Expatica France is pleased to offer a historical and cultural tour of Paris from City of Light expert Thirza Vallois. We continue our tour as we enter the seventeenth arrondissement, including the work of the influential Pereire Brothers.

A vast, elongated territory stretches across the north-western edge of Paris, ripped open by twelve railway lines — an iron social divide that relates the poor to the north and the better-off to the west. From the start, shabby grey tenement houses arose on the wrong side of the tracks, "smelling of the shameful destitution of Parisian roomings", as Guy de Maupassant wrote in Bel Ami.

Standing in the window of one of these houses, his hero watched the tantalising new buildings of the recently opened rue de Rome, on the other side of that "immense trench of the western railway", luminous at sunrise, as though "painted with white light." Despite the jarring discrepancy, the two sides of the tracks were united into one of the eight new arrondissements created and annexed to Paris by Baron Haussmann on 1 January 1860, Haussmann's arrondissement par excellence.

For, despite the 'deep chasm' that separated north from west, no arrondissement was as true to the new middle-class spirit of the Second Empire or promoted the values it stood for to the same degree. Carrying no tainted heritage or stigma from the past, the vast stretches of land, hitherto covered with cornfields, hunting grounds and meadows, became a land of opportunity for the emerging middle classes — four clear-cut strata which, within just a few decades, poured into the arrondissement, dividing themselves up neatly into four distinct neighbourhoods according to their wealth — west of the tracks the wealthy and the well-to-do, in Monceau and Ternes respectively; east of the tracks, in Batignolles, small employees, shopkeepers and pensioners, and further north in Epinettes, honest workmen. It was as neat a distribution as Haussmann's whitewashed avenues themselves.

Understandably, it was not to the taste of someone like the poet Paul Verlaine who, growing up in the 1850s and early 1860s at 2 rue Saint-Louis (now 10 rue Nollet) in Batignolles, described it as a neighbourhood of small, decent people where his father felt at home, "pettily bourgeois, shabbily well-to-do, neat, niggardly, but as clean as can be". The village, however, bore him no grudge and buried him in its cemetery, where his humble grave can still be seen.

Similarly, young Colette was put off by the whitewashed cleanliness of the middle-class area west of the tracks.

Criss-crossed by broad, well-ventilated arteries, which had mushroomed overnight, it still bore the smell of fresh paint. At the turn of the century, her aunt was living on the new Avenue Wagram, "in a magnificent, unattractive new block of flats" with a rapid lift. "I rather disliked all those white walls," remarked Colette. "The drawing-room [...] desperately carried on the whiteness of the staircase. White-painted woodwork, frail white furniture, white cushions with light-coloured flowers, white chimney piece. Good heavens, there wasn't one single dark corner!" Needless to say, Aunt Wilhelmine Coeur greatly disapproved of Papa's living with 17-year-old Colette on the narrow, dark rue Jacob on the Left Bank.

"My dear," she said to her brother, "the new neighbourhoods are far healthier, far airier and far better built." Of course propriety and respectability were the underlying virtues of these virginal beaux quartiers of western Paris, as against "that dirty Left Bank where no nice people live".

Yet, though boosted by Haussmann, the 17th arrondissement was in effect the astonishing achievement of two brothers, Emile and Isaac Pereire, who can justly be claimed to have been its founding fathers. Of Jewish Portuguese extraction, they had come up to Paris from their native Bordeaux in the 1820s. Inspired by Saint Simon's concept of a harmonious industrial society based on social justice, and impressed by the development of the railway in Britain, they believed that in France too the railway would be the driving force of the new industrial society.

They took over the future 17th arrondissement and turned it into the cradle of France's railway and, as a result, the pacemaker of its economic and social revolution. Twin boulevards honour the names of the two pioneering brothers equitably, a unique example in Paris's road network. These run on either side of the railway tracks that they built around Paris, known as la Petite Ceinture ('the little belt'). Also unique was the fact that this honour was bestowed upon them during their lifetime, just as it would be on Victor Hugo several decades later.  Unaware of or indifferent to the role played by the two siblings, modern-day administrators have renamed the boulevard Pereire Nord and Pereire Sud, probably to make things simple. By the by, they also added a spelling mistake to their name: Pereire never had an acute accent on the first 'e'!

Around and About Paris (volume 1, 2 and 3) is published by Iliad Books, UK
For more information, and to order Thirza Vallois's titles, go to Link: www.thirzavallois.com