Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958
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156 | chapter three
train traffic.
103
The 13th, 18th, and 19th arrondissements became sectarian
combat zones when the MTLD split between those who remained faithful to
Messali Hadj and the powerful new FLN. Terrorism and frequent assassina-
tions by one side against the other became the new public spectacles, with
the dead and wounded counted up and carted away by police authorities.
104
The spaces of the capital turned into a geography of fear—of the collapse of
empire and the decline of France, of violent clashes and terrorism, of plots
by zealot Algerian nationalists. The reaction was increased surveillance, more
retribution, and severe repression.
On March 9, 1956, the National Assembly was set to deliberate on the
granting of special powers to the government to quell the violence in Algeria
and restore French authority. “As if by some mysterious order,” according to
Le Parisien libéré, massive numbers of Algerians throughout the Paris region
“deserted their workshops and construction sites to affirm their solidarity
with the rebels in North Africa.”
105
The morning strike movement called by
the FLN along with the Mouvement national algérien and its charismatic
leader, Hadj, was followed by a call to prayer at the city’s Grand Mosque.
The result was massive crowds (ten thousand, according to press estimates),
made up mostly of young men, that quickly transformed into a political dem-
onstration. They marched along a novel political route from the Mosque off
the rue Daubenton past the Jardin des Plantes. Unable to advance along the
quays of the Left Bank to reach their final destination of the Palais Bour-
bon (which was defended by thousands of CRS forces) the protesters at-
tempted to cross the pont Sully to the Hôtel de Ville. Screaming slogans in
Arabic and waving the green and white flag of Algerian independence, they
threaded their way through a tangle of trucks and automobiles with horns
blaring in anger and aggravation. When some 2,500 of them were rounded
up and taken away by police, the crowds reacted with violence, rampaging
through the streets, ransacking boutiques and automobiles, and harassing
passersby. Clashes between police and demonstrators intensified throughout
the afternoon, leaving a trail of destruction and debris in its wake along the
quai Henri IV and the quai de la Rapé. Clots of traffic came to a standstill,
with innocent bystanders caught in the fray. After a last siege at the Hôtel de
Ville, the riots finally dissipated by the end of the afternoon.
The reaction in the municipal council was immediate outrage. Calling
the protestors “assassins and thieves,” members from a swath of political
persuasions indulged in a xenophobic stupor and castigated the prefect of
public space and confrontation | 157
police for his moderate strategy in the face of “10,000 men parading through
the streets of Paris, slapping the face of the nation and demanding separa-
tion from it.” When the communist Camille Denis attempted to defend their
right to “demonstrate their desire for peace and freedom for their country,”
he met with loud ridicule.
106
To add to the threat, the rioters were identi-
fied as “minors.” The image of the young Arab male played into the fear of
juvenile delinquency and gangs of tricheur troublemakers, of thievery and
criminal behavior. The May 1957 assassination of Ali Chekkal, vice president
of the Algerian Assembly at the Stade de Colombes, did nothing to calm
anxieties, nor did the arrests of FLN leaders at Clichy and Saint-Ouen. The
topography of Paris seemed to be exploding into pieces as a corollary of the
Algerian conflict. The political meaning of the fractured symbolic landscape
was grotesquely exaggerated as adherents from all sides battled for control
of the capital.
The Italian urban observer Alberto Arbasino reflected on the anxiety
and agitation of the summer of 1957 as the capital awaited the annual fête
nationale celebrations:
The place is swarming with paratroopers. . . . They have taken possession
of the city. . . . They are amassing in Paris for the great Sunday morning
parade down the Champs-Élysées; 14,245 men, 123 planes, 60 tanks, 32
cannon, 377 military vehicles, 415 horses, and they are taking advantage
of their free time in their occupied capital.
The Fourth Republic was in a hopeless position, with the threat of a mili-
tary coup to save French Algeria all too real: “Each time they arrive at a bal
prolétaire, the paratroopers are welcomed with enthusiasm as good saviors
of a nation in difficulty.”
