Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958
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at a bal. Families, children, and young lovers are entranced by the extravagant
panorama.
63
The fête foraine was one of the most enduring features of neigh-
borhood life and its public spaces, and it remained so throughout the 1950s.
For most people, these fairs represented postwar reconstruction and revival,
and the reappearance of stability, well-being, and pleasure. In a Les Actuali-
tés françaises newsreel from March 1951 entitled “Springtime in Paris,” Yves
Montand walks along the Seine and watches children playing hopscotch in
the street while he croons about “le printemps dans mon quartier.” He ends
at the midway rides of a fête foraine, singing the joys of “la fête de dimanche”
before he is mobbed by young girls begging for autographs.
64
Promenading
the fairs and ending the day at the local café with neighbors and friends was
an essential ceremony that commemorated the well-being of public space.
But the carnival spirit of an alternative universe filled with the unexpected
remained. A motley display of inversion, irregularity, and satirical clowning
seethed just below the surface.
There was an edgy quality to this conscious performance, this reappro-
priation of the spaces of the city by the people. In the postwar context singing
and dancing, bazaars and fêtes foraines were all reintegrated into the popular
imagination as part of the time-honored visual and sensory seasonal cycles
of the city. The uses of the past were magnified. This sense of the nostalgic
reappearance of ludic, carnivelesque art forms was intense enough to cause
some people to invoke the fairs as obsolete vestiges that had outlived their
time and purpose. But this public criticism hid the deeper meanings of these
populist festivals and spatial rituals. Rather than simply fleeting and meaning-
less, or for that matter nostalgic, they were a theater of becoming in which
the power of the people was given free rein. They were other than everyday
life, and yet they were in everyday life. In his Critique of Everyday Life (1947),
Henri Lefebvre listed the fête foraine, along with the café, radio, and television,
as among examples of the work-leisure dialect. They hold real content and
yet retain an illusory form: “Here we enter a humble, restless microcosm,
extraordinary and vulgar. And apparently cheap.”
65
The fooling around, the
unruly spatial performance was an autonomous realm; it was ungovernable.
Adored as entertainment, the fairs were incorrigible scenes of provocation
and arousal. In the context of the postwar era, they could also be read as a
rebellion against the absurdity of the cold war and the atomic bomb, which
threatened to wipe out existence at a moment’s notice. But more than mere
defiance, the intent of this nervy theater was to revolutionize the everyday
the landscape of populism | 97
practices and spaces of the city and to inscribe them with new meaning. Fes-
tival and play laid the outlines for a new kind of society, a counternarrative
to the utopian dreams for a new France in official reconstruction discourse.
They harked back to France’s revolutionary heritage and to the broad project
of creating a new civilization. It was the “reign of mirth.” The fête became a
fixed part of a postwar cosmology that attributed this revolutionary, trans-
formative capacity to the French people themselves. In other words, far more
than just nostalgic revelry, populist street entertainment and festivals were
permeated with contemporary counterrhetoric and practice.
Magical Urbanism
Perhaps no other event captured this subversive, transformative quality of
the fête than the legendary Fête de l’Humanité, the prewar working-class cel-
ebration that drew all of eastern Paris and its suburbs into great festivals of
public solidarity. Once the war was over, L’Humanité immediately sponsored
the reappearance of the Fête de l’Humanité in September 1945 and again in
1946. Media outlets from newspapers to radio and film newsreels were the
primary chroniclers of these events and helped to produce them as narrative
and visual spectacles. Over a million people streamed from the subway sta-
tions into the Reuilly hollow in the Bois de Vincennes (where the event was
held annually until 1956) singing the “Marseillaise,” the “Internationale,” and
the “Chant des Partisans.” “It is the people, singing!” L’Humanité raved.
66
In
its re-creation of the ceremonial procession through the city, the movement
en masse to the park was as significant as the event itself and was featured
prominently in the militant Cinéfrance documentary Fête de l’Humanité 1946,
in which cars and trucks decorated with “Fête de l’Hum” posters parade,
along with a flood of revelers, through the streets to Vincennes.
