The Errant Æsthete

“Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.” — Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

A fascinating story of undercover intrigue out of the heart of Paris. It appears that every night over the course of a year, a group of urban explorers in Paris who call themselves UnterGunther slipped into the Pantheon, the national mausoleum for French giants from Voltaire to Hugo to Marie Curie.

Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it.

Their mission: to restore the abandoned monumental 1850 Wagner clock with the help of Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker they hired to restore the masterpiece before its irreversible state of defacement The group claimed that the ancient mechanism had been neglected and left to rust by the French government.

UnterGunther’s stated motives for these clandestine restorations–besides restoring things, of course–is to highlight “the incapacity of the French National Heritage administration, Monum, to preserve the heritage it is in charge of.”

In an interview last month with the Times of London, the group explained their motivation, “We are the counterpoint to an era where everything is slow and complicated. It’s very difficult to get anything done through official channels. If you want to do it, you have to be clandestine.”

One of its members, Lazar Kunstmann, who by day, is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter, yet at night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers.

Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.

The authorities view them differently: as the dark side of the City of Light – irresponsible, paranoid subversives whose actions could serve as a model for terrorists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sewers, catacombs and old quarries that are their pathways under Paris. Prosecutors have been instructed to file charges whenever feasible.

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