107
The Right appropriated the western districts of
monumental Paris for their defense of France and Algeria, from the Champs-
Élysées to Notre Dame. In March 1958 a massive protest march by the Syn-
dicat général de la police wound from the prefecture to the Palais Bourbon
in a test of the government’s legitimacy, while right-wing groups staged a
relentless stream of demonstrations in support of French Algeria and in
“homage to Jeanne d’Arc.” The Left relied on its splintered neighborhood
landscape in the eastern districts for the defense of “republicanism.” A day
of national protest and strikes against the war in Algeria was called by the
PCF on October 17, 1957. Thousands marched through the streets from
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Saint-Denis to the Latin Quarter in a reiteration of the decentered political
cartography that dominated the city. Three hundred people wound down the
rue Mouffetard shouting “Peace in Algeria!” In Batignolles as in most places
the protesters combined their calls for peace with those for an end to misery.
In the 13th arrondissement, the infamous slums around the rue Nationale
attempted a protest that was swiftly broken up by police.
108
A general strike
was called on October 25 the same year. Once again, demonstrators took to
the streets for marches and meetings.
By May 8, 1958, in the midst of the national political crisis, Le Figaro
reported on yet another traditional celebration taken over by the passions
and urgency of the moment. V-E Day, or the May 8 victory in the Second
World War, which had been honored in the past with such enthusiasm, “was
no longer celebrated as a fête in the hearts of men because it costs too much
blood and too many tears.” The traditional commemoration march down
the Champs-Élysées drew only a small crowd, many of them tourists and
foreigners, largely indifferent in a “melancholic” atmosphere of grey skies
and rain. Only the street vendors offering their souvenirs broke the mood.
109
Rather than a popular fête, the parade had become a grandiose display by a
government on the edge of collapse, with motorcades of black cars bringing
in President René Coty and his entourage, the Republican guard on horse-
back, colonial troops in their regalia. It was the war in Algeria, far more than
the one that had been fought fifteen years previously, that was on the minds
of Parisians. The superficial pretension of state power at the May 8 victory
parade drew few patriots and did nothing to hide the atmosphere of national
emergency. It was eclipsed by strike movements, work stoppages, “commit-
tees of resistance,” protest marches, and right-wing military demonstrations
that furled out across the public landscape of the capital. The spaces of Paris
became a polymorphic political tableau depicting the downfall of the Fourth
Republic.
Crowds of French colons (colonials, many of them students) and a coterie
of French army officers stormed the French Government-General build-
ing in Algiers on May 13, where General Jacques Massu of the brutal 10th
Paratroop Division became head of a newly formed Committee of Public
Safety against the fellaghas. They demanded that Coty do the same in Paris.
Right-wing activists mobilized in preparation for a military seizure of power
in Paris. The Association des anciens combattants (army veterans’ associa-
tion) staged a march from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de
public space and confrontation | 159
Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées to the place de la Concorde. It was
led by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jean-Maurice Demarquet, outfitted in para-
trooper berets, carrying regimental flags, and shouting “To the Chamber [of
Deputies]!” and “French Algeria!” The event provoked comparison to the
February 1934 march, when extreme right-wing demonstrators tried to cross
the Seine and storm the Chamber of Deputies. As the protesters crossed
the pont de la Concorde, they were stopped by riot-police barricades and a
wall of CRS vans. The ensuing violence left a trail of wounded as protesters
dodged police lines and continued their protest on the rue de Rivoli and the
place de l’Opéra. Faced with a looming military coup, President Coty asked
de Gaulle to become premier, under the condition that he rule by decree for
six months and submit a new constitution. After de Gaulle’s press conference
on May 19 declaring he was ready to take the reins of government, thousands
of young men took to the street in support of his investiture. A May 29 march
began at the rue Solferino, then moved to the Champs-Élysées past the Arc
de Triomphe and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where demonstrators
observed a moment of silence and sang the “Marseillaise.” They then moved
on to the place de la Concorde.
