Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958

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76 | chapter two

ing celebrities framed in half-real, half-surreal beauty. The quality is dra-

matic, hyperscenographic. In his well-known shot of the Sèvres-Babylone

intersection taken in 1948, the simply act of a woman crossing the street is

transformed into visionary drama by the black-and-white textures and the

conscious framing of the action around the street awning in the foreground.

figure 6. French-fry sellers, rue Rambuteau, 1946. © willy ronis/rapho.

the landscape of populism | 77

Ronis composed french-fry sellers at work on the rue Rambuteau (1946),

smiling, backlit in sunshine, nearly beatiﬁc in features. The gaiety of a fête

foraine on the boulevard Garibaldi (1947) spills out from a merry-go-round

packed with laughing people. These images exude the discovery of the an-

gelic beauty, the nobility, and the goodness of ordinary people that was the

hallmark of poetic humanism.

The districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant were the object of Ronis’s ex-

tended focus from 1947 through 1951. The districts, little known and certainly

little photographed, were only then being rediscovered by urban observers.

The images were published by Arthaud in 1954 as Belleville Ménilmontant,

with an introduction by the novelist Pierre Mac Orlan (author of the ﬁctional

Le Quai des brumes, set in Montmartre and made into a ﬁlm by Carné and

Prévert). The volume offers what appears to be a nostalgic vision of the twin

quartiers populaires, almost suspended in time. But Ronis had little patience

for nostalgia. Rather, his creative impulse was to portray the immediacy of the

city’s life. The urban artiﬁce of public spaces, streets, and stairways become

the indigenous theater of the Bellevillois and the Ménilmuche that Ronis

captures in his ethnoreportage. In his introduction, Mac Orlan describes

the quality of Belleville and Ménilmontant as a “poetic of authenticity” that

is revealed “in song and careful observation, and by Ronis’s camera.”

It is

deeply sensuous and emotional. This poetic power is found in place-names,

in evocative faces on precise streets, the particularities of the urban environ-

ment that take on life in Ronis’s black-and-white images. He ﬁxes his gaze on

the public world of street sellers and singers, of local markets, of busybodies

peering out their windows, of May Day parades and celebrations, of neighbors

chatting and children playing. The butte of Belleville and its angular stairs

form a constant stage of human action. The power of these images lies in their

accuracy and ordinariness. This collective life of the streets, the energy and

vigor of ordinary people, threads together the physical setting. Ronis’s gaze

transmutes them into scenes of simple, exquisite beauty. The city’s surfaces

become a ﬁeld of psychological and social intimacy.

The works of Prévert and Ronis are among the principal images stamped

on our vision of Paris during the 1950s, and they portray the complex urban

imaginary of the period. Passionate wanderers, the two men left behind the

elegance of the boulevards and the endless ﬂux of modernism and instead

haunted the back streets of the capital, looking for the authentic expression

of Paris. Like Prévert, Ronis deﬁned his art as an imaginative language that

78 | chapter two

transmuted reality in what he called the “poetry of the streets.” Both their

photographs and their poetry exude a moral sensibility. They created a sen-

timental, humanist aesthetic of working-class Parisians, honest and genuine,

naturalized in their own neighborhood landscape. Despite the harshness of

modern urban life, the spaces of the city are still sites of childlike play and

collective pleasure, intimacy and sociability. The public domain is collectively

and individually readable as an extension of the self. The lived environment

of Paris became marvelous through their eyes. Although the charms of these

figure 7. Avenue Simon Bolivar, Belleville, 1950. © willy ronis/rapho.

the landscape of populism | 79

poems and photographs are obvious, they are also rooted in a transformative

posture. If Paris was, in the words of Mac Orlan’s introduction, “a museum

of nuances,”

its particularist qualities were not relegated to an inert and

rose-colored past. They were fashioned in the currency of the present. Both

Ronis and Prévert sought a transcendent vision in which the ordinary, the

mundane sameness, of the urban landscape was in fact a freeing up, an em-

brace of life. Their work projected newness, provocation, and disruption in

the midst of what appeared to be commonplace, in a fashion close to that

espoused in the situationist dérive. In his 1956 article in Les Lettres françaises,

René Lacôte described Prévert’s work as “exalting with an intense direct

power the sentiment of revolt, or de fronde.”

