Vehicular invasion

5From the latter part of 1871, with order re-established after the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, the new authorities accused the old Second Empire of—among other things—failing to provide sufficient public transportation in a capital that had been transformed. The Prefect of the Department of the Seine, Léon Say, deplored the fact that the large-scale works that had been undertaken, while providing a network of sewers, had not included a railway network, whether above-ground or underground, for transporting Parisians more efficiently than the traditional (and slow and infrequent) services of the Compagnie générale des omnibus (CGO).  [5] The rush of different proposals at this time demonstrated the level of interest in the idea among the capitalists of the day. In 1872, holding up examples of cities abroad, the industrialist and businessman Albert Dehaynin addressed the General Council of the Seine, declaring that “the public think well of it, as do the shareholders.”  [6] The cost of a ticket was to be the same as for the omnibus, at 15 centimes, but with more seats available, a faster journey, and the prospect of a good profit. Pending the unobtainable metro, the tramway had the power to win over the general public and shareholders alike.

6The first tramlines were laid slowly and with some degree of hesitancy but, by 1878, a proper network could be said to be in place, and it would only become denser and more extensive, with fifty lines in place in 1890 and seventy-two by 1912.  [7] Between 1896 and 1899, the general council did everything in its power to facilitate the construction of a set of local lines and so-called penetration lines, so as to ensure connection “between all suburban communes and Paris, and linking most communes with each other.” There were concessions for no fewer than nineteen such lines, all electrically powered and at a reduced fare of 10 centimes.  [8] This was an essential feature of the Paris tram network right from the start: not only did it link the different districts of Paris together, as the omnibus had done; it also connected the suburbs with the city. At a time when several railway services cut through Paris’s outer districts without stopping (except in the west); when the metro, constructed late in the day, was still limited to Paris proper; and while other well-used facilities such as the chemin de ceinture (belt railway) and boat services were by nature limited in their reach, the unloved tramway  [9] played an essential role in transporting the public into and around Paris prior to 1914. There can be no doubt that, for those communes that were poorly served by the railways, the tram was the principal mode of public transportation—a real Trojan horse for accessing Paris from the suburbs.

7There was a chaotic element to the development of the tram network, however. Some lines only ever existed on paper, and the 10 centime fare could not support the reality of operational requirements for long. Progress was slow due to complex procedures (prompting interventions by the state, the Prefecture of the Seine, and the two elected councils) and because of the resistance put up by the Compagnie générale des omnibus, which fought tooth and nail to keep the 1860 monopoly on land transport in Paris that it claimed to maintain. Then, from 1901, a dispute flared up pitting aesthetics against profits—a conflict that would merit a whole study in itself. A further factor, this time economic, would soon put another spanner in the trams’ wheels. For any line connecting Paris with a suburb, the most lucrative section was the part inside the city, serving Parisian customers, so the goal was to make as much of the journey inside Paris as possible. For routes that stayed within the city’s boundaries, crossing between different parts of Paris meant a changeover of passengers along the route and hence high revenues. This indicated that the tramway was set to pass through central, highly symbolic parts of the city, which carried the risk of engendering resistance, and sometimes even real hostility.

Showcase of the world

8If we are properly to understand the various episodes covered in this study, we need to set out the contours and the landmarks of this well-to-do city whose feathers the tramway so effectively ruffled.

9Paris’ wealthy western districts go back a long way. It was the inclusion of Saint-Honoré, Saint-Roch, and Montmartre in the urban area that drove the extension of this wealthy city in that direction.  [10] The district of Saint-Germain, which itself has a long history, would never extend beyond its original boundaries, so it is reasonable to consider it as being restricted to the right bank. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Saint-Honoré, going toward the Seine via le Roule and Chaillot, offered huge expanses of ground for building townhouses and properties for rent, mixed in with more modest dwellings, whether rural in nature or otherwise.  [11] At this time, following the improvements to the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, which separated the two regions of the city, was altered several times in order to make it into a majestic avenue worthy of the socialites who enjoyed taking their promenades there.  [12]

10These areas had enjoyed all the benefits of the Second Empire. In the western part of the city’s old center, which was already home to well-to-do Parisians, the foundations were laid for the network of residential and shopping streets that we are now familiar with: Avenue de l’Opéra, initially only completed at each end, linked up with the Bourse via Rue du Quatre-Septembre (known at the time as Rue du Dix-Décembre), which was later to be extended east as Rue Réaumur, then in a state of limbo. These new roadways (also including Boulevard de Sébastopol and Rue de Turbigo in the eastern part of the city center, which had also been reconfigured) allowed for the construction of buildings that came to be described as inordinately Haussmannian, and about which so much has been written.  [13] It can often be forgotten that, behind the architectural gloss, most of these buildings were of mixed usage, and were designed for residential, business, commercial, and office use. Ground-floor shopkeepers had private living space and storage upstairs; agents and money changers would receive their clients in their apartments; and the manufacturers of “articles de Paris” would house their workers in one or several of their own rooms. For those on whom fortune shone, the opulent western suburbs, which formed the eight arrondissement from 1860, offered them all the tranquility and luxury they could desire, whether on the more traditional streets, along the new roadways opened during the empire along the Friedland-Haussmann axis or around Boulevard Malesherbes. The all-conquering bourgeoisie of the time was now coexisting with aristocrats by birth and the established rich.

