Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie Read Free Book Online

eternity, but for a long, long time.

François’s Follies: Building Afresh in a Museum City

The idea that Paris in a century or two could become the privileged enclave of Japanese tour operators is a thought that makes Mitterrand bristle .
—L UC T ESSIER , Director of the Coordinating Body of the Grands Projets , 1988
    haraoh,” “emperor,” and “king” were favorite titles given former president François Mitterrand. Admirers and detractors alike also called him “Tonton” for his avuncular charisma, or “La Grenouille,” because he looked startlingly like a frog. Mitterrand’s presidency lasted from 1981 to 1994. But his heritage as a builder lives on. Like a pharaoh, he commissioned a pyramid (at the Louvre) and a Great Library of Alexandria (the Très Grande Bibliothèque, at Tolbiac). With Napoleonic imperiousness he ordered a triumphal arch (at La Défense) and one-upped Napoléon III with a bigger opera house (at La Bastille). To prove he could subsume his presidential predecessor, he adopted the unfinished projects of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing: La Villette, the Musée d’Orsay, the Institut du Monde Arabe.
    Anyone who thinks Mitterrand’s so-called Grands Projets are old news should rethink: not only do Parisians have to live with them daily, a condition known by some as “collective sore eye.” The heritage of Mitterrand’s genius continues to gall into the current century. His international conference center planned for the Quai Branly near the Eiffel Tower only got under way after he died. His successor Jacques Chirac torpedoed the plan and commissioned the Quai Branly museum instead. A comic-strip supertanker or cargo ship with rust-red, canary yellow, and ochre shipping containers jutting from one side, the egregious complex excogitated by star-architect Jean Nouvel houses controversial African, Asian, and global multiethnic, multicultural collections. But this fiasco is not Tonton’s fault. His credits lies elsewhere.
    With something approaching awe and horror I watched Mitterrand’s follies coalesce and had the good fortune to scramble through many while under construction, and interview their prime movers. Not long ago I revisited the president’s main offspring. Have they, as Mitterrand hoped, saved Paris from becoming a “museum city” cut off from its suburbs? Have they lastingly boosted the prestige of French architects, while indelibly impressing Mitterrand’s name in the history books?
    Métro line 1 links the troika of sites that were closest to Mitterrand’s heart: Bastille, Louvre, Grande Arche. For the sake of chronology and convenience my first stop was the Louvre. Mitterrand’s earliest and most ambitious operation was transplant surgery on what had become a dusty, dreary place whose decline threatened Gallic gloire and histoire , not to mention tourism revenues. After visiting Washington’s National Gallery, Tonton highhandedly hired its designer I. M. Pei to create Le Grand Louvre. No architectural competition was held, a technical illegality. Mitterrand briefed Pei to respect the Louvre’s historic components. His solution was the now-familiar seventy-foot (twenty-two-meter) pyramid of glass and crisscrossed steel that rises above an underground entrance, theater, shopping concourse, and parking lots.
    Like most Paris denizens, I was not thrilled by Pei’s proposal. But I recall my bafflement when critics claimed the pyramid would “deface” the Napoléon Courtyard’s façades. A historicist’s hodgepodge, they were as kitsch in their day as the pyramid was in the 1980s. In reality, at issue was the Socialist president’s perceived defiling of a royal enclave. As some pundits put it, Mitterrand marked it as a dog might.
    Swept by crowds from the Métro station into the Louvre’s subterranean maw, I couldn’t help marveling now at Pei’s success in hitching high art to consumerism. Where the weary masses of old once deciphered turgid texts or strained