Le Butte Bergere, a lovely green and decorated corner, in the 19th arrondissement

Many people know the magnificent Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. A famous park, one of the largest and most original in the capital. But who knows Bergere Hill, a charming, rural corner just five minutes from the famous park?

Very few Parisians know it, let alone tourists who don't come to the place in droves, and that's a good thing. It's a mini-neighborhood, on a hill, one of the hills of Paris , called La butte Bergeyre. When demarcating the Parc des Buttes Chaumont ("Park of the Bald Hills"), between 1863 and 1867, Baron Haussmann decided not to include this hill in the park's territory, and so it remained an independent space, outside it, with rue Manin separating it from it.

Today, this magical hill, “Le Butte Bergère”, is home to around 1 lucky residents, including a large number of architects, designers, directors and actors, while in the past, in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, painters and doctors ruled the roost. During this period, the now defunct Hôtel Dell, at XNUMX rue Edgar Poe, was also crowded with criminals fleeing justice and, to a lesser extent, political refugees. In one of its rooms, the writer and journalist Henri Calet hid from the authorities, having stolen money from the factory where he worked to satisfy his gambling addiction.

Today, there is no trace of poverty in the neighborhood. Cute houses, different from each other, diverse but coordinated, like fairy tales, stuck together, a kind of parallel yakumon, calm and relaxing. Reserve half an hour for a walk that expands the lungs and heart. From there, you can go to Parc de But Chaumont to continue breathing fresh air. You can go as far as the Muzaia neighborhood, and for that you need at least half a day.

Let's get back to the topic of the article. "Le Bute Bergere", until the 16th century, was a small hill with a rich history, a pasture area, dotted with grain fields, windmills and rows of vines but largely dominated by gypsum quarries that, after their closure, housed a historical museum, a successful amusement park and a prestigious stadium until it became a sought-after celebrity neighborhood. Who would have thought that today's sleepy village was once a cultural, entertainment and sports center, so vibrant, so active?

Gypsum quarries and windmills

Until the 16th century, gypsum quarries operated in the area, leaving little room for a few pastures, vineyards, and small grain fields. Grain growers would bring their crops to seven windmills, six of which stood in “Les Buttes Bergères” itself. In a painting by Claude Chastillon, one of the architects of the Saint-Louis Hospital, built in 1608, and seen in the center, you can see the windmills peeking out from behind, standing on our hill, which would later be called “Les Buttes Bergères.”

The gypsum quarries were gradually closed until the creation of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in order not to further endanger the stability of the ground. This was not enough, and renovations are still taking place today to strengthen it and prevent collapses. The holes that open up on the surface of the ground and in the tunnels beneath it require constant supervision. The windmills were dismantled in 1778 because of the same danger of underground damage. Hippolyte Adam's painting, from 1835, shows a bald hill, above the Saint-Louis Hospital, from the Saint-Martin Canal.

The history of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont begins here. In 1863, the desolate hills of the park were cultivated into a steep romantic garden, a well-kept hymn to the French landscape , but the hill west of rue Manin, which was not included in the park and was not yet called “Le Buttes Bergère”, remained for another twenty years in an almost wild state.

The Historical Museum on the Centennial of the Revolution

Émile Bin was a painter of mythological scenes and portraits, as well as a republican statesman and a passionate patriot. He contributed these skills and inclinations to an original project that, despite its success, lasted only three years, from 1888 to 1891. Bin conceived the idea of ​​establishing an open-air historical museum on the pastoral hill where visitors could also stroll along the green paths, enjoy several amusement rides, and admire the magnificent view of the city and its surroundings from a tower at the top of the hill, the Belvedere.

The museum will include twenty huge pictures, 100 square meters each, that will illustrate the most important moments of the revolution, according to the principle of Daguerre's diorama (a painting of enormous dimensions on a transparent substrate that presented the effects of changing lighting conditions). He said and did. Among the twenty pictures we can mention, for example, "Poverty in the Villages", "The Fatherland in Danger", "The Fall of the Bastille", "The Trial of King Louis XVI", "The Fall of Robespierre", "Waterloo", "The Assassination of Marshal Brienne", "The First Railway", "The Fall of the Tuileries", "The Declaration of Universal Suffrage".

The picture “Poverty in the Villages” provides the background. An unfortunate peasant family, unable to pay the rent, sees how, as is customary, the doors and windows of their miserable hut are being torn down. The noble lord, arrogantly, passes by in his carriage, accompanied by his servants dressed in embroidered uniforms. Splendor and splendor compared to black poverty. But the day of revenge has come, as the following pictures show until the victory of the Republic in 1899.

On Easter Sunday in 1889, the museum called “Le Diorama des Buttes Chaumont” was inaugurated. The entrance was from the corner of rue Manin and rue Priestley, which is now called avenue Mathurin Moreau.

