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| The Rhône river in central Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
I had never been in Lyon before. It's a long time since I was last in France at all, fifteen years, maybe. It's even longer since I was first in France, almost forty years ago.
It's a tremendous thing, being in France for the first time. i don't think Germany makes the same initial impression. (When I arrived in Germany it was my first time on the European continent, I had missed all my connections, and it was one in the morning. I was in a cheap hotel recommended by a couple of friendly inebriates on the street, and my only specific memory is of looking in dismay at the first featherbed I had ever met, and thinking, how the hell is this bedding supposed to operate?)
France was different. It was late September or early October, I'd been on a cheap, packed night train from Munich and got out at Avignon hours before dawn, in order to catch a morning train deeper into rural Provence to meet a friend. [Molly, this was your mother, a couple of months before you were born, so you were sort of along on the later part of this venture.] I dozed in the station until it was full day, and then walked into center city in the rainy morning, in search of breakfast.
How different the streets looked here, how different they sounded and smelled! There were tall houses with mansard roofs in long rows, there were arcs of big umbrellas filling the street, cutting the line of sight. (I know this, it's a painting! It's a provincial version of the Paris Street, Rainy Day at the Chicago Art Institute!) Heavy metal shutters started to creak up over shop windows. There was French-coffee smell in the autumn rain, French-bread smell, the faintly nauseating smell of raw meat hanging in the open at the butcher's.
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France is still France. The hotels are still called the Grand Hotel of Peace, or the Hotel of the Theatrical Performers, or the Grand Hotel of the Emperor. (Hotels in Germany, as in the US, are called the Best Western Hamburg or the Westin Berlin.) The barrier machines on the Metro still suck up and spit out the little cardboard tickets with startling aggression.
The streetscape still looks like a painting. In fact it still looks like the same painting. Not-quite-Paris street, not-quite-rainy day.
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| Place des Jacobins, Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
You can get a lot of entertainment out of reading English Wikipedia articles about provincial France, which tend to be translated from the original by dashing Francophones equipped with a dictionary and not much else. In the case of the fountain in the Place des Jacobins (above), we learn that the funds for the sculptural group were "donated by a tapestry." The sculpture itself was "melted by Barbezat," and the figures on the fountain are four local artists "represented with their respective clothes."
The figures are supported by several water-nymphs, represented without their respective clothes, each clutching a spouting fish to her bosom.
Ah, Germany is not like this. There is a shortage of naked water nymphs in Berlin, a shortage of classical and allegorical figures of all sorts (except on the east end of Unter den Linden, which is half-lost under construction work). How lovely the fountains are here, how clean and silver-sparkly the water looks. Our unsculptured and empty neighborhood fountain in Berlin tends to be a trap for dirt and fast-food wrappers.
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The equestrian statue of Louis XIV in the next square south of Place des Jacobins (Place Bellecour) has an allegorical figure of the Rhône on one side of the base:
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| The Rhone; figure on fountain in Place Bellecour, Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
And an allegorical figure of the Saône on the other side.
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| The Saône: figure on fountain, Place Bellecour, Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
I have never seen an allegorical representation of the Spree or the Havel. One may yet surprise me, of course.
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We complain occasionally about changes of street names in Berlin, but street-naming is far more volatile in France. The Place des Jacobins used to be Place Confort, then Place des Jacobins (for the Dominican church nearby), then the Place de la Fraternité (revolutionary France), then the Place de la Préfecture (less revolutionary), and the Place de l'Impératrice (for Napoleon III's wife?), and then the Place des Jacobins again when there was no longer an empress. It reminded me of an old joke of Archangel's, in which the Rue du Roi is renamed the Rue de la République after the Revolution, and then the Rue de l'Empereur when Napoleon takes over, and then the Rue du Roi again when Louis XVIII comes back, and then the Rue du Président in the Second Republic, and then the Rue de l'Empereur again; and finally the locals get fed up with the name-changing and dig in their heels and rename the street--finally, unchangeably--the Rue du Pouvoir du Chef-Exécutif.
The renaming in Berlin usually has a shorter history than this. Dorotheenstraße in Berlin (Archangel's office address) was named for the person on the left below, the seventeenth-century princess Dorothea Sophie von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg [see Spree 7 post in June for more on the Glücksburg family]. In East-German times it was renamed Clara-Zetkin-Straße, for the person on the right. (What a wonderful picture. Is there a place for such formidable frumps in France? Perhaps not, which is one of the less comforting things about France. I would love to grow old looking like Georgia O'Keefe, but I'm more likely to grow old looking like Clara Zetkin ...)
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| Clara Zetkin member of the German Parliament, 1920s Photo, Wiki Commons. |
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| Portrait of Dorothea Sophie, Electress of Brandenburg. From Wiki Commons. |
With the end of East Germany, the street became Dorotheenstraße again. End of socialist frumpery, return of (slight, flat-chested) historical elegance.
