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

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126 | chapter three

smashed and shots rang out amid ﬂeeing commuters. Some twenty thousand

demonstrators took part in the protests and riots, with one of their number

left dead, two hundred wounded, and hundreds arrested, among them the

Communist Party secretary, Jacques Duclos.

After the Ridgway riots, all demonstrations and street theater in Paris,

including the traditional February, May Day, and July 14 marches, were

forbidden unless police had no choice but to concede territory to demon-

strators. In 1953 the PCF, labor unions, and an assortment of neighborhood

and suburban organizing committees, supported by a host of intellectuals

and media personalities, deﬁantly went ahead with plans to commemorate

May Day and July 14 in “defense of liberty.” L’Humanité called for a “vast

protest” against the prohibition that “unmasked the fascist character of the

government.”

The pressure forced police authorization of a May Day march

limited strictly to the traditional Bastille-to-Nation route. In a show of unity,

ofﬁcials from the Union des syndicats de la région parisienne, the CGT, and

the PCF, as well as a variety of left-wing organizations, marched along with

some sixty municipal councilors and parliamentary deputies in a parade of

some 22,000 people. The police were ready to head off any repeat of the

Ridgway riots and immediately cracked down on groups massing anywhere

outside the faubourg Saint-Antoine. For the July 14 parade, the PCF plans

featured veteran and youth organizations as well as women’s groups, who

would march alongside representatives of the arrondissements and suburban

towns in defense of long-established public rights and territory. L’Humanité

publicized the plans as a mobilization of the peuple. The appeal would be made

all the more passionate by the violence and deaths that ended the day (see

“The Presence of Undesirables” later in this chapter). The ofﬁcial reaction

was to ban further marches along the Bastille-to-Nation route and to push

the traditional commemorations even further outside the city in an unprec-

edented suppression of political and populist uses of public space. The 1954

May Day commemoration was authorized strictly for the Reuilly meadow

in the Bois de Vincennes with police cordoning off access to the place de

la Nation. After thousands deﬁantly marched in a spectacle-manifestation on

July 14, 1954, L’Humanité announced triumphantly, “It is impossible to ban

July 14. The unwarranted banning of the traditional parade from the Bastille

to Nation, and of all patriotic and republican protests on July 14, has not

stopped Parisian men and women and the people of the laboring suburbs

from celebrating this date, known the world over as the symbol of freedom

public space and confrontation | 127

and the nation.” The police restriction was attributed to the planned visit to

Paris by John Foster Dulles, who was blamed for attempting to break down

peace negotiations in Geneva on the war in Indochina. The descriptions of

the parade, local dances, and ﬁreworks were laced with calls for peace.

The clampdown was unmistakable in the repressive tactics for the ninth

commemoration of victory in the Second World War at the place de l’Étoile

on May 8, 1954. In the late 1940s victory tributes had been the most populist,

emancipatory events in Paris. Instead, every ofﬁcial effort was now made to

maintain security and control. The commemorations would be restored in

“all their dignity”; “only” the French president, a small number of govern-

ment ministers, along with veteran representatives would participate. Two

lines of police barricades would ensure total control over the area and “ac-

cess to the plateau of the Arc de Triomphe by the public would be rigorously

prohibited.”

Paris Match reported the preparedness of prefect of police,

Jean Baylot, who was ready with squadrons of CRS and mobile guard units,

radio communication, and air surveillance.

The security was so tight even

de Gaulle objected. He complained at a press conference, “I will be at the

Arc de Triomphe, but I will be alone, without a cortege. . . . I ask that the

people be there. I ask that veterans be there.”

For the most part, de Gaulle

figure 11. The 1953 May Day march. © gerald bloncourt/rue des archives.

128 | chapter three

and the RPR kept a low proﬁle on the streets of Paris. The capital was not

their political ﬁefdom, and ﬂashy public displays generally brought immedi-

ate reaction by the Left. When the RPR did engage in commemorations and

rituals, such as, in 1945, the Day of the Flags (March), the Fête de Jeanne

d’Arc (May), or the commemoration of Armistice Day, they were oriented

around the capital’s monumental spaces, especially the Invalides, the place

de la Concorde, and the Champs-Élysées. In any case, the 1954 victory cer-

emony at the place de l’Étoile did take place under an onslaught of police

and without the typical crowds. Photographs of the event expose the empti-

ness of space, the sense of a ceremony inside a stark void. In contrast to the

massive populist celebrations that marked these anniversaries in the imme-

diate post-Liberation years, the ofﬁcial 1954 ceremony was distinguished by

its attempted closure of the public domain and the banishment of Parisians

deemed too dangerous to play a role.

