Eric Hazan - A walk through Paris: a radical exploration

In The Trip Across Paris, a film by Claude Autant-Lara from 1956, Jean Gabin and Bourvil walk through the night of the Occupation, made darker than usual by air-raid precautions that have put out the street lamps and covered the windows with blackout paper. The two rogues, carrying heavy suitcases filled with pork, proceed from the Rue Poliveau to the Rue Lepic from the Jardin des Plantes to Montmartre. This was a very famous film in my youth, and even today Gabins Poor bastards! has the ring of a popular phrase. The story may well have inspired my title for this book, and perhaps the entire project, even if it has nothing in common with the adventures of Gabin and Bourvil, in which encounters with policemen in cycle capes, black-market traffickers, German patrols and ladies of the night, all to the sound of sirens, are comic episodes whose backdrops make Paris the setting of a night-time dream.

My own path is rather a daytime one, with a different orientation: from Ivry to Saint-Denis, more or less following the dividing line between the east and west of Paris, or what you could call the Paris meridian. I chose this itinerary without much consideration, but later on it became clear to me that it was no accident, that this line followed the meanders of an existence begun close to the Luxembourg garden, led for a long time opposite the Observatoire, and continued further to the east, in Belleville, at the time I am writing, but with long spells in the meantime in Barbs and on the north side of the Montmartre hill. And in fact, under the effect of the peerless mental exercise that is walking, memories have risen to the surface street by street, even very distant fragments of the past on the border of forgetfulness.

If this journey begins at Ivry it is because of a bookstore. Envie de Lire is not simply a shop that sells books, it is also a place of browsing and discovery. The piles of books, often unstable, are not arranged by chance, but linked by a thread that takes a moment to discern. Perhaps you wont find the title youve come to look for, but no matter, you will leave carrying a book of photography or philosophy, a Mexican novel or the memoirs of a forgotten revolutionary. These small premises on the Rue Gabriel-Pri are propitious for discussion, even argument. Readings from new books finish late, and groups on the pavement are in no hurry to disperse as the staff finally bring in the boxes of books open to all under the arcade. The business is a cooperative, so does not have an owner; but R., solidly built as Spaniards can be, is both the soul of the place and the representative of an endangered species, that of poetic communists.

Another reason for choosing Ivry as my starting point is its remarkable town centre, in which Envie de Lire is a lively presence. This is an architectural ensemble unlike anything familiar. Emerging from the Mtro and looking upward, you are struck by a tangle of points, sharp corners, irregular polygons, gangways and planted terraces, all in raw concrete. Small apartment blocks, all designed to be slightly different, are linked by direct contact or by a network of stairways and overhead passages, creating a three-dimensional labyrinth. Enclosed in the general tangle, half a dozen small towers punctuate a landscape whose grey concrete is softened by the overflowing green of the planted terraces.

The architects, Rene Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie, took thirty years to build this ensemble, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, at a time when, in the name of town-planning, the banlieue was falling victim both to zoning different activities pigeonholed into distinct zones and to high-rise blocks and concrete slabs. Their aim, on the contrary, was to superimpose functions, mixing together shops, services, artists studios, crches, schools, offices and housing, in an attempt at collective living made possible by the support of the communist municipality. Rene Gailhoustet herself lives in the quarter that she built. From her terrace planted with fruit trees, she shows me how, by way of these staggered spaces, superimposed and almost attached, connections are established between the tenants. She tells me how she designed the tower apartments to create duplexes with two aspects, and all the tricks she came up with to make this social housing as pleasant as that of the rich.

The exit from the Mairie-dIvry station opens onto a noisy avenue widened into a square. This does not continue eastward, towards the Paris cemetery and Villejuif, being blocked by a hill with a small medieval church on its summit and, behind it, a rural cemetery just a hundred metres from the flow of cars. Traffic is routed towards Paris on a road that bears the name of Ivrys great man, Maurice Thorez. This is bordered with shacks, workshops, garages, small factories, low-rise apartment blocks a landscape you cross without really looking at it, though not lacking in charm. From time to time, you have a view of lower Ivry and the Seine, marked out by the smoke from urban chimneys and the concrete spire indicating the red high-rise of the Cit Maurice-Thorez.