PARIS (dpa) – In a way, Paris has fallen victim to its own popularity – and the city’s tourist office is beginning to worry. It seems that visitors to the world’s most popular tourist destination are not seeing “the real Paris”.
As a result, this summer the French capital’s tourist officials have made an effort to divert visitors away from so-called “tourist ghettoes”, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Left Bank neighbourhoods that have become caricatures of the Paris of old.For those visitors seeing the French capital for a second time or simply interested in something different, it is now recommended to get off the beaten tourist path and seek out the “Paris of the Parisians”.Such as the district of Belleville.Located in the northeast of Paris, between the rococo Parc de Buttes-Chaumont, the Canal Saint-Martin and the Pere Lachaise cemetery, Belleville has long been what the French call “un quartier populaire”, or workers’ district, and was often reviled by bourgeois Parisians as a hotbed of crime, idleness and rebellion.Over the course of the last century, it became as well a haven for the persecuted and impoverished from all over the world.As a result, today it is the most diverse and vibrant of Paris neighbourhoods, the city’s melting pot, where North Africans in djellabas share the busy sidewalks with Orthodox Jews, African women dressed in the bright, floral-patterned dresses of their homelands and French artists drawn to the area by its energy, greenery and low rents.This rich human variety is also reflected in the diversity of foods on offer in Belleville’s streets.A walk along the rue de Belleville and its side streets takes you past restaurants and cafes offering food from China, Thailand, India, Afghanistan, Mexico, Spain, Greece, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritius, India, Japan, the Antilles – and even France.The district is also a hybrid of architectural styles, with tranquil tree-lined country lanes redolent of lilac and lavender and abloom with wildflowers hidden in the shadows of unsightly high-rise apartment blocks.In fact, few Paris neighbourhoods today so vividly reflect their history as does Belleville.In the 18th century, and during much of the 19th, the village of Belleville was a popular destination for day-trippers from “downtown” Paris, who came to enjoy its pure springs, vineyards and fruit orchards.The Industrial Revolution transformed the village entirely, and it became home to small workshops in ramshackle houses as well as increasing number of the poor.In 1860, it was annexed by Paris with two other villages and divided along its high road, the rue de Belleville. Half of its 70,000 inhabitants were consigned to the 19th arrondissement, the other half to the 20th.Soon, poverty gave rise to political discontent, and Belleville became fertile ground for the Communist party and a focal point for the 1871 Commune, the bloody – and failed – insurrection against the central government in Versailles.In the early 20th century, many political and economic refugees found a home and jobs in Belleville, then a seedy, disreputable quarter. Eastern European Jews, Armenians and Turks worked in the district’s sweatshops, producing clothing, leather and shoes that were sold in the better quarters to the city’s upper crust.It was also in Belleville that the most popular French entertainer of the 20th century was born. A plaque affixed to the facade of 72 rue de Belleville declares, “On the steps of this house, on 15 December 1915, was born in the most dire poverty Edith Piaf, whose voice would take the world by storm”.Born Edith Gassion and nicknamed “the little sparrow” (Piaf means sparrow in French), she embodied the district’s working-class feistiness and fierce independence.“My music school is the street,” she said, and meant the loud, untidy sidewalks of Belleville.The sidewalks are still untidy, and you can still hear the popular French “chanson” in many Belleville cafes – but the music in the district has grown more worldly.As France grew prosperous in the 1950s, the city tore down many of Belleville’s tenements, in an effort to “beautify” it, and erected prefabricated hi-rises that soon filled with new waves of immigrants.First, black Africans as well as Jewish and Arabs from North African moved to the quarter. Later, immigrants from China and the Asian sub-continent joined the crowd, creating a melting pot of ethnic and religious groups perhaps unparalleled in such a small area.Belleville is also one of the greenest districts in the city, offering two quiet havens for those in need of a respite from its tumultuous streets.The sumptuous Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is one of the most beautiful gardens in Paris. It was created when Napoleon III decided in 1864 to transform a site blighted by centuries of gypsum mining into a “people’s Tuileries”.The result is one of the capital’s most charming spots, complete with artificial lake, grotto, waterfall and a copy of Tivoli’s Temple of the Sybille topping a high cliff.Actually located in the neighbouring district of Menilmontant, the Pere Lachaise cemetery is no doubt the area’s best-know tourist attraction, particularly as rock icon Jim Morrison is buried there – as are Piaf, Frederic Chopin and the medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise.It is a quiet, shaded place and ideal for contemplation.But the true pleasures of Belleville reside in its life, in the great diversity of its residents, the many languages spoken in its streets – and the deep impression that the “Paris of the Parisians” embraces the entire world. >The new “real Paris”
Paris – The street market held twice a week on the Boulevard de Belleville is one of the most colourful in the French capital – and among the places the tourist authorities now like people to go. – Photo: dpa Features
