Reflections from an old timer in Paris: Les PTT

Reflections from an old timer in Paris: Les PTT

One area in which France changed massively in the years I have lived here, is the Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones, which were known collectively as Les PTT. The period from the pneumatique, public phone booths and boxes, and several postal deliveries a day, to the age of the Internet and the mobile phone, seems to have passed in the blink of an eye.

 

I regret to this day never having actually sent or received a pneumatique before it was suspended in March 1984. I remember such systems in department stores such as Harrods in London, where I once worked as a student. In Paris it was an ingenious and rapid intra-city delivery system, with the message arriving at the closest terminal to the receiver’s address and then being delivered by courier.

Of course, in the event of an urgent piece of news, be it good or bad, there was always the telegram. I have kept many of them, congratulating me on the birth of a child or once, when I was living in Hong Kong, informing me of the death of my mother. The pasted ticker tape and language void of conjunctions, the sentences that ended abruptly with the word STOP in all caps. In France the telegram service only ended in 2013 after a 133-year history. There is a marvelous sketch by Yves Montand called Télégramme, in which he dictates a telegrammed declaration of love to a PTT phone operator, who reads it back to him over the phone in a deadpan monotone.

 

Telephones in the home were a rarity here up until the mid-1970s. Only one household in seven had one and in Paris it was more expensive to rent a flat with an existing connection than one without, for the waiting list was several months long. To call someone you went to your local café to buy a jeton, or token, to be used on the café’s phone or one of the public phones outside the post office or bus shelters. By the 1990s there were some 241,000 telephone boxes all over France but the rapid development of other means of communication led to them becoming graffiti-covered symbols of urban decay, with phones ripped out and glass walls shattered. Nevertheless, given that the sole operator at the time, France Telecom (later Orange) had a duty of public service to the entire nation, phone boxes remained in many rural areas. They were not cost-effective even there and in 2015 President Macron passed a law ruling that they no longer constituted a vital public service.*

 

By the 1980s, landline telephones had been installed in most households and modernized with digital keyboards replacing the dial, and an extra earpiece so that two people could listen to a conversation. And then came the Minitel. That was truly revolutionary, and I have never understood how France, then so advanced in telematics, subsequently fell behind in the early days of computing. The little brown and beige terminals weren’t available to everyone immediately but experimented with in various zones, starting in Brittany where it all began, and then in selected Parisian arrondissements. By 1990, 6.5 million households were equipped with a Minitel. When we got ours, the terminal sat on a table in the hallway, next to the telephone. Now we had no need of the cumbersome Pages Blanches and Pages Jaunes if we wanted a phone number or an address, we simply typed in the four numbers of the service required (3611 in this case). The La Redoute catalogue still arrived religiously twice a year, but I could now order the children’s clothes via the Minitel instead of by post of telephone or buy train tickets from the SNCF – though of course we had to fetch the clothes from a store and pick up the ticket at the station. A multitude of (paying) services were now added to the monthly phone bill, including access to pornography, and ‘sexy’ business cards advertising the four digits and code for the service abounded, many pasted on the walls of the remaining phone boxes. They generally included a Scandinavian name and jokes are still made about ‘3615 Ulla’.

 

Next in the early 1990s, in a failed attempt to compete with the emerging GSM (2G) network for mobile telephony, France Telecom launched the ‘Bi-Bop’. I was working in the 8th arrondissement at the time and one day, walking down the Champs Elysées, I observed a man holding a cumbersome black object and talking to himself. He was standing under a kind of telegraph pole with a box on top. That was the Bi-Bop. The massive not-so-mobile phone cost a small fortune and only worked if you stood under one of the few and scattered hotspots. Needless to say, Bi-Bop failed with no more that 90,000 subscribers at its peak and was abandoned in 1998.

Now everyone has a mobile phone if not a smart phone, and most people have WiFi. Conversely, La Poste has gone from two distributions a day to one, and soon possibly once every two days. But then, who writes letters anymore?

* Recently however, a collective in Grenoble called Observatoire international pour la réinstallation des cabines téléphoniques (OIRCT), has declared that people have the right not to live without a smartphone, and installed a working phone box in the city, with a plan to reinstall another 21 there before moving on to the rest of the country. It will be interesting to see if that project gets off the ground.

By Krystyna Horko, an old timer in Paris (since the early 80s). Krystyna is currently looking for a new custodian for her mother’s 1955 seventeen volume British Encyclopedia Britannica.

© Krystyna Horko, 2023

Enjoy the clip « 3615 Bonheur » by Soprano