67
Much as
in the tradition of the World’s Fairs, these people’s expositions aspired to a
utopian vision of urbanity and were christened the worker’s capital city. The
1945 festival constructed “a real city,” entered through a sparkling silver tri-
umphal arch beribboned in red, white, and blue. Fairgoers then promenaded
down the “Champs-Élysées de la fête,” flanked by “perfectly aligned” booths
and stalls. The 1946 fair was hailed as the “the second city of France.” The
triumphal boulevard was lined with colossal statues of the heroes of French
democracy. Marching bands, clowns, food, and games imparted a carnival
atmosphere. The Communist Party booth featured can-can dancers in cos-
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tume. During the course of the day, fairgoers were treated to a traditional
music festival and a colorful “parade of flags of the democratic nations.” In
both the 1945 and the 1946 festivals, a massive stage guarded by trumpeters
was the scene of a theatrical reenactment of the “Resistance, Victory and
Liberation” with full chorus and ballet. Then a “streets of Paris” set formed
the backdrop for a 1946 performance of the “return of the free press after
the Liberation,” complete with newsboys hawking copies of L’Humanité and
other left-wing newspapers. A satirical presentation of “restrictions, recov-
ery, and the struggle against the black market” featured dancers costumed
as meat, vegetables, and dairy products. Finally, Maurice Thorez, André
Marty, Jacques Duclos, and other French and Spanish Communist Party
officials climbed the platform to whip up the crowds with fiery speeches and
a collective singing of the “Marseillaise.” Parachutists dropped from the sky,
giant boats floated into the stage. By evening, a star-studded regalia of sing-
ers and dancers performed on the fully illuminated platform (a “fantasy”
after years of black-outs) draped in tri-colors. And then the festivities broke
into a myriad of bals publics with accordionists, to be followed by a massive
fireworks display.
68
This was magic theater, a paradise made by all. It was an
extravagant glorification of the people of Paris and their urban world. The
PCF pronounced; “the Fête de l’Humanité is now the Fête de Paris.” It was
a sign of the “immense fraternal community of more than a million men.”
The people were liberated from work and daily struggle, from the penury of
life. Here they set in motion their authentic and creative powers and fash-
ioned a new urban realm.
This extension of play tactics did not preclude lashing out at political
enemies. The September 1949 Fête de l’Humanité included a rambunctious
“massacre game” in which contestants could finish off dolls representing
Jules Moch, Paul Ramadier, Robert Shuman, and Charles de Gaulle. De-
spite police threats to banish the festival from Vincennes for such an outrage,
the Communist Party’s annual celebration continued to draw upwards of
100,000 people during the early 1950s. De Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peu-
ple Français (RPF) countered the Fête de l’Humanité with its own festival at
Vincennes. The Fête de la Jeunesse, du Travail et du Sport, held annually in
October from 1947 to 1953, included information booths from the city’s most
important manufacturers (Renault, Citroën, SNECMA, EDF, and SNCF,
among others) as well as entertainment. Although the September 1947 Fête
de l’Humanité drew over a million participants, the Fête de la Jeunesse drew
the landscape of populism | 99
an estimated 70,000 people. The fair was undercut by a suspicious series
of calamities (road debris, broken Métro trains, unplugged loudspeakers)
blamed on “communist sabotage.”
The children of paradise had returned to claim the spectacle. The frame-
work for their urban utopia was the creative power of play, satire and farce,
sabotage. In the utopian New Babylon constructed by Constant and the
situationist movement in the late 1950s, fun would be the new normality.
Constant’s urban mirage was built on inversion and disorientation, a deliber-
ate confusion of spatial hierarchies.
69
The revolutionary idea of pleasure and
collective play underlined the entirety of situationist values. In commenting on
the work of Johan Huizinga on the relationship between play and seriousness,
Guy Debord argued for “the transitory, the free domain of ludic activities . . .
as the only field of real life.” It was by making play a fundamental moral,
Debord believed, that the real construction of urbanism, in the largest sense
of the term, would be possible.
70
The “real city” of the Fête de l’Humanité
was gay, melodious, and festive. It exuded a civic infatuation with the imag-
ery of a people rising up, on the march, claiming the future. All this activity
suggests not merely a reappropriation of space, but a making over of the city
in the populist image. Street renaming and embellishment and celebrations
of collective fraternity and play escaped from hegemonic political and eco-
nomic structures and fashioned a transformative spatial domain.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that the names
of streets are part of a broader discourse of “local authority” that creates
habitability outside prevailing functionalist discourses. It creates a poetic
geography that eludes systematization. Spatial topoi are instead organized on
superstition, legend, memory, and dreams.
71
They embellish local topography
with fantasy, with recollections and stories. The inscription of the memory of
the Resistance and Liberation on the streets of the city was one of the most
palpable localized counter-urbanistic discourses of the early postwar years in
Paris. The process began from the moment of the Liberation and continued to
reverberate through the 1950s. The Liberation of Paris immediately became
the stuff of localized place and memory at the level of neighborhood—largely
in place of official citywide or national commemoration. Makeshift memo-
rials at sites where individuals had been killed by the Germans or had died
in the Liberation of Paris were fabricated immediately after August 1944.
