tasty little tales of animal presence in the capital

In December 1870, Paris was besieged by the Prussian army and the people went hungry. Three months earlier, the city had rounded up all the cattle it could from the surrounding regions: 30,000 oxen and 180,000 sheep, which were parked between the Bois de Boulogne and the Jardin des Plantes. The Parisians made short work of it. They soon had to fall back on the horses. Then it was the turn of the dogs and the rats.

The Seller of Rats during the Siege of Paris, oil painting by Narcisse Chaillou dated 1871, is a testimony to this. You can see a reproduction of it in the exhibition “Paris animal. History and stories of a living city”, at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal. Wearing a butcher’s cap on his head, knife in hand, the boy depicted rolls up his sleeves before finishing the little beast lying on his makeshift stall, cobbled together from a chair on the back of which is hung a French flag .

Right next to this painting, like a reverse shot, the menu of a great restaurant shows that, at the same time, the better off were doing well by learning about the exotic flavors of leg of antelope, fillet of elephant or learned seal – although they were also offered “coupe de tire-fiacre”, “boudin de dada”, “rabbit stew from the gutter” and “rat à la crapaudine”.

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A collateral victim of the closure of places of culture linked to Covid-19, the “Paris animal” exhibition has seen its opening postponed many times, but here it is open, and that’s a good thing. The reinterpretation of the history of Paris that it offers, through the prism of the presence of animals in the city, turns out to be as instructive as it is fascinating.

It is the subject who wants this. The exhibition says it well, which opens with a series of statues and bas-reliefs of animals dating from the Gallo-Roman period (unfortunately represented, as so often at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, in the form of insipid facsimiles) and closes with an installation of giant moles, creatures taken from the Baroque imagination of director Philippe Quesne: from horse to bear, from dog to lion, from bull to deer and all kinds of chimeras , the animal has always nurtured fantasies, mythology, religion. To the curators, the architects Léa Mosconi and Henri Bony, he inspired a hyper-narrative scenography that commands attention.

Issue of biodiversity in the city

The twenty centuries covered by the exhibition are condensed into forty-four micro-narratives, all associated with documentary sources from the period, to which the presence of animals gives the tone of tasty little tales – cruel, fantastic or poetic, depending on the case.

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