These attempts at repression were undermined by the war in Indochi-

na and the shock of Dien Bien Phu, which reverberated through the city’s

symbolic sites with particular ferocity. Just a month earlier, in April 1954, a

ceremony honoring the defenders of Dien Bien Phu at the place de l’Étoile

attended by Prime Minister Joseph Laniel and René Pleven was suddenly

broken up by thousands of protestors screaming for their resignations. An

attempted getaway by members of the government was foiled when mas-

sive crowds surrounded their automobiles. Although the media generally

favored facile depictions of ceremonies venerating war veterans, this time

Paris Match photographers snapped away as police attempted to quell the

momentary panic and push back the mobs. By the next month Dien Bien

Phu had fallen. Despite every effort to maintain security, the May 8 victory

celebration by General de Gaulle at the Arc de Triomphe was interrupted

when veterans from the Corps expéditionnaire d’Extrême-Orient, along

with extreme right-wing groups incensed by the defeat, attempted to smash

through the police barricades. They rallied around a paratrooper draped in

a regimental ﬂag. Somehow, some two thousand protesters broke through

police lines. The ensuing violence was ﬁlmed live by television crews as it

moved around the Champs-Élysées. Baylot watched the live broadcast from

his command post and used it to direct the crackdown and reestablish public

order.

The event itself and its convoluted reporting were illustrative of the

spatial and visual interaction taking place around civic life and the ways in

which it produced meaning. The event was also symptomatic of the political

public space and confrontation | 129

complexities. Complaints about the disturbances provoked by the Dien Bien

Phu disaster poured in from Second World War veterans, especially from the

9th Colonial Infantry Division:

On May 8, 1954, we were celebrating our victory . . . we were the ﬁrst

to battle in this ungrateful land [Indochina], we were heartbroken by

this terrible defeat. . . . I saw these men sobbing with their heads in their

hands, not with rage, certainly not, but with shame, because for us the

word “Honor” will remain in our hearts until death. . . . But why May

8, 1954? Why?

How can we read this explosion of political militancy and violence in the

spaces of Paris? The range of disputes and the intensity of the clashes made

the public domain a volatile, multilayered expression of reconstruction and

cold war tensions. Yet these episodes did not ostensibly threaten the fragile

national unity fashioned from Liberation, nor did they reach insurrectionary

proportions in the capital until the crisis of decolonization. For all its aggres-

siveness, the public imaginary of the reconstruction years was constructed

as much around patriotic loyalties as it was around rebellion. This sense of

national endurance and continuity of political culture was essential in a pe-

riod riddled with change and crisis. Activism and unruliness were formulated

around traditional rituals that regenerated symbolic public spaces and political

combat—at times ruthless—without disintegration. This spatial topos was also

deeply intertwined with the possibility of thinking about and voicing vision-

ary plans and hopes for the future. Ironically, all actors claimed to represent

patriotic sentiment and the new France. National identity and the future lay

as much in a mythic concept of the heroic people as it did in state apparatus.

The rebirth of state hegemony that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s

did not extinguish this myth or the localized cartography that sustained it.

Protest marches, demonstrations, and battles with police were understood as

legitimate and patriotic appropriations of civic space. Power was in the streets.

These diverse locations of French identity and wearing of the national mantle

worked to fracture political struggle across a multiplicity of spatial trajectories

and topographies, and across a multiplicity of publics. Political and social

clashes were carried out with a spatial autonomy and ﬂuidity that belied any

privileging of traditional ofﬁcial sites. They took place through thorny negotia-

tion with the forces of repression. The battle for control over these fragmented

130 | chapter three

public spaces and for control over the memory and history of what took place

there deﬁned the postwar reconstruction years. Filmed and reported in the

press, they were media events that illuminated and exposed social class and

populist culture as an intense political theater spread across the capital.

By the mid-1950s the great moment of communist supremacy in the capi-

tal was beginning to wane. The aura of revolutionary cachet that had radiated

out from the political culture of the northern and eastern arrondissements

no longer captured the city’s imagination. The evening communist daily Ce

Soir disappeared in 1953 and L’Humanité began to lose readers. The lavish

commemoration ceremonies honoring the Second World War and Liberation

had become worn spectacles. The streets of the city remained intensely po-

liticized, but these rituals either disappeared or were appropriated by French

state ofﬁcialdom anxious to promote itself in public. For the communists,

Khrushchev’s 1956 de-Stalinization speech, the troubles in both Poland and

Hungary, and then the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising in

Budapest all had ramiﬁcations on the local level. In a reversal of fortune, angry

crowds led by René Pleven, Georges Bidault, and Antoine Pinay marched up

the Champs-Élysées in November in a nighttime protest carrying placards

against the “Soviet Assassins” and turning left-wing newspapers into torches.

The Communist Party headquarters at the rue de Châteaudun crossing in the

9th arrondissement was attacked by angry mobs. This symbolic site of com-

munist power was irreverently renamed the place Kossuth by the municipal

council. In protest against this outrage, the PCF moved its headquarters to

the place du Colonel Fabien. Even the Fête de l’Humanité was banned by

a municipal council vote in 1957. Enraged fellow-travelers and much of the

intellectual scene on the Left Bank broke with the party, while the Soviet

model held little attraction for the younger generation. By the late 1950s mass

consumer culture was also breaking down proletarian and neighborhood

identity as well as the communist counternarrative of national unity.

It was too early to draw the curtain down completely on the city’s left-wing

populism. By the 1959 municipal elections, the PCF could still lay claim to

29 percent of the vote in Paris and even more in the suburbs, where the cein-

ture rouge remained a communist ﬁef. Marches and protest demonstrations

continued to resound in the spaces of the capital across the decade. They

endlessly reiterated political ritual and the spectacle of insurrectionary allu-

sion, a symbolic taking of the streets. The end of October and the beginning

of November 1957 brought a “week of social agitation” with crippling strikes

public space and confrontation | 131

and demonstrations. But the slow, irreversible erosion of communist support

was clear. Protests and street demonstrations themselves were turning away

from the ouvriérisme of reconstruction toward the tragic crisis of decoloniza-

tion and the Algerian War. The public spaces of the city were pierced by new,

far more dangerous political trajectories.

The Housing Crisis

The world of the lower classes in Paris has always had a bad reputation. The

historian Daniel Roche, for example, discovered an eighteenth-century public

discourse that, although laced with descriptive accuracy, conveyed “an in-

stinctive recoil of horror . . . the intimate life of the people is encamped in a

décor devoid of culture.”

It is interesting to examine the public outcry over

housing and slum conditions after the Second World War from this longer

historic perspective. There was certainly no doubt about the misery. In 1946

the mean age of buildings in Paris was eighty-three years. The building stock

suffered from perennial neglect. Some half a million families lived in garnis,

cheap boarding rooms ﬁtted with the bare minimum of comfort—a bed, a

chair, and a table.

The housing crisis formed one of the most important

public debates of the late 1940s and 1950s. It preoccupied the entire spec-

trum of intellectual and political thought and produced a cottage industry of

research and surveys. A torrential outpouring of ofﬁcial statistics and inqui-

ries as well as journalistic reporting attempted to capture the extent of the

problem and the overwhelming wretchedness. Newspapers, magazines, and

intellectual journals featured investigations of the ghastly conditions found in

the most blighted districts of the city. Images of these pitiful dwellings were

sensationalized in ﬁlm and on television. Yet the housing crisis was subject to

contradictory readings that resulted in drastically different interpretations.

As a public debate, it was multifaceted, heavily moralized, and steeped in

political and social tensions.

The MRU, assorted other state ministries, and the Seine prefecture all

sponsored studies of the city’s îlots insalubres and the notorious ceinture rouge.

The reports outdid each other in condemning these areas as social cesspools

threatening the nation’s survival. In ofﬁcial discourse the quartiers populaires

and the everyday reality of working-class life were equated with slums. They

were spatial and temporal voids between a modern future to be built and an

urban past to be destroyed. The dogmatic language and use of statistical re-

132 | chapter three

search techniques made these ofﬁcial descriptions tantamount to truth. Any

authentic public dialog was deemed superﬂuous. In 1943 an intensive study

of the conditions in Paris carried out by the Inspection générale des services

techniques de topographie et d’urbanisme estimated that 150,000 people

lived in furnished boarding rooms “in a promiscuity that breeds all sorts of

bad behavior.”

A 1946 government report entitled “Struggle against Slums”

laid out the consequences of the unhealthy living conditions in the city’s

mean districts with an early nineteenth-century social reform moralism and

fear of crime, vice, and contagion. The working classes appear as a wretched

and irrational human phantasmagoria. Their rundown neighborhoods were

“places for the propagation of infectious diseases, laboratories for murderous

epidemics, agents of moral degradation, destroyers of family life . . . even if

there are some proper activities, they are done in isolation and undermined

by degenerative factors such as hunger, alcoholism, intellectual instability,

and amorality.” The degraded housing conditions were threatening French

renewal and the birth rate. A vast study of housing in Paris completed in 1948

by the Seine prefecture concluded that “order is practically impossible, to

say nothing of hygiene or elemental decency. Family life in this atmosphere

of degeneration and promiscuity is lamentable.”

Proof of unwholesome

conditions was provided by the statistical rates of tuberculosis; the age and

bleakness of housing; the lack of sanitary facilities, gas, water, and electricity;

and population-density rates. It was a perennial litany of simpliﬁed, rationally

standardized measurements of the urban condition. Pour la vie, the review

of family studies, gave evidentiary conﬁrmation that in buildings with a lack

of these comforts and insufﬁciency of space,

health was compromised, mothers were exhausted, any new birth is con-

sidered a catastrophe. . . . When young married couples have to live with

parents or with foreign persons, who doesn’t know instances of separation

and disunion? And this doesn’t even speak of promiscuity, when people

live on top of one another in minuscule apartments (for example Paris,

the City of Light) and the dramas provoked by these situations. . . . We

must absolutely furnish families an indispensable framework for their

normal development; it is a vital issue for the country.

In a 1953 enquête sociologique in the district of Pantin along the canal de l’Ourcq

northeast of the city, the Ministère de l’Équipement commissioned photo-

public space and confrontation | 133

graphic documentation as evidence of conditions. The images are portraits

of urban dystopia. Ruined buildings boarded up, shacks pieced together with

abandoned materials, and pools of putrid water depict a state of savagery.

Young families and children caught in the camera lens amid jerryrigged elec-

trical wiring, dripping water pipes, exposed sewers, rotting beams and plaster,

and windowless shacks on the verge of collapse summon up images of the

worst nineteenth-century slums.

These were scenes out of Zola’s novels.

But the families being photographed are without agency. They are robbed

of their status as le peuple. They are incapable of maintaining a proper qual-

ity of life. They are elements of material wretchedness, part of a despicable

decor to be cleared out.

Despite the appalling conditions, government authorities actually did

not have any real urban planning or housing policy. Between 1948 and

1952 the local Ofﬁce public des habitations à loyer modéré (public hous-

ing ofﬁce, or HLM) received 85,000 applications for housing. It was able

to ﬁll only a few thousand of the requests and predicted the same meager

availability for 1953 and 1954, when the number of applications would

continue to ﬂood in. In the face of desperate need, a total of only 12,000

lodgings were constructed in Paris between 1944 and 1954, according to of-

ﬁcial statistics. Around 40,000 were built in the Seine department outside

Paris.

Year after year public ﬁnancing for housing was either blocked or

reduced still further. In the meantime, the MRU focused on ultramodern

housing archetypes by architectural luminaries that were, for all practical

purposes, relegated to either experimental sites or small public-housing

projects around the capital. The French state essentially followed a laissez-

faire course, which left the housing market to the vagaries of the estab-

lished construction industry and private real-estate interests. The decision

by the MRU chief, Eugène Claudius-Petit, to continue rent control in Paris

through legislation in 1948 was justiﬁed by the anxiety over maintaining

order and “social peace.” But it seemed destined to set ever more solidly

in place the vicious circle deterring any property investment in the capital.

Building owners had little reason to repair existing housing stock, which

fell further into decay. By the early 1950s the housing situation had become

a full-blown, well-publicized national emergency, one that was particularly

severe in the Paris suburbs.