11The imperial regime saw to it that members of high society could enjoy an ideal setting here. In the little Champs-Élysées gardens, before the avenue itself was constructed in splendid fashion, the empire continued work on the improvements that had been undertaken under the monarchy, putting a particular degree of care into the design of the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées to make it an urban intersection without parallel. In 1862, “in accordance with the provisions approved by His Majesty,” the large fountain occupying the center of the circle was destroyed, and its six “planted trays with gushing fountain” were laid out on part of the freed-up roadway, with the sidewalks reconfigured to allow access to the riverside developments, now fronted by fenced-off flowerbeds.  [14] This revealed a concern for harmony coming through the technical design of the time (Fig. 1):

Figure 1: Sectional drawing of the Rond-Point, 1860s, probably drawn for the reconstruction of sewers (Archives de Paris, VO11 577)

Figure 1: Sectional drawing of the Rond-Point, 1860s, probably drawn for the reconstruction of sewers (Archives de Paris, VO11 577)

12The Rond-Point hence became a proper place, joining the top of the eminently aristocratic Avenue Montaigne and the end point of a new road laid out from Pont des Invalides, Avenue d’Antin (the present-day Avenue Franklin-Roosevelt), which was still not complete by 1870. The circle was still not as it should be, but the aim was to connect the suburbs of Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré, creating a fusion of aristocracies. Only cut stone could be used for the surrounding buildings and in the immediate vicinity of the Rond-Point, and there was a ban on commercial premises.  [15] Théophile Gautier, an admirer of the Empire’s great works if ever there was one, did not hesitate in reporting, semi-seriously, that “the center of Paris is the rond-point on the Champs-Élysées.”  [16]

13The path was clear for horse-drawn carriages to cross the Rond-Point, which had effectively become an étape on the extensive social circuit that had emerged under the Second Empire virtually from scratch. First, the Bois de Boulogne had been completely transformed, with lakes, avenues, and a fine hippodrome on the Plaine de Longchamp. The Grand Prix de Paris that is held there, founded in 1863, remains one of the finest symbols of the fête impériale.  [17] A vast avenue dedicated to the empress was constructed to connect the Étoile to the Bois, passing through Passy and Neuilly.  [18] These locales served as magnificent backdrops for the well-off and for socialites, forming so many open-air salons. Greetings would be exchanged while riding across the Rond-Point or along the Allée des Acacias, only to be renewed later around the dining table. It was in order to maintain the harmony of these parades of carriages that, for as long as the empire lasted, omnibuses were forbidden from using the Champs-Élysées for a part of the afternoon and were banned from Avenue de l’Impératrice at all times.  [19]

14After the end of the Second Empire, Paris emerged into a happy, golden age. The most spectacular sight remained the lines of equipages parading up and down the Champs-Élysées, with all their rituals and etiquette (Fig. 2).

Figure 2: Le retour du Bois aux Champs-Élysées, drawing by Paul Merwart (Source: Alexis Martin, Paris: Promenades dans les vingt arrondissements (Paris: Hennuyer, 1893), 163)

Figure 2: Le retour du Bois aux Champs-Élysées, drawing by Paul Merwart (Source: Alexis Martin, Paris: Promenades dans les vingt arrondissements (Paris: Hennuyer, 1893), 163)

15The nobility and the cream of the bourgeoisie were the most prominent users of these spaces, but they were not the only ones. As far as we know, the Champs-Élysées gardens (which were never fenced off, unlike the Tuileries, for example), attracted much more modest walkers, such as the working-class family described in 1856, who liked taking a stroll on the Sundays when they were paid “in their brand-new clothes.”  [20] Cafés-concerts in the open air drew common folk with their children to listen to the fashionable music (albeit from a distance).  [21] It was the grand avenue leading to the Bois de Boulogne that was now the holiest of holies, still subject to an omnibus ban and hence free from vulgar traffic.  [22] According to a contemporary traffic expert,  [23] Avenue du Bois was the busiest avenue in Paris during the height of society promenades, with 3,000 horses or colliers per hour, far busier than Boulevard des Italiens, which was the most heavily used thoroughfare at normal times. Between four in the afternoon and eight in the evening on the day of the Grand Prix in 1881, 6,290 colliers, probably accounting for Paris’s entire fleet of private carriages, were counted—and that was without even noting the number of horseback riders.

16What about the sixteenth arrondissement, or the Plaine Monceau? This was the Second Empire’s grand design: transforming the far west of the right bank, where there were already bourgeois residential settlements, including at Passy, into a real Champs-Élysées, where the heroes of business and the arts could find a city to their taste in a perfect continuation of the Saint-Honoré suburb and the Quartier du Roule. In 1870, and even in 1880, the set of roadways branching out from the Étoile toward the sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements, including the upper sections of Boulevard Malesherbes and the whole of the network designed by the Pereire brothers to cut across the plaine, were marked out but far from all built, and the bourgeoisie were slow to settle in these areas. The sixteenth arrondissement had the lowest population in Paris in 1876, and it would only overtake the eighth in 1901.  [24] Indeed, it was the eighth arrondissement that attained the highest residential property values in Paris in 1914,  [25] and which, most likely, had the highest number of families with a subscription to the Bottin mondain (Society Directory).  [26] The differences between these two districts extended to political preferences: from 1871, the first year of municipal council elections after the Commune, the four quartiers of the eighth arrondissement always elected conservative representatives (Bonapartists and royalists, who only constituted a very limited fringe of the council as a whole), while the sixteenth chose a long line of republicans, notably those from the Deligny, Clamageran, and Marmottan families.

17The tramway affairs, in which these names would feature, almost all concerned the eighth arrondissement, where Paris’s nobility and wealthier bourgeoisie coexisted, living the lives of socialites—or at least drawn to that existence.  [27] Given the prestige of these places, curious onlookers would gather at the Rond-Point or toward the Étoile. As one aristocrat recalled, “Idlers would be sat on the iron chairs lining the sidewalks, watching us passing by.”  [28] A rather catchy nickname for these onlookers was used by those distinguished persons who inhabited the world where the horse had long been king: les pannés, in other words people who were dans la panade—“in a pickle” or “down-and-outs”—suggesting that those who were not personally in possession of an equipage must be in poverty by definition.  [29] In fact, these pedestrians were neither workers out in their Sunday best nor romantics. Indeed, “persons of the best company” were observed gathering with their neighbors, or as tourists.  [30] There was not much social distance between those members of the bourgeoisie who took part in the parade of carriages and those who sat on benches to watch them pass by, but there was a differentiation between them in terms of success. Those who traveled via equipage constituted their own layer of nobility within these opulent districts, and they were prepared to do anything to preserve this status.

18The following map shows developments in the defense of Paris’s wealthy neighborhoods (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: Roads and focal points of the Paris tramway disputes between 1872 and 1914

Figure 3: Roads and focal points of the Paris tramway disputes between 1872 and 1914

The scandalous tramways

37The first of these little tramline altercations—and the most spectacular—concerned the crossing of the intersection at the Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées. One of the planned lines under a CGO concession that was to form part of the tram network approved by the municipal council in May 1894 was supposed to lead from the Porte d’Orléans through the whole left bank to the Saint-Philippe du Roule church by following the entire length of Avenue d’Antin, which by then was complete. In other words, it would cross the Champs-Élysées at the Rond-Point. No opposition was voiced at the public inquiry, and the councilor representing the area, the immovable Maurice Quentin-Bauchart, a Bonapartist man of letters, had even congratulated himself about this tram route at the 1896 elections.  [50] It would greatly improve the connectivity of the district, he said.

38It all went wrong when the workers laying the tracks reached the famous intersection in March 1897. There was uproar in high society, and at one point the gatherings around the building site became a proper demonstration. A contemporary newspaper sketch shows a crowd of pedestrians and vehicles occupying the Rond-Point, with smartly dressed gentlemen and ladies in hats who had apparently emerged from a flotilla of carriages backed up all the way to the Étoile to view the catastrophe at close quarters.  [51] These spontaneous protests were supported by large sections of the press. On March 23, L’Écho de Paris published an article that captured the mood with its tone and its title, “Le tramway des Barbares” (“The barbarians’ tramway”). What was more, the Minister of Public Works was himself concerned about the matter, and asked the Prefect of the Seine to work with the municipal council to find an arrangement that would satisfy “the admirers of Paris.” The works were definitively blocked by order of the Prefect of Police, Louis Lépine, who declared that he had the right to halt the progress of the tramway, in these days of great affluence among high society, if such a measure ever had to be imposed in this place. The affair took up almost an entire session of parliament on April 3. The council once again voted for the line to be constructed in its entirety, however, and so the work resumed. The line was officially opened on May 18, 1897 as scheduled—no doubt to the deep chagrin of those “admirers of Paris.”

