The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [7]
The wide boulevards and squares with resplendent monuments designed by Haussmann are much admired today, but at the time were regarded by many as the destruction of Paris. Haussmann himself was nicknamed “the great destroyer.” Paris had been a medieval city of narrow, winding streets, a teeming maze. Within these crowded and nearly unnavigable neighborhoods lived the Parisian masses that had risen up against Napoleon III's despotic rule on several bloody occasions.
It is not by chance that the layout of today's Paris bespeaks power and militarism. To many at the time, the emperor was simply bulldozing neighborhoods and building streets through them in which troops could quickly be deployed. A wide boulevard, later known as the boulevard Saint-Michel after a statue that was erected in a central square, cut a wide swath through the Latin Quarter. The same reshaping took place on the right bank. Poor people were evicted, neighborhoods were leveled, boulevards and monuments were built.
By the time Zola returned to Paris, the area around Les Halles was unrecognizable to him just as it is to Florent in the opening of The Belly of Paris. Paris streets were renamed after men of power, and only a few names remain today, mostly in the former Les Halles neighborhood—rue de la Ferronerie (Foundry), pas du Mule (Mule Path)—to remind Parisians not only of the old Paris names but of what the old Paris was. The gentrification and destruction of working-class neighborhoods is a theme that runs through The Belly of Paris and many other Zola novels. In Au Bonheur des dames, published ten years later, in 1883, a department store opens and an entire neighborhood of shops is put out of business. It is a process that has, sadly, continued in Paris, but The Belly of Paris is set at the dramatic beginning of this process.
Zola writes about longing for the little remaining of old Paris, “les belles rues d'autrefois” the beautiful old-fashioned streets, and as an example he cites rue de la Ferronerie. I remember feeling the same way a hundred years later, after they tore down Les Halles and it was just a hole in the ground and some of these same streets, including rue de la Ferronerie, were all that was left of the old neighborhood. It is all gone now, of course.
Not only public works but also poverty expanded in the Paris of Napoleon III. Inflation dramatically reduced the spending power of the average Parisian. Many of Paris's 1.7 million people were near starvation. The average worker spent between a third and two thirds of his income on bread. At the same time conspicuous displays of gluttony were made fashionable for the ruling class, encouraged by the emperor. Peace was maintained by police repression. As many as 35,000 Parisians were arrested for vagrancy in a single year.
In 1866, things grew even worse when Haussmann was caught skimming funds from his enormous public works budget and fired. The work stopped, and perhaps as many as 100,000 workers who had been rebuilding the city were thrown out of work.
While much of the city starved, the new boulevards were packed with restaurants and cafés offering gaudy displays of gourmandism. This was especially true in 1867, when Napoleon hosted a universal exposition and threw almost daily galas for visiting dignitaries.
In 1858, when Zola as a young man returned to the Paris of his birth, the final touches were being put on the first six pavilions of the newly redesigned Les Halles Centrales, the central market. The market had already been there for seven hundred years. An irony for Zola, whose novel is so much about the connection between Les Halles and fat people, the market was started in the twelfth century under Louis VI, who was known as Louis the Fat.
Napoleon I had planned