Many people know the stunning Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, one of the largest and most original parks in the capital. But who knows La Butte Bergeyre, a charming, almost rural little corner just five minutes from the famous park?
Very few Parisians know it, let alone the tourists who thankfully don’t flock there. It’s a mini neighborhood on a hill, one of Paris‘s many hills, called La Butte Bergeyre. When Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (“the park of the bare hills”) was being laid out between 1863 and 1867, Baron Haussmann decided not to include this hill within the park’s grounds. It remained an independent space outside it, separated from it by Rue Manin.
Today, about twelve hundred lucky residents live on this enchanting hill, “La Butte Bergeyre,” among them quite a few architects, designers, directors and actors. In the past, during the 1930s and 1940s, painters and doctors ruled the roost. At that time, a now-vanished cheap hotel at number 1, Rue Edgar Poe, crowded together criminals on the run from the law and, in a very different vein, political refugees struck by misfortune. In one of its rooms hid the writer and journalist Henri Calet (1904-1956), who had stolen money from the till of the company where he worked to feed his gambling habit.
Today there’s no trace of poverty left in the neighborhood. Charming houses, each different from the next, varied yet somehow in harmony, huddle together like something out of a fairy tale: a parallel universe, calm and soothing. Set aside half an hour to an hour for a walk that will do your lungs and your heart good. From there you can move on to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont to keep breathing fresh air, or go as far as the Mouzaïa neighborhood, for which you’ll need at least half a day.
Back to our subject. Until the 16th century, La Butte Bergeyre was a small hill with a rich history: pastureland dotted with grain patches, windmills and rows of vines, but mostly dominated by gypsum quarries. After the quarries closed, the hill was home to a history museum, a successful amusement park and a prestigious stadium, before it finally became a sought-after neighborhood for celebrities. Who would have guessed that today’s sleepy little village was once such a bustling, lively cultural, entertainment and sports center?
Gypsum Quarries and Windmills
Until the 16th century, gypsum quarries operated in the area, leaving room for only a few pastures, small vineyards and modest grain fields. Grain growers brought their harvest to seven windmills, six of which stood right on La Butte Bergeyre itself. In a drawing by Claude Chastillon, one of the architects of the Hôpital Saint-Louis, founded in 1608 and shown at the center of the image, you can make out the windmills peeking out behind it, standing on our hill, which would one day be called “La Butte Bergeyre.”
The gypsum quarries closed gradually, even before Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was built, to avoid further destabilizing the ground. That wasn’t enough: renovations are still carried out today to reinforce the ground and prevent collapses. The holes that open up on the surface and in the tunnels beneath it require constant monitoring. The windmills were dismantled in 1778 because of that same risk of underground damage. A painting by Hippolyte Adam, from 1835, shows a bare hill above the Hôpital Saint-Louis, on the side of the Canal Saint-Martin.
The history of Parc des Buttes-Chaumont begins here. In 1863, the park’s bare hills were transformed into a steep, romantic garden, a carefully tended ode to the landscapes of France. But the hill west of Rue Manin, which wasn’t included in the park and wasn’t yet called “La Butte Bergeyre,” remained almost wild for another twenty years.
The History Museum for the Revolution’s Centennial
Émile Bin was a painter of mythological scenes and portraits, and also a Republican statesman, a passionate patriot. He put both his talents and his inclinations into an original venture that, despite its success, lasted only three years, from 1888 to 1891. Bin came up with the idea of building an open-air history museum on the pastoral hill, where visitors could also stroll along green paths, enjoy a few amusement rides, and look out from a tower at the top of the hill, a belvedere, over the magnificent view of the city and its surroundings.
The museum would include twenty giant paintings, 100 square meters each, illustrating the most important moments of the Revolution, following the diorama principle invented by Daguerre (a painting of enormous dimensions on a translucent surface, used to create effects of changing light). Said and done. Among the twenty paintings were, for example, “Poverty in the Villages,” “The Homeland in Danger,” “The Fall of the Bastille,” “The Trial of King Louis XVI,” “The Fall of Robespierre,” “Waterloo,” “The Murder of Marshal Brune,” “The First Railway,” “The Fall of the Tuileries,” and “The Declaration of Universal Suffrage.”
The painting “Poverty in the Villages” sets the scene. A miserable peasant family, unable to pay their rent, watches as the doors and windows are stripped, as was customary, from their wretched cottage. The haughty lord passes by in his carriage, attended by servants in embroidered livery: splendor and grandeur against stark poverty. But the day of reckoning came, as the following paintings show, right up to the Republic’s triumph in 1899.
On Easter Sunday in 1889, the museum opened under the name “Le Diorama des Buttes Chaumont.” The entrance was at the corner of Rue Manin and Rue Priestley, today known as Avenue Mathurin Moreau.