39The resolve of these same admirers would once again be sorely tested the following year, when the issue of a tramline crossing Avenue du Bois arose. Alexandre Grammont, a manufacturer of electrical conductors, had requested the concession for a so-called northwestern network, featuring a line from Neuilly to Trocadéro via Levallois, which would follow Avenue de Malakoff toward the Trocadéro, hence crossing Avenue du Bois.  [52] This would disturb the daily elegant parades, and hence represented a new attack on the empire’s social circuit. Moreover, the sixteenth arrondissement had changed a great deal since 1878, becoming richer and more populated. The so-called pannés, these bourgeois admirers of elegant carriages, had settled in the area in large numbers. Political representation at a municipal level had shifted to the right: Ernest Gay, councilor for the Porte-Dauphine district, who had unseated Deligny in 1893, was foremost among those who opposed the plans.

40The public inquiry, which was open from August 29 to September 29, 1898,  [53] involved a great many people so as to avoid surprises, as had arisen the previous year with the “violation” of the Rond-Point. Positive words were said about the proposal in Neuilly, at any rate, and its mairie (town council) emphasized the “undeniable” interests “in being linked . . . to the district of Passy and to Chaillot.” The mairie of the sixteenth arrondissement, on the other hand, was inundated with protests from the inhabitants of Passy, who spoke of “considerable damage,” “vandalism,” and even “savagery” in connection with the plans. Petitions were lodged at the mairie, including one submitted by Le Journal, one of the “big four” of the Paris press,  [54] and one that was led by Jean-Jacques Roche, “director of the twenty newspapers of the twenty arrondissements of Paris,” who called for the line’s terminus to be moved so as to avoid the route crossing the avenue. A total of 4,090 signatures were gathered.  [55] Public meetings were held in the district, including one on Rue Pergolèse organized by the Marquis de Castellane in protest at the “vandalism” that the plans represented, in his view.  [56] Above all, he risked having the tram pass before his very windows: his townhouse, the famous Palais Rose, was situated at the corner of Avenue de Malakoff and Avenue du Bois.

41The matter came before the municipal council on March 24, 1899.  [57] The committee in charge of transportation had already come out against the proposal. During the session, however, socialist councilors swooped to the aid of the scheme: “The Bois de Vincennes,” one of them said, “is crossed by an electric tramway. It is the wood for the poor, it is true, whereas the Bois de Boulogne is the wood for the rich.”  [58] The council’s convictions had been clear for some time, however, and in the end only thirteen left and far-left councilors, out of the sixty-four who voted, opposed the committee’s recommendation. The inquiry had formed a strong impression among the council, with many members ending up convinced that it would be sacrilege to cut across Avenue du Bois. One radical councilor joked: “It would be like trying to lay an electric tramway across the floor of the Salon Carré in the Louvre.”  [59] The hostility displayed by the Prefecture of the Seine did the rest. The Director of Architectural Services delivered a lecture to the councilors:

42

How can you create such superb promenades at great expense only then to butcher them in a similar manner? I cannot believe it. It would open the door to all devastation.

43This turned out to be a great deal of fuss about nothing: despite being modified, this line was never built in the end. Grammont was not the most serious of businessmen. Yet high society had freed itself from danger and came out victorious, just as it would again with the Avenue Montaigne affair in 1901. This road was not yet the showcase for high-end luxury we know today. An exclusively residential area with practically no commercial premises, the avenue was lined with townhouses (at least nineteen out of sixty addresses) and beautiful apartment buildings.  [60] The surrounding area had become a splendid part of the city. The lower quarter between Montaigne and the Champs-Élysées, Marbeuf, had been filled in and subdivided in 1883, and was now full of fine residences. On the other side, the Quartier François 1er, toward the Cours la Reine, containing streets such as Rue Bayard and Rue Jean-Goujon, had for a long time consisted of only a few poorly constructed buildings, but it had now started to rival Avenue Montaigne in the prevalence of townhouses.  [61] As the tour guides would say, the quarter had become a “jewel” of the west of Paris.

44And as the press would put it, Avenue Montaigne was now “in jeopardy” from a planned tramline running from Suresnes, entering central Paris via the Porte de Saint-Cloud and passing by Pont de l’Alma, then taking Avenue Montaigne and passing through the Quartier François 1er, finally turning up Avenue d’Antin to Saint-Philippe du Roule via the Rond-Point (Fig. 5).

Figure 5 – Route of the Suresnes line between l’Alma and Saint-Philippe du Roule, 1898 (Archives de Paris, 25 W 39)

Figure 5 – Route of the Suresnes line between l’Alma and Saint-Philippe du Roule, 1898 (Archives de Paris, 25 W 39)

45This end of the line had everything in it to displease a certain section of society: the laying of tracks along Avenue Montaigne and the promise of extra traffic at the Rond-Point. The public inquiry organized at the mairie of the eighth arrondissement over May and June 1900 could not have cast a less favorable light on the route and, this time, no one on the municipal council spoke up in its defense. It was decided, on July 1, that the line would go no further than the Place de l’Alma.  [62] Councilor Pierre Quentin-Bauchart thanked his colleagues for having rejected the “insane” plan.

