PARIS OF YESTERDAY, AND PARIS OF TO-DAY

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PARIS

O TOWN of Europe has undergone such profound transformations as those which, for the past hundred years, have changed

the face of Paris. I am not now speaking of manners, but merely of the look of the streets, of the views and of the various styles of architecture. The nineteenth century saw new cities, like Berlin or Pesth, develop with marvelous rapidity; but at Berlin as at Pesth, the old town was an almost insignificant nucleus around which a modern town was abruptly formed. Very little was demolished; but there was constant building on a new plan. At Paris, on the contrary, it was necessary to adapt a large old city to the needs of an indefinitely increasing population. From 1800 to 1900 the total number of Parisians grew more than five-fold, whereas the area of the city was not even tripled.1

I.

At the same time that the population increased, the orders of health officers made the ventilation and sanitation of the old quarters obligatory, and commerce and industry demanded streets through which there might be quicker traffic. Thus there was and as yet has been no pause in working over the plan of the city, in straightening crooked streets, in opening direct great avenues, in renewing, from end to end, the decoration of the capital. It was under the first Empire that the metamorphosis of Paris began. It was then a question of putting to use the vast sites left free by the convents just suppressed by the Revolution; the Rue de Rivoli, which dates from this period, is the first of the great highways of modern Paris. But until the reign of Napoleon III. these works were pushed slowly. Under the second Empire the great building fever broke out which turned Paris topsyturvy. Then, in all directions, old quarters were ripped up. The plan of a modern city was drawn and superposed upon the plan of the old-time city. It was ruthlessly adhered to.

The events of 1870 and 1871 interrupted, for a few years at most, the undertaking conceived by Haussmann, prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III. As soon as the traces of the war and the marks of fire had been removed, the process of tearing down, destroying and rebuilding began again. Moreover, from one decade to another, the constantly recurring World's Fairs altered the whole aspect of the western part of the city, and bequeathed to Paris certain of the buildings put up for each international holiday. The Exposition of 1855 left the Palais de l'Industrie on the Champs 1 The area of old Paris was formerly 3402 hectares (13,135 + sq. m.); since 1860, by the annexation of various suburbs, it has become 7802 (30.124 + sq. m.)

Copyright, 1904, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.

Elysées. That of 1878 brought Paris the gardens of the Trocadèro and the Palace overlooking them. That of 1889 caused the erection of the Eiffel Tower. In 1900 Paris fell heir to a bridge, two palaces and a new avenue; but at the same time it lost the Palais de l'Industrie.

Thus for about fifty years sanitary progress, industrial development, the fury of speculation and enterprises connected with World's Fairs condemned Parisians to life in the midst of demolished buildings and of construction sheds. Some finally became used to it, others realizing that modern life has certain unavoidable necessities, long since resigned themselves.

But for some years a new public feeling has begun to appear. On all sides people are asking themselves, as they look about them, whether these famous "necessities of modern life" really demand so much destruction and ruin. It has become evident that without reason, often even without pretext, some of the most admirable views of Paris have been sacrificed or impaired. Without slighting the rules of hygiene and the needs of quick traffic, people are beginning to talk of the rules and the needs of taste. City æsthetics," a happy phrase, invented, I believe, by M. Buls, once Burgomaster of Brussels, quickly found favor. As early as 1885 a society was formed for the purpose of protecting the monuments of Paris, the Société des Amis des Monuments Parisiens. From the beginning it has always made energetic protests against all attempts at vandalism, protests which we must admit have sometimes been vain. Three years ago the municipal council of Paris established a consulting committee, called the Committee of Old Paris. It is made up of city councillors, officials, literary men, and archæologists; its business is to protect all the landmarks and memorials of the town. In various quarters of Paris small local societies have been founded to watch more particularly over the aspect and the monuments of special parts of the capital. During the World's Fair of 1900, an International Congress of Public Art met under the auspices of the municipality of Paris. Both newspapers and reviews, moreover, are now ready to receive the complaints of Parisians who are weary of seeing their city at the mercy of speculators and destroyers.

To-day the fight is on between the Vandals and the friends of Paris. The former are certainly better armed; they generally have on their side the support of public authority; they can invoke, as an argument, the semblance of immediate utility; they are helped by the apathy of the majority of citizens. The rest can meet them merely with reasons based on good taste and good sense; and as they always seem to be defending the interests of the aristocracy, democracy suspects them as soon as it hears of them, as if it were not in keeping with the principles of genuine democracy to wish that

the street in which every one passes should remain a joy to the eye and a school of good taste.

II.

"We are not archæologists," say the defenders of the beauty of Paris; "we should be far from willing to stop the free development of our city merely for the sake of a few old stones." Such sentimentality would never be understood by the masses; and on this point let us recognize that the masses would be wholly right.

Under pain of death cities must be transformed. Admirable places for reverie are Bruges and Ravenna, where our imagination may enjoy noble and delicate delights. They are dead towns where for a few hours one loves to breath the pure perfume of the past. But it is natural that the fate of Bruges or of Ravenna should rouse but little jealousy, and that a man should wish another destiny for his native city.

Yet in Paris, as in all old cities, we wish the modern town to be built without disfiguring that of our ancestors. The soul of a city is fashioned, in some measure, by the genius of its inhabitants, the formation of the ground, the light of heaven and the vicissitude of history. It is the duty of citizens to respect that ancient soul in its most beautiful and characteristic works.

