Webster’s defines “cliché” as a “trite ex-pression” and “trite” as “worn out by constant use.” Happily, the title Ville Lumière or City of Light is neither a cliché nor trite. Though it is constantly used in reference to Paris, it has become a nickname, a sobriquet, an endearment.
For me, the images it evokes are rooted in history but remain very much alive today.
Say Ville Lumière and some will see old-fashioned street lamps spilling pools of light along the Seine where lovers stroll hand in hand. Others will think of the Champs-Elysées and Eiffel Tower ablaze. Still others will envision night-lit monuments perched on hills—the Panthéon, Sacré Cœur, Trocadéro—and a cityscape bathed in an other-worldly glow.
Personally I’ve often imagined the expression had more to do with the welcoming lights of the city’s cafés, its bookshops, museums and universities, where minds meet and tongues wag into the night. Certainly, for centuries, men and women from across the world have been drawn to Paris like the proverbial moth to a flame—or a light.
Professors and philosophers like to say that the appellation Ville Lumière isn’t about physical sources of light at all. Rather it’s a metaphor for political, spiritual, cultural and intellectual energy. Louis XIV, the enlightened despot, was known as the Sun King (though he abandoned luminous Paris for swampy Versailles). The 18th-century’s Enlightenment found fertile ground here for its philosophical, social and political ideals: empiricism, skepticism, tolerance and social responsibility. Voltaire, Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other proponents were called les lumières.
In his writings on the French Revolution, historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was probably the first to call Paris la Lumière du Monde—Light of the Earth, a beacon for humanity. During Michelet’s lifetime, Paris underwent radical change: its population more than doubled. By the second half of the 19th century (starting with the Second Empire in 1852), Paris had indeed become the most stimulating, the most modern and best-loved of European cities.
In some ways it was an ideal city, a military man’s Utopia conceived by Emperor Napoléon III and built by his prefect Baron Haussmann. It was anything but ideal, though, for the nostalgic, romantic or visionary. In Les Fleurs du Mal and other works, Charles Baudelaire scented death and urban anguish in Haussmannization. “Old Paris is gone,” he wrote in The Swan, “no human heart changes half as fast as a city’s face.”
Haussmann’s was an ideal cosmopolis for those who believed in order, uniformity, and the hygienic properties of open air and sunlight. At Napoléon III’s behest, the prefect demolished some 25,000 centuries-old buildings in fewer than 20 years. Broad cannon-shot boulevards and regular street alignments with uniform facades rose where a tangle of dark medieval alleys had once been.
With few exceptions the Impressionists and early photographers who documented this remade world were fascinated by its novel cityscapes and seemingly endless perspectives. They sought above all to capture the effects of a new kind of light that was at once physical and spiritual. It was the light that sifted through the trees planted on the new boulevards. Or the light cast by the hundreds of gas lamps erected in the 1860s on the sidewalks of those boulevards. Light streamed into the windows of modern buildings. Lights burned round the clock in the new cafés, theaters and train stations that sprang up all over town. And, by association, la lumière was also the enlightened attitude of the inhabitants of this marvelous new world.
The late 19th-century’s Universal Expositions, in particular that of 1889, which marked the centennial of the Révolution and the building of the Eiffel Tower, seemed at the time to herald a new age of technical progress and scientific reason flanked by the artistic flowering of the Belle Epoque. We may marvel today at their ingenuousness, but most of the spectators of all classes and walks of life who crowded around to watch the Eiffel Tower’s inauguration in 1889 were astonished, transfixed and delighted. The world’s tallest structure was lit by 10,000 gas lamps. Fireworks and blazing illuminations drew the spectator’s eye to the tower’s various levels. A pair of powerful electric searchlights—among the earliest of their kind—raked the city’s monuments from the summit at a height of 984 feet. Some say it was this signal even that engendered the name Ville Lumière, but there are no records to prove this.
Admittedly not everyone was bowled over by the tower, its lighting display or what it stood for. Caricatures and political cartoons of the period show strollers shading their eyes at night, blinded by Paris’ newfound modernity. One cartoon’s caption noted that from then on, people would need to use seeing-eye dogs to go out for an evening stroll. By the 1890s, most of the city’s gas lamps had already been replaced by even brighter electric lighting (though the last gas réverbère was removed only in 1952).
