AFTER MY RECENT profession of my fondness for stone, it should come as no surprise that I love the cobblestones of Paris. And as this piece attests, cobblestones are as much a part of Paris’s identity as the Eiffel Tower; old as the city itself, they are also a sign of change.
DAVID DOWNIE lives in Paris with his wife, the talented photographer Alison Harris. Together, they have collaborated on a number of books, including Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light (Broadway, 2011) and several Little Bookroom Terroir Guides, such as Food Wine: Burgundy (2010), Food Wine: The Italian Riviera & Genoa (2008), and Food Wine: Rome (2009). Downie is also the author of Quiet Corners of Paris (Little Bookroom, 2007) and Paris, City of Night (MEP Foreign, 2009), and he wrote for many years for the former Paris Notes, where this piece first appeared (see interview with Downie on this page).
Sous les pavés, la plage.
Under the paving stones lies a beach.
—Slogan of Paris student rioters in 1968
WHAT CITY’S STREETS are paved with dreams and peacock-tail mosaics—thousands of them? No prize if you guessed. The classic Paris cobble is an eight- or tencentimeter granite cube, a pavé mosaïque, laid down in patterns road builders call queues de paön. Many of the capital’s 5,993 streets—totaling over one thousand miles—are cobbled, and cover a quarter of Paris’s surface area. That translates to millions of cobbles, often unseen under the asphalt, and always unsung.
Cobblestones are as much a part of Paris’s identity as the Eiffel Tower. Read a classic from Anatole France to Émile Zola, find a riot or revolution, and cobbles will star in the show. The pavements rose in righteous wrath in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870–71, and again in 1944, when the Nazis decamped. There’s nothing better than cobbles for barricade building or shot-putting. Aux barricades, camarades! And there lies the irony. Cobbles did not disappear when Paris streets were widened, paved, and modernized. Modernization—“Haussmannization”—aimed to rid Paris of medieval alleys, where rioters could ambush troops. The cobbles merely went underground—under the asphalt.
Sound like ancient history? Click forward to times recent enough for hoary fiftysomethings like me to remember. Behind the cobblestone barricades of 1968, rioters shouted not only Aux barricades but also Sous les pavés, la plage—under the paving stones lies a beach. The cryptic chant egged on students to tear up stones as their forebears had, but also hinted at a different world, a beach in the big city.
In reality that “beach” was the sandy layer the cobbles are embedded in—or were. Nowadays sand is mixed with mortar, and joints between cobbles are grouted. Rioters would be hard-pressed to pry them out. That’s telling of our times. So, too, is the current positive value attached to the humble cobblestone, at least for those with green credentials, meaning green politics or a swelling wallet full of greenbacks.
The sometimes idealistic Soixante-huitards of ’68 are as dead today as the barricade builders of rue Royale in 1848. Everyone but commuters, it seems, is embracing cobbles and their petrified relatives as heralds of low-carbon prosperity. Wherever the peacock’s tail is laid down anew or exposed by débitumation—the stripping of bitumen, meaning asphalt—real estate values soar. Neighborhoods are revolutionized not by rioters tearing up cobbles, but by cobble-prone developers, new-paradigm moguls, Greens, and bobos—Paris’s celebrated bohemian bourgeois.
“Cobbleification” is an integral part of pedestrianization and means that streets or neighborhoods are car-free or benefit from restricted traffic flow. In Paris, these areas go by the designations zone piétonnière, aire piétonne, quartier vert, and, most recently, Réseau Vert—a specific pedestrian-cyclist roadway network.
Like other attempts at social engineering through urban planning, Europe’s first and biggest pedestrian zone was created in the 1960s. The Strøget area turned historic Copenhagen into a giant mall, complete with fast-food joints, roughneck street fauna, men dressed as Vikings, and what boosters called “street entertainers”—musicians, performers, artists, jugglers, and fire-swallowers. They’ve become a permanent feature of pedestrian zones worldwide, and a powerful argument against building more of them.
Given the motor-mania of the sixties, Paris was slow to follow Denmark’s lead. The City of Light’s first—and still its largest—pedestrianized area was begun in the mid-1970s. It spread around the former wholesale markets at Les Halles, and the Centre Pompidou at Place Beaubourg. The idea was to redesign European cities such as Paris for cars, creating safe havens for tourists, especially shoppers, in traffic-clogged historic neighborhoods. After the Les Halles/Beaubourg experiment came the Saint-Séverin/Saint-Michel precinct and its wall-to-wall couscous joints and Greek tavernas, an object lesson in how not to master plan a city.
Mallification continued under pro-automobile mayor Jacques Chirac, and the policy only began to morph during the reign of his successor, Jean Tiberi. But with traffic, noise, and air pollution untenable, instead of beginning the process of limiting cars throughout town, Tiberi initiated more refuges. These weren’t the malls of the seventies and eighties, but they maintained the fiction that Paris and cars could live together. The Les Halles/Beaubourg enclave grew, and more were planned and built.
