Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [41]
But the kings of France had not had done with walls. Goods entering Paris had long been taxed at the gates of the city, but the new boulevards proved too permeable to fraudsters. In 1784 the tax collectors, or fermiers généraux, obtained royal permission to build a ten-foot wall around the capital:
Pour augmenter son numéraire
Et raccourcir notre horizon,
La Ferme a jugé nécessaire
De mettre Paris en prison.
To fill their coffers
And lower our horizon,
The taxmen have judged it necessary
To imprison Paris.
grumbled the wordsmiths of the Pont Neuf, who quickly assessed the popular resistance in near-palindrome, quipping that the fourteen-mile “mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant” (the wall circling Paris renders Paris rebellious). Come the Revolution, no observer was startled when the forty-five strange and wonderful tax gates, designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, figured among the mob’s first targets.
The fermiers généraux’s wall was only a tax barrier. In 1814 Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King, was persuaded to build a twenty-five-mile fortification encircling the tax wall and encompassing twenty-four suburban villages. The annexation of these villages and their nearly twenty square miles in 1860 nearly doubled Paris’s size.
In the twentieth century the walls finally came tumbling down (to the wrecker’s ball), and the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne were incorporated into the city limits. Each successive wall had corseted the capital’s growth. Having occupied less than five acres two thousand years previously, Paris had grown to a city of more than forty square miles, without much altering her rotund figure. Traces of each expansion, like the rings of a tree, can be seen in the street plan—in spite of Baron Georges Haussmann’s radial thoroughfares. The nineteenth-century wall was demolished in the 1920s, but its circuit yielded the land for the boulevards extérieurs that speed (or fail to speed) traffic around Paris’s periphery.
Baudelaire bemoaned the fact that “the shape of a city / Changes faster, alas, than the heart of a mortal.” The historical maps of Paris chronicle those changes, reaching beyond language to recount their times; as a bonus they are often masterworks of the woodcut maker’s and engraver’s arts. Thus it is not surprising that those caught up in a passion for Paris are seduced by the siren charms of these historical maps, many of which have been reproduced and some of which can be purchased for reasonable sums.
The Archives Nationales, at 11 rue des Quatre-Fils, catalogs tens of thousands of maps, but the earliest recognized contemporary map of Paris is the Plan de Munster, which declares itself “The Portrait of the City.” Produced, probably partially from memory, by a Franciscan monk named Sébastien Munster, this rather crude woodcut shows the Paris of about 1530, when François I was busy bringing the Renaissance to France. Like most maps in that era, Munster’s map served as a kind of civic ego trip, enhancing the fame of the city and its monarch in both French and Latin.
A decade later an enormous tapestry incorporated a map of the late-medieval city in a style derived from illuminated manuscripts, with the place names inscribed on curious, beguiling banners. In the eighteenth century the tapestry, purchased by the city, was hung to adorn the façade of city hall on the Feast of Corpus Christi and was used to cushion the floor at a ball celebrating the advent of a dauphin in 1782. By 1787 it was in tatters. Fortunately the Plan de la Tapisserie had been copied, and engraving plates made. The latter are today part of the sumptuous collection of the Chalcographie, a unique department of the Louvre’s Cabinet des Dessins, where fine engravings restruck from the original plates are available at quite affordable prices.
About 1551 another woodcut map appeared, the Plan de Truschet et Hoyau. This was an ambitious work covering eight sheets and cataloging the city’s 287