It has inspired French film-makers and songwriters, proven useful to cannabis smokers and aestheticians and served as an emergency bookmark or jotter – but now the Paris Métro ticket has reached the end of the line.
The city’s public transport authority is phasing out the rectangular pieces of cardboard that have kept the capital’s travellers on the move for the past 120 years.
Twenty years after the New York subway finished with metal tokens, the Métro ticket, measuring 6.5cm x 3cm and white with a brown magnetic strip, is on a one-way journey to transport history. Across the Channel, London still allows the purchase of single and return paper tickets for its tube network, but charges close to double the cost of the equivalent peak contactless ticket.
The Île-de-France regional transport authority, of which Paris is part, had hoped the paper ticket would have long departed by now but the Covid crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a global shortage of microchips were blamed for delaying the introduction of newer technology.
“We were in a hurry but the chip crisis slowed us down,” Laurent Probst, the director general of Île-de-France Mobilités told Agence France-Presse.
The first Métro ticket was used at 1pm on 19 July 1900 at the inauguration of Line 1 for the 1900 Paris exhibition. It cost just 25 centimes in old money for a first-class seat. Now a single ticket costs €1.90.
In the 1952 film Le Salaire de la Peur, Yves Montand offers a Parisian Métro ticket as a token of friendship. Serge Gainsbourg’s 1950 song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas pays tribute to the poinçonneurs (ticket punchers) whose jobs disappeared with the arrival of automatic turnstiles. Raymond Queneau’s novel Zazie dans le Métro, made into a 1960s film by Louis Malle, featured a paper ticket on the early paperback cover.
Grégoire Thonnat, the author of the 2019 book Petite Histoire du Ticket de Métro Parisien (A short history of the Paris Métro ticket), writes: “Since 1900, the Métro ticket has accompanied our daily life, at the bottom of our pockets, in our wallets or in the middle of the pages of our books … it will soon disappear.
“It’s one of the elements of Paris life. It’s lifespan is very short, around an hour to an hour and a half, but we’ve become attached to them. It’s irrational.”
The transport authorities believe one in 10 tickets is lost, damaged or forgotten at the bottom or a pocket or bag.
Ticket-issuing machines are being phased out across the city network; by 2025 the Paris Métro ticket will have reached its final stop, replaced by tickets on mobile phones or travelcards.
• This article was amended on 5 October 2022. The photo caption on an earlier version wrongly stated the illustrated Parisian Métro tickets as being from 1973 to 1992.