46That year’s change in political majority on the municipal council need hardly be mentioned in explaining its passivity on the matter. For the majority of councilors, the need to avoid spoiling this most opulent of districts by having a tramway run through it was obvious, as it had been in the case of Avenue du Bois. For those who might have been appalled at such an exception being made, the battle was lost from the outset, given the prejudice of their fellow councilors and the very clear outcome of the inquiries. Once again, the administration had become the champion of the privileged elite. In February 1900, one engineer wrote:  [63]

47

It should be noted that these affluent streets are entirely lined by townhouses, whose owners nearly all have horses and carriages, and the passengers who might use the tramway, consisting entirely of domestic staff, would not bring the service a substantial profit; rather, because of the daily parking of carriages by the buildings, the traffic would be considerably disrupted by a line being laid.

48It was as if the residents of Suresnes, Boulogne, Auteuil, and Passy—those primarily served by the line—could not possibly have anything to do with Avenue Montaigne or Saint-Honoré.

49On an issue that was indeed of more importance, the council would not be stopped by the prestige of a given location. Take the episode (or episodes) of Rue du Quatre-Septembre. Should the tramway that had recently been opened on Rue Réaumur be extended, or not? No more than a plan under the Second Empire, this street was constructed by the city authorities in 1897, completing the major axis linking the Opéra, the Bourse, and the widened Rue du Temple, near the Place de la République. The additional tram network that had been examined by the general council that year included the extension of an existing line running between République and Romainville in both directions: to Noisy-le-Sec one way and toward the Opéra the other way. This implied that, to get to the Opéra, the line would have to go along the busy shopping street of Rue du Quatre-Septembre, which was lined with highly popular boutiques, including milliners, perfumiers, and jewelers. Manufacturers of bicycles and automobiles, which were luxury products at the time, had opened showrooms there. The upper stories were occupied by banks, currency exchanges, and agencies, not to mention all the tailors, couturiers, florists, and plumassiers.  [64] In short, Quatre-Septembre was a mixed street, combining lucre and luxury, its various commercial activities sheltered by the marble and stuccos of the luxury apartments above.

50We might well imagine the protests by shopkeepers and property owners during the public inquiry held toward the end of 1897. A tramline would hamper deliveries, and customers would be dismayed to find the street overly cluttered:

51

The great number of top luxury commercial premises attract a wealthy clientele, who will always arrive in private carriages or cabs, which park in front of the shop entrances, sometimes in two lines, while purchases are made.

52This would inevitably lead to ruin for businesses, and to unemployment for domestic staff. Despite all the protests, and even in spite of the administration’s hostility, the municipal council came out in favor of the plan in March 1898, and the commission of inquiry endorsed its choice.  [65] As far as the council was concerned, a line going as far as the Opéra would be a positive outcome of the millions of francs spent on opening up Rue Réaumur route, as it would help large numbers of workers from the east of Paris and the outer districts to make their daily trips to the central western part of the city to serve the numerous fashion and luxury industries located there, not least the major fashion houses on Rue de la Paix, Place Vendôme, and Avenue de l’Opéra. Some councilors and others voiced the objection that the metro would soon fulfil the same role in any case, with talk of an east-west cross-city route between the twentieth arrondissement and the Opéra. At that time, however, those plans were merely on paper, and this “transversal” route—today’s line 3—would not open until 1905. The regular service on the Noisy-le-Sec-Opéra line opened in May 1900, and the trading aristocracy had to resign themselves to the plebeian tramway going past.

53Paradoxically, it was the construction of metro lines that rekindled the disputes over the tramway. In June 1902, the company that ran the line, l’Est parisien, warned that the metro works would trigger subsidence on Rue du Quatre-Septembre and Rue Réaumur, which could be highly dangerous for the traction system used—the Diatto stud contact system.  [66] The company was right to issue this warning, to the administration’s embarrassment. What, then, should be done? Should the service be suspended? The line was said to serve “such an obvious requirement” that such a measure “would provoke general and absolutely justified protest on the part of the public.” The company had to resort to using a trolleybus on the route, although it was among the “most central and luxurious in the capital.” There were vigorous debates at that time in the two councils on the issue of installing overhead wires: the suburbs were for, the center was against, and those living on the outskirts were divided on the matter. Accusations were traded about playing into the hands of transportation companies for which the trolleybus was the most profitable solution. On January 16, 1902, a majority on the general council resolved that, in future, “no trolleybus shall be . . . authorized in Paris.”  [67] In July of that year, when the Prefect of the Seine requested the municipal council to provisionally authorize the setting up of a trolleybus line along the two roads, it was flatly rejected, despite the pleas of Émile Landrin, Socialist municipal councilor for the twentieth arrondissement:  [68]

54

One sure fact is that, since the Opéra-Place de la République line was opened, a great many inhabitants of the city center have come to reside in our quarters . . . The administration may seek to consider all means of avoiding the trolley, but it should not deprive a whole population of means of transportation through fear of offering some Parisians a less agreeable view for just a few months.

