Passage Pommeraye
Interesting facts
- Louis Pommeraye poured his entire fortune and his wife's inheritance into the arcade, went bankrupt in 1849 and died the next year at 44, leaving seven orphans.
- Jacques Demy filmed here three times, including a brief scene of about 25 seconds in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).
- The passage was lit by gas from its opening day in July 1843, a rare novelty at the time.
- When it opened it held 31 shops, their fronts designed by the decorator Achille Légier.
- The arcade runs about 134 metres and rises some 20 metres from floor to glass roof.
- Gustave Flaubert passed through in 1847 and mentioned it in his travel account Par les champs et par les grèves.
- Julien Gracq evoked the passage in his 1985 book about Nantes, La Forme d'une ville, and Jacques Tardi drew it in a 1974 comic.
- Bronze busts honour the Nantes figures Jean-Baptiste Ceineray, Mathurin Crucy and Pierre Haudaudine.
- In the 2013–15 restoration the great staircase was rebuilt in oak from trees 200 to 300 years old, and LED lamps now copy the original gas fittings.
Why it is worth it
Nantes built its fortune on the Atlantic trade, and in the early 1840s the property developer Louis Pommeraye gambled on giving the city's merchants something Paris already had: a glass-roofed shopping arcade. The difficulty was the site. Between rue de la Fosse, down near the old port quarter, and rue Santeuil on the slope towards Place Graslin, the ground drops by more than nine metres. Architects Jean-Baptiste Buron and Hippolyte Durand-Gasselin turned that awkward fall into the passage's great idea, and the arcade opened in the summer of 1843.
Instead of a single level corridor, the Passage Pommeraye stacks three galleries around a monumental central staircase, so the visitor descends through the building as if through a theatre set. Light pours in through glass roofs carried on cast-iron arches; the balustrades and ironwork came from the local Voruz foundry. Look up and the ornament keeps multiplying: allegorical statues by Jean Debay stand for Commerce, Industry, Agriculture, the Arts, the Sciences and maritime trade, a row of medallions by Guillaume Grootaërs portrays figures linked to the region, and two child figures of Day and Night flank the clock above the stairs. The effect is Renaissance fantasy filtered through nineteenth-century commercial confidence.
Almost two centuries on, the galleries are still lined with shops. It was classified as a historic monument in 1976. Writers and filmmakers have found it irresistible: André Pieyre de Mandiargues named a short story after it in 1946, and Jacques Demy, who grew up in Nantes, used it as a location in Lola (1961) and Une chambre en ville (1982), while Agnès Varda returned to it in her film about his childhood, Jacquot de Nantes. The best way to see it is slowly, from the top of the stairs, where the three levels, the statues and the glass roof line up into a single view.
Getting there
The passage is in the centre of Nantes, about 0.6 km from the heart of the city, between rue de la Fosse and rue Santeuil, close to Place Graslin. Nantes Atlantique Airport (NTE) is about 8 km away. Tram lines 1, 2 and 3 stop at Commerce, a short walk from the lower entrance.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Passage Pommeraye is a small shopping arcade in central Nantes, France, named after its property developer, Louis Pommeraye. Construction started at the end of 1840 and was completed on 4 July 1843. The Passage Pommeraye is a passage between two streets, the rue Santeuil and rue de la Fosse, with one 9.40 m higher than the other. Midway, there is a flight of steps and the mall then continues on another floor. Two architects, Jean-Baptiste Buron and Hippolyte Durand Gasselin, contributed to its design, which is very elaborate and includes renaissance style sculptures.
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