Metro Stop Paris Page 11
Pushed to its logical limit this Other was, in the way Sartre described human consciousness, the omnipresence of God, an unrealizable ideal towards which man was constantly striving, though always falling short. If he did not push himself to his limits, man would fall by the wayside in "bad faith," and reduce himself to acting out the role that the Other's presence wanted him to be: a "waiter," a "worker," a "slave," a "Jew," even a "writer." Though he could never reach that unattainable surface, man had to strive to do so; in Sartre it was a process of continual birth within oneself, a surging forth, a transcendence from oneself to the Other, and ultimately an impossible "conversion"—an image which was repeated throughout his great philosophical work. In his wartime play, Huis clos, he showed the cost of not striving towards the unattainable—in the form of three people, a male coward, a female narcissist and a lesbian, who had to live eternity together: "Hell is other people," remarks one of the characters. "I did not mean to say that our relations with others are always poisonous," elaborated Sartre in an interview in 1965. "I wanted to say that if our relations with others are warped and tainted, then the Other can only be hell." Man had to make an open choice and swallow the bitter pill, otherwise he was damned.
So in 1952, Sartre swallowed the bitter pill. For years he had been groping from a position of aggressive neutrality—a "socialist" Europe which stood outside the influence of the two superpowers — to one of complete cooperation with the Communists. On the Soviet camps, Sartre clung to Merleau-Ponty's Soviet apology of 1947 that capitalism had committed as many evils as those of Stalin's regime. On social policy he argued that the Communist Party most clearly represented the interests of the "proletariat"—a term that he and other intellectuals used with careless abandon to mean any group that appeared poor and exploited. "It is impossible to take an anti-Communist position without being against the proletariat," he explained glibly in 1951. But it was the Soviet Union's Peace Movement, which had been gathering momentum since its first congress held in Wroclaw in Poland in 1948, that eventually brought Sartre with so many other Western intellectuals round to the Communist camp.
Peace was the old dream of Paris's Liberation; the call for peace was a sure magnet for a Germanopratin who had lived through those dramatic months of transition. In La Douleur, Marguerite Duras recorded her impressions of the end of April 1945, shortly after her ex-husband, Robert Antelme, returned from a German camp: "Paris lights up at night. The Place Saint-Germain-des-Pres is illuminated as if by headlights. The Deux Magots is jam-packed. It is too cold for people to sit on the terrace. But the little restaurants are also crammed. I walk outside. Peace seems imminent. I return home in a rush. Pursued by peace."
Ah, peace! Picasso drew his famous dove for the Communist-sponsored World Congress of Partisans of Peace, held in April 1949 in Paris's Salle Pleyel. Ah, peace! Sartre still hesitated at that time, not least because of the foul language the Communist press was deploying against him. It was the Korean War which decided him, not least the American bombing of North Korea. Ah, peace! Many in Paris were awaiting a nuclear war, instigated by the United States. Ah, peace! In a long essay, "The Communists and the Peace," which was published in Les Temps Modernes during the summer of 1952 (at the time of his break with Camus and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre argued that the Soviet Union was a purely defensive power faced with destruction by the men of the Pentagon. He began a series of trips to Russia and to brother Socialist states, such as popular democratic China and Cuba, once it had become Communist. He abandoned his work on ethics, which he had promised in Being and Nothingness; and turned his attentions instead to the impossible marriage of existentialist phenomenology to collectivist Marxism. The work nearly killed him, and it shows; The Critique of Dialectical Reason is a truly impossible read.
We can be even more precise about the moment of Sartre's slide. In May 1952 he was in Rome enjoying the company of his Italian Communist friends when he heard that a Communist demonstration in Paris had been repressed and the Party's rotund, voluble leader, Jacques Duc-los, had just been arrested. Sartre went on record later as saying that this was the instant of his conversion to Communism: "When I came back hurriedly to Paris, I had to write or I would suffocate." Unfortunately, a whole cohort of the Western world's best brains followed Sartre in his conversion, down that route to the absurd.
