Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [158]
Sous les pavés, la plage.
Under the paving stones lies a beach.
—Slogan of Paris student rioters in 1968
WHAT CITY’S STREETS are paved with dreams and peacock-tail mosaics—thousands of them? No prize if you guessed. The classic Paris cobble is an eight- or tencentimeter granite cube, a pavé mosaïque, laid down in patterns road builders call queues de paön. Many of the capital’s 5,993 streets—totaling over one thousand miles—are cobbled, and cover a quarter of Paris’s surface area. That translates to millions of cobbles, often unseen under the asphalt, and always unsung.
Cobblestones are as much a part of Paris’s identity as the Eiffel Tower. Read a classic from Anatole France to Émile Zola, find a riot or revolution, and cobbles will star in the show. The pavements rose in righteous wrath in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870–71, and again in 1944, when the Nazis decamped. There’s nothing better than cobbles for barricade building or shot-putting. Aux barricades, camarades! And there lies the irony. Cobbles did not disappear when Paris streets were widened, paved, and modernized. Modernization—“Haussmannization”—aimed to rid Paris of medieval alleys, where rioters could ambush troops. The cobbles merely went underground—under the asphalt.
Sound like ancient history? Click forward to times recent enough for hoary fiftysomethings like me to remember. Behind the cobblestone barricades of 1968, rioters shouted not only Aux barricades but also Sous les pavés, la plage—under the paving stones lies a beach. The cryptic chant egged on students to tear up stones as their forebears had, but also hinted at a different world, a beach in the big city.
In reality that “beach” was the sandy layer the cobbles are embedded in—or were. Nowadays sand is mixed with mortar, and joints between cobbles are grouted. Rioters would be hard-pressed to pry them out. That’s telling of our times. So, too, is the current positive value attached to the humble cobblestone, at least for those with green credentials, meaning green politics or a swelling wallet full of greenbacks.
The sometimes idealistic Soixante-huitards of ’68 are as dead today as the barricade builders of rue Royale in 1848. Everyone but commuters, it seems, is embracing cobbles and their petrified relatives as heralds of low-carbon prosperity. Wherever the peacock’s tail is laid down anew or exposed by débitumation—the stripping of bitumen, meaning asphalt—real estate values soar. Neighborhoods are revolutionized not by rioters tearing up cobbles, but by cobble-prone developers, new-paradigm moguls, Greens, and bobos—Paris’s celebrated bohemian bourgeois.
“Cobbleification” is an integral part of pedestrianization and means that streets or neighborhoods are car-free or benefit from restricted traffic flow. In Paris, these areas go by the designations zone piétonnière, aire piétonne, quartier vert, and, most recently, Réseau Vert—a specific pedestrian-cyclist roadway network.
Like other attempts at social engineering through urban planning, Europe’s first and biggest pedestrian zone was created in the 1960s. The Strøget area turned historic Copenhagen into a giant mall, complete with fast-food joints, roughneck street fauna, men dressed as Vikings, and what boosters called “street entertainers”—musicians, performers, artists, jugglers, and fire-swallowers. They’ve become a permanent feature of pedestrian zones worldwide, and a powerful argument against building more of them.
Given the motor-mania of the sixties, Paris was slow to follow Denmark’s lead. The City of Light’s first—and still its largest—pedestrianized area was begun in the mid-1970s. It spread around the former wholesale markets at Les Halles, and the Centre Pompidou at Place