Oh how I lust after these! And if big, zoomable, historical maps are your bag, you might just explode with happiness if you visit the BIG Map Blog.

Categories
French History Historical Places History Lost Paris Paris Uncategorized

Lost Paris: A new series

Lost Paris. It’s one of those phrases that sounds so much more poetic in French: Paris Disparu. Listen, you can practically hear the sad wind whistling around those forgotten streets. البولو

Paris, it seems to me, has more than its fair share of lieux de mémoire – those places where history “crystallizes and secretes itself”, where it seeps into the very fabric of the world and it seems that all you’d have to do is pull up the right paving stones and you’d find it glitteringly waiting there for you. But if the Paris of today is defined and animated by visible badges and scars of history, it’s equally shaped by places that no longer exist, that have been wiped off the map, or had the life scrubbed out of them, or where people have simply forgotten the long and – this being Paris – frequently macabre stories that lurk in the shadows of the City of Light.

So today I begin a new series, Lost Paris, in which I’ll try to uncover some of these forgotten places, stroll around in them for a while and imagine what it might have been like to see them. Get on board the gaudy double-decker, time travelling history bus, and some of the sights we’ll be taking in over the next few weeks include… دانى الفيش

Do join me. You may want to bring a nose peg and a sturdy pair of Wellington boots… اللاعب جريزمان

Categories
18th Century Historical Places History Paris

Echoes of the Past – Song in the History of Paris

The Historical Society blog has published a very interesting interview with Robert Darnton about his new book, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. He talks about how popular song became the means by which 18th-century Parisians – starved of all but heavily censored printed news sources – shared news, rumour and gossip. Popular tunes would be married to topical lyrics and sung on street corners. Darnton claims these songs could be highly influential – one particularly malicious ditty about Louis XV’s mistress Madame Pompadour even causing a government crisis in 1749, and precipitating a very serious and, luckily for us, revealing police investigation.

I begin the book with a sort of detective story because the head of the Parisian police received an order from the top person in the government: Find me the author of the song that begins with, and they just had the first line: “Monstre dont la noire furie” (Monster whose black fury). That’s all they knew. The monster was Louis XV. They had to somehow find the author to this song. So they had spies in cafes and they fanned out and eventually one of the spies actually found a student who had recited this song/poem and he is arrested through a kind of ambush. It’s very amusing to see how they staged the arrest, because they didn’t want the word to spread that they were cracking down. They wanted to find accomplices, other people who were connected. So his name was François Bonis. He was interrogated in the Bastille. He said where he got the song. That person was arrested; so A got it from B, B got it from C, C got it from D, then D says “yup, I got it from E,” but meanwhile I got three other songs or poems from X, Y, and Z. And they’re all arrested. And they got poems and songs from other people so soon the police were trailing six poems and songs through overall networks of diffusion in Paris. And you can map the way the songs work into Parisian society with tremendous precision. So it’s possible, thanks to this police force, to actually do a very serious sociological study of oral diffusion.

Marvellously, it’s possible to piece together not only the lyrics of these songs, but also the tunes, and good old Darnton has done just that – making them available to listen to (sung by Parisian Cabaret chanteuse Hélène Delavault) at this web site. Listening to them is a little like holding a shell to your ear and hearing the sea – a magical opportunity to recover a lost dimension of history, and food for the imagination of anyone who’s ever wondered what it would actually have felt like to be in Paris in those heady days.

Which reminds me, song also has much interesting light to shed on the revolution, and there’s an excellent resource dedicated to French revolutionary song here. Most intriguing has to be Ça Ira, one of the most popular songs of the period, which marries steely lyrics about hanging aristocrats from lampposts to a jaunty, upbeat jig of a tune. Listening to it, you have the eerie yet electrifying sensation that you’ve just plugged your brain directly into the mentality of the period.