PARIS: HISTORY, REVOLUTION AND THE METRO

Paris: surely no one has anything else to say about it (although the marvellous
moment of comedy reported in the New York Times and seen on YouTube, with an
American model having a dizzy fling at a quiz and proposing that Budapest was the
capital of France - she couldn’t think of any other European country, nor had she
actually heard of ‘Budapest’; ‘Hungry!?’ she exclaimed when told the answer, ‘Well,
I’ve heard of Turkey!’ does suggest that some people might not know anything about
Paris at all). But since I did live there between 1976 and 1978 and have been
captivated by the place – or perhaps an image of it – ever since, I feel I have a slight
claim to write about it.

Although ‘captivated’ by Paris, I have not been able to spend more than a couple of
days there until recently, when I spent some time in a studio on rue Dauphine, just
near rue St Andre des Arts in the Latin Quarter.

In 1976 we lived in a small apartment in rue Santos Dumont in the 15th arrondisment,
midway between three metro stations, Convention, Plaisance and Vaugirard. Until
then my interest in France had been nourished not at all by the study of French at
school, alas, but by the tumultuous events of May 1968, at which time I was a
government student at the University of Sydney.

What a wonderful time to be a student of politics! We had the Great Proletarian

Cultural Revolution in full frenzy in China, with the West facing what was seen as an
appalling, nuclear armed, revolutionary menace, the Vietnam war reaching its
apocalyptic apogee, Indonesia emerging from the turmoil of Sukarno and
‘Konfrontasi’, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the assassinations of
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in the same year, the Prague Spring, the
Mexico City Olympics with the famous black power salutes of Smith and Carlos
(with the support of Australia’s silver medallist Peter Norman), incendiary groups
such as Baader Meinhof, Students for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen and
Black Panthers traumatising society, and students everywhere challenging the
authorities, and nowhere more so than in Paris where in May 1968 (yes, forty years
ago!) the government of Charles de Gaulle was brought to the brink of collapse.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the charismatic French student leader, and author of ‘Obsolete
Communism, the Left Wing Alternative’ was my hero, and I actually painted the
words ‘Viva Red Danny’ (showing that I didn’t know my French) on the footpath near
Killara station, among other subversive acts.

So when I went to France in 1976 it was more to experience the afterglow of mai’68
than anything else, and amongst the foreign students that I met, many were thrilled
that the tenth anniversary would be coming soon. And the thrill remained - visits to
the University de Vincennes, set up to corral the radicals in an enclosure of their own
design, showed me a university that was an anarchic place of ideas, energy and
disorder, populated by activists, subversives, ratbags and refugees from everywhere.
Its famous far left philosophy department had had as its head Michel Foucault (if
‘head’ is the right word to use for a place that had no perceptible order). Cohn-Bendit
had been expelled to Germany years earlier, but his idea of the university as a centre
of revolution to challenge the capitalist hegemony, first hatched when he was a

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student at the University of Nanterre, was thriving in the chaos of Vincennes; and
Paris student circles buzzed with rumours that he would return in time for the
anniversary.

But of course I also discovered an extraordinarily multi-faceted city that astonished

me from the minute we arrived at Gare du Nord and still does. The intellectuals who
had supported the student movements and were themselves internationally known and
controversial, people such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, were then
alive and living in Paris. It was a powerful thing to feel their presence; most students
would occasionally go to the cafes that their writing had made famous, even if we
couldn’t afford more than a coffee there. I once saw Sartre coming out of his
apartment building on Boulevard Raspail – the oddly turned eye was unmistakable –
and walking slowly up to La Coupole on Boulevard Montparnasse where he was said
to lunch every day. Even the Irish postmodernist, Samuel Beckett, recipient of the
croix de guerre for his support of the resistance, lived in Paris, as did combatants and
fugitives representing every imaginable political cause in exile, from Eritreans to
Iranians. The nouveaux philosophes such as Bernard Henri-Lévy and André
Glucksmann were about but their rightist swerve had yet to make an impact.

By the time we moved into rue Santos-Dumont, after living in a couple of cheap
hotels (the same ones that are now well over 100 euros a night), a chambre de bonne
(maid’s room) in the very bourgeois Neuilly area, and with an Iraqi man we met
loitering around Gare du Nord (who stole my Mao cap), I realised that even the street
names in Paris told more stories than any other place I had been. With a little research
I learned that Alberto Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian and in his homeland he is
considered the father of aviation. In 1901 he acquired extraordinary fame when he
flew a dirigible from St Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and in 1906 he became the first
person to fly a self-powered aeroplane in Europe. Santos-Dumont was noted also for
his style, and was the person who inspired and popularised the wristwatch (invented
by Louis Cartier who observed that Santos-Dumont needed both hands to pilot his
aircraft). There is a dispute of sorts between Brazil and the United States of America
over who was first, Santos-Dumont or the Wright Brothers (whose earlier flights had
required catapults or other external aids), but, typically, in Australia we had never
heard of him. He was a dreamer who committed suicide in 1932, depressed about the
use of aircraft in war.

