Another fact not mentioned in this article is the WWII historical locations found in the unofficial Catacombs. Back when I lived in Paris, I was lucky enough to know someone who had access to one of the Cataphiles' maps (yearly-updated with notes on entrances and potential police patrols, with closest exits and dangerous passages).
We visited an old school basement, which was used as a bunker for members of the Resistance. The school itself was razed and rebuilt over at some point, but the Catacombs still hold traces of this period. Being there felt very...intimate. Nothing like you'd see in a museum or a documentary, we were in the same place as those back then.
I had a very similar experience. I used to do a lot of "urban exploring" in the UK, and as part of that, I visited Paris for it with some friends. We went with a guide I met on a forum to a secret resistance shelter recently uncovered at the time, and there was still litter from the 1940s. Old cigarette and match boxes, wine bottles, old posters and the like. It was exactly as you describe; intimate, in the way that visiting a mausoleum or cathedral is compared to a museum. I'm sure it's been picked clean now, but the memory will stick with me forever I suspect.
From around 2005, they provided free hosting with a custom subdomain with apache, php, mysqL, and ~10GB of disc space. At that time it was miles above other free hosting offers, so a ton of blogs/personal/small websites used them.
Funny sidestory, the founder of Free (Xavier Niel) is famous in the cataphile community, he said that he visits the catacomb since he's 16 and he even bought a private entrance and a underground bunker [1] though he might not be very liked in the community because of this privatization.
They also used to offer webhosting if you were subscribed to them and would never delete your website even if your contract expired (I've got an ugly one from 2006 that's still up even though I've changed ISPs a while ago).
And the subscription itself was free for their RTC per-hour plan, hence the name.
It means it was one of the most popular web host in France during that time, it was literally free, with decent space for the time (upped over time, I think it started at 100MB to 10GB now), a MySQL database, PHP support, no ads, no weirdness. You didn't even have to use that RTC plan you subscribed to.
Very much so: technically, they are big independent ISPs. In practice, it is the keystone in the very ambitious investment strategy of Xavier Niel, France's most influential internet entrepreneur. It is a key reason why internet access in France is so fast and cheap.
Both stories are worth reading, but I don’t know what would be a good reference in English. It’s 100% the most epic internet story I’ve heard (and I’ve got drunk with many famous nerds).
Quick version: Xavier Niel started with the Minitel, making much money from “pink” pages (sex chat) and rapidly switching to offering similar services on the then-nascent Internet. That didn’t kill Minitel, but it was a forerunner.
Having a lot of incoming traffic, he negotiated very beneficial peering contracts that allowed his company, called Iliad, to strong-arm FranceTelecom (the incumbent ISP) into granting him free high-tier internet access. They did not like that but couldn’t complain publicly that their customers were watching so much porn they had to give away the family jewels. (There wasn’t YouTube yet, and the legendary “The Internet is for Porn” from Avenue Q wasn’t playing on every screen.)
Thanks to that free peering, and with a dash of advertising on the home page, he could offer free (hence the name of the ISP) internet access via phone in the late’90s: a toll-free phone number, no monthly fee, and the offer even included web email and a hosting solution, free for individuals: an absolute revolution at the time.
FranceTelecom did not like that. They responded with a revolution of their own: they were the first to offer (A)DSL at an affordable price. They even escaped their legendary big-company committee-itits and released a marketable product: a modem that looked like a cute teal manta ray. I worked there a few years later, and the team was basically openly saying they were waiting for a Nobel prize (technically, it should have been the Millenium Prize, but that wasn’t invented yet).
Except, being a big company, they treated poorly one of the critical engineers behind that miracle. Niel had learned from the unusual characters who operated his website that some developers prefer to live by their own rules. He poaches that guy, and Free releases another bombshell: same ADSL, custom modem, better spec, bargain price, and a marketing campaign that is so iconic people still remember it—20 years later, “He gets it: he’s got Free.” Basically, saying that using any other service is a sign of mental handicap.
