Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958
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Public space and confrontation
3 In the fifteen years after the war, from 1945 to 1959, the eastern
part of Paris was characterized by an intense political militancy derived from
the Resistance and Liberation. August 1944 was construed as the “triumph of
the people” and the hope for a utopian social republic. The dark days of the
occupation were swept away, and suddenly real revolution seemed possible. On
the masthead of Albert Camus’s daily newspaper Combat was printed the motto
“From Resistance to Revolution.” But for the vast majority of people, this was
not a call for insurrection. It exactly captured the hope of carrying the spirit
of the Resistance and Liberation struggles into the rebirth of France. It was a
commitment to far-reaching social transformation and a new kind of society.
The Renaissance française would be built from a common core of humanistic,
progressive values. These were idealistic ends. Every facet of people’s lives
seemed open to discussion and reform. Collective behaviors were intensified.
Everyday life was politicized. Amid severe social conflict there was a passion-
ate yearning for unity, for community, and for securing an invigorated sense
of French identity. That the factory and work remained vital to this enterprise
was clear in the February 1945 creation of comités d’entreprise (participatory
work councils) that were meant to bring far-reaching changes to the heart of
the postwar economy. But workplace reform was now part of a broader de-
bate that included the city’s massive housing crisis and how the new material
culture of the budding “economic miracle” would be shared. These were the
new terrains of militancy. There were intense working-class ambitions around
the new prosperity and an improved quality of life, the right to housing, leisure
and education, culture and sports. There was deep infatuation with the idea
public space and confrontation | 107
that these would be distributed equitably for the common good. Democrati-
zation of all spheres of life would make Paris a model of social harmony and
patriotic renewal. In 1946 the working-class newspaper Syndicalisme reported
on visionary designs for Paris that included sports parks on the city’s periph-
ery, swimming pools and public baths, fountains with great jets of water, and
lawns and shade trees surrounding modern apartments outfitted with every
comfort. It was “the great work of social peace” that would restore the dignity
of France and its workers.
1
The public spaces of Paris were the sites of confrontation over these so-
cial ideals. The questions of accessibility and right to the public domain were
decisive for the representation and interpretation of the future of Paris. After
years of tight control under the occupation, the public spaces of the capital
were suddenly the arena for encounters once again, where various social
classes and political groups could interact in known and unknown, defined
and undefined ways. The surfaces of the city became a multilayered, plural-
istic zone of publics and counterpublics. Public space was fluid, permeable,
and endlessly contested.
The Fourth Republic was hounded by unrest. The late 1940s and 1950s
were marked by a dispersion of political power across the spaces of Paris.
The diversity of protests, marches, parades, and riots—of radically different
natures, both traditional and new—suggest the complexity of this decade
of transition. These pressures from the street, heightened by mass media,
were far from Habermas’s rational public sphere. They formed what Bakhtin
called a “grotesque symposium” that breaks down the dogmatism of official,
authoritative speech.
2
The street was the space of power and legitimation for
those excluded from accepted public discourse. Scenes and actors shifted;
they could be ebullient, and then at other times threatening. Sometimes
they were peaceful; other times, violent. They were phenomena of space
and time, linked to specific moments of political crisis and to transitory ap-
propriations of an evolving cartography of symbolic places and trajectories.
In response, security forces defended the state apparatus and attempted to
curtail the public sphere and maintain order. Each public formed a picture
of the city according to its own interests, a mental topography of paths of
flight and pursuit, of spaces of freedom and surveillance, of confidence and
fear, of domination and subordination. This chapter looks at three specific
movements that depict the contested geopolitics of public space and the
permeability of its boundaries. First, the scores of protests, staged largely by
108 | chapter three
the communists, in the context of reconstruction and the cold war; second,
the housing protests, especially those of Abbé Pierre in 1953; and lastly, the
political struggles created by the cancer of the Algerian War. Together they
evidence the multiplicity of distinct public discourses, the overlapping scenes
and spaces of collective action and contestation that permeated the capital.
Decentering Collective Power
The war and occupation made Paris a city unquestionably of the Left. The
main beneficiary was the Communist Party, under the guidance of Maurice
Thorez. Between 1944 and 1956 the culture and politics of communism in the
capital reached an extraordinary zenith. The communists’ role in the Resis-
tance and Liberation was lionized. A new generation of scholars is rewriting
the history of the French Resistance and questioning the hegemonic sway of
the Communist Party over the movement.