This is Paris, I thought, a place that doesn’t name streets after local nobodies or self-
proclaimed bigshots. This led me to consider the names of metro stations. Perhaps it is
the contempt that comes from familiarity, but it seems to me that in Australia we
rarely rise above the mundane in our civic names.

So Convention is named for the Convention Nationale that governed France from
1792 to 1795, overthrowing the monarch and having Louis XVI executed. Plaisance,
altogether more pleasant, is the village that was once there. And Vaugirard is named
for the Roman path which ran through here. In these three stations we find three deep,
distinct historical resonances. Nearby is Volontaires, which honours the volunteers
who in 1793 (year II in the revolutionary calendar) took up arms to defend the
republic against external and royalist threats, and Montparnasse-Bienvenue, a name,
which, as is obvious and like many in Paris, is a composite one. Mount Parnassus was
the mountain in ancient Greece dedicated to Apollo, god of poetry, music and beauty

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(the Parnassians were a group of 19th century French poets). And the whimsical-
sounding Bienvenue? Fulgence Bienvenue was a visionary engineer whose two
outstanding achievements were the improvement in the city’s water supply and the
conception and development of the metro itself. So Greeks, Romans, revolutionaries,
la peuple, poetry, rural idylls and civic eminence are celebrated in a radius of just a
few kilometres.

As I took the metro daily to the Alliance Francais for classes and then to offices all
over Paris to teach English, I marvelled at the richness at every stop. They cover an
immense depth of history, a breadth of geography and honour an amazing ensemble of
people.

To reach the Alliance I usually alighted at Sevres-Babylone. Such resonances! It is

named for a bishop of Babylon, Bernard de Sainte Therese, assigned to serve ‘in
partibus infidelium’, who owned land in this area, and continued to live there as such
bishops were not required to actually live in the lands of the unbelievers. The Sevres
part refers to the town where the royal pottery was established.

I travelled daily on line 1 from Concorde to Argentine. Place de la Concorde, despite

its name, saw the guillotine fall on Louis XVI and thousands of others; Champs
Elysees-Clemenceau recognises both the mythological ‘Elysian Fields’ of the Greeks
and Georges Clemenceau, a politician whose immense contributions included
leadership of the Paris Commune, jail for declaring a republic, publication of Zola’s
famous letter ‘J’accuse’ which took up the cause of the wrongly imprisoned Dreyfus,
and participation with president Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George in the peace
treaty at Versailles at the end of the first world war; Franklin D Roosevelt and
George V remember these two foreign heads of state; Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, as
well as honouring the war hero and president (1959 to 1969) refers to the hair-raising
star shaped roundabout at ground level, with the Arc de Triomphe, constructed by
Napoleon, at its centre; and finally Argentine; all the other South American countries
have streets named after them.

There are nearly 300 stations on the Paris metro (this excludes the RER suburban
lines). Any line, as well as transporting you quickly and cheaply to your above ground
destination, provides stimulation in the names. Writers, scientists and artists are
honoured: Voltaire, Viktor Hugo, Pasteur, Picasso, Raymond Queneau, Michel Ange,
Diderot, Zola and Dumas; many more (including Beckett, James Joyce and numerous
other foreigners) have streets named after them. Great leaders include Robespierre
who was guillotined at the end of his own reign of terror in 1794, Cardinal Richelieu
the brilliant, Machiavellian secretary of state and prime minister in the early 17th
century, and several generals, resistance heroes and politicians.

Many names are so attractive, arouse curiosity or radiate history that you can’t resist
looking further. My favourites include Filles du Calvaire, named for a Benedictine
monastery located here; Temple, after the monastery of the crusading Knights Templar
in the fascinating Marais district; Pere Lachaise, home to the cemetery of that name
where many notables lie including Marcel Proust, Chopin, Moliere, Oscar Wilde and
Jim Morrison; Marcadet Poissoniers, for the fish marketeers who used the route
above into Paris; Cluny la Sorbonne, with the Musee Cluny being housed nearby on
the site of Roman Baths dating from the first century and the 15th century Cluny

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monastery, while the Sorbonne is named for its founder Robert de Sorbon, Confessor
of Louis IX; Gaite, at the centre of an area of theatres and dance halls; Stalingrad,
which immortalises the heroic defence of this city by the Red Army during the second
world war, a defining battle againt Hitler (the Russian city’s name was changed to
Volgograd in 1961); Quatre September, for the date in 1870 when, after a defeat in the
Franco Prussian war, Parisians revolted, overthrew Napoleon III and installed the
Third Republic; La Motte Picquet-Grenelle, La Motte Picquet being a French sailor
who played a part in the American revolution, while Grenelle refers to rural area; and
of course Bastille, site of the prison which was famously stormed on 14 July 1789
igniting the French revolution and giving France its national day.

I like the idea of Paris as a museum of revolution. As the slogan on the poster that I
had on a wall in my student days reads: LA LUTTE CONTINUE!

A version of this story was published in the Australian on 5-6 July 2008