About 300 meters north of the Centre Pompidou stands an urban concrete neighborhood of 6 to 7 story apartment buildings, known as Quartier de l’Horloge (the Clock Quarter). It’s a grid of narrow streets, with small courtyards and covered passages running between them, lined with tiny shops, fast food joints, and cheap bookstores. Not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find on a list of Paris attractions.
If you think this gloomy concrete neighborhood is named after some ancient medieval clock, think again. It’s actually named after a fairly new and fascinating mechanical clock. More precisely, it’s a mechanical figure, or automaton, called Le Défenseur du Temps (the Defender of Time), tucked away in the heart of the neighborhood and mounted on a wall at 8 Rue Bernard de Clairvaux. The automaton’s remarkable mechanism fell silent on July 1, 2003, but during the years it worked, crowds used to gather beneath it and watch its performance with real fascination. Remarkably, even today plenty of people still make their way there just to look at the frozen artwork.
The impressive sculpture stands four meters tall and weighs a ton, and it depicts man’s heroic struggle against the forces of nature. Every hour on the hour, between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., passersby used to watch a metal man standing on a rock, holding a massive sword, taking turns fighting one of three terrifying creatures: a mighty dragon, a rooster, or a crab, except for three times a day when he had to face all three at once: at noon, at 6 p.m., and at 10 p.m. The dragon, the rooster, and the crab symbolized, respectively, the elements of air, earth, and water, and during the battle you could hear the rumble of the earth, the blowing wind, and the crashing waves of the sea.
The story of the Defender of Time
The sculpture was commissioned in 1975 by the real estate company Cogedim, and the work was created by the master automaton artist Jacques Monestier. Jacques Monestier was born in the capital of the Haute-Loire department, Le Puy-en-Velay, an ancient town surrounded by volcanic hills, home to a breathtaking 12th-century cathedral and the Chapel of Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe, perched on the tip of a rock.
It’s no wonder the unique architecture of these two magnificent structures captured the young boy’s heart and shaped his future. Monestier studied engineering and then architecture at the famous Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and once he finished his studies, he turned to creating mechanical figures, or automatons. In 1965, the young man had already won a professional grant, and it didn’t take long for the animated sculptures he worked on to gain wide recognition. Much like the Italian genius Leonardo da Vinci, whom he admired, Monestier was fascinated by the movements of animals and people, a trait he expressed in the Defender of Time and in many other works you can see on his website.
To build the clock, Monestier worked with Louis Desouches, who was responsible for the dragon’s scales, while Alain Moirod took charge of the steel frame. The four figures were hammered in copper and coated in gilded copper plates, and the rock the man stands on was made of oxidized brass. In September 1979 the automaton was partly installed, and the following month the clock was officially inaugurated by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac.
Over the years the clock needed some light maintenance, and after funds were raised in 1995, the quartz mechanism was replaced with a radio-controlled clock, and the old tape recorder was swapped out for a CD system. But by 2003, the creaking automaton’s mechanism had finally stopped, and its magnificent mechanical metal parts had worn out and rusted. The clock’s glory days, then, had come and gone, and for more than a decade now the broken automaton has been waiting for the budget it needs to be restored. The Defender of Time won every battle against the monsters and the forces of nature, but in the end he was defeated by the very thing he so faithfully guarded: time.
And to remember the glory days of the automaton, here’s a bit of the song by Jacques Brel that goes with it:
Route from the Rambuteau train station:
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The photo at the top of the article was taken by Yoel Thamanlis.
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