Olympic tennis court was once the center of Parisian fashion, society and sin

“The Bois de Boulogne was an important part of the Parisian lifestyle, it provided a theater of performances and a daily show,” said Jean-Michel Derex, author of a book on the park’s history. “It was very inspiring to Baudelaire, Zola, Maupassant, Balzac, Proust and many others.”

Officially inaugurated by French Emperor Napoleon III with the filling of its man-made lakes in 1854, the Bois sparked a social revolution. The first major public green space in the crowded, dirty, disease-ridden capital, it expanded the range of leisure activities available to Parisians and brought about a new mix of classes.

Locals flocked there, strolling along winding nature trails, rowing across ponds, attending concerts, enjoying the view of the grandstands at Longchamp Racecourse, exploring the new zoo and dining in elegant chalet restaurants. But the main attraction was simply strutting around the lakes and gardens, showing off haute couture fashions, handsome horses and liveried carriages.

“It was the “A place to see and be seen,” said Derex.

The daily horse-drawn carriage ride was such a captivating event that it caused major traffic jams in the park and topped the must-see lists in tourist guides. Every afternoon, thousands of spectators admired the flashy outfits of royals, bankers, playwrights, famous courtesans and visiting VIPs. Even the emperor made regular rounds.

“The ride to the Bois is a beautiful spectacle,” wrote the Dublin Times.

“What a stream of open carriages, crowded with voluminous, gay (outfits), occupied the Parisian woods today,” reported the London newspaper Penny Illustrated Paper, which marveled at the “cosmopolitan world” that Paris had become.

Inspired by London’s Hyde Park, the Bois surpassed it in splendor. “The French beat us in parks,” lamented a British writer for the Glasgow Evening Citizen.

Artists such as Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot set up their easels to capture its racetracks, footbridges, aviaries and grottoes, while its panoramic beauty prompted Mark Twain to write in The Innocents Abroad: “I will not describe the Bois de Boulogne. I cannot. It is simply a beautiful, cultivated, endless, wonderful wilderness. It is an enchanting place.”

The creation of the park was also a brilliant PR move by the new French emperor Napoleon III, the brave nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.

A criminal who had twice attempted to overthrow the king – sentenced to life imprisonment on the second attempt, from which he escaped after six years – Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte became France’s first elected president in 1848, when King Louis-Philippe fled the country following that year’s revolution.

However, continually blocked in his plans to comprehensively modernize Paris, President Bonaparte overthrew his own government in December 1851 and announced the following year that he would, like his uncle, wear the imperial crown. He promised to bring order and prosperity to his subjects and to make Paris “the capital of all capitals” during this Second French Empire. Napoleon III’s first major move was to donate the Bois de Boulogne—a walled, private forest that had been the royal hunting ground for centuries for French kings — to the city, on the condition that officials use municipal funds to renovate it.

And renovate they did, accomplishing engineering feats and landscape wonders that were little known at the time. They created two artificial lakes connected by waterfalls, countless ponds, and miles of winding paths, as well as glass pavilions, gazebos, amusement parks, and enclosed botanical gardens. Even those who protested Napoleon III’s rise to power, dubious financial practices, and ridiculous wars—as well as his razing of old Paris to create wide, tree-lined boulevards designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann—largely cheered the opening of the Bois.

“Paris was then a medieval city, damp, without light and without air circulation,” said French urban planner Stéphane Malek, noting the epidemics that often swept through it. After a cholera outbreak killed 19,000 people in six months, public health experts demanded that the cramped city be opened up, but little was accomplished until Napoleon III. The Bois de Boulogne, along with the Bois de Vincennes that followed, gave residents access to fresh, clean air, Malek said. The two parks were known as the lungs of Paris.

Despite the picnics, boats, flowers, children’s attractions and theatre performances, not everything in the Bois de Boulogne was equally pleasant.

First, the daily walks bring leaders closer to the public—as demonstrated in 1867, when a disgruntled Polish immigrant shot at visiting Russian Tsar Alexander II as he traveled in a royal carriage next to the French emperor.

Secondly, the Bois was a favourite place for nobles and politicians, armed with swords or pistols, to meet for duels, which, despite being forbidden, remained a popular way of settling disputes throughout the 19th century. Even women were known to take part in the potentially deadly chase in the Bois de Boulogne.

Furthermore, the secluded groves in the park attracted prostitutes, as suggested in Manet’s painting “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.” Art historian Peter Gärtner writes in his book “Art and Architecture: Musée D’Orsay” that the painting “is not a picnic in an urban forest, as the French title suggests. Instead, it emphasizes the prostitution that was rife in the Bois de Boulogne, which was common knowledge in Paris but a taboo subject.”

Nevertheless, the Bois remained one of Paris’s top attractions for three-quarters of a century. The thrill of the daily stroll has long since disappeared, swept away by the automobile. But the lush park that sparked a new opening of Parisian society is still revered for its beauty, restaurants, horse-racing tracks, jogging and cycling paths, and Shakespeare Garden, which recreates scenes from the Bard’s plays.

The Bois has retained almost all of its natural assets, except for the 21-acre strip where the Roland Garros stadium was built in 1928. In 2019, the stadium was expanded with the addition of the 5,000-seat Simonne Mathieu Court, which extends into the Bois de Boulogne’s Serres d’Auteuil botanical garden. The move was initially met with outrage, until the design included greenhouses that surround the new field on all four sides.

The stadium complex will host the Olympic tennis matches from Saturday to August 4. The boxing finals will be held from August 6 to 10. And the Paralympic wheelchair tennis event will be held from August 30 to September 7.

Melissa Rossi is the author of six books on geopolitics. She has written for platforms including Yahoo News, Outrider, AARP, Rolling Stone, and Newsweek, and often covers historical oddities for her Substack, Rossi reports.