There are 6,100 streets in Paris. If you made a point of walking a different one each day, it would take you more than 16 years to see them all. That’s just meant to be illustrative—you can cover many more of them than that in a day, as The Scrapbook often made a point of doing in its student days there many moons ago (the shortest street in the city is less than 20 feet long). Still, it would probably have taken a lifetime to see them all.
Unsurprisingly, then, we had never until the unhappy events last week heard of the Rue Nicolas-Appert, site of Charlie Hebdo’s offices. It runs a mere football-field-and-a-half in length, from the Passage Sainte-Anne Popincourt to the Rue Pelée, in the 11th arrondissement. In slight mitigation of our ignorance, we should add as a footnote that the street didn’t exist until 1985, which postdates The Scrapbook’s Parisian days.
We don’t have more to add here about Charlie Hebdo—you can get your fill on that subject elsewhere in this issue. But if you saw the street name in the news, as we did, and paused for a moment in curiosity, we’re here to report that M. Appert seems to have been an accomplished and more-than-admirable fellow.
Sometimes called “the father of canning,” Nicolas Appert (1749-1841) was what the French call a confiseur, a confectioner, who in the first decade of the 19th century invented the modern art of preserving various types of food by bottling them and then immersing the sealed bottles in boiling water. His first happy customer was the French Navy.
In 1809 he informed the government of his innovation (we’re shamelessly stealing all these details from Wikipédia) and received a favorable reply from the Interior Ministry offering him a choice between a patent and a onetime cash prize. He took the latter, which meant publishing his methods so that everyone could freely use them. Or as the French Wikipedia entry grandly puts it, rather than enrich himself, he preferred that humanity should profit from his discovery.
The rest of the story, as Paul Harvey might have said, is a little less happy. After the defeat of the French Navy in the Battle of Trafalgar, his biggest customer fell on hard times, and so, therefore, did M. Appert. Some canny Englishmen (pun deliberately inflicted) figured out how to adapt his method for use with tin cans and did apply, successfully, for a patent. Monsieur Appert ended his life a pauper, buried in a communal plot, without the means even to pay for a gravestone.
There has, in recent years, been something of a Nicolas Appert boom, however, with a statue erected in Châlons-en-Champagne, a plaque attached to the house where he was born, a commemorative stamp issued, and several museum exhibits. For that matter, there are apparently 72 streets now named for him in towns across France.
The only mystery is how, in a city deeply devoted to all things culinary and boasting 6,100 streets, it took Paris until 1985 to name one of them for Nicolas Appert.
