Merry Christmas!

To me eyes, the nicest street decorations in Paris this year are on the Rue de Belleville around the Jourdain Metro station. This could have become a subject for a post in itself, about why there is this microcosm of bourgeois Paris in the middle of one of the most working class districts in the city, but that will surely be for another time! Here it is just for the pleasure of the image and to signal my absence for the next 10 days or so.

When I started this blog in September it was more for my own benefit, to give myself a channel to talk about my surroundings. At first I was throwing my observations to the wind and wondering where they would land. At that time I didn't realise that blogland is actually a community, with an army of invisible people sharing their perspectives on their immediate environments and offering mutual support. My greatest pleasure since starting this blog has been the nuggets of wisdom I've received following my posts, correcting me, offering encouragement and widening my knowledge on subjects. These are not platitudes or disguised requests for visits, but intelligent, informed comments from talented and interesting people. Thank you all for visiting, and I hope to see you all again in the new year!


A little light reading whilst I’m away:

• Why Invisible Paris?
• The first post
• The most commented post
• The least viewed post!
• A team effort!
• The most accidentally visited page from Google!

Who Owns the Night?

It's 5 o'clock and the night is already drawing her cloak around me, dimming the city into a twilight world. Despite the chill, it's still my favourite time of the day, when shops and bars are warm, welcoming shelters and rows of appartment windows offer glimpses into the previously invisible. Despite the setting of the sun, it's still a world of luminosity, of street lamps and Christmas lights. Later though, as the evening slides into night, the lights become harsh and intense and the city residents pull curtains or shutters across their intimity. It should be a time to dim lights and put the city to sleep but in the streets the candles are still burning strongly. At this time of the year when the nights are longer than the days, it may seem incongruous to ask the question, but is there anywhere in Paris that offers true darkness anymore? Paris remains the 'City of Light', but is it a city of too many lights today?

Walking through this city at night, an Auden poem pops into my head.

“Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell”

But where are the stars? Are they up there burning with a passion for us that we do not want to return? A group of French urban agitators known as the "Clan de Neon" think so. They believe that our way of returning that passion would be to simply switch off the city lights so that we’ll once again be able to see the stars burning for us. According to the manifesto on their website:

"Les néons engendrent (…) une double pollution, celle pour produire l’électricité mais aussi celle, lumineuse, qui nous empêche de voir les étoiles" (Neon lights have a double pollutive effect – they waste electricity, and through their luminosity, they prevent us from seeing the stars)

They do not deny the utility of certain lights, but simply believe that "trop de néons tuent le néon utile!" In other words, the advertising street signs and lit up shop fronts prevent us from seeing the hospital. They want Paris to remain the city of lights (arts and ideas), but want to prevent it from becoming another city of neon in the image of Las Vegas. To see how they and their followers go about doing this, watch the video below (who knew that it would be so simple?).


When street lights began to appear in cities around 1820 we can imagine that they were welcomed by the inhabitants, but in fact it seems that they brought fear. In times preceeding their introduction, the city was controlled by the provision of light. When the primitive lighting was extinguished, the inhabitants retired to the safety of their houses and beds, and when they were illuminated again in the early morning, the inhabitants knew it was time to get up for work. Very few people would venture out into a pitch-black city, but the introduction of street lights provided the luminosity required by many of the city’s unsavoury characters to prey on their victims. Today we may avoid dimly lit areas, but would we not be safer in a darkened city? Certain areas in the UK have begun trials, swithcing off lights at midnight in order to save on electricity bills and meet envronmental targets, and it seems to be provoking quite a debate!

Leave the city and wander out to the countryside and it's another world and a different space. A series of maps has been produced by an organisation known as Avex showing the major light pollution zones of Europs, but whilst Paris is a glowing hotspot, it remains true that much of France still offers us the chance to admire the stars. In these rural areas, you sometimes literally cannot see your hand in front of your face in the dead of night. When we look up at the thousands of tiny pinpricks in these pockets of blackness, we feel minimised by the sheer size of the sky and the weight of the stars and planets that surround us, and realise just how small and insignificant we are.