* The Hôtel still stands at the sharp intersection of Rue de Buci and Rue de Seine, to the side and above a bountiful fruit and vegetable shop. It even houses a genuine writer, an Egyptian, who has been living there for over fifty years.
6
PORJE DE
CLIGNANCOURT
THE PROBLEM OF conversion turns out to be one of the defining features of the history of Paris, and it is only on the frontiers of Heaven that we can begin to define what is going on. Conversion is not a problem for a city like London for London is interested in the fabrication of material wealth and has not the slightest interest in ideas. It is too much of a problem for cities in the centre or the east of Europe— places like Berlin or Moscow—where whole populations convert at a dizzying rate to the most absurd philosophies. Compared to them, spiritual conversion in Paris, despite home-grown revolutions and foreign invasions, has always been a rather sedate affair endorsed, as the Prince de Talleyrand, the irreverent Bishop of Autun, once put it, "by a long succession of years, and I would even say by prescription of the centuries."
But there are those lines, and they are often the source of violence: on one side of the line one believes this and on the other side that. The lines may define political attitudes, one side being conservative, the other radical. Or religious beliefs: there are lines that indicate pockets of Protestantism in a sea of Catholicism; there are also lines which separate believers from non-believers. One of the most persistent lines in Paris is on the north side of town separating the city from the suburb; voting habits are determined by it, as are religious attitudes. It has long been a line of violence. With the expansion of the city the line has, over time, gradually moved northwards until reaching, in i860, its current position. Back in i860 it was defined by the city's fortifications. It was also reflected in the initial 1895 project for the Paris metro—in the circular line which never got built. Today it is traced by the ring road, the Boulevard Périphérique. The Boulevard Périphérique, particularly its north side, follows an old line that divides local systems of belief, whose origin goes back to the very beginnings of Christianity in northern Europe.
It is interesting to note that Paris, which would be the first city in Europe to de-Christianize, had also been one of the first cities in northern Europe to convert to Christianity. The old Roman city of Lutetia had developed on the south side of town in what is today the Latin Quarter, while remnants of the Gallic tribe of Parish, conquered by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, settled to the north of the Seine on that fault line, around Mons Mercurii, or Montmartre. Christianity first spread in the third century AD in that same northern area among the native Gallic people. But the distinction between the two peoples was fast disappearing in the face of a new threat, that of the Germanic invaders who would appear on the north side of town. Christianity would become the bond that held the defenders of old Gallo-Roman Lutetia together, on the north side of town, Heaven.
A pivotal figure in the early conversion of Paris to Christianity was the first bishop of the city, Saint Denis. We know virtually nothing about him beside the fact that he was decapitated by a Roman legionnaire, tradition has it, in the year 272. According to one legend he was the Saint Denis who the Bible tells us was converted by Saint Paul in Athens, which would give him an age of well over 200 at the time he lost his head. Another makes him a missionary of Pope Clement I, which would make him a youthful 150. A third describes him as one of seven missionaries sent in the third century from the Christian community in Rome to evangelize the northern provinces of Gaul—which is the most plausible of the three. Denis and two other missionary priests, Rusticus and Eleutherus, were arrested along with severa
l Christians and brought before the Governor of Lutetia Sisinnius Fesceninus, who demanded that they submit to the authority and religion of the Roman Emperor. The three priests refused. So Fesceninus ordered their execution before the Temple of Mercury, at the summit of Montmartre (the "hill of martyrs") as an example to all the native Gallic people who lived there.
The story at this point enters the realm of fantasy. What we know is largely derived from a thirteenth-century manuscript, Jacques de Vor-agine's La Vie des saints, but this account was almost surely based on a much older oral tale. The legionnaires were apparently impatient; they decapitated their prisoners halfway up the slope at what is now Rue Yvonne-le-Tac, a few paces from the Place des Abbesses. After the execution, Saint Denis miraculously rose up, put his head under his arm and, guided by an angel, continued the walk up the hill. He washed his head in a spring of fresh water and continued his promenade northwards to what is today the town of Saint Denis—on the other side of the Boulevard Périphérique—where he finally fell at the feet of the widow Catulla; from the spot where she buried him sprouted shoots of wheat. At the same site, a century later, Saint Geneviève founded the basilica where all the kings of France from Charles Martel onwards — save three—would be buried.