The heightened sense of every-

day language and imagery and the dramatic sensuousness of public space as

collective experience formed an idiom of social worth and self-expression,

and they involved an intense political consciousness.

Festival as Utopia

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin pointed to the ceaseless battle be-

tween ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial sociocultural forces, the latter identiﬁed with the

popular or folk-festive culture of the people, the eternally living element of

unofﬁcial speech and unofﬁcial thought that appears under speciﬁc circum-

stances.

Without a doubt, collective leisure and entertainment practices in

this tradition of neighborhood fête or folk festival (much of it so eloquently

captured by Prévert and Ronis) returned with a vengeance in the speciﬁc

circumstance of the war’s end in 1945. Street dances, circus and acrobatic

performances, fêtes foraines and festivals, bands, choirs, and parades—a whole

range of populist spectacles took over the streets. The triumph of the working

classes intensiﬁed popular culture as a ﬁeld of collective identity and action.

In the supercharged atmosphere of the Liberation and reconstruction years,

cultural practices in the plebeian districts became a form of collective public

theater. Rather than a rational disciplining of the self, the public spaces of the

city were associated with self-expression in subjective acts of emotion. The

boisterous, disruptive, libidinous qualities of song, of the fête or carnivalesque,

were associated with a living populism and the capacity for change and trans-

formation. It was a language of fearlessness in which everyone participated.

For Bakhtin, “the carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets

is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own

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way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms

of coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for

the time of the festivity.”

This was professed as a prolongation of the Libera-

tion: life turned inside out, a subversion that jolted people out of the norm

and into other potentialities. It was generally nonviolent, yet all manner of

unexpected things could happen. These festival qualities of popular activism

dramatized both the quest for patriotic unity and the profound social hopes

that sprang up in Paris in the wake of the Liberation’s deliverance. The wide-

spread ludic festivities represented freedom, fraternity, and the dream of a

happier life for an entire people. Much of it was widely covered on radio and

television and by mainstream newspapers, which added to their scenographic

performance qualities. Stardom and celebrity awaited just outside the door,

in the streets, in the squares, in the dance halls and cafés. Yet at the same

time these practices of celebration and fête were also expressive of postwar

social and cultural tensions. They captured the struggle between ofﬁcial and

unofﬁcial voices, the shifting visibility and invisibility of social actors on the

stage of the city’s public spaces.

In the French cultural imagination that emerged from the 1930s through

the 1950s, merrymaking was at once both ordinary and profound in its

signiﬁcance. The entire corpus of Jacque Prévert’s work, for example, privi-

leged festivity, fête, and frolicking, both personal and collective. The fête is

proletarian, and the street is its privileged site. It is always ordinary work-

ing people, for example, whom Prévert imagines at the center of revelry. In

“Grand bal du printemps,” Prévert writes that “people are the ones who

create fun / conjure it with their hands make it alive with their laughter pay

for it in cash parade through it their loves their wives their children // Peo-

ple create fun / others just pretend.”

This exhilarated expression of life’s

energies in the spaces of the city had a particularly complicated range of

meanings after the Second World War. It was part remembrance of custom,

part hope for the future. The “people,” the working classes, the “nation,”

and the young performed and cavorted in the quest for legitimacy. Joyful

and renewed, they would join in common celebration of Liberation and a

new world. Eating and drinking together, singing and dancing, marching,

and the parodies embedded in fooling around and farce were imagined as

the “real” acts of collective life. They were an embodiment of the common

people and acted to express their political militancy, their ultimate victory,

and their capacity for transformation. This idealized vision conceived of

the landscape of populism | 81

Paris as a magical arena and stressed the inseparability of people from the

spaces of their lives.