Come back to the city though, and the night sky seems to be an entity that exists only as patches of hazy orangeness in the gaps between buildings. Are there even some city dwellers who have never seen a star? When the path ahead of us is always lit and the sky is no longer something we use to navigate or be fearful of, do we get an inflated sense of our own importance? Do the people of the city need stars or are they perfectly content with their neon glow? I’ll leave the last words to Auden:

"Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark (orange glow!) sublime
Though this might take me a little time"

A Deer at the Door

Walking along the Rue St Maur with my head bowed down against the freezing sleet, I look up and suddenly find myself eye to eye with a deer. In this modern, concrete environment next to an Atac supermarket, the deer is of course not a real one, but the effect is as the artist would have wished. Who is the more surprised at this instant - me or the deer? The mysterious artist who wheatpasted this image up on the wall late at night, has captured the deer at the moment just before flight, when it freezes at the crack of my footstep before skipping off into the surrounding forest of buildings.

The surprise is one of juxtaposition. City inhabitants are just not used to encountering nature in their safe streets where wolves, snakes and bears would never dare to venture. We worry about dangers of our own creation, but the city has long since won the battle with the natural world. In Paris, this was not an involuntary, organic development, but a planned evolution to protect the city from ignorance.

There are still 66 Portes (gateways) that give access to the city, a legacy from the last time Paris expanded its boundaries in 1860. Today the city is protected largely by the Périphérique ring-road, but it's an impossible job to guard all entrances. Although the city has been twice invaded since this date, in 1870 and 1940, the city fortifications have been less about keeping out invading foreign armies and more about a menace closer to home - the Parisians' fellow countrymen.

Paris is a personification of cerebrality and reason. In the 19th century, the city was both the industrial powerhouse and the centre of learning and culture, whilst beyond the city walls lay a world dominated by agriculture. This natural environment came to represent the simple, unrefined peasents from the provinces, a people that was being drawn to the capital in larger and larger numbers. To protect the integrity of the city, nature had to be kept out, a manifestation of a larger power struggle between two states - the city of Paris and the rest of the country. A planned city for logical humans was created, and nature was beaten back through the doors.

With the city's famously leaky defences though, the occasional trespasser still makes it through the gates. I look again into the deer's eyes and see the question she's asking me. Is she still an intruder?

Wislin in the Wind

In the Rue Ballu near the Place de Clichy there is a combination of two things that I truly appreciate; an unusual brick house and a faint air of mystery. I have already written of Théodore Ballu, the architect after whom this street is named, but what has sparked my interest here is the large ‘W’ sculptured onto the facade at number 28. From watching James Bond films we are familiar with ‘Q’, but who was this mysterious ‘W’? What is the story behind this neo-gothic Flemish influenced pile?

With a little bit of time to waste, I set out on my detective mission. It is a simple task to discover what a property is used for today and who the current occupiers are, but a far more difficult task to discover the origins of the structure and its original purpose. There are some properties though on which clues can be found, and the façade at number 28 has a very generous scattering of these.

I decide first to establish who is currently using the building. A sign outside gives a name; ‘Le Studio’. Here I’m in luck as Le Studio is the only occupier of the building, and the organisation has a significant web presence. ‘Le Studio des Varietes’ (to give them their full name) are now using the house as a centre where artists can come to perfection their instrument playing skills or have voice coaching, or simply to meet other artists. It is also used as an audition space for musical shows and events. A section of the website even enables me to ‘visit’ the building, taking a tour through performance spaces, recording studios and rehearsal rooms. This unexpected bonus makes it easy for me to imagine how the building was originally layed out as a house.

This does not solve any of the original conundrums though - when was the house built and who was ‘W’? Once again, the first question has a simple answer. As is the case with many buildings throughout the city, the building was signed and dated by the architect. Here there is the name, although this has been rendered unreadable by the passage of time, and a date – 1891. Exceptionally, this date can be confirmed elsewhere on the building as there is a second feature which I have never seen on a building in the city before – huge figures spread across the top of the house displaying the construction date.

With a date, can we now discover who ‘W’ was? Thanks to this fantastic resource, I find that the building permit for the construction was issued to a Ch. Wislin, at that time living at 26 Avenue de Wagram, and an architect named G. (Gaston) Dézermaux. Can I be sure that this was intended to become Mr Wislin’s house and that he was the ‘W’? To confirm this, I check another source, “La Societe des Amis des Monuments Parisiens”, an organisation to which Wislin belonged and which kept regular records of its members. Early in 1891 he is listed at his Avenue Wagram address, but by the end of the year his address has become Rue Ballu.

Helpfully, this resource does not only list his address, but also his professions – painter and legal man! Indeed, it seems that if he is remembered at all today it is as an artist. He won an award at the Exposition Universelle de 1900 in Paris, and was linked to a larger ‘Montmartre’ school, which perhaps explains his move from the Avenue de Wagram to Rue Ballu. He was also someone who was never short of money, thanks to his father, Joseph, who was a renowned chemist and who built a fortune through astucious patenting of his pharmaceutical products.

