“A public monument is not there just for lovers.” – city official, Paris (2014)

Now that summer’s around the corner, Paris is bracing itself for the annual influx of tourists. With 36 million tourists passing through Paris every year, tourism has a profound influence on the capital and the country at large. Tiny trends morph into tidal waves of change, and weighing the needs of tourists and residents becomes a tricky balancing act. This week, we’ll kick off a series called “We’ll Always Have Paris” focusing on the history of tourism in France. For our first episode, I’ll take a closer look at one of the most inescapable trends to hit Paris in recent years: the ubiquitous love locks.

Episode 24: “We’ll Always Have Paris: Love Locks”

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Interested in purchasing some of the love locks up for auction? The website is here, though it looks like the website for the cadenas d’amour is not yet ready.

Transcript

LOVE LOCKS/PONT DES ARTS BRIDGE

“Paris is a museum.” Usually when people throw that old bit of snarkiness around, they’re referring to the fact that everything in central Paris is old and change comes slowly. I remember muttering that phrase under my breath when I was 19 and realized the nightlife scene was nothing compared to that of other European capitols. But in the most straightforward sense, Paris often is a museum – with over 100 in the city limits, Paris in many ways has become a place where France deposits things it wants to preserve. But who gets to decide what’s worth keeping? What makes an object into a treasure? With these questions in mind, this episode focuses on one of the most inescapable fads to hit Paris in the last century, a fad which charmed tourists and drove locals insane, a fad which calls into question the relationship – and even the responsibility – between visitors to a sacred site and the site itself. Today, let’s discuss the life and death of the Paris love locks.

The ceremony only takes a moment or two. On the famous Pont Des Arts bridge, which connects the Louvre Museum on the right bank of Paris to the Institute of France on the left bank of Paris, a couple holds up a tiny padlock. The bridge is beautiful, very wide and lined on both sides with a railing that overlooks the river Seine below. The beautiful looping curves make the Pont des Arts a classic subject of any photos of the Parisian waterfront. This couple isn’t here for the beautiful view of the river, or the buildings, and they may not even need to cross the bridge at all. They’re here for the railing. Maybe they think it’s forbidden, and they look over their shoulders. Maybe they think it’s tradition, and they swoon. All of a sudden, the couple bend over, loop the padlock through the iron railing of the bridge, take out the key, close their eyes and swish, toss the key over their shoulder into the river. Maybe they’ve written their names on the padlock. Maybe they’ve drawn a heart. Either way, the couple has made a permanent tribute to their love, the most romantic gesture in the world’s most romantic city, and their padlock will remind Parisians and tourists for decades to come of the couple’s love for one another. Next to the couple, another couple fixes a padlock onto the fence as well. Next to that couple, another couple fixes their own padlock on to the fence. Next to that couple….

[CRASH]

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m a romantic at heart. I swoon when I’m in Paris. I’ll dance to a musician on the sidewalk in Paris. I’ve been known to swing around a lamppost in Paris, more than once! But I think I have go stake my position there: I hate the damn love locks. All over the Internet, you’ll read tourists – and as you’ll see, it’s only ever tourists – sighing over such a romantic tradition, such a classically Parisian gesture. It was getting me all huffy, and I figured it was more productive to make a podcast episode than complain about those locks to my boyfriend for the millionth time, so today is my chance to set the record straight:

Between the years 2008 and 2015, the Pont des Arts bridge was completely covered in love locks. Before the year 2008, nobody in Paris had heard of them. The only people on the Internet claiming that there’s some ancient French tradition of defacing a public bridge to show how much you care about somebody – I’m not making this up – are companies who sell the padlocks. Love locks on the Pont des Arts bridge have been around for fewer years than Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

So where does this idea come from? People on the Internet who are trying to justify the love locks talk about an old bridge high up on a mountain in China where couples would put up locks and hope for good luck. There is definitely a Chinese mountain where folks do that, but I haven’t been able to find any proof of this being an ancient tradition. The New York Times keeps mentioning a 100 year old Serbian folk tale about a lovelorn woman whose soldier boyfriend dies in World War I. That folk tale explains why a small bridge in a Serbian spa town is covered in padlocks, but I doubt anybody in 2008 was holding up their padlock thinking, “This one’s for you, Vrnjacka Banja!”

The real answer is, of course, youths.