It’s no surprise then that at the height of the Belle Epoque (which coincided with the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and its further technical wonders), a novelist named Camille Mauclair wrote a book titled La Ville Lumière. This is the earliest documented use of the term as applied to Paris. The book was published in 1904 and has been out of print for decades. No one seems to remember precisely what it was about. Georges Frechet, conservateur at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, has suggested that the book probably drew inspiration for its title and content from both the Universal Exposition (one of the exhibits, La Fée Electricité, was a celebration of the miracle of electricity) and the intellectual ferment generated by the period’s artists, performers and writers, Stéphane Mallarmé foremost among them.
Though it has been modernized, Paris intra-muros—i.e., the city within the Boulevard Périphérique beltway—has changed relatively little since the Second Empire. Other than minor damage in 1870-71 caused by the Franco-Prussian War and Commune struggle, it was never bombed or burned.
But this changelessness goes beyond the physical. Jean-Paul Sartre described Baudelaire as a man who “chose to advance backwards with his face turned toward the past.” In many ways the same can be said of Paris and the people who live here. This isn’t a museum city—it is far from dead. But the sheer weight of its history, its institutions and above all its culture forces it and its inhabitants to constantly look back while moving forward.
This is particularly true when it comes to both the nuts-and-bolts of lighting the Ville Lumière, and the philosophy that lies behind the myriad of lighting-related technical and bureaucratic constraints.
For a down-to-earth example, consider the many light fixtures on Paris streets that were installed during the Second Empire. Haussmann-style lamps are still manufactured today. There are also Art Nouveau fixtures and others that were added in the 1930s. Are they obsolete? Of course. That’s the point: no one would dream of removing them.
Why? In a word, atmosphère. The atmosphere these old-fashioned lamps create is warm, welcoming and infused with nostalgia. Nostalgia is both a state of mind and a cultural ID card. No other city goes to such lengths to create a “light-identity,” an ambience that immediately says “you’re in Paris, the City of Light.” In many places you could be walking alongside Baudelaire or Brassaï or Sartre through a crepuscular time tunnel.
This is something most denizens and visitors alike take for granted. But behind the scenes, a score of éclairagistes and concepteurs-lumières (lighting designers)—plus architects, engineers and some 400 technicians—are hard at work round the clock creating Paris’ evening magic.
Glance up from anywhere in town and you’ll see how lighting designer Pierre Bideau has illuminated the Eiffel Tower with hundreds of small sodium lamps. The tower’s golden lacework glows from within, recalling the gas lighting of 1889. Louis Clair has turned the church of Saint-Eustache (at Les Halles) into a kind of magic lantern, with light tracing the flying buttresses and spilling outward through stained glass windows. Clair’s delicate lighting of the Rotonde de la Villette underscores the curves and colonnades of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s fanciful 18th-century canal-side customs house.
Roger Narboni and Italo Rota—two other bright stars in the French lighting firmament—have worked together or separately to capture with lights the physical and spiritual essence of Notre Dame cathedral, the Louvre, a handful of bridges over the Seine, and famous avenues like the Champs-Elysées. But there are dozens of other equally impressive night-time scenes: the Place Vendôme and its storied facades seem like a stage set; the fountains of the Place de la Concorde or the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir splash both water and light….
What all of these projects share is the goal of bringing forth the history and symbolism of each site. Flamboyant or experimental lighting displays that might seem marvelous in America, for example, simply don’t fit in here on anything more than a temporary basis. True, avant-garde French light-sculptors like Yan Kersalé do create works in Paris for special occasions (July 14th extravaganzas, bicentennials and so forth). And many French lighting designers rightly consider themselves artists or créateurs. But for them to succeed here, their talents must be solidly anchored to the city’s multi-layered historical reality. To transpose Sartre’s image of Baudelaire, they must light the future by illuminating the past.
“If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, at least you can look back to the past and form some ideas,” says François Jousse, musing about the Parisian worldview in general and how it applies to lighting in particular. Jousse is the chief engineer of Paris’ municipal lighting and street maintenance department, a title that describes only a few of his functions.
