Paris, 1900. There was seldom a city and a year that better defined modernism and style. It was the year of the Exposition Universelle, attended by a record 50.6 million people, and the year of the Métropolitain, Paris’s first underground line, running trains from Porte de Vincennes to Porte Maillot, a 13-kilometre straight line from the east to the west of the French capital.

London, followed by Budapest and Chicago, was first – a good thing for Paris engineers and town planners. As Andrew Martin, author of Metropolitain: An Ode to the Paris Metro, explains: ‘The London Underground was the world’s first metro, and Paris, having taken a long, cool look at it, decided to do the opposite.’ Le Métro would be the antithesis of the London Underground.

First of all, there would be a unified vision: no entrance buildings, a network built much closer to the surface, and much denser so that all Parisians would live within 500 metres of a Métro station. Carriages, platforms, vaults and tunnels would be larger and airier than in London to avoid claustrophobia.

The look of Le Métro was entrusted to Art Nouveau Supremo Hector Guimard, despite his reputation as a rebel. The Métro’s commissioners sought something elegant yet light, with iron, glass, and ceramics as the preferred materials. The result dazzled the world. Hector Guimard’s dragonfly entrances – of which only two still exist in full, at Porte Dauphine and Abbesses – proved, at least to British eyes, according to Andrew Martin, ‘skimpy’, ‘outrageous’ and ‘compellingly bizarre’. To many others, its frosted glass and iron-cast arabesques were a thing of beauty, peak Art Nouveau.

Art critic Robert de La Sizeranne offered his view in an article published on 15 October 1900 in the Revue des Deux Mondes titled: ‘Art at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Do we have a modern style?’:

Sea animals are everywhere. They are on vases and on jewels. That curious little animal called seahorse now adorns women’s hair clips, books and glasses. Recently, a hotel owner wishing to attract new customers and persuade them that his hotel was decorated in modern style, publicised the décor of his billiard room: a glass ceiling, fish, water plants and nymphs painted on the walls. In other words, he invited his guests to play billiards in an aquarium. If there is such a thing as a modern style, it is a subaquatic one.

Guimard’s dragonfly entrances for the Métro were precisely this: an entry into a new magic world. Inside the Métro, every station had its name written on dark blue ceramic signs and its vaulted walls were covered with specially shaped white tiles; their bevelled edges reflecting the low-wattage electric light, creating, in the words of Martin, ‘a moonlight-on-the-sea effect’. ‘Fairy Electricity’, as it was called in Paris, proved one of the many highlights of the 1900 Expo.

At the aptly named Palais de l’électricité, 5,700 bulbs would be lit every evening. Newspapers wrote of ‘an avalanche of diamonds, a sparkling of jewels’, and noted how they sent ‘flashes and glimmers of light that ripple in waves to the most distant, concealed corners of darkness.’ The twenty-nine-year-old Italian painter and soon-to-be Futurist Giacomo Balla arrived in Paris from Rome on 2 September. He was so entranced by both the Expo and the Métro, that he later called his three daughters Luce (Light), Elletricità (Electricity) and Elica (Propeller).

The 1970s were not kind to Le Métro. It was the decade when French bureaucrats arrogantly thought that they were more modern than their 1900 counterparts. In cavalier fashion they destroyed Guimard’s masterpieces one after the other. I was born in that decade. Fortunately, I was taught at a young age to appreciate the relics of the past. As a small child, I often asked to go to Abbesses in Montmartre to walk up and down one of the last remaining full entrances with every detail intact. It was like going to a beautiful zoo.

I also belong to a generation of Parisians who can remember the old carriages where we sat on wooden seats. Built between 1928 and 1933, the famous Sprague-Thomson carriages ceased use in the 1980s. I remember them well: the glossy green paint on the exterior of the second-class carriages and the bright tomato red of the single first-class carriage, the undulating wooden slats of the benches, and the brass double latches on the doors. All the furnishing details were simple, rudimentary even, but elegant. Dismembered and destroyed, a few were sent to the transport museum, while others were salvaged by flea-market vendors.

Today, in 2025, Métro lovers can still sit on those wooden benches. How? Let me tell you a secret. At the tip of the Île Saint Louis stands Café Saint Régis. Few tourists who flock to this retro bistro, with its warm lighting and beautiful views over the back of Notre-Dame, realise that Saint Régis’ booths-for-two are made of those 1930s métro wooden benches.

Don’t tell them, but they might share the same seats once used by Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Carson McCullers, Saul Bellow, Miles Davis, Jean-Luc Godard, Gestapo torturers and Resistance fighters.