A personal note: Let me mention that in 1980 I lived for a year in Avignon at 42 Moro Tower (a narrow building decorated with yellow Art Deco friezes, see photo) but I knew nothing about “Le Butte Bergere” while the entrance to it is at 40… Forty years passed before I discovered the neighborhood…

Let’s go back to the hill’s surprising history, to 1889, the year in which the “Historical Museum on the Centennial of the French Revolution,” as it was initially called, was inaugurated with great pomp and ceremony. The museum, 4000 square meters, was designed as a Greek temple in the style of the Acropolis of Athens, entered via a huge staircase.

The architect who designed the project, Volclair, established, alongside the Museum of the Twenty Pictures, a gallery that collected and displayed various and varied objects related in one way or another to the history of the revolution, paintings, drawings, reliefs, medals, sculptures, books, manuscripts, signatures, weapons, costumes, furniture, and the like.

The entire complex spread across the entire hill and was open eight months a year (except for the winter months). In the first summer after its opening, newspapers report that the crowds that came up to it rivaled those who flocked to the Eiffel Tower at the Universal Exhibition.

It is difficult to believe today what the journalists of the time said, but we must understand that Emile Ban, the creator and executor of the museum, was a successful painter and renowned politician who served as mayor of the 18th arrondissement from 1878 to 1889. He founded “ Le Vieux Montmartre ,” a society for the history and archaeology of the borough, and one of its newsletters tells of a visit by school children from the borough to the historical museum.

In August, Emile Ban, together with Mathurin Moreau, who was an artist and politician like him, a sculptor and mayor of the 19th arrondissement, organized daily events that included dances, costume balls, theater performances, fairs, simulated battles, the conquest of a fortress, sports competitions – running, cycling, wrestling, fireworks and pyrotechnics, and much more, even hot air balloon flights. Emile Ban was full of ideas…

He also had no shortage of connections. Our man was a friend of none other than Georges Clemenceau, but during the period of the Historical Museum he was suspected of Boulangerism (General Boulanger threatened to overthrow the Third Republic) and was therefore dismissed from his position as mayor of the district.

Plans to build a larger amusement park in the garden next to the museum awaited other developers. Emil Bahn and his team abandoned the hill after giving up the buildings in April 1891 to the Salvation Army, a Protestant charity, which turned them into a night shelter. Bahn’s paintings disappeared, no one knows where, and he himself was forgotten.

Émile Bin, painter, statesman and entrepreneur, 1825-1897, photo source: Wikimedia

The Salvation Army's night shelter also did not last long, and in its place, at the beginning of the century, in 1905, at number 29 rue Manin, another humanitarian program took shape: the Fondation Adolphe de Rothschild Hospital (L'Hôpital Fondation Adolphe de Rothschild), eyes, face and neck, rose from the ground and functions gloriously to this day.

In 1886, a surgeon from Geneva removed a piece of metal from Baron Adolphe de Rothschild's eye. He decided to establish a hospital in Paris, similar to the one he had already established in Geneva, which would make available to everyone, regardless of religion or political opinion, the knowledge and advanced techniques of ophthalmology and facial medicine, while providing humane treatment. The philanthropist died in 1900 before he could complete the project, but his wife, Baroness Julie Caroline de Rothschild, successfully carried it out.

Amusement Park, La Paul Butte

While the hospital, built on the grounds of the historical museum, was coming into full operation, an attractive amusement park sprang up on the opposite side of rue Bolivar, second only to the Luna Park at Porte Maillot in the hearts of Parisians at the time. And what an appropriate name the company that built it chose for it: “Les Folles Buttes,” “The Crazy Hills.”

Games, amusement rides, a haunted house, cottages of curiosities (chalets de curiosités) but the highlight of the park, inaugurated in 1912, was a kind of ziggurat, a Tower of Babel, with a curling lamb surrounding it from the outside and inviting visitors to enter the building at every level to enjoy one attraction or another. Disneyland before Disneyland…

Seven good years of success, the second most important and popular park in Paris. During this period, music hall performances, a theater, a skating rink, an open-air cinema, dance balls with an orchestra, a restaurant, a tennis court, a car park... until it closed in 1926.

Allow me another personal interlude. My heart trembles when I think of such enterprises, entertainment and sports, coming to an end. That is how I felt when I explored the entertainment complex in Ranelagh Garden (see the article: Ranelagh Garden – A Tour of the Green Sculpture Garden, a Paradise Where Time Stands Still ), another miraculous initiative by a visionary and doer that has come to an end.

All those initiatives, which did not stand the test of time, to the heartbreak of those who invested in them, nevertheless brought happiness for a certain period and thus comfort. And even greater comfort in the perpetuity of the hospital built by the Rothschilds, on the cutting edge of progress – a huge achievement on a national and international scale.

And there is further comfort in the commemoration of the “crazy hills” in the song by the singer Moloji, “Madeleine,” which recalls his childhood and youth wanderings there:

Où volai-je le premier baiser? Je crois que ce fut à Paris aux Folles Buttes, dans les étoiles. (…). Nous devîmes de chastes amants et nous aimâmes follement des Folles Buttes jusqu'aux Lilas.

