Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [146]
—ELIZABETH BARD, Lunch in Paris
I had never really wanted a photograph of a picture before I saw Millet’s Man with the Hoe. I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I had read Eugénie Grandet of Balzac, and I did have some feelings about what French country was like but The Man with the Hoe made it different, it made it ground not country, and France has been that to me ever since.
—GERTRUDE STEIN, Paris France
The Walls of Paris
MARY MCAULIFFE
AS READERS OF my previous books may recall, I love stone walls. I don’t remember when I became consciously aware that I loved stone walls, but I know I have admired them for a long time. Actually, I love stone in general—whether smooth or rough; whether a building, walkway, tower, stairway, archway, bridge, aqueduct, whatever.
Paris is not necessarily a city that immediately comes to mind when thinking about walls, but in fact the city has had several walls built around it—to keep invaders out, to hold the plague at bay, and to foil tax evaders. I’m especially fascinated by the fifty-five barrières (tollhouses) conceived in 1784 by the fermiers généraux, or independent contractors who collected taxes for the king. The barrières were designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and according to an article by Stephen Costello that appeared in the New York Times (June 11, 1995), were meant to be rather modest customs offices. Ledoux, however, “imagined a monumental system of gateways worthy of ancient Babylon or Memphis. Audaciously, he called these barrières Les Propylées de Paris, from Propylaea, the monumental entrance at the west end of the Acropolis in Athens.” Ledoux apparently constructed more buildings than any other architect of his time (though most of his work has since been destroyed) and the barrières “would be his most extensive and costly.”
Readers especially interested in Ledoux may want to know about the Saline Royale—royal salt works—located about three hours from Paris in Arc-et-Senans, in the Franche-Comté region. The complex was built in a unique semicircle per Ledoux’s plans, and it became a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1963. All of Ledoux’s models for the Paris barrières are displayed in a museum dedicated to him there, the Institut Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.
MARY MCAULIFFE was a regular contributor for more than a decade to Paris Notes and is the author of Paris Discovered: Explorations in the City of Light (Princeton Book Company, 2006), where this piece, adapted from a Paris Notes article, originally appeared. She holds a PhD in history and is working on a book about the dawn of the Belle Époque in Paris, including Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and their friends.
IT MAY SEEM ODD, but not all that many years ago, Paris did indeed have walls—real, working walls, meant to keep out an enemy. And although it may seem strange to think of the City of Light enveloped by bristling defenses, this has been exactly the case for much of its long history.
In fact, Paris has had many walls, each encircling the city like so many rings on a tree. Just as rings tell the story of a tree’s growth, these walls tell the story of a city’s growth. For Paris’s walls, or series of walls, have given the city its distinctive shape—not only the outwardly spiraling outline of its arrondissements, but the arch of its Grands Boulevards, the curvature of its No. 2 and No. 6 Métro lines (circling Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Nation), and the familiar path of its beltway, the Périphérique.
The earliest of this long string of fortifications dates from almost two millennia ago, the third century AD, when the Romans forged a stout set of defenses to protect Gallo-Roman Paris (Lutetia) from barbarian attacks. Erecting sturdy walls around the Île de la Cité as well as their nearby forum, the Romans turned the entire town into a military outpost.
Nothing remains aboveground of the forum or its defensive