Throughout the late eighties and nineties near rue Montorgueil, northwest of Les Halles, the barricades against traffic went up, creating a fortified city-within-the-city, this time with cobbled streets in white Carrara marble. On the periphery, pneumatically activated telescopic piston bollards—called bornes télescopiques—do today what drawbridges did in the past. They’re linked via audio and video to a remote police squad in a centralized poste de contrôle security HQ, with a 24/7 maintenance crew. Only residents, delivery trucks, and emergency vehicles are allowed into the citadel.
In recent years, the Montorgueil zone has spread to rue Saint-Denis and abutting streets, extending as far as rue Montmartre. Running across it is the first section of Réseau Vert, an experimental linear network of semi-pedestrianized, partly cobbled streets with limited car access. To slow traffic, cobbles also mark intersections and pedestrian crossings elsewhere. For now, Réseau Vert runs from Châtelet to Canal Saint-Martin. It may well prove the twenty-first-century answer to twentieth-century citadel pedestrianization.
Though invented by Green Party planners nearly twenty years ago, Réseau Vert is a weapon in Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë’s anti-vehicular arsenal. The days of denial are over. The mayor’s “de-Haussmannization” campaign to keep cars out of town means pain to drivers will increase until they switch to public transportation, bicycles, and walking.
Aptly, a few hundred yards west of the Les Halles/Beaubourg/Montorgueil/Saint-Denis pedestrian zone–cum–Réseau Vert, in rue du Louvre, is Paris’s Direction de la Voirie et des Déplacements. The roadworks department is on the front line in the war against automotive oppression. Here I met architect Yann Le Toumelin, in charge of the Réseau Vert. Mild-mannered, Le Toumelin is too young to remember Les Halles before the wholesale market became a mall. For Parisians under fifty, Les Halles and the Saint-Séverin/Saint-Michel pedestrian zone “have always been there.”
Longevity isn’t always a measure of success. The mistakes of past pedestrianization—lack of access, increased street noise from cafés and musicians, radical demographic shifts, aggravated congestion on perimeter streets—are being studied from the ground up. “Starting with the cobbles,” said Le Toumelin mildly. “Nothing makes a pedestrian area look and feel more seedy than broken or missing paving stones.”
Some stones crack under the weight of a single delivery truck, he explained, adjusting his frameless designer glasses. While sketching on an A3 sheet, he described the various cobbles and flagstones found in Paris. There are the classic pavés mosaïques in peacock-tail patterns. The best are granite—other stones wear too fast. Second most popular is the pavé échantillon, shaped like a bread loaf in a variety—a Whitman’s Sampler—of colors. They’re rectangular, measuring 20 × 14 × 14 centimeters, and laid out side by side. The dalle is a flat, rectangular flagstone and varies widely in size. Usually gray, heavy, and expensive, dalles are used not only on streets but also on sidewalks, such as those of rue de Rivoli or the Île Saint-Louis. A novelty is the dallette, a smaller flagstone measuring 20 × 30 × 15 centimeters. “They’re tricky to keep in place,” Le Toumelin admitted, citing recent problems in the Marais’s rue Saint-Antoine, fronting the celebrated Baroque church of Saint-Paul.
I left the affable architect’s office having learned a new vocabulary, from débitumer and dépoteletisation to axes civilisés, rallentisseur, dos d’ânes, and gendarme endormie. Whether stripping bitumen off cobbles and removing poles from sidewalks, trying to teach civility to Parisian drivers, or installing cobbled speed bumps and sleeping policemen, Le Toumelin and his department have their work cut out. They can design a pedestrian-friendly world with low sidewalks, handsome paving, ingenious one-ways, and dead ends, plus limited, snail’s pace traffic, but the city of Paris lacks police authority to enforce driving and parking regulations. That’s the job of the Préfecture, which controls the Police d’État, often at odds with the mayor. Paris is the only city in France without its own police force.
The oddity of the situation continues: a major source of revenue for the French government is the tax on gasoline. It varies with petroleum prices and exchange rates, but generally yields about a euro per liter, meaning four to six dollars per gallon. So how much does the government really want to reduce car use? Bankruptcy would probably follow if green policies were ever adopted. On the other hand, the city of Paris depends on revenues from parking violations, so the anti-car war the mayor is waging is not only virtuous, it’s profitable.
Curiouser still, city planners have yet to commission studies to determine whether residents in pedestrianized areas are satisfied and whether, as anecdotal evidence clearly suggests, cobbles lead to gentrification—meaning higher real estate prices and radical shifts in resident profiles, street-level business, and noise problems. Once a policy has been adopted on high, the man in the street either adapts or moves out. Why are there no statistics showing how the demographics of cobbled neighborhoods shift? It’s hard to get eye-witness reports before and after cobbling, for a simple reason: locals of pre-cobble days disappear.
At the top of rue Montorgueil near the Sentier Métro station, the date 1991 is spelled out in cobbles. I remember watching the road workers laying them down, and wondering what Carrara marble had to do with Paris. Back then Alison and I used a ragtag gym in a tumbledown building off this street. Reportedly it was the oldest gym in Paris. We wagered ourselves how long it would be before the bobos showed up. We’ve lived in Paris for decades, in the Marais for over twenty-five years, and have witnessed the changes cobbles bring.
