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| The Halte de Courbevoie-Sport has not been used since 1951, but the platforms still exist behind this walled up access point. |
The golden age lasted for barely 15 years, either side of the Second World War. The cynodrome opened in 1936, branding itself as the 'most modern and most beautiful track in the world', with races organised on up to five evenings a week. Although the racing attracted members of the high-society, it was actually probably more popular with those struggling in the difficult years of the pre-war period, for whom it offered cheap entertainment and the chance for uncontrolled gambling.
As is the case with dog tracks the world over, it also attracted some interesting characters. Andre Obrecht, the last executioner in France, worked as a bookmaker at this track during a wartime pause in his activities, before then going on to launch an ice-cream company. As war ended, he quickly returned to his previous job, becoming the country's chief executioner!
The cynodrome closed in 1951 after accumulating large debts, but it continued as a venue for other sporting events. The interiors were used as meeting rooms for local associations, but they never again attracted the fashionable to Courbevoie. More modern sporting facilities have now been built on the opposite side, and the venue continues as a home to rugby and athletics.
Note: although the Olympic rings are visible on the facade and can also be seen on gates to the rear of the facility, the stadium never hosted any Olympic events. The choice of this element in the design seems to come from the fact that the town of Courbevoie hosted the rowing event at the 1900 Olympics on a stretch of the Seine a few hundred metres from this venue.
Note 2: the local authorities originally planned to keep the art deco inspired facade, partly because they believed it was a listed building. However, after finding out that this wasn't the case, and after estimating the costs this preservation would entail, they eventually decided on complete demolition. In an interview with the Le Parisien newspaper though, the builder, GTM (Vinci group) promised to "récupérer des éléments du fronton, notamment les anneaux olympiques" (keep some of the elements of the facade, notably the Olympic rings). Where these will actually end up though is anyone's guess.
Between numbers 1 and 3 of the Rue Chapon in the 3rd arrondissement stands a door numbered 1 Bis. It looks much like any other door in the street, but there is one major difference - behind this door there is only a wall.
The door and associated decoration is in fact a creation by artists Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin called Les spécialistes, and was originally placed on this wall early one Saturday morning in 2006. As no permission was asked for and none granted, the artists were surprised not only that it was still in place three years later, but also that the city authorities regularly kept it clean.
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| The artists gave the address a professional plaque using their own initials. The door even had its own buzzer, but this no longer seems to be working. |
Three more years have passed and it is still firmly fixed to the wall. It looks solid and reasonably clean, and appears perfectly at home here. The artists had chosen their spot carefully and designed the door and wall following typical architectural styles of the area, but it is nevertheless a surprise to find an unauthorised creation that has lasted for so long in a world of fussy officialdom.
The door faces out towards the Rue du Temple, a historic passage into the city which is dominated today by Chinese wholesalers. People have learned to pay little attention to their surroundings in this district, but who would ask questions anyway about such a non-descript door and a plaque that seems to advertise yet another anonymous company?
The address may not be listed in any directory, or marked on a map, but it is an address that has found a place in the city today. The artists intended it to be a temporary installation, a representation of all the banal - yet potentially mysterious - doors and gateways that exist in our cities, but through its very inconspicuousness it has developed a strange life of its own.
In the 92nd division of the Père Lachaise cemetery lies the tomb of Victor Noir, one of its most well-known curiosities. The bronze sculpture, laying flat in position of death, fascinates and amuses visitors, some of whom even believe it has certain special powers (more of which later). Victor Noir though did not arrive here until 20 years after his death. Why did this very ordinary man become such a cause célèbre, and what happened between the moment of his death and his arrival at Père Lachaise?
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Victor Noir, either seated
or very short |
Victor Noir, the nom de plume of Yvan Salmon, was born in 1848 in the Vosges region of France. He trained first as a watchmaker then a florist, but after his brother Louis found success in Paris he decided to follow him to the capital. He became a journalist, and worked on several papers including a new title, ‘La Marseillaise’. It was whilst on a mission for this paper that tragedy would strike.