Collective song in particular represented this quixotic voice of a people

refound and politicized. It signiﬁed the sensuous, unofﬁcial-speech quality

of folk theater and had tremendous symbolic power. Song was a speech act,

a form of expression associated with public space and the discourse created

in it. It was part of what Bakhtin constituted as the heteroglossia of the public

square, a utopia in which every socioideological language develops spontane-

ously, and no narrative or story conﬂicts with another.

Hearing and making

sound placed people at the center of spatial events. It was participatory and

collectively unifying. Song was a potent site of memory, a mechanism for

education and mobilization. The geographer Paul Rodaway argues that the

sensuousness of acoustic space makes it deeply humanistic. It ﬂows outside

the normal visual systems imposed by architecture and the physical fabric

of the city and makes space hypersensorial. The auditory codes and different

timings of the soundscape in the street—its complexity and intermittency—

cause people to act and interact in different ways.

In other words, music

has the capacity to be disruptive and subversive.

Music had always echoed through Parisian streets, and it has enjoyed

a long history as political protest and community practice. The chansonnier

selling songbooks and sheet music was a stock ﬁgure of the street scene and

enjoyed a peak of popularity under the Third Republic. One-man bands

clanged their tunes through the neighborhoods. Open-air concerts and

impromptu singalongs by amateur neighborhood choruses in bistros and

local public squares were traditional features of the working-class world. In

1936 Paris was home to over a hundred amateur choral societies.

Political

or labor-union activities in the neighborhoods were also structured around

ritual music and celebration: buying May 1 lilies, the open-air dance par-

ties of the fête nationale on July 14, and renewing party membership each

January were accompanied by the working-class goguettes or singing societ-

ies at the local bistro. Much of this was in decline during the ﬁrst half of

the twentieth century when war, depression, and the grind of commuting

to work broke down older practices. The people seldom performed; rather,

they consumed music as a public. Music became an industry fashioned by

the stars of Paris’s music theaters and by radio and ﬁlm.

Ultimately, ac-

cording to theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the

modern world became obedient to capitalist culture and the entertainment

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industries that replaced the tradition of vernacular amusements. They ex-

ercised iron hegemony.

What is most striking, however, is the reappearance of vernacular song

performance in the aftermath of the war. Street performers, along with street

singing, dancing, and open-air concerts, acted as a momentary symbolic

code of social unity and an evocative vision of urban cohesiveness. Michel

de Certeau described walking in the city as a “chorus of idle footsteps” and

likened all the modalities of walking—trying out, transgressing, suspecting,

and respecting—to song.

In the milieu of symbolic public spaces, we might

describe this as a militant pedestrianism, with song as a collective speech act.

In his recollections of the 11th arrondissement, one Parisian, Lionel Mouaux,

recounted that circles of people immediately formed around street singers,

quietly listening, singing along, and then buying their sheet music. Lily Lian,

one of the city’s last street singers, recalled “selling pounds” of sheet music

on street corners in late 1944 and 1945 and singing with the crowds at the

Mur des Fédérés outside Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the Barbès-Rochechouart

and La Motte-Picquet Métro stations, at the place de l’Opéra, and on the

Champs-Élysées.

Among Lian’s corners were the gates of the Renault and

Citroën factories in the suburbs. During the lunch hour, thousands of work-

ers streamed out to accompany her in rounds of “Le Chant des partisans,”

“Le Petit vin blanc,” and “On boit l’café au lait au lit.”

Neighborhood choirs, accordion groups, and brass bands were reconsti-

tuted with an intensive schedule of competitions, street parades, and concerts.