The idea of private telecom and internet service providers wasn’t the most comfortable for a country still proud of having a government-invented Minitel. Well, FranceTelecom didn’t like it: everyone else loved the competition. There are a lot of court trials, but almost all are in front of a special court for competitive matters. The president of that court (who happens to be my professor) loves the irreverent Niel. She mainly loves how much Free proves her theory that the court’s laissez-faire attitude (speaking softly and carrying a big stick aimed at the big guy) helps: it protects small players and allows them to run circles around the incumbent. FT (rebranded Orange) keeps losing.
That comforts Niel into showing that he is for the consumer: increasing the number of services, overlooking things like music and later movie piracy, lowering prices, allowing people to hack their modems to filter ads, etc. He is about as allergic to profit as possible during the 2001 bubble. The guy turns into a genuine folk hero. He gets accused of proxenetism (from before his Minitel days), but no one cares. That page is turned for good.
A couple of years later, he started offering mobile telephone contracts, famously a free zero-hour contract again (arguing they had been known for a paying service, the DSL access, for too long, given their name) and ties the mobile contract with the ADSL through genuinely sensible integrated products: for example, any mobile user roaming about town can connect through special access to nearby servers, lowering their mobile bill; when at home, calls to one’s mobile phone are forwarded to a phone-over-IP solution — both revolutionary ideas at the time. Having a landline becomes non-sensical overnight.
That turns Niel into a billionaire, and he starts having some real impact:
* opens Kima, the first very public, opinionated VC firm that invests in all the cool French start-ups; people discuss refusing to go to YC to take Kima’s money (in practice, smart people do both);
* opens 42, a very anti-institutional software school: the tuition is free, no classes or exams, but students have to survive a grueling schedule of super-hard projects (called the “swimming pool”, because people “get it or drown”).
At that point, any wannabe entrepreneur has two goals: get money from Kima and hire a CTO from 42. Sightings of the guy at the LeWeb conference or having coffee with an entrepreneur in the gentrifying Marais (the Jewish/Gay neighborhood that hosts both the fashion and start-up ecosystems) feed the rumor mill.
Because that’s not enough (and because “la Cantine” the free-for-all it-place where all internet stuff happens in Paris — conference with Zuckerberg, FabLab launch, Wikipedia workshops, etc. and “le Camion,“ the accelerator program both start to lose money, coherence, and support), Niel poaches key people from both and fills the void and opens “Station F,” the now headquarter of all things tech. It’s a triumph.
You might not have heard of Capitaine Train, Zenly, Swile, Front, PayFit, Younited, Boom, Carta, Movable Ink, Wise, Alan, Spendesk, Sorare, Ledger, or PandaDoc. Still, those are/have some unicorns where Kima was a key investor. It’s fair to say Niel has made much more money from investing than from Free.
He’s now pretty much the king-maker, getting French President Macron to say that he wanted France to be a “Start-up Nation.”
This was a rapid, unverified whirlwind. I expect to get a lot of corrections from many people (sorry, not trying to write a fact-checked book on the guy), but I hope to have made my point: we need Ridley Scott or David Fincher to make a biopic on him.
> Carthusian monks converted the ancient quarries under their monastery into distilleries for the green or yellow liqueur that still carries their name, chartreuse.
Is that right? Chartreuse is named after the eponymous mountain in the alps, on the other end of the country and it’s been made there for ages because it’s made out of plants and herbs that grow nearby and nowhere near Paris.
No one is planning to do that. Filling entry points with concrete, though, which is what the article is referring to, has been standard practice for a long time. And breaking up those large blobs of concrete has been a core activity of cataphiles for as long as it happened.
I was not a cataphile but, like lots of locals, I used to go down there almost every week-end in the mid-to-late 90s. The times of large decadent parties were already over by then. You could still meet a surprising number and variety of people but the "ambiance" was not as romantic as you might think from reading the article: the IGC was doing crackdowns and blocking entry points, the cataphiles were very hostile to other visitors, and the few "parties" that still happened at "La plage" or elsewhere where really a handful of people smoking weed.
The catacombs were a pretty cool playground to have, that's for sure, but let's not exaggerate its cultural importance.
