The Belly of Paris: Hunger in the face of plenty

“The belly of humanity” Dating from at least the Middle Ages, Les Halles was dramatically modernised in the 1850s. Redesigned by the architect Victor Baltard as a series of massive buildings made of glass and iron, it became a symbol of modernity and of the Second Empire of Napoleon III, which ran from 1852 to 1870. It was literally known as “the belly of Paris.” As Zola wrote in his preliminary notes for the novel, “The general idea is: the belly, the belly of Paris, Les Halles, where food floods in and piles up before flowing out to the various neighbourhoods; – the belly of humanity, and by extension the belly of the bourgeoisie ... People gorging themselves and growing fat is the philosophical and historical side of my novel. The artistic side is the modernity of Les Halles, the gigantic still lifes of the eight pavilions, the avalanches of food to be seen every morning in the center of Paris.”1 The main protagonist of The Belly of Paris is the young Parisian Florent Quenu, an intellectual who has been mistakenly arrested during a failed coup in 1851 and sentenced to five years’ hard labor on Devil’s Island (Île du Diable), the notorious French penal colony of Cayenne in French Guiana, which opened in 1852. Escaping Devil’s Island after a long spell in prison there, he makes his way back to Paris by a lengthy and circuitous route but collapses from hunger and exhaustion just a few miles from the city’s outskirts. It is at this moment that the novel starts. The front driver of a train of horse-drawn carts carrying vegetables into Les Halles from the market gardens around Paris almost runs over the body of the unconscious Florent by mistake in the dark. She takes pity on him and gives him a lift back to the center of his native town. Ironically, the famished Florent completes the final stage of his journey home on a heap of food that he cannot consume: