Death is never far from the surface in many cities. The familiar streets and buildings have too frequently in the past witnessed violent religious programmes, political insurrections and their brutal repression, or licensed killings in the squares and basements of the public buildings. A melancholy atmosphere still lingers about the worst of them.
I have never been able to feel comfortable in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, for example, a place of endless public spectacles of torture and violent death, though these days it is filled with tourists sitting at tables, laughing and drinking beer. There is rarely anything entirely innocent about urban form. Even so, like many others, I have always looked kindly upon the parks of any city, as places where innocence has been maintained. A recent visit to Paris caused me to think again.
View of the Luxembourg Gardens looking west, across the ornamental lake. (Photo by Larraine Worpole)
It was invincible summer, as Albert Camus described the unassailable pleasure and power of assured fine weather, even in September. We took the Metro from Strasbourg Saint-Denis, where we were staying, to Odéon, then joined the crowds strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens on a bright Sunday morning. Yet while the parks in London and elsewhere in Britain were drying up and turning to brown dust, the park lawns in Paris were a rich, luxuriant green as good as an English bowling green and the flowers exhibited their colours as vibrantly as ever.
The Luxembourg Gardens, along with the Luxembourg Palace, were commissioned by the French queen, Marie de Médicis, at the start of the 17th century, and were inspired by the Boboli Gardens in Florence: a jardin de plaisir for the aristocracy before it all went so horribly wrong.
The French are often accused of over-formality in the design of their parks, and in terms of the geometrical symmetry of the paths, parterres, ornamental lakes, terraces, flower-beds, structure planting and statuary, this is certainly true. But within this formal framework, there is a great deal of improvisatory and convivial, even sensual, human behaviour. More so perhaps than in the allegedly informal English picturesque tradition. Take seating for example.
Rather than providing fixed benches, the Luxembourg Gardens has more than a thousand individual metal chairs which people move at will to suit their wishes. Lovers may arrange their chairs to sit facing each other, while husbands and wives place their seats side by side; sleepers or serious book-readers (and French parks are full of people reading) sit on one seat with their feet up on another.
Some move their chairs in order to sit in the sun, others in the shade. One group of (religious or political?) enthusiasts had formed a circle of some twenty seats for a lesson or discussion of some kind. All social arrangements are possible with moveable seating; much less so with the fixed benches which adorn the typical English park, where everybody is forced to sit staring into the impersonal, middle distance.
The ornamental lake is still very popular with children playing with model yachts, which can be hired by the half-hour. (Photo by Larraine Worpole)
Like the Tuileries, the Luxembourg Gardens has a wonderful boating lake, where model sailing boats can be hired by the half-hour or hour. A continuous succession of children watch anxiously as occasional gusts of wind scurry their boats hither and thither across the ornamental lake until they were blown in to the edges again. This is what park life is all about, we like to think, a place of spontaneous freedom and human happiness rescued from the turmoil of the frenetic city.
And then, for a brief moment, it went dark. Walking towards the boating lake I noticed a plaque on one of the elegant terrace walls, never seen before. Perhaps it has only been recently installed. It read: Le Sénate en hommage aux insurgés de la Commune de Paris fusillés contre ce mur le 25 mai 1871. The plaque showed a contemporary engraving of a large number of dishevelled men, some blindfolded, crowded against this very same terrace wall, as soldiers aim yet another fusillade at those still standing. The dead lie in piles on the ground. The engraving also pictured exactly the same statues, jardinières, and terrace balustrades which can be still be seen today. The effect was unsettling: a ghastly anomaly of time and place: a sulphurous whiff of parallel universes.
I read later, back in the apartment in which we were staying, that after the defeat of the Commune, around 20,000 suspected rebels were rounded up and shot without any legal process, in the nearest convenient place. In a number of cases as with Parc des Buttes Chaumont north of the river the parks of Paris provided convenient killing fields.
This shocking collision of the arcadian with the atrocious is a minor trope in visual and literary culture. There is not only the Et in Arcadia Ego genre of landscape painting associated principally with Poussin, in which a group of innocents suddenly come across a tomb or a skull in a beautiful, idyllic landscape, reminding them of the brevity of life and happiness, but one thinks also of Giuseppe di Lampedusas great novel, The Leopard, which opens ominously with the discovery of the rotting body of a Risorgimento soldier in the palace garden.
The terrace wall against which dozens of Communards were executed by firing squad without trial in 1871. Today a tranquil scene. (Photo by Larraine Worpole)
One somehow hoped that the landscaped park might be exempt from these brutal interruptions from history. In the final photograph shown here, two people are sitting by that very terrace wall, soaking up the sun, reading. Yet 132 years before, on that very spot, bodies were heaped in awful and bloody confusion.
It is said that what makes a city is the material presence of history. This was an unexpected reminder of the bloodiness of history, in a setting that seemed in all other respects to be entirely at peace with itself and its place in public memory.