Le Bourget is a French commune located in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis in the Île-de-France region. A small village before industrialization, Le Bourget experienced some battles during the Franco-German war of 1870. Nevertheless, the town is best known for hosting the Paris-Le Bourget airport, which is open to national and international commercial traffic. regular and private planes. Opened in 1919, it was the first civil airport in Paris and remained the only one until the construction of Orly airport. The history of the city is also strongly linked to aeronautics. Le Bourget also houses the Air and Space Museum and hosts the Paris-Le Bourget international aeronautics and space show every two years.
Location
Le Bourget is a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris.
It is located as the crow flies 7 kilometers from the Boulevards des
Maréchaux in Paris, and 10.4 kilometers northeast of Notre-Dame de Paris
Cathedral, the center of the French capital.
The city is also
located about ten kilometers from Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle airport and is
close to the Plaine Saint-Denis and is part of the economic zone of Le
Bourget airport.
The town is located in the natural region of the
country of France, in its southern part, and which is now highly
urbanized.
During the Ice Age, the banks and beds of the Marne and Seine
completely covered the city. Also the soil of the commune is partly
composed of silt and marl.
Before its industrialization and
urbanization, the city was somewhat marshy and even had a pond.
A
stream, the Molette, which has now been drained, crossed the town before
flowing into the Rouillon at Dugny. It served as a separation between Le
Blanc-Mesnil and Le Bourget.
The climate of Le Bourget is similar to that of Paris. The city
therefore has a degraded oceanic type climate: the oceanic influence is
predominant over the continental one. In general, summers are rather
cool (18°C on average), and winters are rather mild (6°C on average),
with however the same amount of rainfall in all seasons (in
precipitation) and lower rainfall (647 millimeters) than on the ribs.
The annual average temperature is 12°C, the coldest month is January
with + 4°C. The hottest months are July and August with an average of
19°C (daily average).
Prehistory and Antiquity
In the Gallo-Roman era, a
busy path was located near the current site of Le Bourget. It is
therefore quite natural that men settle on the current territory of
the municipality.
Middle Ages
The first mention of the
place dates from 1134, when Louis VI ceded the land of Bourget to
the abbey of Montmartre. Le Bourget was then an agricultural village
linked to Paris by the Route des Flandres, a former Roman road.
In the eleventh century, the old hamlet of Burgellum had a leper
colony. Le Bourget also housed taverns on the Flanders route from
the eleventh century, and a post house created in the fifteenth
century. Horses rented at the level of the current avenue
Jean-Jaurès, reinforced the teams of the carts going up the rue de
Flandre until beyond the Saint-Nicolas church.
Modern times
In 1573, the nuns of Montmartre exchanged 60 pounds of annuity to be
taken on the Bourget with Antoine de Brolly, lord of Ménil.
From the end of the 16th century, the seigneury of Bourget was most
often grouped together with that of Blanc-Mesnil. In 1580, Nicolas
Potier was thus Lord of Bourget, as was René Potier, one of his
descendants, who bore the title of Lord of Blanc-Mesnil and Bourget
in 1646-1680. Until 1700, the village was in fact under the
obedience of the lords of Blanc-Mesnil, but on the death of
Mademoiselle de Blanc-Mesnil, the last heiress, Bourget decided to
gain administrative autonomy. and to separate from the guardianship
of the parish of Dugny.
1870-1914
In 1870, Le Bourget had 850 inhabitants. With the
arrival of the industrial revolution, the village developed. From the
end of the 19th century, the town was home to many industrial companies
(such as the enamel crystal factory of Charles Paris, created in 1867),
thanks to its service by the Route des Flandres, the Compagnie du Nord
railway or the of Great Belt.
During the Franco-Prussian War of
1870 and the siege of Paris, Le Bourget was annexed around September
1870 by the Prussian army and was the site of an anecdote but above all
of several clashes.
On October 17, 1870, the mounted balloon
called Liberté was blown away, empty, by the violent wind from the La
Villette gas factory in Paris, which was then besieged. It escapes the
aeronauts and runs aground at Le Bourget after having traveled 11 km.
The remains of the balloon are recovered by the Prussians.
From
October 28 to October 30, 1870, Le Bourget was the scene of clashes
against the Prussians. The event is known as the First Battle of Le
Bourget. On October 28, 1870, General de Bellemare, commanding officer
at Saint-Denis, sent Commander Roland, without the authorization of
General Trochu, to settle with 300 snipers at Le Bourget. Admiral
Saisset had sent a battalion of marine infantry to Drancy to occupy the
village and fortify themselves there, and thus support Le Bourget. The
German garrison was then driven out of the village. But on October 30,
1870 the Germans counter-attacked with a deluge of artillery while the
Prussian infantry advanced from three sides on Le Bourget, Drancy side,
Dugny side and Blanc-Mesnil side. Surrounded to the north, east and
southeast, many French soldiers fled to La Courneuve and Aubervilliers
to the southwest. The Germans then cut the road to La Courneuve. Only
Commanders Brasseur and Baroche, with their troops, remained in Le
Bourget and defended the city in the Saint-Nicolas church and in the
streets. At 1:00 p.m. the Germans reclaimed the square, leaving the
French troops in great disorder. The street where Ernest Baroche died
bears his name today.
The news of the defeat at Le Bourget
reached Paris at the same time as that of the capitulation of Metz on
October 27, 1870. They caused great discontent in Paris.
On
December 21, 1870, Admiral de La Roncière's troops, made up of gunners
and marines, the 134th and 138th line infantry regiments and mobile
guards of the Seine, attacked Le Bourget and Stains during the second
battle of the Bourget (1870). The French troops then attack on two axes.
