"The Paris metro, a 120-year epic": the new special issue of Le Parisien on newsstands

Come on, we forget everything: the overcrowded trains, the delays, the "abandoned packages", the indelicate passengers, the sometimes dubious cleanliness... With this special magazine devoted to the great epic of the Parisian metro, Le Parisien takes you on a journey through the time which is well worth the 6.20 euros for the ticket to board.

It is like this: by dint of borrowing it, even of undergoing it, we no longer look at this old fellow traveler.

By closing this number 21 of our "Histoires de Paris", we are betting that you will no longer find the metro only "practical" or "exasperating", but beautiful, prodigious, fascinating.

However, getting started was laborious.

While London launched its "Tube", from 1863, Paris missed all the trains, navigating between a thousand attempts immediately aborted, sometimes delirious like these wagon-boats supposed to slide between lampposts!

In 1900, the prospect of the Universal Exhibition finally put the capital's back against the wall.

Three years before the deadline, the Fulgence Bienvenüe project (yes, the one whose name has become inseparable from Montparnasse) was adopted and completed in record time.

The brilliant and too little-known Breton engineer perhaps had revenge to take on the rails, after a fall on a railway track which had cost him an arm.

Read also120 years ago, Parisians took the metro for the first time

With the metro, a certain “French genius” comes into play.

Technique, imagination, know-how, all the obstacles are bypassed one after the other: the old gypsum or limestone quarries, the crossing (overhead and underground) of the Seine, the digging of tunnels in the particularly dense urban fabric of the capital… We guess the headache for the builders… and that of the Parisians plunged into the chaos of a gutted city.

Did we moan less at the time?

Remnants of the past

The magazine reads like taking a line without a terminus.

Along the way, we come across some vestiges of the past: the elegant varnished wooden carriages, the hallmarker dear to Gainsbourg, the 1st class, the turnstile, the rabbit (a little moron) who had his fingers pinched, the Orange card, not to mention this good old ticket, also doomed to disappear soon.

A sunken world, like these ghost stations (at the end of the 3-bis line, one of them houses all the filming) or the huge maintenance workshops, which we had the privilege of visiting at night.

Curious about the past, present and future (we tell you about the futuristic epic of the Grand Paris Express), this magazine is made for you.

It can even be used very concretely, with this little mathematical rule to calculate your journey time: number of interstations x 2 - 1/3 of the figure obtained.

And it works… except incident of course!

"Histoires de Paris" n°21: "The Parisian metro, a 120-year epic"