If you've ever wondered "there are no umlauts on the u in 'welcome'", you're about to find out! Despite the heavy traffic and the large number of people who get off at this station every day, we don't necessarily take the time to find out where the name of theMontparnasse-Bienvenüe stop comes from.
So, no, Bienvenüe is not spelled with a spelling mistake, quite the contrary: it's the surname of Fulgence Bienvenüe, a famous French engineer, considered to be the father of the metro.
Born in Brittany in 1852, Fulgence Bienvenüe studied at theÉcole Polytechnique and theÉcole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées before becoming Inspector General of Bridges and Roads in 1875, according to Wikipedia. Bienvenüe went on to work for the City of Paris, where he continued the massive development and urban planning work launched by Baron Haussmann, and then, together with his colleague Edmond Huet, presented a project for an underground electric metro railway network to be developed throughout the capital: that was it, our famous Parisian metro made its debut.
Once the project had been approved, work began in 1898, before being inaugurated at the1900 Universal Exhibition. By then, only one line had been opened, linking Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes in 27 minutes, with a total of 18 stations served.
From then on, Fulgence Bienvenüe devoted the rest of his career and the rest of his life to the gigantic project of this new underground metro. The station at Gare Montparnasse was named Montparnasse-Bienvenüe in homage to the Breton engineer, since it was via Gare Montparnasse - where trains from Brittany arrived - that Fulgence Bienvenüe first arrived in Paris, before spending his entire life here.