3
Yet there is no doubt that Com-
munism was a de rigueur force in the capital, a chic ideology of astonishing
influence in the years after the war. It was almost an autonomous power in
Paris—a counterstate—guarding its fiefdoms in the north and east, relying
on a legion of militants and launching offensives at will against the French
state and bourgeois society and against the American colossus. The PCF had
its own newspapers and literary forums and controlled the most important
intellectual publications in Paris, foremost among them Les Lettres françaises,
the major publishing outlet for the intellectual Left and managed by Louis
Aragon. The intellectual beau monde of the Left Bank adopted the language
of revolutionary politics and was the PCF’s most vocal champion. The party’s
seduction reached out to capture the flashy world of artistic and media star-
dom with a long list of fierce advocates, from Picasso to Gérard Philipe and
Yves Montand. They put their signature to communist and pacifist petitions,
including the 1950 Stockholm Appeal against the use of atomic weapons, and
marched in the streets along with the party’s rank and file. In the late 1940s
and early 1950s the party’s evening daily Ce Soir (also under the directorship
of Louis Aragon) and the official communist organ L’Humanité each enjoyed a
daily readership of 450,000 devotees. The party produced its own advertising
and campaign films and had its own public-relations agency, youth festivals,
film premiers, conferences, and publications. It could rely on a full 30 percent
of the vote in municipal elections in the early postwar years and controlled
the suburban ring of industrial towns that surrounded the capital. The party’s
public space and confrontation | 109
stronghold remained the working-class districts of the 11th, 13th, 18th, 19th,
and 20th arrondissements, 55–60 percent of which still voted communist in
1956.
4
In the mid-1950s the communists still controlled twenty-seven mu-
nicipalities in the Paris suburbs, six of which were in communes with more
than fifty thousand inhabitants: Aubervilliers, Drancy, Montreuil, Nanterre,
Saint-Denis, Vitry-sur-Seine.
5
The suburban population tended to increase
most in these towns, and the newcomers blended easily into districts marked
by party solidarity and working-class sociability.
Yet the party drew its appeal and power to mobilize not so much from these
votes or from strict ideology, but from its historical legitimacy and its claim
to represent the true France. The communists laid claim to universality. For
all practical purposes, they were willing to domesticate their opposition and
rallied to the defense of the nation and the newly formed Fourth Republic,
participating in coalition governments until the onset of the cold war led to
their expulsion in 1947. But at the level of principles and public promotion,
they were unshakably bound to a view of France’s postwar government as
“bourgeois.” The Fourth Republic and de Gaulle’s RPF were seen as un-
scrupulous and self-seeking, sworn enemies of the people and incapable of
representing them. And there was absolutely nothing ambivalent about the
party’s perspective on Paris. Theirs was a comprehensive critique of existing
urban society. Paris was really two cities: the corrupted and vilified bour-
geois society in the western districts and the proletarian world of the eastern
neighborhoods. This equivocation between political participation and genuine
hostility led the party to stress its proletarian identity and its separateness.
6
It offered a coherent social and political model for these working classes—
referred to broadly as le peuple or les petits—and fought for their hopes and
dreams for the future. Based on this imagery, the party represented not merely
class interests, but the French people as a whole. Even more important for
the uses of public space, between 1944 and 1956 the Communist Party was
the principal force of political agitation and protest in Paris. And there were
plenty of glaring contradictions in the trente glorieuses to fuel frustration and
political militancy.
For all the joy of freedom and hopes of the Liberation, for all the talk of a
French renaissance, Paris was a dreary, dirty place with few comforts. Heat-
ing costs had skyrocketed. There was a chronic shortage of food, which was
still rationed in the late 1940s. Official quotas offered each adult the equiva-
lent of 900 calories a day in August 1944 and 1,500 in May 1945. Bread was
110 | chapter three
more severely rationed in 1947 than during the worst hours of the “Fritz”
(Germans), and the hunt for milk was still a nightmare. All of this meant long,
frustrating queues at local markets. Parisians made ample use of the black
market and hoarded ration tickets. Resentment was fueled by the reality that
there were three sets of quotas: one for the poor, another for the rich, and yet
another for the occupying American and British forces. Even when quotas
on basic foodstuffs ended, soaring inflation made them shockingly expensive.
In 1947 even the public outcry over the out-of-control rat population, which
threatened public health in the working-class districts, went unheard.