It was a sonorous engagement between people and the physical environment

of neighborhood. Life in 1947 was still weighed down by restrictions, priva-

tion, and the war’s tribulations. Yet at Montreuil, in the woebegone suburbs

still reeling from wartime bombardments, Sundays meant the appearance

of the local ﬁfteen-member uniformed L’Espérance brass band parading

through the streets. The 10th arrondissement of Paris, which included the

districts around the gare du Nord, the gare de l’Est, and the canal Saint-

Martin, sponsored a full calendar of community festivities, foremost among

them musical entertainment. Their amateur musicians of the Harmonie

municipale du 10ème arrondissement offered ﬁfteen street concerts in the

summer of 1947, while a ﬁfty-member volunteer symphony orchestra and a

theater group organized a winter schedule of performances. All of these com-

munity associations were headquartered at the town hall, which promoted

their 10th arrondissement as the “birthplace of song and the artistic center

the landscape of populism | 83

of the capital; Spectacle vivant [or live performance] is the life of the 10th.”

In a slam at skyrocketing government fees and taxes that were “killing the

tradition of spectacle vivant,” the mayor’s ofﬁce vowed to patiently persevere

in reviving them in “all their past brilliance.”

It is tempting to translate the

concept of spectacle vivant literally as “living spectacle,” a description that ex-

empliﬁes the dramatic temperament of neighborhood public life in the war’s

aftermath. The neighborhood spaces of Paris became an ongoing community

musical theater. Radio music shows such as Ploum ploum tralala, launched in

1945, with its title melody, “On chante dans mon quartier” (music by Rolf

Marbot and lyrics by Francis Blanche), proliferated, and their tunes were

immediately incorporated into community public performance: “Ploum

ploum tra la la / Voilà c’qu’on chante / Ploum ploum tra la la / Voilà c’qu’on

chante chez moi” (That’s what I sing / That’s what I sing at my place).

In this rhapsodic musical discourse, the people emerged from the war-

time debacle powerful and militant. The traditional imagery of the working

classes as wretched, irrational, and insurrectionary, cut off from civilization

in despicable slums reminiscent of Zola, had been dissolved by wartime

struggle. Instead, they were sane, loyal, conscientious, rational, and naturally

good, in the Rousseauian sense of the term. They digniﬁed their past and

shouldered their historic mission. They were moral and idealistic, and they

shared a spirit of fraternity and solidarity. This political aspect of song was

particularly critical for the Communist Party, which emerged from the war

as the most popular and triumphant “voice” of the people. The lusty commu-

nal singing of the “Marseillaise” and the “Internationale” was a hallmark of

communist political activity. A January 1946 editorial in the communist daily

newspaper L’Humanité on the reappearance of street singers disparaged the

ban on street music during the black years of occupation as too frivolous

for the hardness of war, work, and the austerity. It was in singing that the

sans-culottes emerged victorious at Valmy. I have never heard such joyous

music as in Spain where we fought for nearly three years. . . . Song expresses

the rebellious spirit of Paris. The indignation against the “munichois,”

against the Nazis, and the traitors streamed out from song. That’s why we

were deprived of it. They feared the song of the French people.

The Parti communiste français (French Communist Party, or PCF) cham-

pioned the revival of working-class song and dance such as that practiced

84 | chapter two

by sociétés orphéoniques and neighborhood music societies, by accordionists

and brass bands. A reporter for the communist daily L’Humanité painted

a rosy picture in January on the place Wagram in the working-class dis-

trict of the 17th arrondissement, which, despite freezing temperatures, was

ﬁlled with “seamstresses and shopgirls, students, bicyclists, housewives

with ﬂutes in their arms, people at their windows,” all there to sing with

the popular vocalist Saint-Granier and his accordionist. “It’s difﬁcult to

choose between the amateurs who take their turn at the microphone. The

cobblers and carpenters sing as they work. . . . I vote for the subway driver.

And suddenly, despite my voice, I ﬁnd myself singing along with the cho-

rus, me too! An excellent idea, this ‘singing in my neighborhood.’”

The

romanticized imagery was superimposed over far more complex and politi-

cally conﬂicted postwar realities. Yet in this theater of memory, archetypal

Parisiens, entertaining themselves in simple ways despite the difﬁculties,

were immediate, genuinely well-meaning, and optimistic. Their bonhomie

was the stuff of legend.

Even at the heights of musical stardom, the reemergence of the people

of Paris was celebrated in song. The historian Jean-Louis Robert points to

a privileged moment of “Paris songs” around 1950, reaching an apogee of

ten songs about the city in 1951.

