Le Parking Bellefond

My first post on this blog was about a garage, the fantastic art deco styled Grand Garage Haussmann, and I'm sure this post will not be my last on the subject. I don't have a driving licence, cannot drive and I certainly have no passion for cars, but yet I still find car parks fascinating. This is perhaps particularly true in Paris where the vintage models were often designed in interesting ways in order to be allowed into the city.

Advances in engineering techniques in the last thirty years have enabled the city of Paris to sink car parks underground, but in earlier times the problem was how to make these large buildings fit into a street in an aesthetic manner. Paris has never been big on practical brutalism and the purpose of these buildings had to be disguised. The Parking Bellefond in the street of the same name is testament to this fact, with almost no cars being visible from the exterior.

Looked at alongside its neighbours, solid, traditional Haussmannian appartments, this building could easily be a factory or warehouse. It is only at ground floor level that we see cars, but even here the purpose is disguised somewhat by plate glassed office units. Above, the whitewashed walls give a light feeling to the building, and the zig-zagging layers and frosted windows offer a touch of originality to the ensemble. With the potted plants and decorative emerald green mosaic tiling at the entrance, the building becomes almost attractive.

Why am I so fascinated by these multi-story car parks though? They certainly offer a graphic interest making them easy to photograph, but I think my regard goes beyond that aspect. It is more about their atmosphere, and the curious lighting that make them a favoured location for the modern day film noir. How many times have we seen car parks used as the scene of murders, drug drop offs and double dealings? They have become iconic city locations, places where nothing good can happen, and symbols of the machines that are slowly asphyxiating us. In the UK, where car parks mostly have a final rooftop level that is open to the elements, they have also become the urban place of choice for suicides.

The now demolished multi-story car park in Newcastle made famous by the film 'Get Carter'

As a mirror of the city as a whole, the Parking Bellefond has become a kind of vehicle cemetery. Cars are no longer welcome in cities, and far from being objects of pride and prestige they are now something to feel guilty about. Locals can leave their vehicles to rest on the higher floors, but beneath ground level there is a collection of old cars buried beneath decades of dust. It feels like the end of some kind of era, the death of the motor car and therefore the car park too. What will replace them in the years to come though and will any car parks survive to be observed by future generations?

Positivist Discrimination

Paris is made up of approximately 6200 places that are labelled by the city council, including streets, squares, passages, courtyards, bridges and swimming pools. The majority of these have been given the name of a prominent personality, but until recently only around 3% were named after women. In the period since 2001 it has been a deliberate policy to increase this percentage, with 53 out of a total of 171 new namings taking the patronym of a woman, but this is an inequlity that will long remain written large in the city.

Stand in front of the Pantheon and you will see the following inscription on the facade; “AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE”. Inside, amongst the great men such as Victor Hugo, Voltaire and Emile Zola, lays just one woman; Marie Curie. The French state has indeed often recognised the contribution made by the great men of history, but what about the women? It was a question I asked myself when I stumbled across the tiny Rue Clotilde de Vaux.

The street is little more than a small square, a passageway and staircase that sees only pedestrians pass through on their way between the Boulevard Beaumarchais and the Rue Amélot. They may notice the street name or the statue placed on a bust in the garden, but do they know who this lady was? As I stood and took photos I can confess that the name and face meant nothing to me.

What had this lady achieved to be deemed worthy of the rare privilege of having a street in her name? Almost inevitably my trail of discovery into this character slowly led me towards a more well-known male figure. De Vaux is not famous for anything in particular she did or created in her own right, but is remembered more as a sufferer and an inspiration, a tragic character who led a man towards his destination. It seems that many females in the city are only celebrated if they are angel, madonna or muse.

A painting of Clotilde de Vaux which hangs on the wall of the Auguste Comte museum. The sculpture in the Rue Clotilde de Vaux seems to be based on this image.

Born Clotilde-Marie de Ficquelmont on the 3rd of April 1815, De Vaux has been condemned to be known throughout history by the name of her feckless husband. She married Amédée de Vaux, an adventurer when she turned 20, but after he was declared bankrupt following a series of gambling debts, he escaped to Belgium and left her alone and broke. As a divorce could not be declared, she was not able to remarry and thus was condemned to live as a spinster with no income. Her uncle gave her a pension which was just enough to pay for somewhere to live, whilst meals were mostly taken with her brother in his appartment.

She filled her days reading and writing, having several stories and poems published in magazines, but it was to be a meeting with her brother’s professor in October 1844 that would change two destinies. Auguste Comte was the teacher, a man who was working on a monumental thesis but was somewhat lacking in direction. The initial meeting was electric and the married Comte fell instantly in love. De Vaux rejected his approaches but a friendship developed and the two became regular correspondants.