A personal aside: I should mention that in 1980 I lived for a year at number 42, Avenue Mathurin Moreau (a narrow building decorated with yellow Art Deco friezes, see photo), but I knew absolutely nothing about “La Butte Bergeyre,” even though its entrance is right at number 40. Forty years went by before I discovered the neighborhood.
Photo source: ‘France/rénov
Back to the surprising history of the hill. In 1889, with great pomp and splendor, “the Historical Museum for the Centennial of the French Revolution” opened, as it was first called. The museum, 4,000 square meters, was designed as a Greek temple in the style of the Athens Acropolis, reached by a giant staircase.
The architect behind the project, Volclair, built, alongside the museum of twenty paintings, a gallery that gathered and displayed a wide range of objects related in one way or another to the history of the Revolution: paintings, drawings, reliefs, medals, statues, books, manuscripts, signatures, weapons, costumes, furniture, and so on.
The whole complex spread over the entire hill and was open eight months a year (except during the winter months). In its first summer, newspapers reported that the crowds climbing up to it rivaled in number those flocking to the Eiffel Tower at the Universal Exhibition.
It’s hard to believe the journalists of the time, but it’s worth understanding that Émile Bin, the man behind the museum, was a successful painter and a well-known 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 district, and one issue of its bulletin describes a visit by schoolchildren from the district to the history museum.
In August, Émile Bin, together with Mathurin Moreau, a fellow artist and politician, a sculptor and mayor of the 19th arrondissement, organized daily events that included dances, costume balls, theater shows, fairs, mock battles, the staging of a fortress siege, sports competitions (running, cycling, wrestling), fireworks displays and more, even balloon flights. Émile Bin was bursting with ideas.
He wasn’t short of connections either. Our man was a friend of none other than Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), but during the time of the history museum he was suspected of Boulangism (General Boulanger (1837-1891) was threatening to bring down the Third Republic), and as a result he was removed from his post as mayor of the district.
Plans to build a larger amusement park in the garden next to the museum waited for other developers. Émile Bin and his team abandoned the hill after, in April 1891, they gave up the buildings to the “Armée du Salut” (Salvation Army), a Protestant charity, which turned them into a night shelter. Bin’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 didn’t last long either. In its place, at the start of the century, in 1905, at number 29, Rue Manin, another humanitarian project took shape: the Hôpital Fondation Adolphe de Rothschild, specializing in eyes, face and neck, rose from the ground and is still running beautifully to this day.
In 1886, a surgeon from Geneva removed a piece of metal from the eye of Baron Adolphe de Rothschild (1823-1900). He then decided to build a hospital in Paris, similar to the one he had already founded in Geneva, one that would offer everyone, regardless of religion or political views, the most advanced knowledge and techniques in eye and facial medicine, delivered with humane care. The philanthropist died in 1900 before he could complete the project, but his wife, Baroness Julie Caroline de Rothschild, saw it through successfully.
An Amusement Park, Les Folles Buttes
While the hospital, built on the former grounds of the history museum, settled into steady operation, on the other side, along Rue Bolivar, a popular amusement park sprang up, second in Parisians’ hearts at the time only to the Luna Park at Porte Maillot. And what a fitting name the company behind it chose: “Les Folles Buttes,” “the Crazy Hills.”
Games, amusement rides, a haunted house, curiosity chalets (chalets de curiosités), but the park’s main attraction, opened in 1912, was a sort of ziggurat, a Tower of Babel, with a spiraling ramp running around the outside, inviting visitors to step in at any level to enjoy one attraction or another. A Disneyland before Disneyland.
Seven good years of success: the park ranked second in importance and popularity in Paris. During that time, it added music hall shows, a theater, a roller-skating rink, open-air cinema, dance balls with a live orchestra, a restaurant, a tennis court, and automobile parking, until it closed in 1926.
Let me take another personal aside. My heart aches whenever I think of ventures like these, entertainment and sport, that come to an end. I felt the same way researching the entertainment complex at the Jardin du Ranelagh (see the article: Jardin du Ranelagh: A Walk Through a Green Sculpture Garden, a Paradise Where Time Stood Still), another marvelous initiative by a visionary and a man of action that eventually came to an end.
All these ventures, which didn’t stand the test of time, broke the hearts of the people who invested in them, but they still brought happiness for a while, and that is some comfort. An even greater comfort lies in the lasting legacy of the hospital built by the Rothschild couple, at the cutting edge of progress: an enormous achievement on both a national and international scale.
