THE Belly of Paris, Emile Zola called Les Halles. Though, say Parisians glumly, these days it seems to have become its backside. It stinks. Quite literally. Piss, of course, liberally sluiced here, there and everywhere, plus the sweet strains of weed.
No one knows exactly when Les Halles began its inexorable slide south from belly to backside, or why. It’s in the right place, Paris’s crossroads, just west of the Pompidou, just north of the Louvre. It has the right populist mix, four floors of shops, cinemas, galleries, sports centres, submerged under a huge park, a boon in this densest of cities. And it opened with such high hopes, as these things always do. “The belly of Paris discovers its heart ,” ran the front page of France Soir on September 5, 1979. The Pompidou Centre had opened a few blocks away to controversy but great acclaim, the first of the new age of grands projets. Les Halles, the debut of the city’s new mayor, Jacques Chirac, would surely follow in its footsteps.
But slide inexorably south it did. Today Les Halles teems with befuddled tourists, hunting for Amélie but discovering Alphaville, or the bridge and tunnel crowd, here to pick up budget buys in a B-list shopping mall.
No rue de Rivoli, this, but an airless, claustrophobic, labyrinthine netherworld that brings even shopaholics out in a cold sweat. Come up for air, though, and you surface amid a clutter of cheap mirror-glassed mushrooms, “les parapluies”, whose “space age” looks don’t even have the decency to look ironically retro. By night this is the only part of central Paris you hurry through. Fast. Unless you’re here to pick up weed or coke from the lurking scoundrels.
And yet nearly a million Parisians must pass through Les Halles every day, like some mass civic punishment. Les Halles is less Paris’s stomach, these days — or even backside — as its heart. Slap bang in the centre of the city, scored by three RER lines and five Metros, Les Halles is the circulatory hub of a ten-million-strong metropolis. And it’s an embarrassment.
Last week, the popular Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, chose a new heart/belly/backside for Paris. He could have picked France’s home-grown superstar, Jean Nouvel, whose “rus in urbe” proposal threw hanging gardens 90ft (27m) high. Or that enfant terrible du jour, Rem Koolhaas, whose “canyon” and multicoloured glass “emergences” plunged their roots into the remodelled mall below. Or the Netherlands’ latest Wunderkind, Winy Maas, who imagined Les Halles as a multicoloured patchwork of roof, gardens and grand place, like a “dancefloor”.
He could have picked all manner of architectural pyrotechnics. Instead, he chose the quiet guy nobody’s heard of. David Mangin, professor at L’École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and head of the architecture firm SEURA, designed the dullest masterplan of the four shortlisted entries: the shopping mall hell is lightened, the ground-level gardens simplified with what Paris does best, a grand boulevard, and the mirror-glassed parapluies replaced by a simple, albeit vast, glass and copper pavilion an understated 9m (30ft) high. And that’s it. Plus plenty of nice green space, community facilities and a playground for the kids. What, no grand projet? Nope, and that’s precisely the point.
As Colin Jones explains in his new book, Paris: Biography of a City, Paris is a city entirely composed of grands projets, used by successive rulers, whether kings, emperors or presidents, to cast the capital in their own image of France and to write their own epitaphs. True it brought us the quintessential Enlightenment city. But dip below its refined surface and Paris’s true and bloody history is exposed.
Those elegant grands boulevards? Built as early shopping malls by Baron Haussmann on top of working-class districts shunted to Belleville and made wide enough for the military should the masses rebel. Sacré Coeur? Built where rebelling communards were shot by firing squads, to atone for the “sins” of the 1871 Commune. Even President Mitterrand’s lauded grands projets were but attempts by the state to appease the spirit of 1968. De Gaulle may have given no quarter to the demands of the rioters. Instead, the French state began two decades of courting the public, using architecture as PR, reshaping Paris just as Haussmann had, as a modern day consumerist playground, only with that faintly socialist gloss heralded by the people’s palace, the Pompidou. Those decades gave the city unrivalled schools, health centres, trains that ran on time and monuments like Les Halles, regarded enviably from across the channel by British architects locked in battle with their own wannabe Louis XIV, the Prince of Wales.
Twenty years on, though, the grands projets don’t look so grand. True, the Louvre Pyramid and Pompidou still pack them in, and Jean Nouvel’s masterly double act, the Fondation Cartier and the Institut du Monde Arabe, remain marvellous. The rest, though? Mon dieu.
Bombastic boxes all. The dreary Grande Arche de la Défense hasn’t tempted many to La Défense. The Bibliothèque Nationale? A joke from beginning to end. Worst of the lot, the Bastille Opera House, whose ugly face, an insult to Garnier’s original, has been flaking tiles and imperilling pedestrians below since the day it opened. It is due for a multimillion-euro refurbishment barely a decade into its life. And then there’s Les Halles.
Delanoë’s choice is highly symbolic. Announcing the architectural competition in 2002, he admitted he was stepping into “very sensitive territory” — “I have no desire to impose more trauma on the neighbourhood.”
The site has plenty of that Parisian hidden history. Les Halles has been a “people’s neighbourhood” since the market first set up there in the 12th century. When Napoleon planned his own grand projet there, he was sure to preface it with a caveat: “I want to turn Les Halles into the Louvre of the people.” In 1853 the first of ten magnificent market halls was inaugurated by Napoleon III. Emile Zola likened “ le ventre de Paris” to “some ancient forest”, “a teeming flowering vegetation of luxuriant metalwork”, home to the “real” city beyond the boulevards.