Local Liberation committees and the parti des 75,000 fusillés, as the Commu-
nist Party called itself, were in the vanguard in honoring fallen martyrs. The
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communists had been the driving force behind the Liberation on the streets
of Paris, and they understood the movement as a grass-roots insurrection.
They treated the spaces of the city as text upon which the heroic history of
the Resistance and Liberation would be written. For example, in the days
following the Liberation, the communist section of the 9th arrondissement
between the gare Saint-Lazare and the gare de Nord circulated two hundred
flyers requesting local residents to come forward with information on any-
one arrested, deported, or killed during the occupation or sacrificed in the
Liberation of Paris so that they could be honored.
72
The walls of buildings,
sidewalks, and trees in the neighborhoods where fighting had taken place
were decorated with the names of the dead, inscribed on small pieces of wood
along with written testimonials, photographs, and flowers in a spontaneous
display of public sorrow and witnessing. In keeping with the fashioning of
the Liberation as a populist revolt, the memorials were embedded directly
into the urban landscape where the events had actually taken place.
These early testimonials could be interpreted as forms of magic theater
or even graffiti that represented “the ‘primitive’ energy of the everyday life
of the ‘masses’” in the sense meant by Cobra founder Constant, writing in
1948.
73
The streets would become sacred sites. These gestures collapsed both
mythologized space and lived space into one. The unauthorized and fractured
nature of decision making turned them into forms of provocative populist
urbanism. They transformed urban topography. They were discrete formula-
tions of urban utopia in which the act of renaming became the framework for
setting in place a new society. On October 21, 1944, the Communist Party
organized solemn local corteges and ceremonies during which eighteen streets
in Paris were renamed for fallen heroes. The selection of those to be honored
as martyrs was determined entirely by the space and politics of neighborhood.
L’Humanité reported that in the 11th arrondissement, where severe fighting
had taken place, forty thousand were in attendance for the renaming of the
rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, a local métallo and militant communist hero killed
during the war.
74
The ceremony was presided over by the communist mayor
of the 11th arrondissement, along with officialdom from the local metallurgy
union and the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of
Labor, or CGT). In sum, the “glorious week of August 18–25” was commemo-
rated in a splintered fashion, at the level of the streets that figured in discrete
events. It revealed a creative, expressive zone that intertwined temporal and
spatial allegory as well as the capacity for creative rupture.
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The abundance of improvised shrines and street renamings pointed to the
fragmentation of political power and the degree of autonomous place-making
enjoyed by the arrondissements and neighborhoods in the first months after
the Liberation. The process became more formalized by 1945, when the Paris
municipal council began to recoup its authority. Neighborhoods seeking a
commemorative street-name change were to formally apply to the municipal
council, which would then make the final decision and organize official acts
of tribute and remembrance. The council’s general resistance to the penchant
for spontaneous, unofficial street renaming at the neighborhood level was a
sign of the latter’s provocative self-determining quality. But it was difficult to
ignore the emotional longing to inscribe experiences in the urban landscape,
or the power of local Liberation committees and their communist activists. In
July 1945 in particular, the Paris municipal council took up a steady stream
of nominations accompanied by formal testimony of the heroism in ques-
tion. To honor the battle for the 10th arrondissement that had raged at the
place de la République, the Prince-Eugène barracks were renamed for Jean
Vérines, the commander of the Republican Guards, killed in 1943. Most of
the streets along the canal Saint-Martin were rechristened for local Resistance
heroes.
75
Enormous crowds watched the official inauguration of the place
du Colonel Fabien near the canal Saint-Martin, named after the commu-
nist Pierre Georges (or Colonel Fabien). A plaque bearing his name and an
account of his heroic exploits also graced the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro
station. With the help of the ambassador to the Soviet Union, the place de
la Villette was rechristened the place Stalingrad in honor of the Red Army
victory.
76
In 1946 a local committee at the place Stalingrad petitioned the
municipal council to support a further commemoration with the planting of
a Liberation-Victory tree.
77
In the political heat of the Liberation, a ritual purging of the city’s spaces
of any reference to collaboration was initially nearly as important as honor-
ing the dead. The avenue Victor-Emmanuel III was one such street name
chosen to be removed; it was renamed for the American President Franklin
Roosevelt in order to wipe out any urban reference to a country (Italy) that
had “fallen under the chains of fascism.”