Place names hardly ever change like this in the US, which likes to keep its street-names neutral. You don't need to rename Main Street--let alone Second Avenue--when politics change. (Very occasionally the US has a street name that becomes politically embarrassing, like Balbo Avenue in Chicago. Balbo was Mussolini's air minister, living there is almost like having an address on Hermann Göring Drive. But the US tends to let sleeping histories lie. Admittedly, there was a small movement a few years ago to rename Balbo Avenue for the physicist Enrico Fermi, or possibly for a local baseball player. (The U of Chicago blog, arguing for Fermi, acknowledged the opposing argument that Balbo was not the worst of Fascists, and added, "But being the world’s nicest fascist is a little like being the world’s biggest Chihuahua; you’re setting the bar pretty low.") It's still Balbo Avenue.)
Passing thought ... Does anyone else feel uncomfortable in a place like Greeley, in Colorado, which doesn't have street names for the most part, just numbers? 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue, and so forth run north-south, and 1st Street, 2nd Street, etc. run east-west. It seems excessively abstract, but maybe the system grows on you if you live there. At least you know where an address is when you see it, and you know how to get there. A name like W. 9th St. gives you more information, in this sense, than a name like Roosevelt Drive does. (And more occasions to ponder the possible differences between information and meaning.)
The urban-planning problem, of course, is what happens when the city expands beyond 1st Avenue and 1st Street, on the opposite side from 2nd. You could follow the real number line and have Negative 1st Ave., Negative 2nd Ave., and so on, to the east of Positive First Avenue. But I suppose this might not be popular. East of 1st Ave. Greeley has started using entire words for street names. (Short words. Ash. Birch.) But north of 1st St. the city continues to be very frugal in the amount of meaning it dispenses to create a place-name. The street names are just individual letters plus the E. or W. indicator. So you can have an address on W.C. Street. If you want.)
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Well, let's get out of the central streets in Lyon and onto a river.... Hmm, it turns out that we can't do this on the Rhône side of the Confluence neighborhood, because one of the busier highways in France roars along the riverbank. It appears that, as a pedestrian, you can't even get close. (This is the so-called Freeway of the Sun, the Autoroute du Soleil, which takes Parisians down to the Mediterranean for their beach vacations in August.)
Farther north in the city, however, we can get to the Rhône, which welcomes us thus:
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| Danger! Eating fish caught in the Rhône is forbidden. My photo, August 2014. |
Cross the center-city peninsula to the Saône, and you see a similar sign.
This is a bit shocking--after all, we can eat the fish from the Havel and the Spree, we can even eat the fish from the Rhine (in moderation, perhaps). The Rhine was the sewer of Europe forty years ago, but it's been cleaned up a lot. The Rhône has not been cleaned up a lot. (PCB levels in the Rhône fish are as much as forty times the allowed maximums.)
One must admit that the Rhine fisheries aren't what they were either, though for other reasons. Invasive giant catfish, which get as big as three hundred pounds, have been taking out the salmon and the trout. One of these can give a fisherman quite a run for his money, I have read. But I'm not sure that big-time sport fishing is coming to western Germany soon. It's so much less Hemingwayesque to battle a big fish in the gray chill on the Rhine, in the shadow of the aspirin factory, than to do it in the sun off some Caribbean island.
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It becomes conspicuous here that the environmental movement has been weaker in France than in Germany. Hello, where's the broad-range recycling? Where are the bicyclists? Where's the renewable energy? France, which has way more sun, has about a tenth of the solar generating capacity that Germany does. (We had a peak day this summer when 75% of the power in use in Germany was coming from renewables--which beats buying gas from the Russians--but of course the winter is going to be a different story....)
Things are changing in France, but it's slow. The information sheet in our hotel says, Please don't drive your car in Lyon. Walk or bicycle or take public transit. (That is, the French side of the sheet says this; the English side just says Walk, for some reason.) Along the portions of the rivers not occupied by highway are some pleasant promenade stretches with bicycle paths, and there are conspicuous public bike-rental places--but much of this looks recent, not yet a settled part of local life. The people on bicycles are young and look like they're engaging in le sport; they're not the all-ages crowd that spins through the city on bikes as part of daily life in northern Europe.
Geography has a bit to do with the absence of bicyclists, of course. Northern Europe is flat. Lyon, like many cities farther south, has some steep and rocky stretches.
Street rises above street ...
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| Along the Saône, Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
Tower above tower:
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| St Jean cathedral (below) and Fourvière basilica (on hill), Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
But then, realistically, if you live here, how often do you actually have to go to the top of Fourvière hill? Much of the population lives and works on the flat ....
I look at this and think: The world we grew up in was strange. The area around the cathedral in Lyon is one of the largest Renaissance cityscape ensembles in Europe (see photo below for some interior detail). And in the 1960s it seemed like a good idea to the city government to run a bulldozer through it and replace it with a freeway ramp.
Happily, this project did not happen (and central Lyon has done perfectly well without the freeway ramp). But what were people thinking?
