Left Bank

Paris is divided by the river Seine into two parts of unequal size: the Left Bank and Right Bank. Up until about the eleventh century, annual floods covered the Right Bank and made it rather inhospitable. Thus the Left Bank, which was higher and protected from floodwaters, was inhabited first. Today, one can still see remains of a vast Roman amphitheater there: the Arènes de Lutèce. The famous abbey Saint-Germain-des-Prés was founded on the site of an old pagan temple, also on the Left Bank. It was only after the Middle Ages that urban development came to favor the Right Bank, which today is much more extensive than the Left.

The Montagne Sainte-Geneviève—one of seven hills surrounding Paris—is the heart of Quartier Latin (Latin Quarter), an essential part of the Left Bank. It includes the Sorbonne (founded in 1253), the most famous college in the University of Paris (founded in 1170), Europe's second-oldest university. It also includes the Collège de France (College of France, founded in 1530) and the Panthéon, where important historical figures from the French Revolution onward are buried. Westward, Saint-Germain-des-Près district is associated with writers and artists, such as the French [Page 850]writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Arthur Rimbaud, and Americans Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

Tourists and Parisians wander down a narrow Left Bank street lined with cafés.

Royalty-Free/Corbis; used with permission.

This old university area, in the very center of Paris, is rather difficult to demarcate physically even if it enjoys a strong image. Originally, this student district, which appeared officially under the reign of Philip II (1165–1223), was well defined, both spatially and functionally. But the urban sprawling of Paris beyond its fifteenth-century fortifications and the dispersal of educational establishments after the nineteenth century make its present limits very vague. The best that can be said is that nowadays the Latin Quarter is represented by Paris's fifth district and the northeastern part—between Saint-André-des-Arts Street, Monsieurle-Prince Street, and Mazarine Street—of the sixth district.

During the twentieth century, the Latin Quarter underwent a huge transformation, more so than other Parisian districts. Admittedly, it remains both a cultural and student district, but property developers, travel agents, and the media have made it into a rather fashionable area as well: Tourists flock there, thus altering the district's appearance and activities drastically. Today, the Latin Quarter is also a highly soughtafter residential area, with skyrocketing property values. Its local residents are mainly young urban professionals with high incomes and strong purchasing power who nonetheless rarely go out in the Quarter due to lack of time.

The rest of the Left Bank is experiencing a less extreme version of the same situation: The Tour MaineMontparnasse, a tower built in 1972 where once an old railway station stood, and the Grande Bibliothèque (Great Library, 1996), with its four towers shaped like opened books, built near Austerlitz station, are two symbols of this evolution.

Therefore, the identity of Left Bank is getting difficult to specify. No single administrative, business, cultural, educational, or historical center imposes itself upon the whole district. No single social, ethnic, or cultural community can characterize it anymore either. Its present identity seems bound up in a rather negative territorial ideology based on the rejection of tourism and the boutiques that have invaded the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Older inhabitants, newcomers, students, passers-by, and tourists confront one another with their divergent perceptions of this area.

...