78
Under the German occupation’s
“dejudaizing,” the rue Henri Heine in the 16th arrondissement had become
the rue Jean-Sébastien Bach. After pressure from the street’s residents, the
municipal council cleansed the street of the Nazi nomenclature and rechris-
tened it for the “anti-Prussian” poet Heinrich Heine, while a street in the 13th
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arrondissement named for Georges Prade, a former member of the municipal
council and among the most well-known of Nazi collaborators, was purged
and given Bach’s name instead. The boundary between remembering and
forgetting was unambiguous, although the political interpretation of histori-
cal personalities was clearly subjective and ideological.
These local “revolutionary” initiatives to invent a Liberation tableau in
the spaces of the city were largely victorious. They are normally interpreted
within the rubric of invented memory. Certainly, the city’s spaces acted as
the text of collective memory. But they were also instruments of social and
political power and affected the construction of the urban realm. Espe-
cially in working-class neighborhoods and suburban towns, these “spaces
consecrated to the blood of martyrs” effectively acted as claims to political
entitlement and communal liberty. The streets were sanctified. They were
a catalyst for change. Renaming and the placing of symbolic objects set in
motion quotidian spaces and triggered their transformative capacity. Name
changes were a linguistic détournement that demolished past imagery and
instead invested surroundings with personality and subjectivity and with
the emotive, violent struggle of the streets. The magic of proper names for
streets, according to Benjamin, is that they are “conceptually unburdened
and purely acoustic.” They are bare formulas that can be filled up with
feelings.
79
Renaming produced a new layer of spatial consciousness and the
outline for a transformation of urban life in what amounted to a radical and
fragmentary urbanism. It was devised from distinct topographic fragments
onto which events were inscribed.
Some indication of the deep meaning and urbanistic qualities of these
renaming rituals can be gleaned from two areas of the city that played instru-
mental roles in August 1944: the place Saint-Michel in the 5th arrondisse-
ment, and the 14th arrondissement. The place Saint-Michel was the site of
one of the first and most important Resistance barricades during the Libera-
tion. After the events the emotional outpouring by residents was such that the
mayor and president of the local Liberation committee of the 5th arrondisse-
ment were compelled to sponsor the hanging of temporary wooden plaques
on the place Saint-Michel around which people could leave mementos and
express their grief and respect. However, the socialist municipal councilor
Henri Vergnolle proposed a far more grandiose memorial: the erection of a
monumental column at the place Saint-Michel (along the lines of the Bas-
tille column commemorating the 1830 Revolution) that would include the
the landscape of populism | 103
names of the fallen and bas-relief scenes of the battles on the streets of Paris.
80
Memorializing the Liberation was interpreted as monumental urban design.
In the same sense, local Liberation and worker’s committees also proposed
the erection of two monumental columns at the porte d’Orléans in the 14th
arrondissement to commemorate the entry of Leclerc’s divisions on August
24 and the entry of de Gaulle on August 26. The 14th arrondissement had
been the scene of some of the most vicious fighting in August 1944, and
the debates about how to commemorate various sites in the district were
heated. The local Liberation committee was responsible for the placing of
twenty marble plaques on building facades throughout the district. It had
independently voted, for example, to rename the rue de Vanves for one of
its municipal councilors, Raymond Losserand, a well-known militant and
Resistance hero executed by the Gestapo. Because “his memory will always
remain alive for the population of the 14th arrondissement,” the municipal
council was left with little choice but to agree to the proposal. When local
residents in the 14th decided to rename their rue de la Voie-Verte for a local
hero, Père Corentin, who had been killed by the Nazis, the Commission du
vieux Paris finally stepped in. It insisted that the rue de la Voie-Verte was one
of the most venerable in Paris, that its name be retained, and that in general
all of the city’s revered street names be left untouched. As a matter of honor,
the argument over the rue de la Voie-Verte pitted those councilors who could
claim résistant status against those who could not. Communist supporters of
the name change taunted its principal opponent, François Latour, “If you
had been in the Resistance, you would have known Père Corentin.”
81
Renaming was a radical and magical transformation of the street effected
by those who lived on it. The peuple were capable of freeing themselves and
inscribing their experiences in the topography of their neighborhoods. It
was not simply the presence of these names that counted, but their visibility
and absorption into the texture of the civic landscape. The ceremonies were
often part of commemorative anniversaries of, for example, the war’s end
in May 1945, when La Vie ouvrière reported that “commemorative plaques
for the heroes of the barricades blossomed” amid the massive crowds, the
singing, and the observances.
