Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [149]
Until the Sun King sent out his demolition crews, the successive walls of Paris had served for centuries to keep out danger, whether enemy troops or—as in the case of the Hôpital Saint-Louis, built just outside city walls—the plague. (Now a greatly expanded full-time hospital, Hôpital Saint-Louis still retains its seventeenth-century core, at 2 place du Docteur-Alfred-Fournier, in the 10th.)
But since Philip’s time, the walls of Paris had also served the king in quite another capacity—that of foiling smugglers intent on evading the traditionally steep royal tariffs on incoming goods. The disappearance of Louis XIII’s wall left the royal tax collectors in the lurch, giving resourceful Parisians a major assist in bypassing the tollgates.
The royal solution was simple and dramatic: a new wall around Paris, this time one whose sole purpose was to buttress the royal tax collectors, or tax farmers, called the fermiers généraux. This wall, known as the Fermiers Généraux wall, went up in a hurry in the 1780s, ringing Paris with more than fifty tollhouses linked by a wall ten feet high and more than fifteen miles in circumference. Much of Paris’s population was devastated by this turn of events, which sent prices soaring.
Oddly, those responsible for the wall seemed to think that Parisians would find their new constraint more acceptable—even a matter of pride—if it appeared to be a magnificent work of art, a kind of “garland” around Paris. They could not have been more mistaken. Instead, the very grandness of the numerous neoclassical tollhouses designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, one of the foremost architects of his day, stirred up an extraordinary degree of anger and resentment. Even aficionados of neoclassical architecture, such as Thomas Jefferson (who served as American minister to France during the 1780s), heartily despised them. Not surprisingly, the people of Paris destroyed many of these hated “temples of commerce” during the opening clashes of the Revolution.
Only four of these controversial tollhouses have survived. On the Left Bank, twin buildings—the remains of the old tollgate the Barrière d’Enfer—still stand at Place Denfert-Rochereau (14th), where one now serves as an entrance to the Catacombs. On the Right Bank, a small rotunda (capped by a nineteenth-century dome) graces the northern entrance to Parc Monceau (8th), marking what once was the Monceau toll barrier. Far to the east, in the Place de la Nation (11th and 12th), two columns dramatically mark the old Barrière du Trône tollgate. (The statues that top these columns, added later, are of Philip Augustus and Saint-Louis.) Twin buildings flanking these columns once served as offices and lodgings.
Most striking by far is the Rotonde de la Villette (19th), at the foot of the Bassin de la Villette by Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad. The largest of the surviving tollhouses and the centerpiece of the misjudged “garland” that Ledoux cast around Paris, this massive rotunda (based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda) guarded a convergence of northern routes into Paris, including the old Roman road to the sea. A strange relic of the ancien régime in this working-class neighborhood, the rotunda—set in a pleasant park—survives the indignities of the nearby Métro (which here streams past aboveground), just as it somehow managed to survive the revolutionary mobs two centuries ago.
The Fermiers Généraux wall itself managed to survive for many years, owing to the fact that Napoléon Bonaparte and subsequent regimes found both it—and the income it collected—useful. But in 1860 the government at last took it down, leaving only the boulevards that had run beside it and, eventually, the No. 2 and No. 6 Métro lines to mark its course.
By this time Paris had continued its surge outward into areas such as Passy, Montmartre, and Belleville. Reflecting this new ring of growth, the government had already enclosed Paris within yet a larger and more bristling wall. Named after France’s then premier Adolphe Thiers, the Thiers fortifications (built from 1841 to 1845) eventually