Yet for all these difficulties, housing still remained the fundamental crisis
facing the city’s people. A 1948 law began to free up rents, but it still pro-
tected those (mostly the elderly and the well-off) who already had somewhere
to live. Anyone looking for shelter faced housing costs that jumped sixfold
between 1948 and 1956. Finding any sort of dwelling in Paris was a virtually
hopeless task that involved a procedural jungle, myriad contacts, and the
likelihood of payoffs for even the nastiest of abodes. This contrast between
the dreams of a better life and the reality facing young families is one of the
most enduring features of this entire period. After years of deprivation, mil-
lions of Parisians strolled through mesmerizing expositions on reconstruc-
tion, habitat, decorative arts, and urbanism. They drooled over the displays of
modern kitchen appliances, washing machines, and sleek furniture designed
by Charlotte Perriand at the 1947 Exposition internationale de l’urbanisme
et de l’habitation. Attendance at the 1951 Salon des arts ménagers alone
reached well over one million.
7
The tempting peeks at the future made the
difficulties all the harder to bear. Shysters sold lists of apartments “soon to be
available.” Young couples scoured public auctions and the black market for
basic furniture that cost a fortune. For thousands of people in the capital—but
especially in the northern and eastern neighborhoods—sordid living condi-
tions became the norm. In 1944 the working-class newspaper Syndicalisme
launched an editorial on housing conditions that asked why workers toiled
in factories with the most modern, efficient machinery and yet went home
to hovels: “We want to see the instruments of liberation. Where is the clean
airy kitchen attached to healthy living spaces? Where is the bathroom, the
washing machine, the indirect light that softens the view . . . ?”
8
Beyond the immediate injustices palpable at the level of everyday life,
the trente glorieuses more generally caught the traditional working classes in
its wake. Gains in France were real, and total wages increased regularly, with
public space and confrontation | 111
all wage earners experiencing an improvement in their purchasing power. Yet
these positive indicators hid the widening inequality in wages and standards
of living. Reconstruction and modernization favored the most qualified and
talented. Those with the training to wade into the new industries and the
expanding service sector were highly competitive, and their incomes rose ac-
cordingly. This was particularly true for the new managerial and employee
classes, or cadres supérieurs and cadres moyens, as well as of skilled workers.
Workers in traditional industries faced stagnating salaries and saw their stan-
dard of living decline relative to these gains. Even worse, by the mid-1950s
many of these manufacturing activities were no longer profitable. They faded
from the scene. Those Parisian companies that did remain viable were being
banished to the provinces in the government’s decentralization programs. The
result was that income inequalities and social hierarchies were exaggerated.
In 1949 real salaries were at their lowest point for the entire period between
1913 and 1954, and 50 percent lower than they had been in 1937. Although
they did begin to increase after 1949, by 1954 they had still not reached their
prewar levels.
9
The city’s working classes, who were the PCF’s traditional
political base, found themselves facing a tightening job market and declining
purchasing power just when consumer goods were dangling in store windows
and mass culture was offering a new way of life. In a 1956 study of the working
classes, the respondents in an opinion poll indicated that the cost of living,
housing, and fears about the future were their most immediate problems.
When asked whether their lives had improved over the last five years, over
50 percent replied in the negative.
10
Between 1956 and 1964 the real income
of managers in France increased by 39.5 percent, that of employees by 32
percent, and that of skilled workers by 25 percent, yet for minimum-wage
earners the increase was just 3.8 percent. While the cadres were busy buying
cars and domestic goods for their homes, food was still consuming nearly
60 percent of the budget of working families. The minimum wage, or SMIG,
was increasingly divorced from economic reality, which by 1952 was already
trailing 35 percent behind the cost of living.
11
Traditional representations of
the flourishing trente glorieuses thus hide deep social tensions. The inequalities
were most palpable at the level of everyday life. Despite the dream of a good
life for all, prosperity and access to consumption were far from democratic.
There were plenty of reasons to join the Communist Party, to organize strike
movements and descend into the streets in protest. The public spaces of the
city were volatile, chimerical. All things seemed possible.
112 | chapter three
In the somber atmosphere of the postwar era, the PCF fought against these
injustices. It was the defender of the people. In the words of Pierre Nora, “No
other political party or group created a universe so thoroughly mapped out, so
reassuring, so full of signs and markers, so warm, protective, or comforting.”