The problem is delicate. With a little good-will, however, it is not insoluble. In every old city the centre of social life has been displaced from age to age. A mysterious law governs this movement; all the great cities of Europe are advancing towards the setting sun. Paris began as a Gallic borough shut up on an island of the Seine. Little by little, it stretched along both banks of the river through all the Middle Ages. Then it grew towards the West, and built in that direction the palace of its Kings, the Louvre. For a time during the seventeenth century, it receded towards the East (it was then that the Marais quarter was beautified), but soon it resumed its normal advance. On the left bank it created the Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the right bank the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; in the nineteenth century, pushing ever towards the West, it reached the age of the Bois de Boulogne. Thus, from century to century, both old and new quarters took form on the map of the city.

When the idea of modernizing Paris first came up, the following plan might have been followed; to let air and light penetrate the old quarters, so as to make them habitable for the men of to-day; but to carry out those changes prudently, without altering the historic aspect of the streets and squares, and above all in those districts to avoid too modern architectural effects, too glaring incongruities; in the new quarters, on the contrary, to

try to realize the ideal of the modern city with the utmost possible comfort and elegance. But the work was done haphazard, without any prearranged plan; the old quarters were ripped up; venerable or interesting monuments, which told passers-by the history of Paris and of France, were torn down; certain beautiful aspects of the city, views that had become almost traditional, were sacrificed to the superstition of straight lines; and yet by a strange contradiction, while the old mansions of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth centuries were torn down, they were revived in imitations throughout the new quarters. In old Paris, modernity reigned; in new Paris, archæology.

Against these aberrations we protest. There is still time. For however great the activity displayed for half a century by engineers, destroyers, architects and speculators, they have not yet ruined the beauty of Paris, and abolished the traditions of good taste. In spite of everything, the grace of the Seine, the softness of the sky, the splendor of the foliage, the magnificence of the palaces and churches have until now preserved for the city nearly all its olden charm. Those who love Paris have still a hundred reasons for loving her; but if they are not alert, the Vandals will soon have taken from them the best of all those reasons, namely, that Paris adds the elegance of a great modern city to the charm of a very old town, and that the life of to-day in Paris is made more beautiful and delicate by the constant spectacle of the elegance of the past.

III.

Let us illustrate, by a few examples, the main ideas of this Parisian plea pro domo sua.

The great monuments of the past, the glory of Paris, were spared when, fifty years ago, the general plan of the modern city was conceived; and now they are no longer threatened with ruin. Though they have been restored with a hardihood which at times has slightly disfigured them, they have been " classed," that is to say, put under the protection of the law. We are all but certain that they will never be torn down. Moreover, they are used for public purposes, and their maintenance is assured. They might perhaps be better defended against the vagaries of those who live in them, by not permitting wooden blinds to be hung on the Louis Quatorze fronts of the palace of the Louvre, and by not tolerating a forest of chimneys or hanging gardens above the terraces of those two marvelous pavilions erected by Gabriel on the Place de la Concorde. But such details are of little enough importance. The great monuments of Paris are safe. If public taste some day proves itself more scrupulous, these blemishes will vanish.

The great peril for the beauty of Paris is commercial publicity, that

great leprosy of signs and placards covering all, even the most beautiful, buildings of the capital. When these debaucheries of advertising take place in wholly modern streets, the fronts of whose houses are utterly lacking in style, we console ourselves readily; sometimes these color-medleys are an unobjectionable break in the monotony of bare and graceless stretches of real But the most elegant quarters and the most magnificent squares of Paris are now profaned, by day with frightful placards and by night with luminous signs. What is left of the old city is disappearing behind the painted canvases and the gilt lettering of commercial houses.

estate.

Among the most individual beauties of Paris are three magnificent squares, which tell passers-by the history of two centuries of French art; the Place des Vosges, the Place Vendome, and the Place de la Concorde. These are three architectural wholes, each of which, by the harmony of its lines and of its coloring, calls to mind the taste and the manners of the time when it was built. At the end of the reign of Henry IV., the Place des Vosges, the former Place Royal, was constructed on a uniform plan which is a model of elegance; the handsome fronts of brick and of stone, the high tiled roofs, the delightful walk that surrounds the square, are the highest efforts of the purely French taste before the invasion of the Greco-Roman. First put up to shelter workmen and merchants, under Louis XIII. and Louis XIV., these charming houses became the dwellings of the French nobility, who felt that in the Faubourg Saint Honoré they were too near the Louvre, that is to say, too near the King. On the Place Royale, festivals, duels, rendezvous and insurrections occurred. There, in the seventeenth century, princes, poets and courtesans were to be met. There, Richelieu was seen passing and the great Condé, Corneille, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, Marion de Lorne, Saint Vincent de Paul, Ninon de Lenclos, Molière, Madame de Longeuville, Françoise d'Aubigné and Turenne. Such memories as these make this square one of the sacred places of our history. The Place Vendome is the work of Louis XIV. The plans were drawn by Mansard, the architect of the palace of Versailles. With its splendid symmetry, its Corinthian ornamentation, its classic pediments adorned with the arms of France, it expresses admirably the cold and majestic solemnity of the "great century."

Finally the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Royal were conceived by the greatest of eighteenth century architects, Gabriel. The two pavilions which rise to the north of the square, with their delicate colonnades, are miracles of elegance. It was on the Place Louis XV., now the Place de la Revolution, that the Reign of Terror set up the guillotine.

To understand all the history of the city, and to follow, as if in an outline, the destination of the French monarchy, it is therefore enough to trav