Both Henri Rochefort, the newspaper's owner, and Pascal Grousset, its editor, had entered into conflict with Prince Pierre Bonaparte, the nephew of the Emporer Napoleon III. Grousset was so incensed by the altercation that he sent two of his employees, Noir and Ulric de Fonvielle, to the home of Bonaparte to deliver a challenge to a duel. Bonaparte, himself something of a wild and hot-headed man, took umbrage to this challenge, and in the scuffle that broke out, shot and killed Victor Noir.
It was as his life ended that the cult of Victor Noir began. The reign of Emporer Napoleon III, who interestingly had been elected as the country’s first President in the year of Noir’s birth, was already in danger of collapse, but the murder of a journalist by a member of his family was exactly the kind of event his opponents were looking to exploit. News of Victor Noir’s death travelled fast, and on the day of the funeral, perhaps as many as 200,000 people had gathered around Noir’s home in Neuilly.
The plan had been to bury Noir in the small local cemetery, but the people demanded that he be taken on a triumphant procession through Paris and laid to rest at the city's Père Lachaise cemetery. Just as the scene threatened to get out of control, Victor Noir's brother Louis appeared and pleaded with the crowd, telling them that it was the wish of the family to bury him in Neuilly. The crowd eventually parted and let the coffin be taken to the cemetery for burial.
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| The Neuilly cemetery on the day of the funeral, and (quite possibly) the same scene today. |
The Prince Pierre Bonaparte was arrested and imprisoned in the Concièrgerie - with the assent of his exasperated uncle - but was later freed after the court decided that he had been provoked and had accidently killed Noir during the scuffle. Although Victor Noir's death had lead to protests and demonstrations across the city, as well as a whole series of articles in the press attacking Napoleon III's regime, the empire survived - until later on that year when the Prussians invaded France.
Many of those who had been involved in the protests following the death of Victor Noir, including Louise Michel and Jules Dalou, took part in the 1871 Commune in Paris, and were forced into exile after it was violently put down. Revolutionary activities, to which the name of Victor Noir was now indelibly linked, were no longer in evidence, and the young journalist was able to lay undisturbed in Neuilly for the next twenty years as the Third Republic entered a period of relative tranquility.
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| Victor Noir may have been removed from the cemetery in Neuilly, but he lives on in the name of the street that surrounds it. |
As the exiles slowly returned to Paris, the name of Victor Noir began to circulate again. Was it not now time to give him the monument he deserved? A public subscription was launched to raise the necessary funds, and one of those present at his funeral, Jules Dalou, was given the job of creating the sculpture in bronze. He chose a realistic model of his moment of death (taken from press sketches made at the time), his hat dropped at his feet. The remains of Victor Noir were then transferred to Père Lachaise in 1891, and his tomb became a shrine to revolutionaries - and much later, to another kind of public.
When Victor Noir was moved from Neuilly, not all of him made it to Père Lachaise. As the remains were being removed from his original resting place, his brother Louis asked to be left alone for a moment alongside the coffin. A witness declared later that he'd stumbled across the scene and found Louis removing his brother's skull. He said nothing to anyone else at the time, and Louis apparently kept the skull in a glass case in his home, talking to it regularly! After Louis died, the skull was eventually taken to his tomb in Père Lachaise where it joined the rest of his body.
Looking at the sculpture today, we see a rather heroic, romantic figure, handsome and svelte, but in reality, Victor Noir had been an unexceptional young man. He was a rather overweight and plodding character who had been due to marry his 16 year old fiancée when he died. He had not been a revolutionary in action or through his writing, but just an individual who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and confronted by the wrong person in the wrong mood.