On the first axis of attack, after 7 a.m., the forts in eastern Paris
and Aubervilliers, batteries at La Courneuve and armored wagons on the
Soissons line opened fire on Le Bourget. The offensive then begins and a
first battalion attacks from the northwest, seizing the cemetery and
taking a hundred Prussian prisoners. A second brigade attacked it from
the southwest on the road to Flanders but could not enter the village
because of the fortifications made by the Prussians during the month of
November. The attack fails and the French soldiers and sailors leave
with a few prisoners. On the second axis, General Ducrot took up
position at Drancy with numerous troops. He is informed that the
offensive on the first axis has been a failure and it is then decided to
undertake a siege of the village of Le Bourget. Drancy is then armed
with batteries, without any result however.
Lieutenants Bousset,
Morant, Patin, Wyats, ensign Duquesne were killed at Le Bourget on
December 21, 1870.
Several paintings in the Saint-Nicolas church
in Le Bourget relate these battles.
With the French defeat in
1871 and the signing of the Treaty of Frankfurt on May 10, 1871, the
Burgundians, then refugees in Paris, were able to return home. The
fighting then left many ruins.
On June 2, 1907, young people from
the Batignolles district of Paris, returning from a Corpus Christi
procession in Dugny, were attacked at Le Bourget, one of these young
Hippolyte Debroise was mortally wounded there. The trial of these
aggressors presented as The Apaches of Le Bourget took place thereafter.
The newspaper La Libre Parole published a long article on this
assassination on the front page of its June 6, 1907 issue. The bloody
shirt of young Debroise is kept in the Saint-Joseph-des-Épinettes church
and he is buried in Batignolles (8th division).
1914-1945: Le
Bourget airport in Paris
From September 1914, the army set up an air
reserve at Le Bourget and Dugny, closer to the front than those at
Saint-Cyr. She quickly creates an airfield, in order to protect the
"entrenched camp" of Paris against German air attacks. The requisition
of agricultural land was immediately followed by the installation of
seven wooden and canvas sheds, and barracks for workshops and
administrative offices.
In 1915, the effectiveness of the
squadrons against the night attacks led by the zeppelins remained
disappointing and the squadrons were sent to the front in rotation by a
third. The Le Bourget site is nevertheless experiencing a densification
of its infrastructure, mainly on the territory of the municipality of
Dugny, where the air reserve continues to develop to reach up to 500
aircraft.
After the First World War, the air reserve continued
its activities on the Le Bourget site, continuing to manage stocks. In
the aftermath of the conflict, civil aviation benefited from facilities
and equipment at Le Bourget airport which quickly made it the benchmark
Parisian airport. The first regular lines served London, Brussels and
Amsterdam then, little by little, all of Europe.
Le Bourget is
also becoming a place for walks where people come to admire these
machines which will soon connect the four corners of the world. It is a
place of departures or arrivals of major air raids. On May 8, 1927, the
White Bird took off from Le Bourget and its pilots, Charles Nungesser
and François Coli, hoped to reach New York non-stop; unfortunately the
plane inexplicably disappears. It was finally Charles Lindbergh who made
the first aerial crossing of the North Atlantic between New York and
Paris, on May 21, 1927. We came to applaud the aviator, "winner" of the
North Atlantic, posing on his Spirit of Saint Louis. A huge crowd also
welcomed Édouard Daladier on September 29, 1938, after the signing of
the Munic agreements.
In 1935, the architect Georges Labro won
the competition for the construction of a new terminal for the Paris
International Exhibition of 1937. The winning project is a building with
sober architecture, 233 meters long, integrating the set of functions
for passenger reception and airport management. Not fully completed to
welcome the first visitors to the Universal Exhibition in June, the
terminal was officially inaugurated on November 12, 1937.
In
1939, Le Bourget airport, with 21,000 aircraft movements and 138,000
passengers, was the second airport in Europe after Berlin-Tempelhof.
During the Second World War, the Germans took possession of the
airport and considerably enlarged it while occupying the city. On August
16, 1943, American and British forces bombed the runways but the airbase
remained occupied until its liberation58,60. This bombardment of August
16, 1943, called "Operation Starkey", intended to destroy the airport,
razed the town of Dugny to 98% and the north of the city of Le Bourget.
Since 1945
At the Liberation, Le Bourget airport was
rehabilitated by the Americans and the British. From May 1945, 42,000
prisoners of war and deportees were repatriated and then passed through
Le Bourget.
At the end of the war, airport traffic increased
rapidly and in 1952 Paris acquired a new airport, that of Orly. In the
1960s, the saturation of the latter led to a return to activities at Le
Bourget, but in 1974, Roissy-en-France airport was opened to traffic. Le
Bourget airport is gradually neglected.
The creation of the new
Roissy-en-France airport frees up space at Le Bourget and the grouping
of the collections dispersed in part of the airport hall is studied. It
was from 1973 that the Air and Space Museum gradually moved from
Chalais-Meudon to Le Bourget airport. The first hall, hall B, was
inaugurated in 1975 shortly before the Paris Air Show.
Before
January 1, 1968, the city of Le Bourget was a commune of the department
of Seine, a department subsequently abolished (just like the department
of Seine-et-Oise in which it was landlocked), in application of the law
of July 10 1964 relating to the reorganization of the Paris region. It
is therefore integrated into the department of Seine-Saint-Denis.
In November 2005, like many municipalities in the Paris metropolitan
area and those of the large provincial towns, acts of delinquency
affected the city but remained more moderate than in other
municipalities in the department, even neighboring ones such as that of
Blanc-Mesnil. There was no increased violence at Le Bourget as the
timeline of the 2005 riots in France shows. Nevertheless, this episode,
relayed by the media of many countries, then shows the state of ethnic
and social ghettoization of many suburban sectors and the inability of
the political power to face the failure of the integration of a large
immigrant population