Steps and stones

In the two narrow streets where our third floor apartment overlooks a corner the most reverberating sounds are the scooter engines flitting by day and night, and the clickety -clack of shoe heels against the pavement, until the last neighbors have retired home. It is summer and as people like to stay up and enjoy the cooler evenings their conversations flow out of the open windows, a higher-pitched, staccato sound over the background buzz of the great city around us.

We are just three blocks south of Saint Antoine, a busy thoroughfare that becomes rue de Rivoli to the West, and, to the East, across the Bastille with its high green column crowned by golden angels and its carousel of cars swirling around it, becomes the rue du Faubourg de Saint Antoine. This is revolutionary Paris; even today the great convocations of the left meet where the Bastille used to stand and unfold toward the Place de la Republique, further North. The column commemorates the three days in June 1830 when the people of Paris rose up to overthrow the ancient, tired, inept Bourbon monarchy, who, as the saying goes “neither learns nor forgets”.

Few cities in the world have a history as soaked in blood as Paris. A very fanciful writer said that if you stepped hard enough on the cobblestones of what is today the place de la Concorde, you could see the blood seeping up. The romantic Seine flows over myriad bones. As late as the 1960’s the Paris police rounded up Algerians in the wake of a succession of terrorist bombings, and stupidly dumped hundreds of their bodies into the river, where they bloated and floated. Modern attempts to clean up the Marsellaise, the French national anthem, eliminating that part of its lyrics that refers to the enemies’ blood soaking the homeland furrows, have successfully been resisted.

Cobblestones, that other component of the romantic haze, have been the people’s weapon of choice, century after century. A call to the barricades was a call to dig up the streets and use the stones to obstruct the way of the cavalry. After the violent and protracted student uprising in 1968 the municipality finally decided to repave the Boulevard St. Germain with asphalt.

The relationship between the French Government of whatever stripe and the people of Paris, be they subjects or citizens, has always been fraught. The temper of the city is skeptical and sour towards whoever holds power. In spite of being the cradle of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the French nation has loved few of its rulers, and those it loved often showed little respect for that document. The Revolution was not made for love or by charismatic men and women, it was driven by indignation and power-grabbing.

Napoleon, to a point, was loved because of the adroit propaganda that he unleashed around his person. The concept of French glory and grandeur he took from the overthrown monarchy; but when the cost of so much war started to weigh too heavily, the love was gone.

De Gaulle was probably more respected than loved to the end. Fortunately he was a wonderful foil for cartoonists and comedians, who imitated and spoofed his style, manner and diction, thus bringing him nearer to everyday man.

The most recent uprising of Parisians in the latter years of the 1900’s was against the building of skyscrapers in down-town Paris; a protracted media campaign under the motto “Paris-Las Vegas, a city that only Americans could love” after the Tour Montparnasse was built, pushed developers towards the outskirts in La Défense, and the Francois Mitterand National Library was planted out of the way upstream of classical Hausmannian Paris.