Federico Moccio is sort of the Italian equivalent of John Green – he’s writing books about sad teenagers in love which become huge hits thanks to the Internet. One of his books, I Want You, was originally published in 2006 but didn’t make an impression at first. Ten years later, Italian teenagers looking for the next Twilight rediscovered the book and bought up 3 million copies in only a few years. In the book, two Italian teenagers fix a love lock onto a lamppost on the Ponte Milvio bridge, the oldest bridge in Rome, before tossing the key into the Tiber river below. Let’s be clear: Federico Moccia made this idea up in his head for a book. He told the New York Times he “like the idea of tying locks to love”. Well, that may be all fun and good when it’s a small handful of lovestruck teens, but I’ll give you three guesses what happened next: after the next thousand couples put locks on the same lamppost, the lamppost fell over. Keep in mind that this is Rome, and everything in Rome is old, and when I say that the Ponte Milvio is the oldest bridge in Rome I mean that it was built in the year 206. Love locks aren’t old. The Ponte Milvio bridge is old. But if you’re thinking that the lamppost falling over gave anybody doubts about the so-called tradition, you’re very wrong: locks started popping up on the bike racks, the road signs, even latched on to the lid of the garbage can. At some point, I’m guessing someone remembered that there are all kinds of bridges in Paris – why not try a love lock there?

[DUN DUN DUN]

Reading through years of news reports on the love locks of Paris make it sound like a terrible disease outbreak. It starts innocently enough: “Gestures of Love and the Pont des Arts.” “Paris Love Locks: A Love That Won’t Die.” But something which might be cute the first time, even the first ten times, becomes annoying after a thousand times, and dangerous after ten thousand times. As early as 2010, officials at town hall worried that the locks were threatening the stability of the bridge. “Love Locks Return to the Bridges of Paris” “Dear Tourists, Please Unlock Your Love” “Paris Removes 100,000 Pounds of Eternal Love From Bridge” “Locked and Loaded: Love Locks Inundate The Bridges of Paris” The city officials begged tourists to stop adding locks to the bridge, which couldn’t handle the weight. “What? That’s ridiculous!” said a bunch of tourists who knew better than civil engineers. By that time, the bridges were running out of space for the locks, and tourists began attaching locks even to the sculptures on the bridge. At this point, it wasn’t just officials protesting the trend, it was the Parisians themselves. “Paris Falls Out Of Love With The Padlocks On Its Bridges” “Are Love Locks On Bridges Romantic Or A Menace?” “Crumbling Under the Weight of Commitment” The tipping point arrived on June 9, 2014, when city officials’ nightmare came true: the bridge handrails collapsed. Just like the lampposts in Italy, the Pont des Arts couldn’t actually handle expressions of love on that scale. But if you thought that people would stop adding locks to the bridge after the bridge began tumbling into the river, you’re mistaken. “Love Lock Epidemic Spreads, Amidst Growing Controversy” “Love Conquers All, Despite City Hall” “Lovestruck Couples Still ‘Locked’ To Paris Despite Officials’ Best Efforts” “Paris Paramours Foil Love Lockdown” Paris officials didn’t know what to do. Even after adding plexi-glass and fining anyone who was caught with a padlock, the locks kept coming. On the blog, I’ve added pictures of the bridge in 2015, where it looks like this beautiful bridge is overwhelmed by a tumor of padlocks. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said “The problem is too big to control or contain…It’s a mania now.” The city began telling everyone in no uncertain terms to stop chaining their feelings to the fence, and told tourists “Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love.” The deputy mayor of Paris was clear as day when he said, “We don’t want the love locks on the bridge. It’s not very beautiful and it is dangerous. We want people to come to Paris but we don’t want them to put love locks on.” You can’t accuse the officials of being wishy-washy here. Finally, last year, Paris threw up its hands and said, ENOUGH! Snip, snip went one million padlocks, weighing over 45 tons. 45 tons is like taking a monster truck and leaning it against a chain-link fence, hoping it will keep the truck from rolling off. Even this drastic measure didn’t get the message across – when I visited the Pont des Arts in October 2015, just a few months after this massive unlocking, the padlocks were making their way back like kudzu. I give credit to the city officials: they don’t want to be killjoys. If the world wants the Pont des Arts to be a memorial to love and lovers, okay! Paris isn’t ever going to say no to that. But could we find a way to pay tribute to love that doesn’t sink the city’s famous monuments into the Seine?

