Guest post.

One of Paris’s lesser known (by tourists, anyway) treasures, the 4.5km Promenade Plantée – literally translated as ‘the planted stroll’, and also known as la Coulée verte – is a pleasant walk on the west-east axis of Paris from Opera Bastille to the Périphérique in the east. The section to the Jardin Reuilly is about 2 km. The promenade is elevated above street level on what was formerly a defunct railway viaduct (the railway closed in 1969) of 75 arches. The original red brick arches have been restored, renovated and enclosed with glass. They now house arts and crafts workshops, galleries, furniture showrooms, a restaurant and a café. The walk itself is a tranquil stroll between beautiful garden beds, at an eye-level with third-floor apartments. One can ascend to the viaduct behind the Opera near Bastille(or at Avenue Ledru-Rollin) at the western end. There are other stairs located at intervals.

In the early 1990s, the City of Paris and SEMAEST, Société d’Economie Mixte d’Aménagement de l’Est Parisien, transformed the weed-infested railway line into the Promenade Plantée, although walking along it one would imagine it to be much older.
The design was created by landscape architect Jacques Vergely and architect Philippe Mathieux.

The architects for the Viaduct des Arts were Patrick Berger and Jamine Galiano. The Promenade Plantee was the model for the plan developed by the Friends of the High Line in New York City.

The photo to the right shows a small group of artists completely absorbed in their work. The man in the foreground in the red t-shirt had a tiny palette of water-colour paints which he was using on a very small sheet of paper; all his equipment fitted into a case smaller than an iPad! Just as I took the shot the fellow in the grey jacket ambled with a studied insouciance into the space, making a nice foursome; the artists were so engrossed they looked up at no one.

Below, a gallery of photos from the Promenade and le Jardin Reuilly at the eastern end of my walk. Click to enlarge.

[Show as slideshow]

When I was diligently poring over the canonical 17th century French novel La Princesse de Clèves last year during my French literature class in Melbourne, the last thing I would have imagined was La Princesse becoming a symbol of resistance to President Sarkozy.

Sarkozy seems to have borne a grudge against La Princesse for quite some time. The first sign of it, according to Liberation, was in February 2006, in a speech the president made in Lyon. He said that he’d been amusing himself by reading the exam papers for entry into public service administrative positions. According to him, either a sadist or an imbecile had put on the program questions on La Princesse de Clèves. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve often had cause to ask a clerk what they think of La Princesse de Clèves. Imagine what a spectacle that would be!’

Now, I’m no expert in French literature, but I have a hunch that La Princesse occupies in France a position a little like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) does in English, although a hundred years earlier. Both authors took their respective fictional traditions and made such innovations to the form, and especially to the rendering of human thought and feelings, that these books represented a distinct shift which gave birth to the form of the modern novel.

And that is probably why La Princesse is staple fare in French secondary schools. I wish I could say the same for Sense and Sensibility in the Anglophone world, but alas it is not so, except for students taking specialized literature subjects.

The topic must have continued to weigh heavily on Sarkozy’s mind, though, as he brought it up again in July last year at a teaching seminar, implying what a waste of time it was to have to devote any time to La Princesse, and telling how he himself had ‘suffered under her’. From the video, it appears he got a few laughs, although that may have been due to the stand-up comic quality of his delivery.

You don’t have to be French to know that to make fun of what a public service clerk may or may not think of a French classic is rather at odds with notions of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

In any case, this performance was one too many for the university lecturers who are already opposing Sarkozy’s efforts to ‘reform’ higher education (read: make it more like Anglophone higher education). On February 16th this year, lecturers and others opposed to Sarkozy staged several marathon public reading of La Princesse, one of which was outside the Pantheon. Readers took turns, one of them being the wonderful young actor Louis Garel, who starred in the 2008 remake of the story, titled La Belle Personne, set in a Parisian lycée (the film having been made in protest at Sarkozy’s dismissive comments).

I had to quit my literature class last year before finishing La Princesse unfortunately, but I shall persevere with her, encouraged by feeling I am—if only vicariously—part of the movement that seems to be gathering momentum in France.

There are even multiple Facebook sites in support of the movement, and the book is reportedly sold out in many bookshops. And according to an article in the UK Guardian on March 31, award-winning French writer Régis Jauffret is expressing his protest by encouraging every French citizen to mail Sarkozy a copy of La Princesse.

As my friend Marc Cogan commented in the previous post, the recent general strike had as its unofficial slogan Sarkozy’s comment, although this time directed back at him, “Casse-toi, pauv’ con” – “Bugger off, you sorry asshole.” Around two-thirds of the marchers were wearing this slogan in some form, and Marc managed to get a photo of one of them, wearing it stuck to her hair.

Statistics I heard on Radio France this week may help to put this in some context: over two million (7.8% of the population) are now unemployed in France, with youth being the hardest-hit demographic. This is much higher than in Australia, where we have over half a million, or 4.8%, unemployed.

(by guest blogger Marc Cogan)

Last Thursday’s general strike and supporting march were big successes, both from an organizational perspective, and as spectacle. Even the weather had already chosen sides, as the newspaper Libération, said, and it was sunny and warm throughout France. The weather swelled the crowds and buoyed their spirits.

The parade was much longer than at the equivalent march in support of the January strike. The organizers were a little cannier, too. There’d be a lull in the marchers, and you’d think, “Ah, that must be the end of it.” But no, all of a sudden new marchers would appear, in large numbers and dense ranks. Parade marshalls were stopping marching groups and holding them while others turned up, concentrating their numbers, and giving a new impetus to the line.