Auguste Comte

The relationship lasted for just over a year until de Vaux’s untimely death from tuberculosis only two days after her 31st birthday in 1846. Over the year, Comte’s feelings became close to an obsession and each meeting and word from de Vaux took on almost a religious significance. De Vaux herself was a practising Catholic whilst Comte was a scientific athiest. He saw de Vaux as his moral superior and began to infuse his theories of the human condition with a more religious flavour. He concluded that cults and celebrations are indispensable for mankind although he still leaned away from Catholicism and the traditional church.

Comte’s initial theories were a kind of early Sociology. Indeed, he is credited as being the first person to use and describe the term. He studied the conditions of man in society and how he could develop, believing that science was the ultimate answer, with sociology being the most important science of all. After de Vaux’s death, he transformed this scientific positivism into a form of natural athiestic religion. This religious positivism described the principles by which the human society should organise itself, namely according to three notions; altruism, order and progress. Although Comte’s cult is almost dead today, the last two terms survive on the Brazlian flag, a fact which is not surprising as it was in this country that the theories of Comte were most popular.

The Chapelle de l'Humanite in Rue Payenne, featuring a bust of Comte and Brazilian and French flags.

The connection with Brazil continued in a bizarre manner after Comte’s death. His cult had been moderately successful and in 1903 a group of followers in Brazil wanted Comte’s creation to be recognised and celebrated in his homeland. They believed that the ideal place for a chapel would be in the house where Clotilde de Vaux had lived and died, but for some reason they bought the wrong house. The chapel still exists today, the only Positivist temple remaining in Western Europe, at 5 Rue Payenne, whereas Clotilde de Vaux had lived at number 7 (today demolished and rebuilt).

A museum also exists which celebrates the life of Auguste Comte and is situated in his old home at 10 Rue Monsieur Le Prince in the 6th Arrondissement. The museum is curiously only open for 3 hours a week, on Wednesdays between 2 and 5, but admission is free. There is also a statue of Auguste Comte in front of the Sorbonne, something which caused controversy recently when a Minister of Education tried to have it removed. Finally it was only moved 90°, something that Comte himself had done after meeting Clotilde de Vaux.

Note: Both Clotilde de Vaux and Auguste Comte are buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery. If you visit their tombs you may notice messages from Brazil. Comte still has followers there whilst de Vaux was revered as the spiritual mother of the religion (it is probably also her face which is featured on the alter in the Positivist chapel in the Rue Payenne).

Supernatural

On a little concrete triangle between the Canal St Martin and the Rue Jean Poulmarch a naked wall has been given over to groups of local artists. As the artists climb ladders and reach down into pots of paint, children run with footballs, using the wall paintings to mark out the contours of the goal. It is the kind of space that helps a city to tick, displaying a constantly changing selection of creations whilst also giving local children a safe space to fill their lungs. The two worlds exist in very picturesque harmony.

On the day I pass by to take photos though, I'm struck by the rather disquieting composition of the place. At first, all seems normal. Artists are at work, creating interesting, colourful pieces and the local children are running around as freely as usual. A desk has been set up in front of the wall - apparently you can add your name to a list in a book and get involved in future creations. Passers by all seem to have smiles on their faces as the sun at last brings warmth with light. To one side though, a tree showing the first signs of budding has two unwelcome intruders.

At first the sight is amusing. Trapped in a tangle of branches are a Velib bicycle and a green wheely bin. It is surprising. It makes passers by stop and I am not the only person to take photos, to search for the right angle to capture this unusual scene. When I stop to reflect though, it is a scene that makes me angry. On this space, the tree composition becomes a form of performance art, but just what message did the individuals involved want to pass on? The articles chosen are also heavy with significance, a Velib bicycle and a recycling bin are at the forefront of the attempts by the city of Paris to create a greener future, and trees are the lungs of the city. Combining the three is pure vandalism and an empty, nonsensical message.

On the wall, an artist is working on a representation of a tree. His tree has a face and is a living, breathing being, with leaves of pinks and yellows. It is a loving reproduction with seductive, swirling branches and flowers coming into bloom. The tree roots are bathed in a pool of water and a lush jungle is growing alongside. Are the artists aware of the anti-creation behind them? The only thing that is certain in the scene is that when the individuals made their creation (and it was surely more than one person - a Velib bicycle is very heavy!), nobody asked the tree if it wanted to be involved.

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Mon Paname, que Tu es Loin

Like many large cities, Paris has its own affectionate nickname. To tourists it is the city of light, but to locals it is known simply as Paname. It is not entirely clear where this name originated from, but it seems that there may be a connection to the city of Panama and its canal, possibly linked to Ferdinand De Lesseps's failed attempt to build the waterway in 1880. A connection was made to Paris, a city cut in half by a river, but the name was probably only adopted because it had such a nice musical ring. Indeed, the continuing popularity of the nickname is probably due to its continual use in song lyrics, such as Edith Piaf's "Marie la Française" featured in the title of this post.