Paris in 2016 straddles a weird divide: it’s the most visited tourist destination in the world, and it’s also a city people live in. One out of every 1,000 people on Earth visited Paris in 2015, myself included. How should Paris negotiate the demands of its tourists, who fund 7% of France’s GDP, with the demands of its citizens, who have to live there 365 days a year? The author David Foster Wallace once wrote that “To be a mass tourist…is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, it is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you.” There are 3 tourists for every 1 citizen of Paris. Being a tourist in Paris isn’t like being a tourist somewhere else – every action you take will be multiplied by 7 million by the end of the year. Every trend, no matter how much it may seem harmless, will have a significant impact on the city of Paris. What responsibility do tourists have towards the places they love and cherish? If tourists come to a city they love and cherish, how can they respect those who live and work there? Well, for a start, don’t chain your junk to their monuments. Don’t throw metal garbage into their rivers. Find a way to participate in city life without damaging that city’s infrastructure.

When the Pont des Arts first opened in 1804, the bridge’s architects created what they called a suspended garden, with beautiful arches, which would hopefully be decorated with hanging plants, boxes of flowers and comfortable benches. The bridge was a daring design, using metal instead of stone to create a lightweight bridge with crisscrossing arches which hovered over the water instead of blocking anyone’s view of it, and it looked less like a piece of infrastructure and more like a sculpture. But over the next 200 years, the beautiful, fantastical, delicate bridge would sustain damage after damage. First, shelling in World War I. Then, shelling in World War II. The city’s architects started worrying about the bridge’s brittle bones. Then, in the 1970s, a floating barge delivered the final blow. For the next decade, Paris rebuilt the bridge, this time in 20th century steel, recreating the original, unobtrusive design. The Pont des Arts has always been a tribute to the beauty of the river Seine, and for 200 years architects have designed a bridge meant to be both beautiful and transparent, a lovely place to stand and take in the view without blocking the view of the Seine from any other point. Not only do the love locks of Paris threaten the physical structure of the Pont des Arts, they miss the point. The bridge was designed to contribute to the aesthetic beauty of Paris without blocking the view. Since 1991, the banks of the river Seine have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, defined as an area of “outstanding cultural or natural importance to the common heritage of humanity”. Even when they aren’t collapsing the guardrails, even when they aren’t poisoning the fish, the love locks are a way of taking away that beauty for yourself. You wouldn’t carve your name on the Washington Monument. You wouldn’t chip away at a Roman wall. So the locks are gone. What’s next?

For now, Paris officials are reconsidering what it means to be a true Pont des Arts: not merely a bridge between the Louvre and the Institutes of France and their masterpieces, but a piece of art in its own right. Right after the locks were removed, when the guardrails were temporarily replaced with wooden panels, Paris officials turned the wooden panels over to el Seed, a French-Tunisian artist who specializes in what he calls calligraffiti. I was lucky enough to see this installation when I was there – giant pink Arabic characters quoting one of France’s greatest novelists, Balzac: “Paris is in truth an ocean: you can plumb it, but you’ll never know its depths.” Just in time for summer 2016, Paris unveiled a beautiful exhibit of metallic sculptures from the sculptor Daniel Hourdé. Like the bridge itself, the statues of lightweight and delicate, and many of them are kinetic, turning gently in the wind. The statues will be on display until December 2016 and then, like the like the locks themselves, they’ll be gone. Sometimes, Paris is a museum. But sometimes, Paris is just a city, like any other.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/23/italy-bridges-locks-of-love

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-saint-james/adieu-to-the-lovelocks-of_b_7993008.html

GREAT before and after: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ceciledehesdin/ponts-des-arts-before-and-after?utm_term=.yd19JlMJ7#.gy2qa4dak

http://www.widewalls.ch/graffiti-street-art-replace-love-locks-on-pont-des-arts-bridge-in-paris-el-seed/

OTHER OPTION: take a photo in front of the i love you wall http://www.lesjetaime.com/english/lemur.html

Daniel Hourdé’s Enchanted Installation Haunts Paris’s Love Lock Bridge

Sources:

 

“In Rome, A New Ritual On An Old Bridge” (New York Times)

Italy’s bridges weighed down by locks of love (The Guardian)

A Scourge in Paris, Love Locks Prevail In Other Cities (New York Times)

Adieu to the Love-Locks of Paris (Huffington Post)

This Is What Five Years’ Worth of Paris’ Famous ‘Love Locks’ Look Like (Buzzfeed) —> LOOK AT THIS :-O

Further Reading:

See the calligraffiti of the artist eL Seed  on the Pont des Arts bridge on Widewalls. I was able to see this installation in person, and it was so beautiful, all the more so because it was temporary.

See Daniel Hourdé’s beautiful, kinetic installation on the Pont des Arts bridge on Artnet.

LET’S TALK PARIS! You can see my own recommendations here, but don’t forget to talk about it on the show’s Facebook page!