THE CAVERNS UNDER PARIS.

THE CAVERNS UNDER PARIS. I said in this post that Graham Robb’s THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE was a great book. His new book PARISIANS is also a great book. It has many stories about Paris artfully told—stories which seem to have been selected to be of special interest to me. For example, I am interested in archaeology and in what lies below, as in this post about the subterranean rivers of London. Graham Robb tells about the collapse of a major street in Paris in 1774 and the enormous problem that caused the collapse. The street that collapsed was then called the Rue d’Enfer. It is now known as the Boulevard Saint Michel. The problem was that for hundreds of years, beginning with the Romans, the massive formations of limestone and gypsum which lie under Paris had been removed for building stone. The result was a maze of tunnels under Paris. Graham Robb makes a hero of Charles-Axel Guillaumot, who was charged with mapping the tunnels and stabilizing the ground under Paris. Here is a good article on the current state of the tunnels by Neil Shea, a version of which appeared in National Geographic. Collapses still occur, although they are rare events. Shea notes that: “….a pit collapsed beneath a train station in central Paris in 1975….”