Garden Metaphors in Paris

Paris: A Garden of Urban History

This post is a final essay I wrote for a study abroad program, after travelling to Paris for two weeks. Making Paris Modern, January 2019.

A picture frame sits on the shelf in my grandmother’s bedroom next to her vanity. The vintage photograph inside captures my great-grandmother standing in her backyard garden, on a Finnish island in the summertime. Their “summer place.” My grandma keeps that picture because it’s where her mother was happiest, in her garden. Classic love stories in literature and film have romanticized the mystic of a garden, alluding to the stillness and comfort one feels surrounded by flowers, ivies, and water.

I understand Paris, France as a beautifully mystical-romantic-copious garden. A garden is a work of art about nature, and it encompasses the spectrum of difference between a wilderness and a landscape. The narrative of Paris’s socio-urban development is characterized by the cyclical shifting between a state of wilderness and a state of landscape. First, wilderness as organic growth, then landscape as man’s natural solution, and finally wilderness as a landscape of Ruin, or the degradation of man’s constructions.

The book of Genesis tells one story of mankind by Creation. Paris’s history of geology, agriculture, and the responsibility of work in nature parallels that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden:

“The Lord God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground—trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit. In the middle of the garden he placed the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” (Genesis 2:8-9 NLT).

Man was placed in a natural haven, tasked with working the soil and harvesting the vegetation. First, he was asked to celebrate the organic state of nature. But then, he was asked to exploit nature, to manipulate the brush, and to control this organic growth for his own benefit. He moved through the land to erect new architectures and to revise inefficient systems. This is true of primitive hunter-gatherers, of Medieval feudal lords, and of Baron Haussmann in the 19th century.

Like the dichotomy of ‘good and evil’, of wilderness and landscape, Hazan describes the developmental differences between the Left and Right Banks of Paris. The “asymmetry” of the banks creates an “eloquent contrast…between the magnificent Right Bank of the river and the Left Bank which is not even paved, and still full of mud and filth,” (The Invention of Paris, 87-88). These differences, Hazan claims, are the result of urban development being unequally concentrated within the Right Bank.

Like natural selection, where some species of flowers might thrive in one region and die out in another, a garden seeks to support the superior species. Paris similarly sought to develop the most promising urban projects, which were concentrated in the Right Bank. Thus, pockets of culture, people, food, architectural style, and disease organically sprouted to create the labyrinth network of (Right) Old Paris streets.

The lack of order between those pockets, or the Chaos of Paris as a growing garden, presented a need to organize a new Order.

Thus, Napoleon commissions Baron Haussmann to illustrate a new ideal landscape from the existing Chaotic urban wilderness that was Paris in the 1860s. Trimming, cutting, carving, demolishing, and reconstructing grand boulevards were his solution to tame Parisian organics. Rather than free growing brush in the French countryside, or freely developing arrondissements in Paris, Haussmann selected which structures to cut and where to build new ones.

The supreme marker of Haussmannization is the plaza before Palais Garnier, l’Opera, where five major boulevards converge. As the nucleus of Napoleon’s Second Empire, architect Garnier and planner Haussmann both worked to serve the imperial desires of the emperor. Other examples of idealized nature in the city include the Lourve park and gardens, contemporary green space at La Defense, and the playground park at Les Halles.

La Defense, business district. Sunday January 6, 2019. 5pm

Like flowers arrayed in a window box or the perfectly trimmed trees lining the entrance walk to Musee de l’Orangerie, the most manicured landscape is that of all the objects for sale in Le Bon Marche. This perfect, curatorial collection of retail items indicate an elevated culture of consumerism and capitalism and brand prestige. While these materials may not be characteristically ‘natural’, they are indeed manufactured from organic elements manipulated during technological revolution.

Michael Miller credits the development of the department store to the 19th century “revolution of retailing.” Changes in ‘merchandising philosophy’ introduced the ‘idea of shopping’ through a plethora of options all combined within one grandiose market, rather than in specialty merchant shops, (“Le bon marche” 21,4). Consumerism was no longer a task of necessity, but a field for competition between merchants’ product quality and shoppers’ wealth.

Le Bon Marche, department store. Wednesday January 2, 2019. 11am

The resulting power struggles, corrupt democracy, and class disparity caused by technology have inspired a number of political revolutions in France. Just as some plants freeze and wither in the winter, social institutions run a limited life cycle too. The solution is to plant new flowers, or perhaps a species that can withstand cold temperatures. Socio-political institutions need similar regulation; if left alone, social Order eventually collapses under the pressure of uprising and falls to Ruin, as described by Rebecca Solnit in her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).

She describes the mythological process of Ruin, “I wonder now about Hades and Persephone. Maybe Persephone would be glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm…maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranates, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death had to be part of the picture…Hades’ realm is called the underworld, and so are the urban realms of everything outside the law. And as in Hopi creation myths, where humans and other beings emerge from underground, so it’s from the underground that culture emerges in this civilization,” (Field Guide, 91).

Persephone straddles two realities – one a place of cool, dark anarchy, and another place of law and Order. Solnit’s explanation of escaping into the underworld and equally emerging from it describe the struggle of crafting a collective social identity within a changing landscape.

Montmartre, the 18th arrondissement, demonstrates this mythology in its urban topography. The Sacre Coeur cathedral sits perched highest on the hill, so that religion and power symbolically reign superior. Down the front stairs is a landing perfect for panoramic pictures and an elevated view of the greater Ile-de-France region – not quite divine, but higher than the bourgeoise situated within the maze of old apartments buildings further down the hill. Perhaps this hierarchy is a model of mythological Ruin, reestablishing wilderness as the distance between high and low classes (heaven and the underworld), and some class in-between (our emergent earth).

Montmarte, view over Paris. Thursday January 5, 2019. 4pm

So many hierarchies in nature attempt to establish a clear superior one and an inferior other. This is true of natural selection in plant species, and of Nazi supremacy during WWII. Jean-Paul Sarte describes the tense reality of Occupation as “more terrible than the war,” because French civilians had to frequently choose between supporting the shameful Collaboration or the controversial Resistance (“Paris Under Occupation,” 14).

The Nazis decidedly occupied France during the War to establish their power as international conquerors; the German soldiers in France were militarily superior leaving no room for social democracy, thus is why the Occupation was so ‘terrible’ for French people. Obviously, while some hierarchies are natural and necessary, other constructed hierarchies can be harmful to a thriving society, as they were during the French Occupation.

This is why I appreciate Paris as a garden with neither landscape nor wilderness as superior, but rather as a simultaneous juxtaposition of both.

A landscaped garden can’t exist without knowledge of fauna in the wilderness, otherwise there’d be no ideal collection of species to curate. The ultimate Order of a manicured urban landscape cannot be recognized before the beautiful Chaos of a narrative wilderness, because as much as society prefers the progress of urbanization, there is also equal sentiment in Paris’s colorfully complex history. Solnit’s theory of Ruin, Haussmann’s sculptural urban project, and other author’s descriptive literatures characterize Paris as a beautifully evolving garden of urbanity and historicity. -

Citations:

The Holy Bible, New Living Translation

Eric Hazan, “The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps” (2010)

Michael Miller, “Le bon marche: bourgeois culture and the department store” (1981)

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Jean Paul Sarte, “Paris Under Occupation” (1998)