Underground Paris

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Underground Paris

In September 2004, while on a training exercise in a group of tunnels underneath the Palais de Challiot, the Parisian police stumbled upon a clandestine underground cell. Nothing to do with terrorism, this one, but an actual subterranean chamber, 400 square meters in size, which had been fitted out as a cinema by a dedicated club of film noir lovers. As the story hit the press, a band of troglodytes emerged blinking into the full beam of the media spotlight. Since the 1980s, turned out, hundred of these “cataphiles” had been holding anything from underground parties and art exhibitions to festivals and, it was rumored, orgies. Experience tunnel-goers talked of elaborate graffiti murals and a huge, pillared party room known as “La Plage”.

In fact, the tunnels underneath Chaillot form only a small part of a vast network that dates back to the medieval era, when the stone for building Paris was quarried out from its most obvious source, immediately underfoot – almost as if Paris were matched by a negative image of itself below ground. To clay over 300km of underground galleries lie beneath the city, especially on the Left Bank’s 5°, 8°, 14° and 15°arrondissements, where the Grand Réseau Sud runs for over 100km. Another separate network lurks beneath the 13° arrondissement, while in the 16°, it’s said collapsing buildings, a royal commission was set up to map the old quarries and shore up the most precarious foundations. Great galleries were cut along the lines of the roads and the material used to infill the worst voids. Today, some of these underground “streets” still exist, while that above has disappeared. Some attribute modern Paris’s relative lack of skyscrapers to doubts about the quality of the city’s foundations.

In the nineteenth-century, many tunnels were used for mushroom cultivation (the everyday supermarket variety is still known in France as the champignon de Paris), others for growing endives or brewing, the Carthusian monks even practiced distillation under the modern-day Jardin du Luxembourg. The most creative scheme, however, involved the hygienic storage of human remains. From the 1780s, the contents of Paris’s unhealthily overcrowded cemeteries were slowly transferred underground. In Montparnasse, one bone-lined section of the Catacombs can still be visited but, otherwise, "penetrating into or circulating within" the network has been illegal since 1955. You can always get down into the Metro, of course, while at the Egouts de Paris you can descend into a part of the city’s 2300km of Sewers. But it would be foolish to try anything more adventurous. In 1993, one cataphile apparently disappeared into the labyrinth, never to return.