Se déplacer dans Paris: le métro

Station Saint-Jacques - ligne 6

The London Underground is 150 years old (hurrah!), so the least I can do is to undertake a grand tour of the famous métro system to see how the Parisians answered!  This answer took a full thirty-eight years to appear (in 1900), but was no less vigorous.  Ask for a map (try not to despair when handed the tourist version, five months into my Year Abroad) and you will see this vigour by the sheer density of the lines.  

Cité - line 4 runs beneath the Seine.

The Parisian métro was constructed with a different philosophy from the London Underground's. In the British capital, the Metropolitan and District lines behaved like main-line railways : they carried freight, ran far out into the London suburbs and Buckinghamshire, and bickered with each other of course.  The visionary eccentric Sir Edward Watkin,  Metropolitan chairman, even wanted to run direct services from Manchester to Paris via the Great Central railway, the Circle line and a Channel Tunnel for which preparatory excavations were actually undertaken.  Imagine the Eurostar setting off from Sloane Square!  Even the subsequent 'Tube' lines (built by tunnelling deep underground) cover significant distances between stations.

Ligne 6 - above the street on steel viaduct (métro aérien).

The métro behaves rather more like a bus or tram.  The rapidity of transport is achieved not so much by the speed of the trains in the tunnels, but by the high frequency of stations.  The idea has been to reduce the distance on foot required between origin and destination; the result is that the network can be reached within five minutes from most of central Paris, and that stations can also be seen from each other along the tunnels.  Most of the lines were built not by the deep-level tunnelling of  later London lines (here I tread carefully in case any engineers are reading), but by the 'cut-and-cover' method of the Metropolitan and District: the digging of an enormous trenches, and their subsequent covering-over to form a tunnel. Occasionally they leap out of the ground and into the air on steel viaducts (métro aérien). This means that most lines follow the streets, and also that the passenger need drop or climb only two or three flights of stairs to reach the platforms.  It also has the consequence that the trains can be heard and felt above ground: through innocuous vents in the pavements, for example, or with particular resonance by the congregation of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs near Montparnasse...

From Denfert-Rochereau station on ligne 4, two stations (Mouton Duvernet and Alésia) are visible down the line.

The R.A.T.P. Logo (obtained from Wikimedia Commons).

Responsible for the infrastructure and operation of the métro, along with the buses and two R.E.R. lines, is the equivalent to Transport for London: the R.A.T.P. (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens).  (The R.A.T.P. incidentally owns the London United bus company - so the logo of a company owned by the French state is displayed proudly on buses all over London!).  It is easy to see how the R.A.T.P. views the métro's job by its numbering system (there are no names; could you imagine a French Jubilee line?).  The underground lines are numbered from 1 to 14, numbers which are taken up again at number 20 by the hundred or so bus routes which thread the city and which deserve their own blog-post.

Um... have I boarded the wrong train?

Another peculiarity of the Parisian métro is that the station names take quite brief forms of the place-names they serve.  They normally take the name alone of a street, a junction between two streets, a main-line station, a square, a church or an important building, with exotic results: "Raspail", "Cardinal Lemoine" or "Maubert-Mutualité".  It is as if stations in London were called "Baker", "Warren" or "Sloane".  "Monument" or "Bank" have a similar air.  The result is that you can travel to Crimea, Stalingrad, Strasbourg, Liège, Luxembourg and Rome for 1,30 euros one way.  Other stations are named after battles, monuments public figures and writers (of course!).  And there are also stations called "Temple" and "St-Paul" where, sadly, there are no connections with the London Underground.  

The famous Art Nouveau style at Cité.

Being French, the system has effortless style, particularly the well-known art nouveau iron-work and typography which indicate the stations, or the glazed white tiles of earthenware lining the walls and ceilings.  Also, being French, it works: the R.A.T.P. has five hundred trains in service at rush-hour and carries four million passengers a day; thanks in part to lines 2 and 6 which effectively form a 'Circle line'  most journeys can be made with only one change.

The ten-year-old film below, from the series 'C'est pas sorcier', is good fun to watch: if not for useless facts such as line 4 being the warmest because it is all underground, has the greatest number of trains and uses rubber tyres, then for the colloquial high-speed French!

Finally, the Parisians know how to have fun with the métro:

As one of the comments pointed out ("Pas mal... mais bon, c'est pas très difficile de doubler le métro de la ligne 10 ;)"), they have picked two stations very close to each other on one of  the quietest and slowest lines on the network... but still more than I could do, given my croissant consumption! 

Pont du Bir-Hakeim (Ligne 6)

À nous deux maintenant!

It is already the end of my first week in Paris.  Probably I ought to have known that I would not have time, nor be calm enough, to produce any prose pretentious enough for this blog's pretentious title before now! 

 It is exhausting to arrive in an unfamiliar city: bus tickets and pedestrian crossings hurl the newcomer into consternation.  He wonders what use it was looking up the French for 'anvil' when he can't ask for a filled sandwich on the top shelf.*  He makes a public nuisance of himself trying to see what everyone else does as they glide through ticket barriers, without going through himself.  He (literally) cannot get his head around looking in the right direction as he crosses the road.  However, the question mark hovering above my head is at last beginning to fade and I think I have recovered enough to record my first and raw impressions...

1. This is real! Here am I, not merely staying but living and (soon) studying in Paris!  The great slabs of parchment-coloured apartment blocks with their cast-iron balconies are real;  the broad straight corridors of the avenues penetrating through the city are real; and, outside the classroom and lecture theatre, the French language is real.                                
2. Some of what the British imagine about the French is actually true!  They really do carry baguettes down the street, for instance  (and who can blame them: heavenly manna or some other celestial panary essence falls daily from Heaven onto the shelves of a million boulangeries).  Another example is the proliferation of paperwork involved in the opening of a bank account (just in case any worldly riches come my way – one never knows!) which testifies to the famous French bureaucracy.  Motorists give the impression of making up the rules as they go along,  though I feel that Parisian driving is no more aggressive than London's for the greater reliance upon motorists’ discretion.
3. There is more graffiti in Paris than in London: a warning which drivers of pristine white vans should heed.
4. The French are not slaves to their mobile phones.  There are plenty around and in use, but in public they are no more evident than books or newspapers.
5. More people – and certainly more young people – smoke in Paris than in London. 
6. Plenty of time is taken over meals.  The sort of food which, in Britain, is beyond the powers of the average wallet and palate, is in France expected, duly received and savoured in the company of one's beloved, one's friend or one's newspaper.
7. The French language is supremely beautiful (and therefore deserves its own blog-post!).
8. There are moments of euphoria when I feel that France is better than Britain.  No!  No!  I didn’t mean that!  I think this the general effect of arriving in a foreign culture: that certain particularly noticeable novelties make the whole seem better or worse, even though it is always composed of the currents of goodness and corruption.  In the same way that turning a kaleidoscope produces a new pattern (that might be called better or worse) but does not alter its nature, the human condition is borne here in slightly different ways, in some ways better, in some ways worse, even though the human condition is invariable.

I shall write soon about Meudon, the town to the south-west of the city where I am living.  Here is a panorama of Paris from the Observatoire at the top of the town: visible are the Tour Eiffel, the Tour Montparnasse, les Invalides, the Seine and La Défense.  Eugène de Rastignac had a view like this (from the north-east) at the end of Le Père Goriot.  He too was a student unfamiliar with Parisian society (though he was also fictional): so like him I can say, ‘À nous deux maintenant!’

Click to enlarge... I Spy 20 points for each landmark.

*enclume (f).  One of these days it will come in useful, mark my words!