And there’s one more tribute to “the Crazy Hills,” in a song by the singer Mouloudji (1922-1994), “Madeleine,” which recalls his wanderings there as a child and teenager:
In the song, Mouloudji recalls stealing his first kiss somewhere around Les Folles Buttes, under a sky full of stars, and falling innocently in love there, a love that carried him and his sweetheart all the way to the Lilas neighborhood.
Mouloudji, Complaintes, Seghers, 1975
A gentle tribute to young love found on the slopes of “the Crazy Hills.”
Mouloudji, Complaintes, Seghers, 1975
Bergeyre Stadium
A large Paris sports club, originally based in a high school in the 15th arrondissement and 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, himself a rugby player and the owner of a clothing store chain he had inherited from his uncle, the club bought the top of the hill, where cows were still grazing. It took four years of intense work to level the pitted, uneven ground and prepare the field for sports competitions.
On August 18, 1918, the stadium opened: “Stade Bergeyre,” named after Robert Bergeyre, a promising rugby player killed at the age of twenty on July 22, 1918, the deadliest day in French history, with 27,000 dead.
Besides Robert Bergeyre, hundreds of athletes fell in battle, but despite the heavy losses, the stadium opened with the “Meeting des champions alliés,” an international meet between French and American athletes. The Gaumont company produced a short film, available to watch at Le Forum des images, Les Halles, Paris, along with fifteen photographs from journalists, and a later Gaumont newsreel is also available.
The stadium saw many important competitions in many fields, not just rugby: soccer (the French Cup finals of 1919-1920, many other competitions, and the 1924 Olympic Games), basketball, tennis, field hockey, athletics, gymnastics, fencing. At times it was used for other purposes: at the end of May 1921, it was rented out for a café-concert show whose proceeds went to a retirement home for lyric artists. The entertainers included Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972) in a parody wrestling match alongside a real champion in the field, and Mistinguett (1875-1956) leading a race in which Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (1887-1933) competed, or rather, their stand-ins did.
Stade Bergeyre, 1922. Photo source: Wikimedia
La Butte Bergeyre from the 1930s to Today
Renting out the stadium for shows like these didn’t solve the serious financial problem caused by the constant need to reinforce the fragile ground. Eventually, the Sigrand family, owners of the stadium, decided to sell the land to a real estate company led by a shrewd and successful developer named Charles Pélissier.
Pélissier understood the hill’s potential as real estate during a housing crisis caused by a lack of buildable land. Even before the sports facilities were cleared from the site, he quickly drew up a plan dividing it into 220 plots of 100 to 1,200 square meters, connected by five streets. He set aside the interior of the neighborhood for low, private houses built by the buyers of each plot, while on its edges, from numbers one to seventeen on Rue Manin and fifty to sixty-two on Avenue Simon Bolivar, he and his partner built taller buildings themselves. That’s how Charles Pélissier shaped the urban landscape of the hill, a legacy that remains to this day.
Sales began in the second half of 1927, and in 1928, Joséphine Baker (1906-1975) inaugurated the first homes. In 1933, the Austrian modernist architect Jean Welz (1900-1975) built the Villa Zilveli, named after its owner, a Greek engineer born in Turkey, who commissioned the house as a gift for his wife, a Frenchwoman from Normandy. From the wide windows of this avant-garde villa, inspired by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, there’s a stunning 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, gradually crumbled, and became a safety hazard until 2019, when the illustrator, photographer, graphic designer, ad man and fashion figure Jean-Paul Goude (born 1940) bought it at auction for 2.2 million euros. He had no choice but to demolish it entirely (it couldn’t be renovated), but Goude decided to rebuild it, more or less, after the original design, which would cost him another 2.2 million euros.
The villa still hasn’t been rebuilt. When I visited the site in December of this year, 2023, at number 70, Rue Georges Lardennois, I found a fenced-off, completely empty lot. To its left, I caught a stunning view of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica: a unique vantage point from La Butte Bergeyre toward the Butte Montmartre, with a bench that lets you linger over the magical moment.
Walking along the paved streets, taking in the house fronts, lifted my spirits and let me forget, for a moment, the harsh news and the unbearable reality of the world. A peaceful escape, straight out of a fairy tale.
Near the viewpoint over Montmartre, there’s a community garden shared by the neighborhood’s residents, with trees, aromatic plants and flowers, a small vineyard that produces about a hundred bottles of wine a year, and beehives that complete the pastoral picture (open Sundays and Wednesdays, in the afternoon). It’s worth coming back at dusk for some truly grand photos.
Getting There
Metro: Colonel Fabien, line 2
Bus: number 75, which stops at the same station
Walk up Avenue Mathurin Moreau, and at number forty turn right. Climb the stairs or take the paved street, and you’re in paradise.
FAQ
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