> No one is planning to do that. Filling entry points with concrete
Filling is mostly to reinforce zones threatened by collapse. Entrances are secured mostly by sawing off the ladder rungs and welding the manhole covers.
> ambiance" was not as romantic as you might think from reading the article
Romantic to people who enjoy mud !
> cataphiles were very hostile to other visitors
The small groups who go down to party in what they consider their own private space can indeed be a bit noxious, with reactions such as lighting up smoke generating fireworks to drown the a bit of the network... I won't forget the adventure of finding our ways with one foot visibility.
> Filling is mostly to reinforce zones threatened by collapse. Entrances are secured mostly by sawing off the ladder rungs and welding the manhole covers.
They started using concrete to block entrances too, for the better-known entrypoints.
I remember seeing a popular entrance on the PC sealed with concrete a couple of times in those days… only for the cataphiles to dig up a new one a couple meters away.
Wow, hat is a new development - it had always been left as a "safety valve" to let tourists access from that unchallenging part of the network... But yes, the low gallery goes all along the Petite Ceinture tunnel, only a brick layer away !
> Unlike in the 19th century, when weak cavities were shored up by purpose-built pillars, the policy now is to inject concrete to fill up endangered spaces
The parent's "them" is not your quote's "endangered spaces". There is no plan to fill the carrières/catacombs (the parent's "them") with concrete and filling parts of it (your quote's "spaces) has been an established practice for decades, either for structural reasons (new metro lines, etc.) or for policing reasons (preventing people from entering the system). It was really hard 30 years ago to stay underground for more than one hour without having to squirt your way above a blob of concrete.
Yes, it progressively makes parts of the system harder or impossible to reach and something is definitely lost in the process for the very few who care but that's how the underground in general—and this underground in particular—has always worked.
I really don't see how "there is no plan to fill the catacombs, except for the public plan that's been in place for decades" is supposed to be a defense to the argument "we shouldn't fill the catacombs".
There was no argument to defend to, only a misconception to correct.
But, if you really want to make the argument that "we shouldn't fill the catacombs", then feel free to petition the IGC, because it is "they", not "we", who are in charge. Be more precise in your petition, though, because "the catacombs" is a very specific and profitable part of the system that no one ever thought of filling up with anything but tourists.
FWIW, I haven't gone down there for nearly three decades so I don't care one bit about the catacombs and the cataphiles. While I have very fond memories of the time I spent down there when I was younger, I moved on, as most people did. If "they" need to fill up a short section somewhere to prevent collapse during the new Metro works, I am fine with it.
> Sad to see they are planning on filling them up with concrete:(
I'm not sure what "them" exactly refers to, here, probably "the Paris Catacombs" in the title… which is not very precise. The misconception is that there is a plan to fill up a) the publicly accessible part of the network (the actual "catacombs"), or b) the non-publicly accessible parts of the network (the "carrières" and "abris" that both cataphiles and casuals incorrectly call "catacombs"), or c) both with concrete.
The publicly accessible part is basically the ossuaries, which is a very popular tourist spot. That part is profitable and very well maintained so there is no reason whatsoever to fill it with concrete.
The non-publicly accessible parts are the ones the cataphiles care about. _Many_ parts of it have been clogged with concrete over the past decades for the reasons already mentioned, but there is no plan to do that at the scale of the network which, given its size, would be insanely costly, challenging and pointless. No one is planning to do that.
The whole network? No. Just no.
What will continue to happen is concrete being poured here and there whenever the IGC identifies a security risk that can only be mitigated that way—entitled weed smokers be damned—and the cataphiles being pissed about something they can't do shit about.
I'm not good at dead languages, but I've heard complaints about cross-language mixing often enough that I suspect that there's a special term for people who like pointing that out.
Or perhaps, depending on irony levels, three terms. One each in Greek and Latin which they use to describe themselves, and one in Greek and Latin others use to describe them.
We visited an old school basement, which was used as a bunker for members of the Resistance. The school itself was razed and rebuilt over at some point, but the Catacombs still hold traces of this period. Being there felt very...intimate. Nothing like you'd see in a museum or a documentary, we were in the same place as those back then.