Although the grid of ofﬁcial interpretation privileged statistical analysis,

infectious disease and immorality (and then offered utopian solutions to this

134 | chapter three

crisis), those in left-wing discourse narrated and visualized the experience of

human suffering. Shelter for working-class families meant wretched rooming

houses, makeshift settlements, and bidonvilles (shantytowns). Desperate squat-

ters took over vacant apartments and bombed-out houses, and then ended up

in collisions with police. High densities and shocking infant mortality rates

destroyed any semblance of family stability. Tubercular parents were forced

to spend months in sanatoria. The housing crisis was caused by slumlords

who raised rents to exorbitant levels for pathetic hovels and regularly threw

families out into the street if they were unable to pay. In the shoddy rooming

houses that functioned as homes for thousands, families were forced to split

up because owners refused to accept children or because the sordid rooms

had no heat or even the means “to heat a baby’s bottle.”

In the press, the

spotlight was on life stories about identiﬁable disadvantaged households

and individuals. The measurement of the housing crisis was particularistic,

contextually situated, personal. “Who offers lodging,” the self-help commu-

nity at Montreuil asked, “to the family with ﬁve children, whose father was

a war prisoner and has struggled for seven years to ﬁnd a place to live and

is still in the two small rooms where the air streams up from underneath the

cracked, bare ﬂooring, where the stairwell barely supports anyone attempt-

ing to climb it but the rats?” “What do you say,” it continued, “to a worker

who, after two months of unemployment, is thrown out of his wooden shed

because he hasn’t paid his rent and his landlord proﬁts from the situation by

pointing to the clause that allows him to demand 75,000 francs for breaking

the contract?”

There are few statistics in this discourse. The tragic descrip-

tions and narratives about the truth of the housing crisis stretched across the

1940s and 1950s in emotional, heartbreaking portrayals that resonated with

the general public and illuminated a solid working people and their struggle

with misery. In this discourse the peuple are victims, but they are not without

power. They maintain their Rousseauian goodness and their courage in the

face of misfortune. They have the capacity to defend their interests and act

on their own behalf.

In general, the Left was suspicious of the state’s revolutionary housing

schemes as utopian fantasy and a pretext for inaction. The immediate need

for decent housing set them against the grand-scale designs for the future city

that were pouring out of the MRU. Reacting against the dazzling Première

Exposition de la Reconstruction organized by the MRU in late 1945, Syndi-

calisme decried “the reﬁned luxuries, the prodigious displays of sumptuous-

public space and confrontation | 135

ness, the superﬁcial modernism without any consideration of the extremely

urgent needs of slum dwellers and workers without decent homes.” In setting

out an agenda for the next exposition, “we would like to see a very important

special section reserved to modest homes that should nevertheless be out-

ﬁtted with practical comforts.”

La Vie ouvrière went further in its critique

of the Exposition: “We can’t go astray with these unreal utopian solutions.

Not taking into account the ﬁnancial and material resources of our country,

ignoring the limits the current regime puts on solving the housing problem

is to perhaps increase desires . . . and deceive public opinion.”

In Septem-

ber of the same year La Vie ouvrière contemptuously exposed construction

priorities in the city. Near the gare de Courbevoie, the luxurious “American”

Prado bistro and bar was undergoing complete renovation for tap and swing

dancing and “zazous frolicking.” There was no glass for windowpanes or

materials to rebuild homes, but the Prado was installing an enormous glass

facade that looked out onto the street. The Seine prefecture had capped the

budget for reconstruction work, but thousands of francs were being poured

into luxury makeovers: “The moral: the shameless waste of building materi-

als, black-market trafﬁcking and the employment of workers ‘unavailable’ for

the homeless. The disaster victims of Courbevoie demand an explanation.”

Lowering construction costs through prefabrication, refurbishing buildings

damaged by bombardments, making use of existing housing stock through

renovation, requisitioning private ﬂats and chambres de bonne, and support-

ing self-help housing projects were all among the practical solutions offered

by the Left as an alternative to the private housing market or the ofﬁcial

dreamscape of modernist prototypes.

The communists in particular launched a dramatic attack against the

shameful living conditions the working classes were forced to endure. So criti-

cal was this issue that an analysis of elections during the early 1950s found a

direct correlation between dissatisfaction with housing and Communist Party

votes.

During the 1952 municipal elections, the PCF compared the Pleven

government’s hefty military ﬁnancing of the “American war” in Korea and the

war in Indochina to its paltry investments in housing. Campaign advertising

jabbed directly at the rank and ﬁle’s sorest wound: “Badly Housed, without

Housing at All! Make the municipal elections an immense protest by the real

victims of this crisis!”

From their seats on the Paris municipal council the

PCF railed against the state’s denial of sufﬁcient funding for new public-

housing projects. The communist Maurice Collin reminded his colleagues of