Starting Saturday, tens of thousands of spectators from around the world will descend on Roland Garros stadium in western Paris each day to watch Olympians smash forehands and overheads on the courts that host the French Open each year.
The stadium complex occupies the southeast corner of the Bois de Boulogne, a vast pleasure park that was the bustling heart of Paris in the mid-19th century. Nearly three times the size of New York’s Central Park, the 2,100-acre forest (pronounced “boo-wah”) was the heart of Parisian social life for almost a century, a source of media coverage around the world and a colorful spectacle depicted in paintings and novels.
“The Bois de Boulogne was an important part of Parisians’ lifestyle, providing performing theaters and daily shows,” said Jean-Michel Delex, author of a book on the park’s history, “and was a great inspiration for many people, including Baudelaire, Zola, Maupassant, Balzac and Proust.”
Officially opened in 1854 by French Emperor Napoleon III as a filled-in artificial lake, the Bois de Paris marked the beginning of a social revolution. It was the first large-scale public green space in a crowded, filthy and disease-ridden capital, expanding the range of leisure opportunities for Parisians and introducing a new class mix.
Residents gathered there to stroll the winding nature trails, take boat rides across the pond, enjoy concerts, take in the views from the grandstands at Longchamp Racecourse, explore the new zoo, and dine in elegant chalet restaurants, but the main attraction was the parades around the lake and gardens, showcasing haute couture fashions, beautiful horses, and uniformed carriages.
“It was a place to not only see but to be seen,” Derex said.
The daily carriage processions were such a glamorous event that they jammed traffic through the park and topped tourist guides’ must-see lists. Each afternoon, thousands of spectators came to admire the extravagant costumes of royalty, bankers, playwrights, famous courtesans and visiting dignitaries. Even emperors made frequent rounds.
“The drive into the woods is a magnificent sight,” wrote The Dublin Times.
“What a train of open cars, full of many merry passengers! [outfits]”Today the woods of Paris…” reported London’s Penny Illustrated Paper, marveling at how Paris had become an “international world.”
Inspired by London’s Hyde Park, it surpassed it in grandeur: “The French have outdone us in parks,” lamented a British reporter for the Glasgow Evening Citizen.
Artists like Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot set up their easels to paint racetracks, footbridges, aviaries and caves, while Mark Twain, moved by the beauty of the panorama, wrote in Childhood: “I have no desire to describe the Bois de Boulogne; I cannot. It is simply beautiful, cultivated, endless, a splendid wilderness. It is a fascinating place.”
The creation of the park was also a great PR move by the new French Emperor, Napoleon III, the valiant nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was a felon who twice tried to overthrow the King, was sentenced to life imprisonment after the second attempt, but escaped six years later. In 1848, when King Louis-Philippe fled the country after the Revolution, he became France’s first elected president.
But with his plans to thoroughly modernize Paris constantly thwarted, Napoleon III dissolved his government in December 1851 and announced that he would be crowned emperor like his uncle the following year. He promised to bring order and prosperity to his people and make Paris the “capital of all” during the Second Empire. Napoleon III’s first major move was to donate to the city the Bois de Boulogne, a private walled forest that had been the royal hunting grounds of French kings for centuries, on condition that officials renovate it using city funds.
And they renovated, achieving engineering feats and landscaping marvels little known at the time. They created two artificial lakes connected by waterfalls, countless ponds, miles of winding paths, glass pavilions, gazebos, pleasure parks, and enclosed botanical gardens. Even those who protested Napoleon III’s power grab, questionable financial practices, foolish wars, and the destruction of old Paris to make way for wide, tree-lined boulevards designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann heaped praise on the opening of the forest.
“Paris was then a medieval city, damp, dark, with no air circulation,” said French urban planner Stéphane Marek, referring to the city’s frequent epidemics. After a cholera epidemic in 1832 killed 19,000 people in six months, public health experts called for opening up the cramped city, but little was achieved until Napoleon III. The Bois de Boulogne, and later the Bois de Vincennes, provided residents with fresh, clean air, Marek said. The two parks became known as the lungs of Paris.
But despite the picnics, boats, flowers, children’s rides and theatre performances, all was not well in the Bois de Boulogne.
Firstly, daily walks bring leaders closer to their people – as evidenced by the 1867 shooting of Russian Tsar Alexander II by a disgruntled Polish immigrant while he was visiting in a luxury carriage with the French emperor.
The Bois de Boulogne was also a favorite place for nobles and politicians to gather, armed with swords and pistols, to duel, which, despite being illegal, remained a popular way to settle disputes throughout the 19th century. Even women were known to take part in potentially deadly duels in the Bois de Boulogne.
Additionally, the park’s secluded woods throughout the park attracted prostitutes, as alluded to in Manet’s painting “The Luncheon on the Grass.” In his book The Art and Architecture of the Musée d’Orsay, art historian Peter Gartner writes that the painting “is not, as its French title suggests, a depiction of an urban woodland picnic. Rather, it highlights the rampant prostitution that was common in Paris but taboo in the Bois de Boulogne.”
And yet the forest remained one of Paris’ star attractions for 75 years. Though the thrill of a daily stroll has long since disappeared with the advent of the car, this lush park that brought a new sense of openness to Parisian society is still beloved for its beauty, restaurants, horse racing track, running and cycling paths, and Shakespeare Garden, which recreates scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.
The Bois de Boulogne has retained almost all of its natural assets, except for the 21 acres on which the Roland Garros Stadium was built in 1928. In 2019, the stadium was expanded to include the 5,000-seat Court Simonne-Mathieu, extending into the Bois de Boulogne’s Serre d’Auteuil botanical gardens. The move was initially heavily criticised, but greenhouses were incorporated into the design, surrounding the new court on all sides.
The stadium complex will host the Olympic tennis events, which began Saturday and will run through Aug. 4. The boxing finals will run from Aug. 6 to Aug. 10. The Paralympic wheelchair tennis events will run from Aug. 30 to Sept. 7.
Melissa Rossi is the author of six books on geopolitics. She writes for platforms like Yahoo News, Outrider, AARP, Rolling Stone, and Newsweek, and frequently covers strange events in history on her Substack, Rossi Reports.
