In 2009, I was given the extraordinary honour of being granted a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria. The project was to uncover the background of a book that I’d seen in the collection almost 20 years earlier. It was called l’Atlas des anciens plans de Paris—a huge volume from 1880, containing intricate reproductions of ancient maps of Paris, showing the City’s evolution from its early days as a Roman settlement on the Seine.
In the process of this research, I unexpectedly uncovered a much larger collection of books, all related to this atlas, and of which the State Library of Victoria was quite unaware. The collection of books was an extravagant gift, made by the Government of France to the City of Melbourne, as an act of cultural generosity to mark the beginning of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880-81, probably the largest annual event of the global calendar—and what a gift it was!
There were in excess of 150 books, some of them very large, and in them the people of Melbourne saw Paris spread out in all its glory. Alongside maps, images and tales of old Paris were descriptions of a very new city—a very modern city. By 1880, Paris had reinvented itself as the very picture of modernity, having become the most advanced metropolis in the world. In fact these books were something of a template for the creation of a state-of-the-art city. For example, there were detailed plans of the world’s first fully-enclosed sewerage system and water supply, connected to every property in Paris.
But against this futuristic flourish, it was this one volume, l’Atlas des anciens plans de Paris, that held my focus—with its vivid account of where Paris had come from, to becoming the grand European centre of palaces, gardens and high-culture.
The hidden story behind these maps is that they are testament to a city recovering from the debris and destruction of both the Franco-Prussian War and the fiery domestic battles of the Communes. Barely ten years before the creation of these books and the subsequent gift to Melbourne, Paris had suffered terrible damage. As a result, l’Atlas des anciens plans de Paris is a precious document that represents both the survival of one of Europe’s greatest cities, and a fierce determination to hang onto the memory of how the French capital came into being.
Paris To Melbourne With An Atlas, was one of the outcomes of my Creative Fellowship at the State Library. It was an exhibition that I curated at Alliance Française de Melbourne in November 2010, to celebrate 120 years since that organisations beginning in Melbourne. It was held in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, which kindly loaned the wonderful l’Atlas des anciens plans de Paris, along with some of the original maps, which I had been extremely fortunate to obtain from the Bibliothèques de la Ville de Paris, while researching the books in Paris.
See also: Adventures with an Atlas
© 2010 Michael Shirrefs