82
Both at the place Saint-Michel and at Bar-
bès-Rochechouart, the staging of plaque ceremonies included officers and
members of the FFI in full uniform, speeches and music, and the placement
of bouquets in what were combinations of funereal and festival rites attended
by thousands of local residents. Ten streets were inaugurated in the north-
104 | chapter two
ern district of Gennevilliers and five in Saint-Denis. The local population of
Gennevilliers began their commemoration of the Liberation at the place de
la Mairie (which had been rechristened the place Jean Grandel, after a Re-
sistance hero), then marched in tribute to the cemetery and its monument
to the dead, to the gasworks that had been the scene of the last battles of the
Liberation, and then to the cenotaph to British war pilots. At Saint-Denis
residents gathered before the commemorative inscription to local militia killed
during the Liberation, then marched to the place de la Résistance and on to
other scenes of the fighting, each in turn marked by a memorial plaque.
83
Largely under the influence of the Communist Party, the Liberation was
memorialized as a glorious urban insurrection carried out by the peuple de
Paris in their neighborhoods.
Yet these gestures were saturated with political tensions. As the central-
izing forces of the Fourth Republic under de Gaulle’s leadership began to
triumph, the municipal council resisted any further changes to street names
or existing space. In the case of the place Saint-Michel, for example, rather
than continuing the call for a monumental column, the local mayor of the 5th
arrondissement instead acceded to the Seine prefect’s insistence on funding
far less obtrusive commemorative marble tablets. Even the text inscribed on
them had to be approved by the prefecture.
84
These were no longer simply
neighborhood decisions made in the zeal of Liberation, but instead reflected
the cementing of an official history. The historian Gérard Namer has called
Sunday, August 19, 1945 (the first anniversary of the Liberation), the “day
of the plaques” that consecrated the landscape of the uprising through of-
ficial ceremonies and the placement of commemorative tablets throughout
the city. The carefully choreographed citywide ceremonies were overseen by
the Conseil national de la Résistance (National Council of the Resistance, or
CNR) and de Gaulle’s government. At the Parc des Princes, the crowd paid
homage to the fallen and heard political speeches and music by an American
military band. Russian performers interpreted songs of the Red Army. It was
a carefully selected historic imagery that suppressed debate and attempted
to unite collective memory across invented points of reference. The eventual
inauguration of the newly named avenue du Général Leclerc in the 14th ar-
rondissement was deliberately fixed by the municipal council for the anniver-
sary of de Gaulle’s appeal to the French nation of June 18, 1940, with Charles
de Gaulle’s brother, Pierre, as master of ceremonies. The communists staged
a counter-demonstration at the mayor’s office in the 14th arrondissement. As
the landscape of populism | 105
the vectors of memory became increasingly associated with official interpre-
tation and Gaullist symbolism, local Resistance fighters were promised that
their martyrs would be venerated by the plaques mounted and the names
affixed to the streets, stadiums, parks, and squares in the modern neighbor-
hoods that would blossom along the city’s periphery. The inscribing of local
memory was absorbed as part of French state urban planning schemes and
would follow the working classes out to the suburbs. Further debate was to
be suppressed in favor of rationalized technocratic mapping.
But, according to Namer, this official narrative lacked both the legitimacy
and the intimacy of the local rituals. Instead, what marked the commemora-
tion of the Liberation was the extreme dispersion of the ceremonies and the
theatricalization of local commemoration.
85
It was a map of the new urban
world, a measure of passion and instrumentality at the most localized and
self-directed level. Street naming and celebrations, the local festivals and
performances, the singing and dancing that reemerged with such intensity at
the end of the Second World War were mnemonic sites that triggered social
remembrance and association with free action and subversion. They were, in
other words, a form of avant-garde collective engagement on the boundary
between neighborhood and city, between tradition and novelty, both rooted
in and an inversion of the everyday. They were a practical action in the life-
world of the neighborhood, exemplary instances of how people escaped from
the definitions and systems of control that the dominant culture endeavored
to apply to them. They acted as a seamless continuation of the Resistance
aura and the Liberation, a stage in the struggle for political legitimacy that
underlay the fragmented landscape of the capital. Not just nostalgia, they
were deeply intertwined with the possibility of thinking about and voicing
the future and its visionary hopes. In this sense, they formed a parallel public
sphere, which in this case illuminated and exposed social class and populist
culture in entirely modern ways. It also formulated a magical urbanism: an
idiom and a set of practices that together constituted an alternative vision of
Paris.