Edith Piaf (born in Belleville) and Mau-

rice Chevalier (born in Ménilmontant) were of course the established stars

of the genre. But they were compromised by their concerts in Germany to

“cheer up” French prisoners of war, an episode Chevalier justiﬁed in Marcel

Ophuls’s epic The Sorrow and the Pity. Young stars such as Yves Montand and

Francis Lemarque took over the tradition of Paris popular songs in the 1950s.

In this musical vision of the times, the secure everyday world of the Parisian

vélo, the artisan, and the midinette emerged from the war not only unscathed,

but victorious. They were actors in history. In Yves Montand’s “À Paris” (by

Montand and Lemarque), “Depuis qu’à Paris on a pris la Bastille / Dans tous

les faubourgs et à chaque carrefour / Il y a des gars et il y a des ﬁlles / Qui sont

sur les pavés sans arrêt nuit et jour / Font des tours / Et des tours / À Paris”

(As soon as you hit the Bastille in Paris / No matter where you go / There are

guys and gals / Nonstop on the streets day and night / Cruising / Cruising /

In Paris). Montand himself was the personiﬁcation of this Parisian populist

imaginary: he was the working-class guy, the gars, who had achieved fame

and fortune through hard work and talent. From a ﬁercely communist fam-

ily, he long remained a member of the French Communist Party. In his 1952

the landscape of populism | 85

“Rendez-vous avec liberté” (by Renaud and Philippe-Gérard), “Les quais de

Paris chantent / . . . les murs de Paris chantent / Le sang qui coule / L’espoir

des foules / Et leur grand cœur / Et l’histoire/ Dont les leçons enfantent / Les

victoires . . .” (The quays of Paris sing / The walls of Paris sing / Blood ﬂows /

The hope of the people / And their great heart / And history / Whose lessons

bring forth / Victories). In October 1953 Montand’s show at the Théâtre de

l’Étoile opened with an unpublished poem by Jacques Prévert and ended

with an emotional rendition of “À Paris” and a ﬁnale encore of Prévert and

Kosma’s “Falling Leaves.” The performance was an absolute sensation and

established Montand as the most popular star on the French music scene.

More than one-third of his songs were stories of the les petits gens of Paris,

many of them emotional renditions of Prévert’s and Lemarque’s lyrics.

The

1951 popular song “Paris en fête” (by Henri Bassis and Kosma) asked “Qui

veut que le Peuple règne / C’est Paris / Celui que les bourgeois craignent /

Qui du monde porte enseigne / C’est Paris! C’est Paris!” (Who wants the

people to reign / It’s Paris / What the bourgeois fear / What the world knows

/ It’s Paris / It’s Paris).

For the people of Paris to outwardly manifest themselves and their political

culture, they became, to use Robespierre’s phrase, their own spectacle. They

sang, danced, and marched to music and paraded in an outburst of collective

theatricality. It was a mass performance, an emotive outpouring that continu-

ously reappropriated public space. Dance halls and bals populaires carried

on this vernacular musical entertainment as a vital form of neighborhood

sociability. From the late nineteenth century on the dance halls and taverns

of Paris and its suburbs were symbolic institutions of social integration and

democratic urban life for the classes populaires.

They enjoyed three privi-

leged moments of extraordinary success: at their origin in the 1880s, during

the Popular Front, and again from 1945 to the end of the 1950s. For a dozen

years after the war, the historian Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard argues, “the

success of the bals and the guinguettes was enormous.”

The most popular

were on the rue de Lappe, the narrow alley near the place de la Bastille that

for decades had been the meeting point of the fearsome Apache hooligans,

small-time gangsters and pimps. It was the street of the bals musettes, the tra-

ditional dance halls with Italianesque accordion band and music kept alive by

the immigrant community from the Auvergne who lived in the surrounding

neighborhood of La Roquette. In the war’s aftermath, the rue de Lappe was

a gathering place for young people crowding into the Balajo, the Bousca, the