When the Buttes-Chaumont park aimed to “deconfinate” eastern Paris

The mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo has scrapped all week to obtain from the government the reopening of the parks and gardens of the capital, still closed until further notice due to the epidemic of Covid-19. A “public health” issue, according to her. After a videoconference with Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, the elected socialist deplored that the government remained "deaf" to his request, including his proposal to reserve access to certain parks for the elderly for a given period of time. Edouard Philippe replied Friday that he was thinking about the opening of parks and gardens in Ile-de-France.

The impatience of Parisians was also very strong, in April 1867, when the new Buttes-Chaumont park finally opened its doors to the public, after three years of colossal work.

The plant jewel of Napoleon III

"The most beautiful thing that Paris can show ..." Like the Petit journal which has a bucolic pen in this spring 1867, the press does not have enough enchanting words to describe the latest born in Parisian parks. After the Bois de Boulogne, Parc Monceau and many other squares, Napoleon III can finally present his plant jewel to the world: 25 hectares of greenery in a steep landscape which gives Paris the air of "little Switzerland", as it is already fashionable, to nickname the Buttes-Chaumont park.

By inaugurating it on April 1, 1867, the day of the universal exhibition at the Champ-de-Mars, the aging emperor undoubtedly thinks of the Swiss landscapes of his childhood, when his parents, of the Bonapartes, were exiled to the edge from Lake Constance.

"What a glance! What a horizon! ”, The press of the time was ecstatic

Under the leadership of Adolphe Alphand, responsible for the capital's “Promenades et plantations”, the architects, engineers and gardeners worked hard to model this picturesque landscape which undulates between its six mounds, then descends the slope where a stream winds. There is even a large lake, a waterfall, a jagged cave of stalactites, a suspended walkway, a "forest" of conifers, three chalets for dining and a strange arched cliff that evokes that of Etretat.

"What a glance! What a horizon! Echoes the reporter from Le Petit Journal again. A little later, one of his daily colleagues takes over, just as emphatic: "I tell myself that his most attractive advantage for future walkers will be the excellent air that we breathe there before going back down to the depths of Paris . "

If you believe you are in the mountains, you would almost forget the urban scent that continues to torture your nostrils in this deprived corner where factories spit their smoke. The site has not always been that "enchanting Eden" that the gazettes now greet. For centuries, odors have even been mephitic.

The Buttes Chaumont garden, 25 hectares of greenery in a steep landscape which gives Paris the air of "little Switzerland" ./Selva/Leemage  

Long before the park, the air was putrid

Here, the famous gallows of Montfaucon deployed its sinister patibular forks, where the hanged men of Paris danced at the end of their chains then decomposed in the bad wind. After the Revolution, the gallows ended, but the rest was hardly more brilliant. These gypsum quarries where nothing grows (Chaumont, like ... Bald Mountain) served as a giant slaughterhouse, intended for rendering horses.

The heaps of carcasses left at the mercy of rat colonies stifled the air up to the Louvre. Balzac, a few decades before its transformation into a landscaped park, had pinched its nose before "a natural haven of misery and despair", refuge of the underworld and the destitute.

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In 1862, twelve years after the death of the writer, Haussmann, the prefect of Paris appointed by Napoleon, had this land lost, and entrusted the keys to Alphand. The "receptacle of all the rubbish of Paris", commented the polytechnician, whose disarray we can imagine by inheriting this garbage dump with a lunar aspect. However, he was going to make it a green, totally artificial masterpiece.

In 1864 the first picks were heard. The company, titanic, mobilizes a thousand workers, a hundred horses, and 450 wagons which use the 39 km of rails fitted out to extract the tons of rocks exploded with dynamite. The genius of the engineer Alphand, flanked by Gabriel Davioud (architecture) and Jean-Paul Barillé (gardens), is to chisel the old quarries to draw mountains.

Then cover with soil (200,000 m3!) The infertile gypsum, which makes the Buttes-Chaumont a huge park ... above ground. In short, everything is done to give the inhabitants of the popular districts of the East the impression that they are walking in a raw nature ... and too bad if this stunning piece of greenery is only a huge trompe-l'oeil . And a delicious inversion of the course of Parisian history: in just three years, this damned place has become a dreamlike setting, an invitation to travel.

Immediate popular success

Louis-Napoléon, who had written a book twenty years earlier on "the extinction of pauperism", feels that he has worked for the poorest, by providing them with a park - whose popular success is immediate - which will certainly make jealous in the chic districts of the West. He also had in mind to put the lid on the revolving pot (1789, 1830, 1848) that were then the suburbs of the capital. A little greenery to calm the agitation, in short. From this point of view, it is a failure: four years after the inauguration with great fanfare of the park, the Buttes-Chaumont will be sacked by the confrontations of the Paris Commune.

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