55Gabriel Bertrou, who represented the district around Rue du Quatre-Septembre  [69] in the second arrondissement, replied to Landrin:

56

Can you concede that the traders of Rue Réaumur and Rue du Quatre-Septembre are being inconvenienced both by the roadworks and by the presence of the trolleybus?

57The prefect took it upon himself to authorize a period of works for the trolleybus line, and the wires were installed. Over the next few years, there followed an avalanche of complaints, petitions, administrative measures, and litigation.  [70] The last remaining trolley poles were not dismantled until June 1909, when the company successfully installed a caniveau system on the tracks (using an under-road conduit for power supply), which was reliable but very expensive. In the end, the city agreed to grant the company an advance of 965,000 francs, and the tramline was re-established as it had been in 1900.

58The opposing attitudes of those involved are clear from the accounts of these disputes. On one side was the determination of the municipal councilors, albeit on two occasions they bowed down before the equipages, like true pannés; on the other side was clear hostility from the prefectural authorities toward any potentially disruptive route. Lépine, who had intervened in the Rond-Point affair, was a socialite police chief;  [71] the following year, Charles Blanc, briefly Lépine’s successor, used his influence to keep Rue du Quatre-Septembre free from tram tracks. And what did the engineers at the Prefecture of the Seine have to say? They knew how to be pragmatic, in any case, as with the trolleybus situation, and the roads service took a close interest in a proposal to use pedestrian underpasses for crossing Avenue du Bois. The Director for Architecture and Walkways put a stop to that idea, however, noting that the access paths and entrances to these underground passages “would harm the appearance of the whole avenue.”  [72] Traffic was always seen as a matter of social choice rather than a technical problem, and civil servants like these were in fact the best allies of those who always felt that the tramway was an intolerable intrusion.

A conspiracy against Paris

59The anti-tramway arguments based on traffic jams supposedly created by the existence of tracks or on the apparent depreciation of residential and commercial property prices are as old as the tramway itself, and it would serve no purpose to re-examine them. If one might ascribe any “merit” to the incidents that have been described above, it was to have generated an unusually stark discourse of exclusion and political and social disdain.

60The “barbarians’ tramway” article that featured in L’Écho de Paris in March 1897 was written by a well-known journalist at the time, Edmond Lepelletier, once left-wing, but later very much on the right, albeit with no royalist or Bonapartist sympathies.  [73] This article would be followed by another in the same vein in 1898, written at the time of Avenue du Bois affair.  [74] For Lepelletier, the crossing of the Rond-Point was a low blow by the municipal council:

61

The raucous, all-conquering appearance of the tramway on the Champs-Élysées, breaking the line of the equipages, blocking the road to bourgeois cabs, and interrupting the ascent of walkers toward the trees of the Bois [de Boulogne] is no simple road operation or modification to public transportation services; it is a decisive attack on the part of the masters of Hôtel de Ville against an area of the city that is unfamiliar, almost alien to them, of whose population they are jealous and whom they seek to offend, humiliate, and punish.

62This foolish initiative was said to stem from “class antagonism”—like the “builder who, out of malice and envy-driven animosity, rubs his plaster-smeared shirt on the clean sleeve of your black frock coat when he passes you.” The “dense hordes” of those “migrating from the east, north and south, from Montrouge” had been sent, he insisted, to lay siege to the “wealthy territories to which access has long been forbidden,” on the orders of these modern-day Attilas:

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Oh, they are no longer at our gates, these present-day Goths and Hans [sic]; rather, they are right in the heart of the city, which they upset and ravage, heralding the debasement, disruption, and obstruction of the most beautiful city in Europe . . . venting their destructive fury in the invaluable spaces of western Paris.