It is the image of a man who became a revolutionary symbol despite himself. What is even more unlikely though is his current status - as a fertility symbol. He was someone who was quite possibly still a virgin when he died, but this reputation comes from two elements. For some reason, Dalou chose to emphasise a certain part of his anatomy, but nobody seemed to notice this until the 1970s, when certain tour guides at the cemetery invented the fertility myth.
Since that moment, women looking to fall pregnant visit the tomb and rub themselves against the sculpture, and some parts are very clearly 'polished' (nose, mouth and chin, the tips of his boots - and of course his genitals!). He also regularly receives flowers, as can be seen in the photo at the top of the page, as well as messages in his hat.
His death may not have lead to the downfall of an empire, but who can say that it has not indirectly lead to the birth of a few babies in the city?
It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, but one could also say that cities abhor a blank wall. Rather than leave walls for what they are, such spaces are often filled with a vast trompe l'oeil which transforms them instead into something they seem to be. I am not a fan of these creations, which impressive though they may be tend to veer towards the twee, but I have discovered that they can give interesting results when over time they are absorbed into the fabric of the building.
In the 16th arrondissement, near the Marché de Passy, what must once have been an attempt to recreate the facade of a typical Haussmannian building has instead become something that looks like a Roman ruin. What was supposed to be a vision of life in a quiet square has instead become a representation of death. As the picture has faded, crumbled and cracked, it has come to look like a scene uncovered at an archeological dig, and is today surely far more atmospheric than when the paint was fresh.
Sitting alongside the decaying buildings of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, this rotting creation seems completely at home. Added originally to bring a little colour to the Rue Buffon, it has instead taken on the predominating shades of rust and grime in the vicinity, making it look as old as the buildings themselves.
Inside the museum we can see the skeletons of long-dead creatures, but this picture too now looks like the fossil of some primitive life form. It is as if someone has sliced through the building and revealed traces of an ancient petrified forest.
Soon somebody will probably decide that these creations need to be cleaned up, to bring a more vibrant and colourful aspect to the respective quarters. This rebirth though would in fact be a death, as it would remove the organic attachment they have developed to the building on which they have been grafted.
Looking at this accidental art, I can't help wondering if it would be possible - in a similar manner to the current mode for vertical gardens - for architects to commission works of art that would develop and age with a building. It would certainly be more interesting than relying on the artifice of the trompe l'oeil.
||PART OF A TWIN FEATURE PUBLISHED WITH INVISIBLE BORDEAUX||
As Invisible Bordeaux has already told us, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney remembers his 30-month stint in France as a Mormon missionary in the 1960s as being marked by buckets for toilets and hoses for showers. For the period spent in Paris though, in a neo-classical house in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, it is unlikely that there was such hardship.
His final months in France were spent with the country's Mission President at 3 Rue de Lota, in a home that fellow mission volunteers described as being a palace with servants. Today the opulence of the property is still evident (despite the fact that it is currently unused), but coming after a tour of some smaller cities in the west of France, where he lived in more rudimentery accommodation, it is surprising that the house did not make more of a lasting impression in Mitt Romney's memories of his mission abroad.
As Romney has not spoken of his time at this house, it is not clear what he knew about the property. Did he know for example that it had a link to the United States?
The house was built at the very end of the 19th century for Douglas Fitch, the heir of a wealthy American shipping family that had emigrated to France and settled near Marseille. Fitch had recently inherited the family chateau (the Chateau de Pradines) on the death of his father, and although although he didn't sell that property, he did almost immediately marry a comtesse named Marie-Thérèse Gouttenoire de Toury, and set about moving to Paris.
The scale and decoration of the property they built show that they clearly had vast sums of money to spend (a further sign of the wealth of the Fitch family is the fact that the young Douglas had even had his portrait painted by Renoir). As a pied de terre in Paris, it is certainly impressive, with its largely classical forms supplemented by several more modern touches.