12
The solidity of its moral and revolutionary appeal was striking, and it was both
nostalgic and avant-garde in orientation. Paris was imagined and idealized as
a topography of localized populist neighborhoods—unified in a revolution-
ary genealogy that had carried through to the Liberation. Through a universe
of ingrained rituals, ceremonies, historical references, cultural postures, and
codes, the party invented the framework for a republic of the people, a coun-
tersociety that claimed the public spaces of the city as its own. The proletar-
ian Paris of the northern and eastern districts was lionized as the territory of
communist militancy. It was a base, a training ground, a space of withdrawal
and regroupment. In May 1952, when police flooded the rue de Ménilmontant
looking for a local PCF official, the neighborhood immediately defended its
terrain against the hostile invasion.
13
The PCF was the true Paris in this cult
of Paris populaire. In 1945 the communist L’Avant-garde conjured up the magi-
cal street naming that turned the rue de Ménilmontant and the surrounding
neighborhood into a lyrical topos of working-class political culture:
Ménilmontant Street, Belleville Boulevard, a working-class neighborhood
of Paris sings the melody of its life and touches the heart of our people.
Hermitage Street, Envierges Street, Maronites Street, poetic names where
freedom, happiness and justice have always been passionately defended.
And the young will continue the fight: the Commune, February 1934 and
the Resistance. There is a mark of nobility at Ménilmuche.
14
This was the poetic landscape made so poignant by Jacques Prévert and Willy
Ronis. Although these stereotypes came under some criticism by the Left, the
party generally supported them. They were an emotional appeal to memory
and symbolism, to the rituals of the street. A cornucopia of local observances
and celebrations created an informal communist or ouvriériste sociability and
territory in neighborhood space. This expressive discourse reached back into
historic practices and traditions to knit back up the unraveled fabric of urban
civic practices. It was on this foundation that the people would surge toward
a future of their own making and lead the renaissance of France. This mythic
imagery succeeded in politicizing virtually every aspect of collective life.
public space and confrontation | 113
This hypnotic vision was reproduced in the localized power of the ar-
rondissements, the number of communist mayors who controlled them, and
the unique character with which each and every neighborhood was imbued.
The experience of the Resistance and the Liberation itself had taken place
largely at the level of urban neighborhood. Partisan loyalties were defined
within the restricted context of quarter, arrondissement, and suburban town.
The experience effectively politicized municipal governance. Before the war,
mayoral seats in local city halls in the arrondissements were largely honorific
positions held by aging local elites. In the aftermath of the deliverance, they
were controlled by local Liberation committees made up of young activists
from the Resistance, who were emerging as the new political leadership. By
February 1945 communist mayors controlled the working-class enclaves of
the 3rd, 10th, 11th, 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements, as well
as nearly half of the city’s assistant mayoral seats.
15
Raymond Bossus, origi-
nally from Charonne and one of the leaders of the August 1944 insurrection,
dominated municipal politics in Belleville and Ménilmontant. Marcel Cachin,
a party chief, was elected deputy and municipal councilor from La Goutte
d’Or in the 18th arrondissement. An assortment of neighborhood communist
newsletters—Le Phare du Ve, Le Patriote du VIe, La Voix du XVIe—enjoyed avid
readership and popularity. The party’s influence even spread to better-off
areas of the city and the core central districts. This localized municipalism in
Paris was mirrored in the working-class suburbs. The historian Jean Girault
makes the point that after the Liberation, the local municipality became an
essential component of the “red suburbs” and the most effective political
tool of the Communist Party. In 1945 fifty of the eighty municipalities in the
department of the Seine were controlled by the communists. For the first
time in the long, sordid history of the exorcised margins, communist may-
ors of towns such as Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers, filled with a newfound
municipal pride, were powerful political figures in their own right. The most
illustrious leaders of the Communist Party—Charles Tillon, Ambroise Cro-
izat, and André Marty—were elected from Paris and its suburbs.
During the war years, mayors and municipal councils were directly ap-
pointed by local Vichy officialdom. The stain of collaboration and consequent
purges offered the opening for thoroughgoing electoral and administrative
reform at the local level. In the first election after the war in April 1945 (and
the first in which women voted) municipal councilors were chosen by ar-
rondissement. But, inspired by the ideas of Henri Sellier, one Communist
114 | chapter three
Party member, Georges Marrane, proposed to the Comité parisien de la
Libération a complete overhaul of the city’s administration. The Paris munici-
pal council would be dissolved altogether in favor of autonomous municipal
councils for each of the twenty arrondissements. They would be twenty sepa-
rate “cities” with independent powers and would see to local affairs just as the
municipal councils did in the suburban towns. The Paris region as a whole
would then be administered by an elected representative assembly. Marrane
argued that not only was the Paris municipal council hopelessly inept, but
each of the arrondissements was different, with different problems that only
a local mayor could hope to understand.
