Author van den Boogert has written a book about the famed 'puces' market in Saint-Ouen, France, where stalls have plenty of vintage finds, as long as you know where to look and what to expect. — GASPAR LEFORT/The New York Times
ALMOST anyone who visits Paris and loves to shop will be told to visit the storied flea market – “marché aux puces” in French – which occupies five acres in Saint-Ouen, just north of the city limits. The problem, many visitors find, is that it’s impenetrable.
“There are a lot of visitors who walk through and leave empty-handed and baffled,” said Kate van den Boogert, 51.
“It’s very big and covers a lot of ground and it’s easy to feel like you don’t know where you are.”
Van den Boogert’s new book, The Paris Flea Market, is less of a guidebook and more of a celebration of the culture, history and oddball treasures of the market, which has existed in some form since the 19th century.
In the book, she writes, “The puces asks you to upturn typical perfection, eccentricity over good taste, mystery over rationality, one-off and handmade over factory-made, yesterday over tomorrow, mess over order, and poetry over business.”
Van den Boogert, who lives a 12-minute bike ride away from the market in the 18th arrondissement in Paris, said in a phone interview that the genesis of the project was in her 2020 book Makers Paris, about artisans and shopkeepers in the city. “Many of them spoke about the importance of the puces,” she said.
A native of Melbourne, Australia, van den Boogert first came to France at 19, while on a gap year. First she was a nanny, but found it “strange and difficult” to be in the middle of another family’s issues.
She ended up studying English and French at the University of Melbourne and worked in publishing.
She moved to Paris in 2000 and worked at sandwich bars and independent magazines, eventually working on GoGo city guides.
Now, she has immersed herself in the world of the Saint-Ouen market, which is the largest of the Paris flea markets – besting others in Montreuil and Vanves.
Different experiences
Part of what makes Saint-Ouen appear so labyrinthine is that it’s separated into 11 markets, each with a decidedly different shopping experience. “Some do correspond to what you think of for a flea market but also some of the most exclusive and expensive antiques in the world change hands there and everything in between,” said van den Boogert.
She explained that one of the markets, Vernaison, sells bric-a-brac while others, such as Paul Bert or Serpette, specialise in furniture and design and have rents higher than some shops in Paris.
“What is fascinating is these endless rabbit holes of expertise and taste,” said van den Boogert.
“There’s someone that just sells doorknobs. There is a woman who sells old tools. There are sculptures from old chateaus, gilded mirrors, paintings, furniture of all epochs, crystal and silverware and ceramics, lace from Brittany.”
While she would love to own some of the Roman or neo-Classical wares to be found at the flea market, she admits she’ll never be able to afford them. Instead she owns what she calls “odds and sods”: an old cigarette tin, a set of romantic antique photographs of a couple, a linen apron.
The book includes essays from stars of the design world like Philippe Starck and Benoît Astier de Villatte called “why we love the puces” championing the place. Van den Boogert also profiles 18 dealers.
“I wanted to orchestrate a kind of chorus of voices who could sing a true song of this place,” she said.
Child of the flea market
One is Eva Steinitz, who sells arts and furniture from her booth in Paul Bert.
“I am 40 years old and pretty much a child of the flea market,” said Steinitz. Her maternal grandfather, Sylvain Chamak, was an Algerian Jew who started a secondhand business at the flea market and her paternal grandfather, Bernard Steinitz, had a gallery in central Paris.
She views her own taste as a fusion of the two, selling a Thonet coat rack from 1900 or carved angels from 18th century Italy.
Her clients include designers, architects, gallerists, but also less professional shoppers who just want to dress up their homes.
“I never really restrain myself from buying any kind of piece. I like the unusual,” Steinitz said. One of her favorite pieces she has ever sold was an ice cream cart from the early 1900s. “Some Americans bought it to put with their swimming pool,” she said.
The flea market has a history of being a place where immigrants can make money, from “chiffoniers” – ragpickers – of migrants in the 1900s to recent immigrants selling goods from their countries of origin.
Van den Boogert noted that Saint-Ouen had just three mayors between 1945 and 2014 and they were all Communists, perhaps aiding the market’s social diversity and resistance to gentrification of big businesses, which is noticeable at London’s Portobello Market.
“I wanted to be mapping cultures and subcultures,” she said. “The flea market in Paris is not some harmonised rational place that is predictable or makes sense.”
She meant that as a compliment. – The New York Times