110
Violent street battles took place on May
30 on the Champs-Élysées between supporters of de Gaulle and communist
militants.
On May 28 the Left struck back. That morning Pierre Pflimlin resigned
as premier, leaving a power vacuum that only de Gaulle was capable of filling.
Led by Pierre Mendès-France, François Mitterand, and Edward Daladier,
some 120,000 to 150,000 demonstrators descended onto the streets of Paris
in a great unity march. According to Le Figaro,
The place de la Nation, the avenue Trône, the cours de Vincennes were
everywhere overflowing with delegations. Workers, women, young men
massed on the boulevards and adjacent streets, responding to the call of
a newly organized left-wing alliance, the Comité d’action et de défense
républicaine, that was joined by the communists, the CGT, the Union
of Socialist Left, and no end of progressive and pseudo-communist
groups.
111
Under surveillance by police and CRS units, they marched by professions,
by trades, by veteran associations, carrying their flags, banners, and signs
to the place de la République, where they sang the “Marseillaise” and the
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“Chant du départ” and shouted “Vive la République!” Prominent left-wing
intellectuals and media stars marched with them, led by Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, and Gérard Philipe. It was one of the largest demon-
strations of the postwar era.
Demonstrations and protests continued throughout the working-class
districts on June 1. In the 13th arrondissement, crowds marched from the rue
Jeanne d’Arc to Gobelins. Five thousand marched from the gare Saint-Lazare
figure 17. Demonstrators protesting against the referendum on Algerian independence
during Charles de Gaulle’s speech at the place de la République, September 4, 1959.
© gerald bloncourt/rue des archives.
public space and confrontation | 161
to the Louis-Blanc Métro station, thousands from the rue Saint-Antoine
through Saint-Paul to Les Halles, from the gare Montparnasse to the gare
Austerlitz, from the Latin Quarter down the rue Mouffetard. L’Humanité
reported these events as a “Popular Front” against fascism. In a series of
dazzling editorials, the former résistante and journalist Nelly Feld took her
rhetoric and imagery directly from populist memory. The images are a replay
of the Liberation, with young men and women smiling, being photographed,
self-conscious and aware that they are participating in an historical event.
The people of Paris mobilized with flowers, with their placards and flags.
There was a sense of enthusiasm and resolve.
From Nation to République. By hundreds of thousands we have marched.
Paris, heart of the nation, rises to defend the Republic. The sounds of
the Marseillaise and the Chant du Départ thunder through the city. . . .
And the place de la République, already black with people, erupts into
song with the cortege. In the center, the statue of the Republic applauds.
She applauds the dozens of hands held high, all around her pedestal.
The circle squeezes up around her. Then a “Marseillaise” resounds the
likes of which is rarely heard. I look at the dates inscribed on the pedestal
of the statue: 1792, 1793. I imagine that this is how they sang in those
times—with this fire, with this enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that filled their
hearts. The great joy of feeling strong, because we are united, because
we are so strong.
112
But the loyalty to republicanism, the passion and ritual, did nothing to alter
the course of events. By June 1 de Gaulle was invested as the head of govern-
ment, with full powers. He presented the new constitution at the place de la
République to a jubilant crowd. “Once again,” André Malraux cried, “the
meeting at the Republic is with history, and with General de Gaulle.”