Mouloudji, Complaintes, Seghers, 1975

Where did I steal my first kiss? I think it was in Paris, on “Wuthering Heights”, on the stars. (…). We became monastic lovers and loved each other madly from “Wuthering Heights” to “Lilac Bushes”.

Moloji, Lamentations, Segres, 1975

Berger Stadium

A large sports company in Paris, which had its origins in a high school in the 15th arrondissement and was therefore called Le Sporting Club de Vaugirard, was looking for a place to build a rugby stadium. With the generosity of its president, Gaston Sigrand, a rugby player himself and owner of a chain of clothing stores inherited from his uncle, the company purchased the top of the hill where cows still grazed. Four years of hard work were needed to level the potholed and compacted ground and prepare the field for sporting competitions.

On August 18, 1918, the stadium, “Le stade Bergeyre,” was inaugurated, named after Robert Bergeyre, a promising rugby player who was killed at the age of twenty on July 22, 1918, the deadliest day in French history ever, 000 dead.

Apart from Robert Berger, hundreds of athletes fell in battle, but despite the heavy losses, the stadium was inaugurated at the “Meeting des champions alliés,” an international gathering of French and American athletes. The “Gomon” company produced a video available for viewing at Le Forum des images, les Halles, Paris. Fifteen photographs by journalists, and another, later, article by “Gomon,” are also available.

The stadium hosted many important competitions, in many fields, not just rugby – football (the 1919-1920 French Cup final, many competitions and the 1924 Olympic Games), basketball, tennis , field hockey, athletics, gymnastics, fencing… It was sometimes used for other purposes, and so at the end of May 1921 it was rented out for an entertainment café-concert show, the proceeds of which were dedicated to a nursing home for lyrical artists. Among the entertainers were Maurice Chevalier in a parody of a wrestling competition, together with a champion in the field and a mustang at the head of a race in which Charlie Chaplin and Patty Arbuckle (their doubles, of course) starred among the competitors.

Berger Stadium, 1922, photo source: Wikimedia

Le Bout Berger from the 1930s to the present day

Renting out the stadium for such events did not solve the serious financial problem caused by the ongoing need to reinforce the fragile ground. Ultimately, the family of Gaston Seagrand, the stadium's owner, decided to sell the land to a real estate company headed by a shrewd and successful entrepreneur named Charles Pélissier.

He understood the potential of the hill as a real estate asset during a housing crisis due to a lack of land with building permits. Even before the sports facilities were evacuated from the area, he quickly prepared a plan in which he divided it into 220 plots of 100 to 1200 square meters and connected them with five streets. He designated the interior of the neighborhood for low-rise private houses built by the buyers of the plots, and on its edges, from numbers one to seventeen on rue Manin and from numbers fifty to sixty-two on avenue Simon Bolivar, he himself and his partner erected taller buildings. Thus, Charles Félicier determined the configuration of the hill's urban landscape, which remains his legacy to this day.

Sales began in the second half of 1927, and in 1928 Josephine Baker inaugurated the first residences. In 1933, the Austrian modernist architect Jean Welz built the Villa Zilvelli, named after its owner, a Greek engineer born in Turkey, who commissioned the house as a gift for his wife, a Frenchwoman from Normandy. The wide windows of the avant-garde villa, inspired by Adolphe Loos and Le Corbusier, offer a magnificent view of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Montmartre on one side and the Eiffel Tower on the other.

The villa was abandoned by its heirs, slowly falling into disrepair and becoming a safety hazard until it was purchased at auction in 2019 by illustrator-photographer-graphic designer-advertiser-motorcyclist Jean-Paul Goude for €2.2 million. He had no choice but to completely demolish it (it could not be renovated), but Goude decided to rebuild it more or less according to the original model, which would cost him another €2.2 million.

The villa has not yet risen from the ground. When I visited the place, in December of this year, 2023, at number seventy of Georges Lardennois Street, I discovered a fenced-in lot, completely empty. From its left side, I had a spectacular view of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. A unique vantage point from Bergere Hill to Montmartre Hill, with a bench allowing me to prolong the magical moment.

A stroll through the cobblestone streets while looking at the facades of the houses gave me a blessed sense of elation and a momentary oblivion of the harsh current events, the unbearable reality. A peace from the land of fairy tales.

Near the Montmartre viewpoint, a communal garden of neighborhood residents, trees, aromatic plants, and flowers with a small vineyard that yields about a hundred bottles of wine a year, and beehives complete the pastoral picture (open Sundays and Wednesdays, afternoons). It's worth returning at dusk for grandiose photographs.

reaching

Metro: Colonel Fabien, line 2

Bus: number 75 which arrives at the same stop

Go up the avenue from the Moro tower and at number forty turn right, go up the stairs or the paved street and there you are in paradise.

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