The sacred nature of Montmartre, the route north, the fertile fields that would feed the city, the link between Christianity and French royalty are all in this tale. So too is the significance of Saint Denis' place of burial, just beyond the frontiers of the city: Saint Denis plants the seed of Christianity outside the city, as did Saint Paul, beyond the reaches of Jerusalem. The universality of Christianity is thereby confirmed. It does make the path of Saint Denis well worth inspecting.
To follow in his footsteps, we really ought to change from the Saint-Germain line No. 4 at Marcadet-Poissonniers, and take line No. 12 to Porte de la Chapelle. But Porte de la Chapelle, despite the ringing name, is a dismal place that will eliminate any thought of Christian sanctity. Two high concrete apartment blocks guard the gate. And a gate it is, blocking one world from another. "Nobody visits the towns on the north side of the périphérique these days unless they are unfortunate enough to live there," said a wicked reporter in November 2005 after two Arab youths, fleeing the police, got electrocuted in their hiding hole, a powerful transformer. The news of their deaths spread like fire with fire: every town beyond that urban border— Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Bobigny and Saint-Denis—exploded into a three-week auto-da-fé; night was brighter than day.
Those northern towns, across the périphérique e, can no longer be called the ceinture rouge, the fiefdom of the Communists; the administrative term for this forsaken suburb is "sensitive urban zone," zone ur-baine sensible (ZUS). The two towers at Porte de la Chapelle warn you that you are approaching a ZUS. Next to one of them is a Supermarche Alibaba, selling oriental wares. The African women have colourful headdresses. Old men wear turbans and other exotic garments. Urban blight is all about. At the bus stop you may see the advertisement for a live concert by the black gospel singer Frere Clovis Makola—a name worth noting. At Porte de la Chapelle you may be forgiven if you forget for a moment that you are in the capital of France.
If it is pleasure you are seeking, you would do better to stay on line No. 4 until it reaches its terminal at Porte de Clignancourt. Here you can still get a sense of that urban frontier, while there are some lovely surprises awaiting you. The crooked old streets by the métro stop excite curiosity What goes on in that narrow Passage Penel off the Rue du Ruisseau? On the corner of Rue Esclangon is a café Espe run by Monsieur Ngulu; an African flag is pasted to its window above the phrase " Ô Nama—chez—Pris et Nov"—which possibly refers to what is on the menu. Two minutes' walk north, in a Denisian direction across the frontier of the pé'riph', will take you into the world of the Marché aux Puces.
Every class of every nation comes here every weekend; it is a genuine melting pot of peoples. The Marché aux Puces claims to be the largest flea market in the world. Its origins go back to the Siege of 1870 when rag pickers set up barracks and tents on the Plaine des Malassis, an abandoned slab of land between the Fortifications and the first line of houses of Saint-Ouen, held by the Prussians. The Marché aux Puces consists of pavilions, each one of them having a name. At the market of "Malassis" you will find pieces of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture going at a good price, though you should make a comparison with the markets of "Vernaison" and "Dauphine." The market of "Michelet" contains inviting little cafés that serve food to the sound of live accordion music or of guitars that have the rhythm of Django Reinhardt. "Serpette" specializes in art-nouveau objects.
As in the quartier of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, commerce and religion play with one another on an old urban boundary. Those ethnic barriers, so present in one's mind as one treads today in the steps of Saint Denis, have always been there. The people on one side of the urban boundary—whether it was the Farmers General Wall, Adolphe Thiers' fortifications or the Boulevard périphérique —have always been different from the people on the other. Those differences go back one and a half thousand years — to the days when the Christian Gallo-Romans faced the invasion of the original barbarians. What happened at that time would affect religious thought in Paris and right across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. And it would leave its mark on those urban lines you cross today.