As I strolled down rue Montorgueil on a recent visit, heading toward Les Halles, I couldn’t help being impressed by the chain store bakeries and cafés, designer boutiques, and trendy restaurants, not to mention the offices of Web consultants, artists’ studios, and real estate agencies, most on side streets. Never mind that the Carrara marble pavements wouldn’t stick, and have been replaced by classic cobbles.
It was reassuring to find a handful of traditional places—among them the landmark pastry shop Stohrer, at 51 rue Montorgueil, with a nineteenth-century storefront and painted ceilings. They invented the baba au rhum and puits d’amour. I always bought sweets here after a workout—the gym was next door. The gym is no longer. A luxury apartment complex has replaced it.
The landmark oyster eatery from the mid-1800s, Au Rocher de Cancale (at no. 78), still has its wonderful murals of birds and boozers, and carved wooden oyster decorations outside. Lounging on sidewalk tables, thirtysomethings half hidden by cigarette smoke pecked at their laptops, hooked up via Wi-Fi. Indoors a couple of codgers rustled newspapers and looked distinctly out of place.
The totally un-PC façade of Au Beau Noir (no. 59) is still around, and new neighborhood regulars I buttonholed find the establishment’s dry-cleaning services handy. Further down the road, historic restaurant L’Escargot Montorgueil appears little changed, with its private dining rooms and cozy décor, though most of the snails are imported from eastern Europe nowadays, and the longtime clientele is gone.
For better or worse, the feel of the neighborhood has changed, utterly. As one curmudgeonly butcher told me, Montorgueil has gone from a rough-and-ready “authentic” market street to a certified bobo playground, preferred, it’s claimed, by the gauche caviar. It’s a fact that the Socialist party’s local HQ is on the corner of rues Montorgueil and Léopold-Bellan, but, ironically, given the rents, you have to wonder how much longer the PS will be able to afford it. Real estate sells for 7,500 euros per square meter in the Montorgueil citadel, up tenfold since pre-cobble days, and a thousand euros a month to rent a closet-size studio is typical, among Paris’s highest. There’s no question of chicken or egg. As with Les Halles/Beaubourg/Saint-Denis, the cobbles came first.
Closer to home, I toured the Marais’s newest pocket-size pedestrianized areas, my eyes on the peacocks’ tails and Whitman’s Samplers of cobblestones, not to mention the dalles and dallettes. Most of the Marais was gentrified in the 1980s and ’90s without the help of cobbleification—exception made for streets and squares like Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. But it took the recent repaving and semi-pedestrianization of the old Jewish neighborhood on and around rue des Rosiers, and on rue Saint-Antoine, to complete the process. The boutiques stand cheek by jowl and real estate prices have spiraled up, apparently unaffected by the Great Recession of 2008–10. So far, some longtime residents have held on, anchored by religion, family, and culture. More walkers and bikers than ever crowd in, yet complaints about increased noise are few: the street has always been chaotic.
After months of jackhammering and snarled traffic, another semi-pedestrianized zone was born in 2008 on rue Saint-Antoine, fronting Saint-Paul. If Yann Le Toumelin is right, rues des Rosiers and Saint-Antoine are the way of the future. They’re part of Réseau Vert. Instead of a citadel with piston bollards—which often malfunction, damaging vehicles—other means will be used. They include easy and cheap traffic signals, 15 kph signage, cobbles, and traffic cops to bar the unauthorized. Sidewalks have been widened and lowered, and the poles that keep cars at bay—but hinder strolling—have been removed. No parking is allowed—in theory. Civic sense is key and plainly doesn’t always work. The Saint-Paul experiment and the Réseau Vert in general often feel like war zones, with frustrated drivers facing outraged bikers and pedestrians. Perhaps war is part of the process.
New-generation cobbled areas can only work in tandem with car-hostile roads flanking them, and bikes are essential. The Vélib rental scheme—in which riders pick up and drop off bikes at dozens of parking areas—is astonishingly popular, peaking at over one hundred thousand users a day. With armies of walkers and bikers, drivers will have to yield—or so the theory goes. War? Aux barricades, camarades!
Cobbled, semi-pedestrianized areas continue to crop up around town, from rue Cler in the seventh arrondissement to rue de la Forge-Royale in the eleventh and rue Cavallotti in the eighteenth. If—a big “if”—it is fully implemented, the Réseau Vert roadway network will link these green islands. Much depends on who sits in the mayor’s office. Another irony is, were the whole of Paris to be de-Haussmannized as Mayor Delanoë plans, the first generation of pedestrian citadels might morph back toward normality. They would be absorbed into a saner, gentler, less car-clogged cityscape. No one expects real estate prices to go down within them, or bobos to move out. Once the old-timers have left, they do not return. Meanwhile, investors are watching to see where the cobbles—and bike lanes—are headed next.