Which brings me to the Residence Paname. It is a little surprising to see the nickname used for these large blocks of appartments between Bastille and Republique, but I imagine it seemed entirely appropriate when the construction was on the drawing board. This post is largely an excuse to publish a series of photographs of buildings that I found to be graphically very interesting, but there is also a strange atmosphere to this Residence, a place that imagined itself as a small-scale version of the entire city.

The construction almost certainly dates from the 1970s, a period when the city decided to replace run down insalubrious housing with modern multipurpose edifices. Between the Boulevards Beaumarchais and Richard Lenoir in the 11th arrondissement, a series of constructions replaced industrial passageways and crumbling courtyards, with the Residence Paname being the largest and most interesting. In a similar manner to Le Corbusier's 'Unités d'habitation', this residence combined living areas with spaces dedicated to other purposes including shops and offices.

Today the dream of contented communal living seems to be over. The appartment blocks stretch skywards, the inhabitants breathing fresh air from their large balconies and enjoying open views across the city. At ground level, the doors to the shopping galeries are locked. The individual appartment units seem clean and well looked after, but down below, the original concrete design features are damp and crumbing. Residents have also complained of problems with the local homeless population. Whilst they sympathise with their predicament, they are fed up with their stairways being used as beds and the gardens surrounding the residence being used as open toilets.

I find an open door into the heart of the construction, an area known as the Centre d'Affairs Paname. Here the units that previously welcomed shops and which were open to the public at large have become individual office units. It is a curious mix of nature and concrete. Dark passageways open out onto roofless square plots, where trees reach desperately up away from the gloom. Looking up through these plots gives a glimpse of angular appartments climbing skywards. There is no link today between this top and bottom, between luminous balconies and the opaque alleys leading to locked gates.

Appartments in this residence are still much in demand as people in cities always want to escape away from the street. Living in the sky, your environment is the patchwork you see stretched out before you. Watching the sunsets beyond the city limits you can almost forget the locked passageways down below and the groups of faceless individuals whose only view is of the stars above.

Creation vs Evolution

In this year, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, it is amusing to find the creation versus evolution debate written large on the Paris skyline. Genesis informs us that “God created the heavens and the earth” and that “by the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing”. It seems that whilst he was resting, an artist came along and commented on that work. Then I came along and took a photo of the artist's work.

The fundamentalist creationist wing of the church would have us believe that the earth is young, approximately 6000 years old. Is it for this reason that an artist has slipped up a conveniently placed ladder, possibly belonging to Jacob, and pasted an Ammonite fossil on a church spire? According to carbon dating techniques, it is estimated that Ammonites are at the very least 65 million years old, but were also living creatures possibly as long as 400 million years ago.

It was the discovery of such fossils that led Darwin to develop his theories of evolution, and whatever your belief systems are, the creation here is a striking homage to this great man in his two hundreth year. Has the artist chosen the right target though?

This simple picture becomes a tale of two men named Charles. Seeing the image makes me think immediately of Darwin, but what is the steeple on which it is painted? The answer is written on the street name on which it is situated – the Rue du Pasteur Wagner. The Pasteur was Charles Wagner, and the church is his, a temple known simply as the ‘Foyer de l’Âme’ (a shelter for the soul).

Charles Wagner (1852-1918) was an interesting man, a talented orator and writer. He belonged to a wing of the church known as Liberal Protestantism, but claimed independence from all creed and orthodoxies. After going on a conference tour around the United States, supported vocally by the President Theodore Roosevelt, he managed to raise enough money to build his temple in Paris. Opened in 1907, from the exterior it is one of the more discreet places of worship in Paris, with just the little wooden steeple peeping over the top of a school on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir near Bastille indicating that it is there at all.

Inside though the temple sits up to 1200 people, proof that Wagner was a popular orator. He was known as a left-wing preacher and attracted many curious visitors from the working class corners of the city. Liberal Protestants very largely accept the advances of science and the the principle of evolution, seeing Genesis as giving only rough metaphors for the process, so it is likely that Wagner celebrated the teachings of Darwin.

The 'Foyer de l'Âme' when first opened (photo taken from official website).

At the entrance to the church, a further clue that this was not a centre of fundamentalism. A sign reads "Ici on enseigne l'humanité" (here we teach humanity), and a quick look at the church website reveals discussions about encouraging homosexuals into the fold. It seems then that the artist chose the worst possible steeple in the city to place the evolutionary comment!

The Protestant faith remains very minor in France, with this temple apparently attracting mostly British and American expatriates. The story ended quite sadly for Wagner too, with his church opening two years after French laws decided on a strict separation between church and state. His temple backs onto a school, but his dreams of universal teaching and of avoiding the schism of the various Protestant factions in France proved to be in vain. He died half way through the First World War, an event which also caused many Liberal Protestants to question their belief system.

Perhaps the artist has chosen this steeple for another reason. The work of art brought my attention to this hidden, but interesting site in the city and it could almost function as a beacon for the particular identity of the church. If this were the case, a perfect title for the work would be that of a famous Liberal Protestant sermon from America in the 1920s – “Shall we let the fundamentalists win?”