For the mormons who made it their home 50 years later, several features particularly stood out. There was the magnificent cast iron staircase and the vast rooms, but above all, there was the huge stained glass window on the facade. This window provided titilation for some of these rather repressed young men, who remember it featuring a lady with bare breasts. The creation features four women representing the four seasons, but seen from the outside, it seems that summer is only in fact revealing barely a single breast. This was probably excitement enough though for the group of mormons living beneath it!
Douglas Fitch lived until 1951, but it is not clear whether he lived in this house until that date. His Renoir portrait is listed as being housed in the Chateau de Pradines until the year of his death, so it is likely that the various properties owned by Fitch were sold at this point. The mormon community purchased the Paris property in 1952, and retained ownership until the 1970s, when it became the embassy of the United Arab Emirates. Were they too attracted by the nubile young ladies in the window?
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| Top: an addition to the facade when it became an embassy. The golden leaves frame three letters; EAU, the Émirats arabes unis. Bottom: the embassy has now moved to a new address, and the building is awaiting a new occupant. |
The house had made a lasting mark on many of the mormons who spent some time there, but what Romney made of it - as well as the time he spent in Paris - remains a mystery. He arrived just as the 'mai 68' movement was winding down, possibly just after his release from hospital in Bordeaux, but the city would still have been simmering as summer arrived. Walking the city's streets dressed smartly in shirt, tie and name tag (the default mormon missionary uniform), he must have made a curious contrast to the protesting students.
Mormons on mission cannot smoke, drink or date, which must make Paris a cruel place of constant temptation. Trying to recruit new members to the mormon church in France is surely a thankless task at the best of times, but as the city revolted, proclaiming amongst other things that 'Dieu est mort', it must have been a hopeless period for Mitt Romney.
What we do know is that the war in Vietnam was often a bone of contention between Romney and the French students. Romney would defend his country's position, seemingly not seeing the irony in the fact that his time in France was what was keeping him out of the military draft.
As Paris veered back towards normality, Romney passed his final months in the country living very much out of the way in what remains a quiet district of diplomats and embassies. The passage through Paris for many young Americans leaves a lasting impression for the rest of their lives, but, Romney, without the opportunity to indulge in women, cigarettes and alcohol, was seemingly glad to go back to the United States.
Read about the first part of Romney's stay in France on the Invisible Bordeaux blog.
Outside any consideration of the artistic merits of street art, what it does always give you is the pulse of a city. Faces may be closed and tongues tied, but the creations on the walls will always tell you the sentiments of its inhabitants.
Reading the walls of Paris today, you can't help feeling a vague sense of menace. It does not look or feel like a city held in the clenches of a financial crisis, but this is election year, and these are strange times in the city.
Near the Place du Colonel Fabien, where the French Communist party has its headquarters, the mysterious Zoo Project has temporarily moved away from his beasts and painted human forms. The slogan alongside these cyborgs brings a touch of nonsense to the scene - it's not always man exploiting man. Sometimes it's the opposite - but the message here is clear enough. No-one is innocent, everyone is to blame.
Beneath, a parasite has leeched onto the creation. One of the candidates at this year's presidential elections, from the far-left Lutte Ouvrière party, has attached a message of her own - workers should not pay for capitalism's crisis. Near to the Place de la République, another creation - or is it just a paint bomb - sends deep red fingers down towards a poster from the Front de Gauche urging voters to 'prendre le pouvoir' (seize power). The two seem to go perfectly together, but which came first? Are politicians now deliberately using street art to help get messages across?
Far noisier is the latest creation by Mère Moustache. A hommage to one of the most famous moustaches in recent history, that of Salvador Dali, it also brings the macabre to the city walls. The skeletal figure has dropped a bouquet of roses to the ground, but as they fall the petals are transformed, slowly forming a pool of blood at street level.
The ghoulish crown prince of surrealism seems to be smiling, so we can hope this is all just a joke. Menace may be in the air, but the majority of Parisians still see a future made of red roses rather than blood.
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