162
spatial imagination and the avant-Garde
4 With the war’s end, intellectuals, architects, and urbanists,
along with the professional cadre supérieur, streamed back into Paris from
the south or from Algiers. After the Liberation, they took Paris by storm,
reclaiming intellectual life and continuing a public conversation about the
nature of the modern city that had gone on since the nineteenth century. The
deterioration of Paris had been the topic of endless discussion throughout
the 1930s and 1940s. It was bleak, worn down by disrepair and by economic
and political crisis, and now it was beyond the capacity of urban planners or
social reformers to save. The last great gathering about the city before the
war was the Paris Congress, held in 1937 in conjunction with the Exposition
Internationale des Arts et Techniques. Le Corbusier and CIAM erected a
huge tent outside the fairground to display a futuristic “radiant city” of glass
towers on the Right Bank from the gare de l’Est to the rue de Rivoli. It was
a visionary solution to what ailed Paris that attracted a steady stream of avid
enthusiasts and horrified critics. The 1943 Salon des Urbanistes provided
yet another chance to condemn the evils of Paris, although this time the so-
lutions proposed were far more conventional. The battle continued to rage
through the occupation, swinging back and forth between preservationists
defending the city’s historic “beauty” and modernists ready to sacrifice it all
in the name of the future.
But by 1945 the terms of the debate had changed. The apocalypse had
happened. The turning point of the Liberation opened up the possibility of
a moral and social revolution. The future was now, and responding to the
capital’s complicated legacy and lived experience held the possibility of trans-
spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 163
formation. These were, after all, the original “spaces of modernity.” This was
the city of Baudelaire and Zola, of Marcel Poëte and Louis Aragon, and a host
of avant-garde predecessors who had breathed in and shaped its ambience.
The intellectual and artistic elites who surfaced in Paris after the dark years
had at their disposal a rich heritage of urban prospecting and flânerie. Some
of the city’s most well-known observers were passing from the scene. Two
literary giants, Jean Giraudoux and Paul Valéry, passed away at the war’s end.
Léon-Paul Fargue died in 1947. The preservationists of the Ligue urbaine et
rurale, men such as the historian Bernard Champigneulle, faded from view.
Intellectuals discredited by their collaboration with the Vichy government
were extirpated in disgrace. The right-wing mouthpiece La Nouvelle revue
française was banned. The Resistance-inspired Comité national des écrivains
(CNE) drew up a blacklist of writers vilified for their Vichy sympathies. The
journalists Georges Suarez and Henri Béraud were shot in late 1944 after
they were found guilty in the first of the purge trials. Robert Brasillach was
executed in February 1945. The writers Lucien Rebatet and Céline were
found guilty but were eventually released. Others, such as Jacques Prévert
and Marcel Carné, seemed to have crossed the great divide from the prewar
years into a new world ready to be born. The occupation and purges that
followed cleared the way for new voices. They emerged among the techno-
cratic young turks of Vichy’s National Revolution, from the Resistance and
the experience of Liberation, from a new generation of avant-garde.
Besides, in the superheated intellectual atmosphere of the Left Bank,
there were plenty of opportunities for passionate discussion about Paris. A
vindicated and profoundly left-wing political grounding was supported by
a milieu of Parisian intellectuals aligned with or along the margins of the
Communist Party, often working together at their CNRS offices, thrashing
out policies on the editorial boards of the leftist literary reviews Les Lettres
françaises, Les Temps modernes, Argument, La Pensée, and Esprit and meeting at
Left Bank bistros. In the decade following the war Louis Aragon became one
of the most powerful figures of intellectual Paris. He was secretary general
of the Resistance-inspired Union nationale des intellectuals and a member
of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party. The old-guard
surrealists around Aragon haunted Le Select, Le Dôme, and La Coupole in
Montparnasse. Aragon and Paul Éluard were the dominant figures in a tight
circle of Left Bank fellow-travelers, along with Claude Roy, Edgar Morin,
and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The regular communist gatherings in Marguerite
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Duras’s apartment on the rue Saint-Benoît and the party cell on the rue de
Rennes in Saint-Germain-des-Prés were a catalog of Parisian intellectual
glitterati of the 1950s fantasizing about revolutionary worker activism. For
their part, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Mou-
nier worked along the edges of communist sympathies. Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir held court at the Café de Flore. Merleau-Ponty presided over
his inner circle a block away at the Rhumerie Martiniquaise. André Malraux
worked from his regular bistro on the rue du Dragon. A familiar figure in
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Albert Camus was working as a journalist, initially
dividing his time between Combat and Gallimard, writing La Peste (1947) and
fighting off admirers. Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel were inaugurating
the Annales school at the École pratique des hautes études with money from
the Rockefeller Foundation. Roland Barthes held a research appointment in
Paris at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) during the
1950s and was writing Mythologies, his tour de force on the empire of signs.
