Barrière d'Enfer
Barrière d'Enfer | |
48°50′02″N 2°19′56″E / 48.8339°N 2.3321°E | |
Location | Paris, France |
---|---|
Designer | Claude Nicolas Ledoux |
Type | Toll Gate |
Completion date | 1787 |
The Barrière d'Enfer (
Origin of name
The name "Barrière d'Enfer" comes from the street "Rue d'Enfer" (now called "Rue Denfert-Rochereau) which leads there after crossing the Rue de Faubourg-Saint Jacques. Some historians think the street was named because it was "a place of debauchery and robbery", while others believe that the name comes from a corruption of the Latin via inferior (in contrast with Rue Saint-Jacques, which was known as the via superior).
History
The two
The main streets originating from the Barrière d'Enfer were the Boulevard d'Enfer (now a part of the Boulevard Raspail), the Rue d'Enfer, and the Boulevard Saint-Jacques.[citation needed]
The third act of the opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini portrays Mimi leaving the city via the Barrière d'Enfer to visit a tavern.[citation needed]
The Barrière is also mentioned in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables:
- "How did those children come there? Perhaps they had escaped from some guardhouse which stood ajar; perhaps in the vicinity, at the barrière d'Enfer, or on the esplanade de l'Observatoire, or in the neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be read: invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum ["they discovered the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes"], there was some mountebank's booth from which they had fled […]."
Description
The Barrière consists of two identical buildings on either side of the Avenue du Colonel-Henri-Rol-Tanguy, which is itself located along the axis of the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and Avenue du Général-Leclerc.
- No. 3 (the eastern building) is the building of the Inspector General of Quarries. The entrance to the Catacombs of Paris is located next to building No. 1.
- No. 4 (the western building) houses of the Highway Service. Beneath the building starting in August 1944 were the headquarters of Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, from which he gave orders pertaining to the French Resistance and the Liberation of Paris.
In commemoration of this, a portion of the Place Denfert-Rochereau between the two buildings was renamed avenue du Colonel-Henri-Rol-Tanguy on the 15th of March 2004,[5] on the sixtieth anniversary of the Liberation of Paris.[citation needed]
References
- ISBN 2-7068-1098-X.
- ^ Faure, Alain (2000). Paris au diable Vauvert, ou la Fosse aux lions (in French). France: Société française d'histoire urbaine. pp. 149–169.
- ISBN 9782708401341.
- ISBN 978-3050023731.
- ^ "Avenue du Colonel-Henri-Rol-Tanguy". paris.fr. Nomenclature officielle des rues de Paris (in French). The city of Paris. 2006-11-29. Archived from the original on 2014-08-18. Retrieved 2010-09-17.
Notes
This article was translated largely from corresponding material on fr:Barrière d’Enfer.