64Lepelletier’s article became famous thanks to its title, Le tramway des Barbares. The phrase was adopted by the press; use of the expression blossomed among the public, repeated by people who may not have read the article.  [75] But where did this striking image of barbarians come from? One thinks of the famous article published in the Journal des Débats on December 8, 1831, written shortly after the Canut revolts in Lyon in November of that year as a cry for help directed toward the bourgeoisie of the day: “The barbarians threatening our society are not to be found in the Caucasus or in the steppes of Tartary; they are in the suburbs of our industrial cities.” The article outraged both the workers and the republicans of the day.  [76] Ozanam’s well-known call of “Passons aux barbares” (“Let us go over to the barbarians),” which appeared in Le Correspondant in early February 1848, was a direct allusion to these polemics. The image of barbarians scrabbling at the gates of Paris persisted, and in 1870 took on the face of that other invader, the Prussian.  [77] It reappeared in Lepelletier’s article at the end of the century, seemingly echoing the Débats piece—evoking Lepelletier’s militant youth in the 1860s, when Ozanam’s text, which was felt to be outrageous, was still discussed. The image was also used for the cause of “the Parisian west,” which lived under the threat of destruction by “migrating” people or those brutes at city hall.

65The radical majority on the municipal council had been infuriating the right-wing press for some time—this was just before the nationalist wave of 1900. In 1897, the newspapers frequently mocked these louts who held power—they did not know any Latin, and they all came from Saint-Flour in the Auvergne.  [78] These councilors were ascribed the language of cunning rogues plotting a devilish coup: the Champs-Élysées was supposedly “the meeting place for high [society], so it needs to take a hit.”  [79] One Figaro reader suggested that the number of these “suburban councilors” should be halved so that they could not pass laws over the “quarters of the center.”  [80] Radicalism was marked out as the enemy.

66The scorn of the newspapers was all the more acute as they believed in the effects of the shady municipal scheme denounced by Lepelletier: the destruction of Paris’s elegance due to democratic intrusions. The most magnificent, unparalleled locations in the world would be deflowered—indeed, “the most beautiful avenue in the world” was already a cliché for the Champs-Élysées—and the patrician lifestyle was set to be shattered. The construction of tram tracks across Avenue du Bois meant nothing less than the demise of splendor and luxury. To resist the tramway was to serve the noblest of Parisian causes: that of luxury itself. The producers of luxury goods had a natural outlet in the quartiers élégants of Paris: wealthy foreign visitors flocked there, drawn by “the aristocratic, sumptuous character” of the locality.  [81] This was a commonplace idea in such circles. As Councilor Quentin-Bauchart said to his colleagues, one should not lose sight of the fact that “it is wealthy people and foreigners who make Paris’s fortune.”  [82] This brings the words of Louis Binder in 1877 to mind: “Paris is big enough to set aside some of its public streets for luxury.” His son and successor Maurice, who became a Bonapartiste member of parliament for the eighth arrondissement in 1893, when questioned on the matter of the Rond-Point, told the chamber:  [83]

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I confess I find it hard to comprehend the desire of the Socialist Party to put off and to drive out of Paris, whether sooner or later, those people who, precisely because of the luxury trades, contribute so frequently and so broadly to supporting the working population to a certain extent (“Very good!” from several benches; interruptions on the far left).

68The coachbuilder did not just mean that foreigners would now shun Paris, but that the rich would abandon it, causing ruin and unemployment.

69It was in this tone that the cause of the opulent Rue du Quatre-Septembre, in its clash with the tramway, was backed by a certain Ernest Levallois. President of the Chambre syndicale des tissus et nouveautés de France (the French Fabrics and New Products Union) and appointed mayor of the second arrondissement in 1907, Levallois published a collection of his aesthetic and administrative essays three years later under the title Paris propre! The main work in the collection was headed “The criminal tramway.”  [84] For Levallois, the “wide, airy, elegant roadways” where luxury commerce could smoothly thrive, attracted a foreign clientele and thereby generated “a considerable contribution to enhancing public wealth.”  [85] Paris was the meeting place of the world, and these places of excellence had to be protected as the city’s pride and joy. The “madness of traffic” represented by the tramway had supposedly ruined the businesses on Rue du Quatre-Septembre and Rue Réaumur. Adieu to “the luxury shops, the large, airy offices, the workshops and the fitting rooms of our most wonderful artists in feminine attire.” This prose was accompanied with photographs revealing the devastated quarter, plus a sketch of the scene and the murder weapon (Fig. 6).

Figure 6: Sketch featured in Ernest Levallois, Paris propre! (Paris: E. Cornély, 1910), unnumbered double page

Figure 6: Sketch featured in Ernest Levallois, Paris propre! (Paris: E. Cornély, 1910), unnumbered double page

70If we are to believe the defenders of Paris as a city of elegance, these repeated attacks had no shades of social benefit. This was repeatedly said about the line that was to cut across Avenue du Bois. A number of people who made submissions to the public inquiry were adamant that the districts served were “completely devoid of both business and commercial premises,”  [86] and Lepelletier, in his 1898 article, asked: “Where are the workers on Avenue Malakoff?” In fact, a number of major industrial concerns had been set up there.  [87] Moreover, the same contributors to the inquiry had no fear in arguing against the tramway, since Avenue de Malakoff was already heavily congested with huge trailers carrying cut stone for the construction of new buildings in Passy. For the time being, that was seen as justification for the congestion.