The autumn book sale of the Comité national des écrivains was among the
most spectacular and brilliant literary events of the Paris season. Thousands
attended with the hope of spotting les intellos and media luminaries that
made the event an annual leftist ritual. In 1956 Les Lettres françaises (which
originated as a CNE review) published a map of the booths at Vél’ d’Hiv so
that fans could easily locate their favorite cerebral idols. Michel de Certeau
was working on his doctorate at the Sorbonne, where Jean-Luc Godard was
also a student; Maurice Agulhon, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie were at the École normale supérieure; and Guy Debord and his band
of followers were drifting through the city. Postwar Paris was a ferment of
intellectual avant-gardism.
1
The purpose of this discussion is to weave together the intertwining
threads that created a general field of public discourse, a pattern of under-
standing and perception about Paris and about urban spatiality that was
shared by these intellectual and artistic elites. Movements as diverse as social
Marxism, Catholic reformism, technocratic rationalism, surrealism, and pro-
gressive patriotism all contributed to French perceptions of the modern urban
experience. Although it may seem as though individuals were separated by
insurmountable ideological barriers, they often shared cultural assumptions
that went far deeper than their differences. Urban modernity allows for a
myriad of itineraries. The labyrinthine windings of Parisian topography and
questions of social class, subjectivity, and rational reform played themselves
spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 165
out across this field of understanding in manifold ways. But a perceptual
coherency places these intellectual elites firmly within the milieu of mid-
twentieth-century Paris and the quest to find the relationship between space,
culture, and society. French cultural theory is now something of a cottage
industry, and the work of renowned theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and
others in this chapter who dominated the Paris intellectual scene has been
brilliantly mined by specialists. Other urban observers considered here are
perhaps less well recognized. My purpose is to find the intersection of these
voices, the common vocabulary that was used to articulate the spatial dynam-
ics in the Paris of their time. This contextualizes the aesthetics of everyday
life, the spatialities and temporalities of the capital that were produced as a
field of knowledge during the postwar period.
We can begin by saying that what all these urban observers shared was
a common framework, one often articulated as humanism. In his analysis
of the cultural and intellectual rebuilding of postwar France, the historian
Michael Kelly argues that humanism “provided the ideological adhesive for
French national unity, a precious and fragile field in 1944, and defined the
parameters of what was thinkable, or at least speakable.” Humanism was
expounded explicitly. Its characteristic preoccupations were with “Man,
the Individual, Society, Culture, Science, and History.”
2
It was more a field
of consensual understanding and values than a rational construct. In the
context of a shattered nation, this utopian discourse held enormous power.
It brought together intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds, from the
religious to the secular, the technocratic to the Marxist. It was a way for all
French to relate to one another. Humanists endorsed the ideal of human
brotherhood. They shared a sentimental sympathy for ordinary people in a
vision that was mythic and emotional in content. Throughout the late 1940s
and 1950s, this ideological framework produced an ethnographic vision of
the city’s population and spaces that was close to the folk tradition of images
d’épinal, lending a poetic, sentimentalized quality to the humanist point of
view. The traditional quartier populaire, with its informal, effortless sociability
and street life, was naturalized as the social space indigenous to Paris and to
its morally good people.
These images were laced together from a number of intertwining stand-
points. First, the Resistance and Liberation were the prelude to the zenith
of French working-class politics and culture during the early postwar years.
The proletariat incarnated the authentic interests of the nation. Their Paris