There were groups of every sort, and for every interest and taste, from the always present Lycée Darius Milhaud, to the Cinémathèque nationale, which may not have had the best sign, simply a hand-scrawled ‘Cinemateque francaise en grève!’, but had its own marching band.

There were marchers from Radio France International, protesting cutbacks and ministerial incomprehension of their mission of teaching languages, and especially of spreading France throughout the world.

And then there was a most unlikely labor unit, the public statisticians. Energy levels were high, and I was struck by how much these young people reminded me of the revolutionaries in Delacroix’ Liberty Leading the People as young marchers swept through the Place de la Bastille passing in front of the July Column commemorating that very revolution. Over it all, the Genie of Liberty seemed a benign inspiration, accompanied by this cheerfully low-tech balloon leaflet distribution system.

But behind the public display, there was an edge to this manifestation that had been missing from the January strike and demonstration. The world economy has worsened, and France is coming to recognize that as budget cuts hit home. The unofficial slogan of the January march—worn as a sticker by a good two-thirds of the marchers—was the punning and almost hippy-ish “Rêve générale.” At Thursday the 19th’s march the all-but-official slogan (it appeared on full-size posters as well as on stickers worn by the marchers) had a new, bitter edge. It was Sarkozy’s comment from last year’s agricultural salon to the man who said, when Sarko was working the crowd and extended his hand to be shaken, “Don’t touch me.” Sarko replied, without any hesitation: “Casse-toi, pauv’ con”—“Bugger off, you sorry asshole.”

This entry is written by my dear friend and guest blogger Marc Cogan:

Carolyne and I went together to a curious exhibition at the Hôtel de Sens in the Marais: “Photochromie: voyage en couleur 1876–1914,” that is, of nineteenth century color photographs. Until fairly recently, I labored under the misconception that until 1948, let’s say, the world existed in black and white. While my father naturally appeared to me in color in daily life, photos of him from World War Two proved that those events occurred in some black and white parallel universe.

Recently, to my surprise, I discovered that the Lumière brothers invented the first process for manufacturing color-sensitive emulsions in 1896. (Photos using their plates from the First World War make us look at those long ago scenes with an entirely new eye.) As it happens—to my second surprise—color photography antedates the Lumière brothers’ invention by several decades. Some 300 examples of these earliest color photos provide the content of this exhibit.

“Photochrome,” the name given this earlier process, involved taking the same photo through different color filters (three at least, more in certain versions of the process), with the resulting images inscribed onto separate plates, which would then be inked in different colors. As in a color lithograph, the final print was produced by running paper through the press for each of the colors.

The results are mixed, I would say. To have color images of scenes from the nineteenth century is, as you would imagine, astounding. But the process of multiple printing has the collateral effect of blurring the sharp lines of the original photograph. The final image loses some of its presence and conviction. It looks, in a word, less photographic; I’m happy that these photos exist, but I think I  prefer the Lumière brothers’ products.

Of course, the real star of the exhibit was the Hôtel de Sens itself. Going to the exhibit was merely a pretext for getting into the Hôtel, which has been closed to visitors for these last two years while undergoing repairs. Built for the Archbishop of Sens between 1475 and 1519, it is the most radiant example of late Gothic domestic architecture in the city of Paris. It is also home to the Bibliothèque Forney, the foremost research library in Paris for the fine and decorative arts.

(The photography exhibit is on until April 18.)

At the cafe in the Place de la Sorbonne

Victorians go out alone far more than Australians in the other states, according to a new survey I heard about on ABC Radio this morning. This started me thinking about how much I enjoy travelling alone. It’s not that I’m anti-social—quite the opposite, in fact. And that’s precisely why I love travelling alone: locals are far more likely to talk to you when you’re alone than when you are in a group. I have sat alone in Paris bistros, for meals or just for a coffee, countless times; on the majority of occasions a fellow diner or even a waiter has started a conversation with me.

A few years ago, I was staying near the Sorbonne, and made it a habit to have a mid-morning coffee and read Le Monde in one of the Cafes in the Place de la Sorbonne. It was the time of the referendum about the European Constitution, and each day there were articles in the newspaper outlining the reasons to vote Yes or No, which I laboured over, looking up many words in my pocket French dictionary. It wasn’t a busy period in the cafe, and one of the waiters in particular always made time for a quick chat, after greeting me with, ‘Bonjour, c’est l’etudiante de la constitution Européenne!’

One evening, quite late, I called in to the same café for a drink on my way home. The evening was not too cold, so I sat outside. My usual waiter wasn’t there, but that didn’t matter. As I was drinking my chocolat chaud, a man came along, looking rather down and out, and holding out a bottle of something that he was trying to sell, saying he needed to buy himself a meal. Before the few of us sitting at the tables could think of what to say or do, one of the waiters walked up to the man, took him gently by the arm, and led him inside the restaurant, saying he would find him something to eat.

As well as in Paris, I’ve sat alone in cafes in Melbourne, London, Brussels, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Tokyo, and possibly quite a few other places that I’ve forgotten. But I’ve never forgotten that waiter’s action, and I’ve never seen it occur anywhere else, although it probably does. When I find myself having to tolerate yet another stupid tourist’s tale about the ‘rudeness’ of Parisian waiters, I sometimes tell this story.