Modest yet contagiously jovial, the bushy-bearded Jousse is famous among French lighting professionals for his expertise on everything from the performance of electric bulbs to the philosophy of monument illumination or the history of lighting since antiquity. Indeed if any one person is responsible for setting the city’s nocturnal mood it’s Monsieur Jousse.
Individual monuments, buildings and bridges may take on a beautiful sculptural quality at night, Jousse readily admits, but what most intrigues him is the night-lit city as a physical, spiritual and emotional whole—the grand display case of Paris and its lifestyles. “Drive into town at night from the suburbs and you feel the difference immediately,” he tells me. “From the linear, traffic-oriented lights leading you through and out of the banlieue you enter the floating blanket of Paris light—a destination, a place, the arrival point.”
As far back as the Middle Ages, lanterns or candles marked the limits and strategic points of the city, Jousse explains. There were originally three. They were highly symbolic because they lit the Louvre’s Royal Palace; the Tour de Nesle (a watchtower that once stood on the Seine); and the cemetery of the Saints Innocents, a favorite meeting place near Les Halles for thugs and lovers alike. Over the centuries, oil lamps were added here and there around town. But it was the Sun King who lived up to his title and in 1669 inaugurated the first systematic public lighting scheme (he even had a commemorative lantern medal minted to celebrate it). By the 1780s, a pulley system had been invented to hang new, elegant lamps over the streets. And then came le déluge of 1789. “The refrain in the Revolutionaries’ song Ah! ça ira is all about hoisting aristocrats from the lampposts,” Jousse laughs. “And those new pulleys came in very handy.”
Paris’ night-time identity as we know it today was largely defined with the advent of modern outdoor lighting in the mid-19th century. Ever since then, the city’s street lamps have been erected at the same heights: 6, 9 or 12 meters (though the Champs-Elysée’s new fixtures, designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, are exceptions at 11.5 meters). Posts are staggered along the sidewalks on both sides of the street to create overlapping, gentle pools of light. The light laps at the buildings and hints at the roofline above the tops of the lampposts.
The overall effect is to give Paris a human dimension, making it an inviting yet safe place to enjoy after the sun goes down.
“It’s the little things I like most,” says Jousse, echoing the sentiments of many Parisians. “For example, there’s a 19th-century wall fountain on the Rue de Turenne not far from the Place des Vosges that no one notices during the day. Even at night, drivers don’t see it. But when it’s lit with two small spots, it’s a wonderful discovery for strollers….”
Beyond the poetry and aesthetics, skillful lighting is one way to diminish vandalism in rough neighborhoods. Jousse is proud that since his technicians have illuminated a contemporary sculpture in the 18th arrondissement’s notorious Goutte d’Or quarter near Barbès, the locals have adopted it as their own: no more graffiti or damage. At the Porte de Clignancourt, under the spaghetti bowl of freeways where the city’s main flea market is held, Jousse and his lighting technicians have lit a wall built there as a safety measure to divide a wide sidewalk. Now, instead of being viewed as an ugly obstacle, the wall is a noctambulist’s landmark, a kind of luminous welcome mat on the city’s edge.
Half a dozen other cities probably have more and brighter lights than Paris these days. New York is a forest of flaming skyscrapers and throbbing, colored bands. Parts of Tokyo and Berlin look like immense, garish outdoor advertisements, the objective correlatives of our age of consumerism. These three cities in particular also sparkle as among the world’s great artistic, intellectual and economic centers. Yet no one would dream of renaming them the City of Light. I don’t think that’s simply because Paris claimed the title a century ago. There’s another, intangible reason. Something about the quality of life, the outlook of the people and the essence of Paris makes the name Ville Lumière ring true. So even if it sounds like a cliché to the uninitiated, countless others—including me—will go on using it for as long as the city shines.
About David Downie
David Downie is the author of half a dozen books on travel and food, including "Enchanted Liguria: A Celebration of the Culture, Lifestyle and Food of the Italian Riviera," "Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome," "The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam," and "Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light." He has contributed to scores of publications worldwide, from Paris Notes to the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times to the Australian Financial Review and London Times, Gourmet, Bon Appétit, and many others. David and his wife, photographer Alison Harris create custom walking tours of Paris for individuals, families and small groups through their company. For information about these tours, visit the Paris, Paris website.