71The tramline coming in from the east as far as the Place de l’Opéra gave rise to ironic and contemptuous articles. Had it been opened “for the convenience of Noisy-le-Sec residents wishing to visit Rue de la Paix?”  [88] Were people to believe “that there are so many regulars at the Opéra with business in the middle of Ménilmontant and so many Ménilmontant residents with subscriptions for the Opéra?”  [89] One high-society magazine later claimed that “the unspeakable tramway on Rue du Quatre-Septembre” was primarily useful for hoodlums to come into the city center to shove children around and molest women.  [90] It was nonetheless hard to contend that this line extension had been a complete aberration. Even if a “new barbarians’ tramway” was a threat, the residents of Romainville had now become “very Parisian” and “expect to be transported down the length of Rue du Quatre-Septembre.”  [91] Developments in the construction of the metro had demonstrated the line’s considerable success, and hence its usefulness. In 1911, Levallois wrote that the “regular influx from the suburbs into Paris” had become indispensable by that time, and that a transportation service was a necessity: it meant “the working population arriving for work fresh and well rested after spending the night in the silence of their country cottages.”  [92] The question now was how to resolve the conundrum of “transporting” workers into the city without compromising the industries whose prosperity they serviced.

72In the case of the Opéra, the solution offered by the defenders of Rue du Quatre-Septembre was to stop the tramcars at the Bourse, or rather just short of it, at the corner of Rue Joquelet (now Rue Léon-Cladel), where there was a suitable median strip in the roadway. “Belleville residents will suffer no inconvenience stepping off the tram at the Place de la Bourse, 200 m from Rue Louis-le-Grand,” the municipal council heard in 1898.  [93] The councilors representing the second arrondissement returned to the charge during the imbroglio caused by the metro works. “In saving passengers on their way to the Opéra a walk of some two or three hundred meters,” said Gabriel Bertrou, “you will be sacrificing one of the most prosperous districts of Paris!”  [94] A little later, Levallois recommended stopping the line opposite Sentier metro station, even though this required a free transfer to the Place de l’Opéra to be put in place. Indeed, it was asked, “what would it be, even on foot, to go from Rue Dussoubs to the Opéra?”  [95] Levallois’ thinking was similar to that of Adolphe Alphand previously: that a trip to the Bois de Boulogne provided an opportunity for a healthy walk, and to that of Pierre Quentin-Bauchart regarding the Rond-Point, for the sake of which the tramway had to be halted further up its route:  [96]

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Travelers will have only a few hundred meters to walk for their connection . . . I am convinced that the public will not grumble in accepting an arrangement that will save the most beautiful promenade in Paris.

74Some people tried to come up with technical solutions to put the tramway underground. François Froment-Meurice, the nationalist councilor for la Madeleine, had suggested that an underpass be constructed under the Rond-Point, with elevators to lower and elevate the tramcars—an “original design, but requiring considerable expense,” his colleagues concluded.”  [97] Froment-Meurice revived the idea before the general council in 1909, featuring underpasses beneath the Place Saint-Augustin for the tramways serving Boulevard Haussmann and Boulevard Malesherbes, complete with sidewalks for pedestrians.  [98] Might this barbarians’ tramway in fact prove to be a spur to innovation?

75Was the catastrophist narrative always genuine? Did Lepelletier and Levallois truly believe that a few meters of track would spell bankruptcy for Paris’s grands couturiers or drive the city’s gentry to the other side of the world? What they certainly could not abide was the intrusion of mechanized transport into their familiar space, carrying people who had no business being there or who at least ought to be entirely discreet about it. This was the expression of a widespread class sentiment. Installing a tramway at the Rond-Point would be the equivalent of the municipal council abolishing service stairs in the homes of the rich.

76Is segregation part of the nature of urban conurbations, either imposed from on high, as in the west of Paris, or as a result of many individual choices, with the exclusionary effects hardly noticeable because they can be taken for granted? It took a vulgar form of transportation to venture into aristocratic territory for an acute siege mentality to emerge and express itself among local residents. What could public policy achieve in the face of this proudly held sense of separation? Quite a lot, in fact. The tramway conquered Paris, penetrating even into forbidden territory—but not without vigorous resistance. In more modern times, the Loi relative à la solidarité et au renouvellement urbains, or Loi SRU for short (the Solidarity and Urban Renewal Act), which was passed in December 2000, has imposed a minimum level of social housing in populated districts, and is now said to be having a positive effect on social mixing in communities. Yet such victories are only ever the fortunate outcomes in a battle destined always to be fought again: at the root of these things lies not some unknown feature of “the city” or a human characteristic, but society, which imprints the inequalities of which it is constituted on minds and on spaces.

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