LUTETIA'S ESCAPE FROM the worst of the barbarian violence owed much to the early Christianization of the city and the fifth-century conversion of Germanic tribes in the northern parts of Gaul. It was around Christmas-time in the year 406 that the most terrifying of the barbarian invasions occurred. Suevi, Vandals, Alani and Burgundians crossed the frozen Rhine near Coblenz and swept across the northern plains in an arc that took them down through Aquitaine and into Spain. Some continued across North Africa and from there mounted operations into southern Italy In 410 the Emperor Honorius refused the Visigoth Alaric I the right of settlement in Noricum, a province covering roughly today's Austria. Alaric, whose tribe had entered Italy through the Alps, marched on Rome and, for three horrifying days, put the city to pillage and rape. Roman authority was shaken to the core. The sack of the imperial city would inspire Saint Augustine of Hippo to write his most famous work, The City of God, which appealed to its readers to regard the spiritual domain of Christ, the city of our hearts, as a higher authority than the toiling, cruel city of men as represented by Rome.
The invasion of 406 was part of a huge movement of peoples across the Eurasian continent that had begun three or four centuries earlier. It may have been caused by a change in the climate, a "little ice age," that can be verified through various odd means of measure- ment, such as the movements of glaciers or the thickness of the rings on California's bristle cone pine trees. The fact that the River Rhine froze in the winter of 406 at the level of Mainz—never witnessed in the last thousand years—suggests that it must have been mighty cold.
Oxford's polyglot historian Norman Davies has described the pattern of migrations and invasions westwards into Europe in the form of a shunting effect, similar to the way in which a small movement at one end of a train, standing in its shunting yard, propels the last wagon at the other end from its resting-place at great force. The image is convincing. The people just beyond the boundaries, the limes, of the Roman Empire were sedentary, like the motionless wagons at the end of a train in its shunting yard. For centuries they had been trading with the cities inside the Empire and cultivating a range of different crops. The frontiers had been relatively calm. Then it all happened: the agrarian Germanic peoples just outside the Empire received the shock of migrants further to the east. Europe would never be the same again.
The massive invasions of 406 and its aftermath created a new, multicultural Gaul. The first thing the agrarian Germans sought was, naturally enough, land to settle. Sarmatians, Quads, Jutes, Burgundians, Herulians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals all claimed their patches of territory. The harassed Roman administration promptly divide
d Gaul into two dioceses and seventeen provinces. There were three Belgiums (the unimaginative Gallo-Roman functionaries called them Belgium I, II and III), two Germanias (similarly I and II), two Aquitaines, four Lyonnaises and two Narbonnaises. Equipped with their iron ploughs the newcomers planted their seeds and taught their neighbouring Gallo-Romans the German technique of crop rotation, which allowed them all to make the most of the cold mud of Gaul. As a consequence, Gaul became not only the most ethnically diversified of regions in the fading Roman Empire, but also its most densely populated.
The Visigoths settled in Spain and Aquitaine, the Burgundians took hold of lands that lay astride the Rivers Saone and Rhone, the Bretons were a Celtic people who were driven out of Britain by the Anglo and Saxon pirates at approximately the same time as the invasion of Gaul in 406. To the south-east, beyond the Alps, there developed the huge new Ostrogoth area of settlement.
Gallo-Roman Paris, or Lutetia, lay on the arc of the invasion, so that it now faced a scattering of Germanic tribal settlements dominated by people called the Franks to the north-east, in current Belgium and the Netherlands. The barbarians never made up the majority of the population; but it was the barbarians who possessed the arms. After Alaric's sack of Rome, the newcomers became increasingly independent-minded. They forbade all Gallo-Romans from bearing arms. Like the defeated Greeks centuries before, the Gallo-Romans were ordered to do the boring administrative work in the conquered territories— because they were the only people who knew how to write. The Germans thus introduced into the Roman Empire a caste system that separated German warriors from Roman functionaries. Gallo-Roman Paris was part of a thin sliver of territory—all that remained of the Roman Empire in Gaul.