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| Cours Philibert Delorme, 16th century, Lyon. Photo by Blaise Laustriat, Wiki Commons. |
With an insufficient sense of history, you can suppose that urban-planning projects are typically bad, and that most public construction works are cases of paving paradise and putting up a parking lot. But the 1960s and 70s were unusually inhumane. The 1920s and 30s often did better. (Our neighborhood in Berlin is a big 1950s public housing project, and it's one of the pleasanter places I've lived in sixty-plus years.) A number of the low-income housing projects that were built in Berlin between the wars are now UNESCO World Heritage sites, and so is a similar one in Lyon.
The Lyon site is in a neighborhood called États-Unis, the United States. (Just at the point when the city was starting to de-slum the neighborhood and wanted to relabel it, the US entered World War I; hence the name.) It's typical 1920s modernist city planning: solid, attractive basic housing, plenty of light and green space. It's still a fairly low-income neighborhood (lots of African immigrants), but it's not a slum. It shows itself off with a museum about the project and its planner, Tony Garnier, and it is home to a (relatively recent) mural project called the ideal city, in which the ends of the apartment houses have been painted to look, for example, like this:
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| In États-Unis, Lyon, August 2014 |
My first name means September.
People get used to certain things in spite of themselves.
Victor Hugo is dead.
In my village the mountain had the shape of a boat.
The big heads say, We are the ones who decide.
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| In États-Unis, Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
Very stylish (of course, we're in France.)
We're in the part of Europe from which Germany has often looked terribly unhousebroken. It wasn't even Roman! Nothing but swamp up here in classical times! And Lyon, in contrast, was very Roman--the biggest Roman city north of the Alps. There was an amphitheater on Fourvière hill that could hold ten or eleven thousand people:
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Roman amphitheater, Lyon, August 2014. My photo.
When people up around the Baltic were barely past worshipping three-headed Triglav and four-headed Svetovid, France was starting to build stuff like this:
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I ask myself now: when we were starting college and took Western Civ or Arts and Ideas or whatever the local institution called it, how much of what we were shown (how much of what was amazing to us, if all we knew was prairies and strip malls) was this sort of thing: a Roman aqueduct marching across Provence; Gothic cathedrals; Versailles; Liberty Leading the People (with the intention of trashing Versailles if the People had been sober enough to walk that far); Van Gogh painting starry nights over the Rhône. How much of it had the subtext, Isn't France beautiful? Look, look ...
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The murals--at least some of them--in États-Unis are by an artists' cooperative called Cité-Création which has done murals elsewhere in Lyon and around the world.
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| Mural, central Lyon, August 2014. My photo. |
One of their biggest projects is on the exterior of the Carrefour supermarket in Shanghai, an immense mural that packs in all the visual cliches of French culture: here is the Eiffel tower, here are the tall Paris houses, here is Sacré-Coeur. Here is a traditional bakery and someone coming out with a baguette.
More than a little kitschy, and dubiously relevant in the middle of Shanghai. But apparently people are taken with it (and this isn't anything special about Shanghai, I think it would work almost anywhere in the world); it's probably effective advertising for Carrefour. How have the French snookered us all into being so charmed by the sight of a French person carrying a baguette?
It's difficult to imagine one of the German supermarket chains tempting international customers inside with a mural depicting a German holding a Landbrot. (One of those wonderful-tasting dark loaves which, if it fell on your foot, would probably break it.) Hard to imagine Walmart adorning itself with a fresco of people loading groceries into their SUVs in the Walmart parking lot.
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Back in Berlin, at Tegel Airport, my suitcase arrives but Archangel's does not. Tegel (which was built for about a tenth of the traffic that now goes through it) is sinking under the weight of summer tourism. We go to the lost-luggage office, and Archangel, who travels a lot, says, exasperated, This happens so often. The tired woman behind the counter says, Yes, yes, I recognize your face.
He says, There was even a priority flag on the suitcase. It seems as though my bag gets lost even more often when there's a priority flag on it than when there isn't.
If this were still Lyon, the woman would probably say that she was desolated, and say so with such charm that one could do nothing but smile. This is not Lyon, however, and the woman behind the counter says sturdily, If you think so, then don't have a priority flag put on your bag. This is Germany, we do not answer with charm, we answer with reason.
The bus from the airport to Moabit is near-lethally packed. Public transit is a social site in the German sense, however, meaning that we are all responsible for each other and must make the best of the situation together. (I did not have this sense on public transit in Lyon, but what do I know, it was a small sample.) There are murmurs and shuffles and calls: younger people give up seats to older people, mislaid children and spouses are passed through the crowd to the people who are looking for them, visitors who are unsure where they are going are shepherded out at their stops.
We struggle out at our stop, sweating like sauna participants, and drag ourselves up to the apartment, with its fine view of the treetops (so much more green here!) and power plants and rail lines. It doesn't look like a painting. It's not beautiful--at least not the same way, it's not Western Civ. But it's good to be back.
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