Charles Wislin, was born in 1852 and was nearly 40 when he moved into this property, but his father died in 1893, two years after the property was constructed. Could the son have added the W at this date, perhaps as a reference to a family symbol used on his father’s products? It seems that one of the patented products was a reasonably well-known kind of paper known as ‘Wlinsi’, which was frequently advertised and which apparently had miracle healing properties. This is only pure speculation though! Wislin himself died in 1932, and it is not clear what happened to the property between then and today, as the only child I can find reference to lived in St Malo, whilst his grandson today lives in an adjacent street. Answers only lead to more questions, but such is the essence of life! I’m happy to have stumbled across this story, and conclude that if the man has left little trace in the world of art, he has left his trace on the face of the city.

A No Horse Town

Looking at the Paris streetscape today, with the incessant flow of beeping, screeching and belping traffic, it’s easy to imagine that the road layout was designed with cars in mind. However, whilst the Péripherique (peripheral ring road) and the Quais (distribution roads alongside the Seine) were post-war inventions to improve traffic flow, most of the city was designed with another form of transport in mind – the horse.

The streets of almost any city are aggressive and selfish zones today, with individuals enclosed in metal cocoons separating themselves from the other road users. Desperately nudging forwards, ever onwards, through orange lights and across pedestrian crossings, the car user is reluctant to share their road space with anybody. They silently yell at motorbikes, bicycles and roller-bladers, but what would their reaction be to the sight of a horse on the macadam alongside them? Despite what we may assume, such an occurrence is possible in Paris as no law exists which forbids the riding of a horse through the streets of the city.

It is very likely that anybody attempting to do so though would be stopped and escorted out of the city. It would be cruel to subject a horse to the traffic of Paris, and there is also the problem of dealing with the ‘pollution’ of this form of transport. A rider could be fined for failing to clean up after their animal! Today the only horses you are likely to see in Paris will almost certainly have a soldier or policeman perched up on top. Around 500 are still housed at the Garde Républicaine near the Bastille and over 1000 at the Ecole Militaire. Go a little further out and you may see them racing around the tracks of Longchamp or Vincennes too, but the simple working horse has long since disappeared from the cityscape. A century ago though the situation was entirely different. In 1900, it is estimated that there were 98,000 horses in the capital, over 50,000 people employed in related trades and 20,000 establishments involved in the provision of horse-drawn coaches and carriages.

It seems incredible that such industry should leave behind so few traces in a city which is itself little changed from this period. Look more closely though, beneath the renovations and conversions, and the surviving features begin to show themselves. Perhaps the most obvious detail are the arched doorways in many 18th and 19th century buildings – known as the Portes Cochères – which were designed to be large enough to let through a horse and carriage.

Through one of these portes, at 10 Avenue de Messine, stables have been converted into garages, but the metal rings where the horses were tied are still visible (picture at top). Here the motorcar has even stolen the horse’s bed!

At the Square d’Orleans, where George Sand and Frederic Chopin lived, a sign warning horse riders to 'Traverser au Pas' (cross the square walking!) – the 19th century equivilent of the drive with care message!

The victory of the motor engine over pure horsepower deleted many features from city life, some less expected than others. As the American composer Elliott Carter recently remarked in a BBC Radio 4 interview, Mozart, Beethoven and Heiden were deeply influenced by the sounds that were the backdrop to their daily existence. As he pointed out, "they were surrounded by the hooves of horses, the clac-clac-clac of horses. It's a whole world of sound that no longer exists at all for us". What are composers today influenced by? Carter continues, "the sounds that I hear are the sounds of airplanes and automobiles, mostly continuous sounds that change in one way or another as they progress, and this is what I've tried to do in my music". The rhythm of our lives today is the hum of the motor engine.

Perhaps more happily for the equine race, other changes in society have removed them from the Paris cityscape in another way. A generation ago horse butchers were commonplace throughout the city, but now an industry website lists only 15 such establishments in the capital. It is estimated that only 2% of the population today consume this type of meat despite apparent health arguments, and it is not something you would ever expect to see appear chalked up on a restaurant’s menu board in the city.

Will we ever see the return of this beast to the city? There are several action groups pressing for a return of the horse in the city, arguing that it is both ecologically sound and an additional attraction for tourists, but it is unlikely that they will achieve anything greater than carriage rides around the Eiffel Tower. Could the city reinvent itself again and welcome them back? In terms of infrastructure, everything that is needed is already in place – if you know where to look!