La bataille de Paris. Des Halles à la Pyramide

Chronique d’urbanisme

Victor Baltard’s legendary steel pavilions for Paris’s Les Halles central market lie in ruins on the cover of La bataille de Paris (The Battle of Paris), the 1991 collection of articles about architecture and urbanism by André Fermigier (1923-1988). While not particularly enticing on a strict visual plan, the combination of cover image and title immediately transports the reader at the core of Fermigier’s contributions to his time’s debates on architecture and urbanism: he wrote almost exclusively about Paris, he battled relentlessly for saving Les Halles… and he was defeated! There is much more to it, of course, and this is why La bataille de Paris deserves to be rediscovered by historians of architectural criticism, as a testament to a relentless activity of public criticism¹, rarely matched for its precision and incisiveness.

A professor of classical literature (agrégé de lettres classiques, in French), specialized in art history, Fermigier’s activity as a columnist spans two decades of an intermediate and mature phase of his career. He starts writing for France’s leading leftist weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1961 – amongst its most prominent contributors at the time was also architecture historian Françoise Choay – and joins popular newspaper Le Monde in 1973. Similarly to other French art historians of his generation, such as André Chastel (1912-1990) and Bruno Foucart (1938-2018), for the general press, he primarily writes about art, both art history and the news. His corpus of articles about architecture and urbanism is more limited but, if possible, even wittier and more surprising. The cultivated intellectual, not a specialist of the topic but a sensible interpreter of his age’s broader cultural trends, takes advantage of his outsider’s perspective to cast a fresher, unbiased gaze on a wide range of topical issues and projects. 

Published in 1991 by Gallimard, La bataille de Paris collects all of his 72 articles about architecture and urbanism, from both Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde. Images are grouped in a single black and white portfolio, printed on thicker glossy paper. The volume is introduced by a 24 page preface by editor François Loyer (b. 1941), a renowned architecture historian who played a key role in the study and preservation of Paris’s 19th century heritage and non-monumental urban fabric². Despite a slightly apologetic tone – quite common for such introductions, whose authors present the experience of a friend or colleague – Loyer’s text is a trustworthy guide through both Fermigier’s personal and professional trajectories, meticulously intertwining considerations about his personality and sensitivity, on the one side, and about the platforms and topics of his activity as an architectural critic, on the other side.

Fermigier is described as uncompromising and yet capable of the subtlest humor, deeply respected by his peers and still solitary in his many campaigns. These characteristics bring him closer to other militant intellectual-journalists of that era, in France and elsewhere: Chastel had a similar profile, as well as the pugnacious Italian archaeologist Antonio Cederna. According to Loyer, Fermigier’s approach to the objects of debate on architecture and the city is also somewhat typical. The 1967 exhibition at Paris’s Grand Palais, Du Paris des projets au Paris des chantiers (Paris, from the Projects to the Construction Sites), showing the most audacious and extravagant visions for the French’s capitals near future, ignites his interest in the current affairs of urbanism. He stands out as one of the most lucid critics of a quintessentially French approach to urban planning, mixing modernist principles and top-down state agency. Starting from 1973, when he joins Le Monde, he increasingly focuses on matters of heritage, which become paramount in the French debate following the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing as President. Fermigier’s articles of this decade are passionate pleas to his readers and the public opinion, to take a position for the preservation of this or that monument or urban space, threatened of demolition or profound alterations.

La bataille de Paris is an overview of two decades of history of architecture and urbanism in Paris: the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. Readers are accompanied through the city from the Centre Pompidou, which Fermigier supports enthusiastically, to the Gare d’Orsay and the dull hotel building, its planned and luckily unrealized replacement, which he describes in both scandalized and resigned tones. They discover the wonders of Middle-Age neighborhoods, in the successfully defended rue Mouffetard, and of workers housing from the 19th century, when Fermigier joins the inhabitants of the picturesque Cité Fleurie, against a real estate project already approved by the municipality. Two battles, though, are the very backbone of Fermigier’s writings and of this anthology. The fight against the Louvre Pyramid – “the zircon” as he called it – and the long-lasting opposition to the demolition of Les Halles – “Qui a vendu les Halles?”, he asks desperately in July 1971, a month before the spectacle of the wrecking ball. They mark the start and the conclusion of his career as an architectural critic. While he lost in both cases, his visions for a different future for Paris survive in his heartfelt, swift articles collected in La bataille de Paris.