Janus would feel at home
in Paris. The two-headed Roman god of doorways, passages and
bridges would surely delight in the city with its thirty-seven
river crossings and extensive labyrinth of little known entrances
and tunnels that are buried below the boulevards and which
give a fascinating and unique expression to the capital.
At street level Paris is particularly Janus-faced. It is one
of the worlds most multifaceted and diverse cities, a public
and private metropolis that is made up of reality and illusion,
fact and mythology expressed through politics, art and architecture.
It is a city of passion, of bloody histories and turbulent
regimes that have produced a lifetime of stormings, terrors,
revolutions, sieges, communes, occupations and liberations
that have shaped it both physically and spiritually. The allure
of Paris is so great that more than one powerful man has been
moved to great declarations: to secure the French throne Henri
IV changed his religion for her; Napoléon Boneparte
proclaimed her ‘the most beautiful city in the world’;
and Hitler would have had her burn rather than outshine Berlin.
But it is not just emperors, kings and dictators that have
influenced the face of Paris. Artists including Monet, Degas
and Toulouse Lautrec have contributed to the Parisian illusion
with work that is familiar the world over; and writers from
de Beauvoir and Collette, to Hemingway and Orwell all add
a layer to the myth. Music successfully perpetuates the fable:
the tremulous voice of Piaf adds fragility to the Parisian
face; the Folies-Bergère gives expression to uncontrollable
exuberance; whilst the Moulin Rouge more than hints at the
simmering sexuality of the French capital. Above all, Paris
has a romantic aspect and has hosted great love affairs from
Héloïse and Abelard to Napoléon and Josephine.
The physical face of Paris is provided by the grandiose architecture
of the great city planners from Phillipe Auguste, Louis XIV
and Haussmann to Mitterand’s Grands Projects. There
is a homogeneity to the city’s buildings many of which
have been constructed from locally excavated limestone, but
despite architectural harmonisation there is also diversity:
the great Gothic structure of Notre-Dame; the red brick and
stone of the sixteenth-century place des Vosges; the sumptuously
Baroque seventeenth-century Eglise de Val-de-Grâce;
the grandly neo-classical Place de la Concorde; and the emphatic
Eiffel Tower. The twentieth-century has also added its touch
to the city with Nouvel’s Institute du Monde Arabe and
Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale.
These are the showy, flamboyant and very public faces of Paris.
There is however a quiet, intimate and undisclosed face of
the French capital that is integral both to its physical structure
as well as its spiritual being. It is Janus in introspective
mood.
Below the graceful boulevards lie miles of dank, subterranean
galleries; they are a result of city planning every bit as
impressive as that above the surface. The underground galleries
make their way through limestone and gypsum quarries found
under the capital. The excavation of these quarries began
in about the twelfth century when they provided the raw material
needed to build the city, including Notre Dame. Extractions
were made indiscriminately: when a quarry had been stripped
of its contents it was abandoned and vacuums developed below
the city that caused potential danger to the people and buildings
on the surface.
Please note: The above essays and dissertations were written by students and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.
