Place de la Nation

The place, briefly

Place de la Nation is a large roundabout in eastern Paris, on the boundary of the 11th and 12th arrondissements, with a bronze group in the middle and gardens around it. It is a working square rather than a monument, ringed with traffic, and most people who cross it are changing trains.

In Giovanni's Room it is the address of the room the novel is named for.

Baldwin gives it twice and both times in passing. At Guillaume's bar, asked where he lives, Giovanni says only that it is out, far out, almost not Paris. Guillaume supplies the rest: he lives in a dreadful street, near Nation, among all the dreadful bourgeoisie and their piglike children. Later, when Giovanni finally takes David home, he puts him in the taxi first and gives the driver one word — Nation.

What David finds there is not bohemian and not picturesque. The street is wide, respectable rather than elegant, massive with fairly recent apartment buildings, and it ends in a small park. The room is at the back, on the ground floor of the last building, down a short dark corridor past the vestibule and the lift. It is small, it is cluttered, and it smells of the alcohol Giovanni burns in his stove.

That is the whole geography of the most famous room in the book, and its ordinariness is the point. Every other address in the novel is somewhere a person goes to be seen — the bar, the boulevard, the cafés at Vavin. This one is at the far end of a taxi ride, on a street with nothing on it, in a quarter Baldwin's narrator finds actively depressing. It is where the thing can happen because nobody is looking, and it is where David eventually cannot breathe.

The square itself has a history the novel does not use but which sits oddly well beside it. It was laid out in 1660 for the entry into Paris of Louis XIV and his new wife, who were received here on a throne, and it was called the place du Trône for the next century and a half. In 1794 the Revolution renamed it the place du Trône-Renversé — the square of the overturned throne — and moved the guillotine here for the last six weeks of the Terror. Roughly thirteen hundred people were executed on this ground in thirty-eight days, more than at the place de la Concorde across the whole Revolution. The dead were buried a few streets away at Picpus, where the cemetery is still there and still private.

It became the place de la Nation in 1880, on the first official Bastille Day, and Aimé-Jules Dalou's bronze group — the Triumph of the Republic, a figure on a chariot drawn by lions — was installed in stages between 1889 and 1899. The square has been the traditional end point of left-wing demonstrations ever since, which is the other thing it is known for.

There is nothing to look for from the novel, because there is nothing to find. Giovanni's street is invented, the room with it. What a reader can do is stand on the square and look down the streets running off it: wide, quiet, respectable, apartment blocks the whole way, exactly as described. The book chose accurately.