16
Although the communists tried
repeatedly to push through this idea of local autonomy between 1945 and
1947, the proposition ultimately failed. However, it spoke to the decentral-
ized sense of work, living, and politics in the quartiers populaires as a universe
of possibilities, legitimized by wartime resistance and by the promises of
reconstruction. The difficulties of war and occupation had already required
ingenuity and resourcefulness. The subculture of daily privation and “ersatz”
living inadvertently cleared the way for the transformation of everyday life.
This quotidian localized environment was the zone of immediate experience
and symbolic representations, a place of social action, initiative, and inven-
tion. It was in this dispersed, autonomous geography that the communists
would build homes, new public schools and daycare centers, parks and sports
arenas, and fulfill the hopes of the Liberation.
In October 1947, in the newspaper Paris Centre, the Communist Party
sections of the 1st, 2nd, 8th, and 9th arrondissements insisted that “Paris
should be administered by its elected” and flaunted their accomplishments:
day-care centers and schools opened, a new neighborhood square renovated,
a sports field outfitted with lights, an inexpensive restaurant launched. The
party championed worker management and the renovation of Les Halles.
17
The PCF also produced its own media campaign, including a 1947 pro-
motional film entitled À la conquête du bonheur. After paying homage to the
résistants and deportees who gave their lives in the war, the film recounts the
reforms enacted by various communist municipalities in the suburbs. Along-
side the paucity of city and state aid, ineptly meted out, the local examples
are inspiring: the health clinics at Villejuif and Gennevilliers are portrayed as
model facilities, the day-care center at Bezons rings with children’s laughter,
thousands of healthy lunches are served at school canteens, the trade school
at Gennevilliers graduates skilled workers, and free wood is distributed to
public space and confrontation | 115
the elderly for heat. The campaign film captures volunteer “shock troops”
organizing to provide temporary shelter for the homeless at Ivry and con-
structing a bus-stop shelter at Noisy-le-Sec.
18
These images portray a mythical
French people, recognizable for their modesty and courage, busy making their
lives and mobilizing locally in their quartier to construct a brave new world.
In the same way, the communist municipal council of suburban Malakoff
boasted in September 1947 about the ultramodern health clinic, the prena-
tal care facilities and nursery schools, and the town’s colonie de vacances.
19
The most triumphant programs were carried out in Saint-Denis, one of the
main bastions of the banlieue rouge, which was heavily damaged by wartime
bombardments. The communist municipality set out a visionary program of
public housing and urbanism under the architect André Lurçat. A member
of CIAM and the modernist movement, Lurçat was an active member of the
PCF in the years after the war. In stark contrast to the housing paralysis in
Paris, Saint-Denis had already begun construction of the cité Paul Langevin
public-housing project as early as 1946. Nursery schools were opened and a
colonie de vacances inaugurated for the city’s children. Paris and its suburbs
had fractured into self-actualizing localized spaces of practical doing and ac-
complishment. Through hard work, les camarades would share in prosperity
as never before and lead the transformation of France.
The Spatial Logic of Class
In the same sense, the PCF had every intention of taking to the streets and
fighting against the injustices so palpable on the landscape. The spaces of
Paris, as the capital, were unquestionably a national terrain of visibility and
political power. Its topography overflowed with emblematic sites, with tra-
dition and ritual. The extraordinary influence of the Left and especially of
the Communist Party in Paris made the struggle for control over this public
sphere passionate and highly volatile. The overt ouvriérisme found its expres-
sion in the civic spaces of the city. Its claim to spatial and political legitimacy
called upon history and memory, rite and celebration, dramatic posturing
and performance, and violent struggle. Ouvriérisme was a staging of trans-
gression, hyperbole, and iconoclasm. It turned the streets of Paris into an
ongoing political pageant, an insurgent civic theater that continued the revo-
lutionary legacy and the outpouring of the Liberation. The immediacy and
influence of the capital’s public spaces was made even more unequivocal by