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176 | chapter four

gion parisienne also allowed Chombart to establish his research laboratories:

ﬁrst the Groupe d’ethnologie sociale, then the Centre d’études des groupes

sociaux (created in 1955), which became the Centre de sociologie urbaine

in 1958–59. Chombart’s work, in other words, was grounded in the politics

of ameliorating the urban conditions he found so deplorable. His lens on

Paris and its everyday spaces had the effect of valorizing the particularities

of working-class life in the eyes of state technocratic planners.

There is a touch of romanticism in Chombart’s work about a people left

outside traditional sociological discourse. His portrait of their collective lives

has an artiﬁcial, nearly idyllic quality. Yet his aim was to shine the light of

empirical research on these unknown, outcast social spaces, to improve them,

and to integrate them into the life of the city and ultimately into a uniﬁed

French society. For Chombart, the science of urbanism was less a matter of

invention and more a matter of discovery. It aspired to respond to the needs

and hopes of all levels of the population and all social groups.

Over time,

however, Chombart and his team became disillusioned with the increasing

dismissal and marginalization of their work, both by public administrators

and by French academic elites. By the early 1960s Chombart’s work was being

criticized as sociology for state planners, without intellectual merit. Perhaps

more important, the social humanism of the Liberation and reconstruction

years was rapidly receding into the past, and with it went the poetic expres-

sion of neighborhood as an intrinsic cultural and social morphology.

Marxist sociology offered the most powerful alternative to the Catho-

lic social reformism of the 1940s and 1950s. Marxists remained steadfastly

antagonistic toward American social science methods as a threat to French

cultural values and because it used psychological and statistical research

in place of class analysis. Yet the Marxist approach to the city generated a

critique of the everyday that was also spatial in orientation and speciﬁcally

French in conception. It was an indication of how signiﬁcant the milieu of

the Liberation and reconstruction years was to the formation of French in-

tellectual life. The most well-known and proliﬁc French Marxist thinker of

this period was Henri Lefebvre.

Although his career spanned sixty years

and a wide range of pursuits, what interests us here is the narrower task of

situating Lefebvre’s life and work within the intellectual setting of the late

1940s and 1950s. During the war, Lefebvre worked for the Resistance in the

south and eventually took refuge in the Pyrenees, where he helped organize

local Resistance groups along the Spanish border and eventually achieved

spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 177

the rank of captain in the FFI. He also began ﬁeld research on peasant life

and folklore in the town of Campan that would eventually lead him away

from traditional philosophy into sociology and provide the impetus for his

doctoral thesis, published as La Vallée de Campan: Étude de sociologie rurale

in 1963. By the Liberation, Lefebvre was in precarious straights. In 1947 he

arrived in Paris, where he was tapped by Georges Gurvitch to join CNRS to

study rural sociology. He remained there—barring a year of suspension for

his communist links—until 1961.

Compared to philosophy, sociology was a political safe haven for Lefeb-

vre. He was the main exponent of a French nondogmatic, humanist version

of Marxism that was wholly consonant with the intellectual climate in Paris

during these years. Its sensuous, emotional content in fact appealed to the

social and Catholic democratic Left more than to the Communist Party.

His interest was in the struggle against alienation, the possibility of human

self-realization and the fulﬁllment of “total man.” Although Lefebvre never

explicitly wrote on Paris, the text of immediate interest is his 1947 Critique

of Everyday Life, which became the philosophical source book for much

noncommunist Marxist thinking of the 1950s and 1960s. It eventually be-

came the ﬁrst volume of three published under the title Critique of Everyday

Life (1947, 1961, and 1981). Written from August through December 1945

during the heady days of Liberation and published by Grasset in February

1947, the original volume had the aura of humanist optimism and belief in

social transformation characteristic of these years. The imagery is heroic.

“In the enthusiasm of the Liberation,” Lefebvre wrote in the introduction

to the second volume, “it was hoped that soon life would be changed and

the world transformed. More than that: life had already been changed; the

peoples were on the move, the masses were in a ferment . . . the proletariat

was no longer an oppressed class.” Critique of Everyday Life situates itself at

a moment in which intellectuals descended from the heights of theoretical

abstraction to become active participants with the people: “To talk about

alienation was no longer possible, no longer permissible.”

The book was a

call to action. Rather than focusing on the family as had Chombart, Lefe-

bvre saw everyday life as the heart of social practice in the modern world.

Precisely because it was insigniﬁcant, uneventful, and overlooked, Lefebvre

argued that the everyday was the site where essential human desires, powers,

and potentialities were formulated, developed, and ultimately realized. It is

in the space of the everyday that we confront the social world and a common

178 | chapter four

culture. It is a ﬂuid present, a perpetual becoming that gives the quotidian

its radical character.

For Lefebvre, Marxism was ultimately a critical knowledge of the everyday.

From this point of view, the esprit of the working-class neighborhood was built

around the thousand and one manifestations of worker social behavior and

community. Even the worst slum districts sustained intense social practice,

created largely from the solidarity and mutual aid necessitated by privation.

Lefebvre called for a critique of these human needs, which Marxism had

insufﬁciently illuminated,

in much the same vein as Chombart. Under

modern capitalism, everyday existence has been undermined and devalued

by the enchanted theater of consumer capitalism. But Lefebvre was optimis-

tic that the empowerment and fulﬁllment of “total man” or “whole man”

was possible if one revived natural social formations such as the festival and

collective play. Everyday life, he postulated, was a theatrum mundi in which

human beings “play a role.” Acting extended reality and explored what was

possible.

It was up to the committed Marxist to look for such a transﬁgured

social existence in the seemingly trivial deeds and gestures of the everyday,

and more speciﬁcally in the theatrics and festival that intensify and magnify

everyday practices. It was there that a true art of living and a genuine hu-

manism could be found. In other words, everyday life is revolutionary. This

mise-en-scène in the spaces of the city, the collective celebration, playful-

ness and laughter, is transformative; it provides a glimpse of a fully realized

social world. The Critique combined the inﬂuences that lay at the heart of

Lefebvre’s humanism: a fear of loss, a note of nostalgic sentimentality for

community and the pastoral villages of Lefebvre’s youth in the Landes, and

his rural-folkoric studies of Campan during the war. The everyday is a blend

of poetic space and the metaphysical space of the Hegelian school Lefebvre

had explicitly chosen for his conception of Marxism. Ultimately, it is the

space of both individual and collective transformation.

Lefebvre would of course go on to expound much further on the rela-

tionship between the city, everyday life, and modernity. But the 1947 essay—

written in the postwar atmosphere of celebration, unbounded hopes, and the

militant pedestrianism spilling out into the streets—contained the core of

the many themes he returned to throughout his career. He shared with his

intellectual contemporaries an outlook derived from the experience of sur-

realism and political avant-gardism, the war and the Resistance, the study

of rurality and ethnographic folklore, and a deeply committed humanism.

spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 179

Superimposed over the everyday spaces and streets of the city, especially in

Paris, this perspective made the public arena the ultimate site of creativity and

the imagination. The inﬂuence of Critique of Everyday Life was imported into

the situationist movement by way of Constant Nieuwenhuys and the found-

ing of the 1948 Cobra, an avant-garde group. Their initial fascination, which

they shared with Lefebvre, was with an urban environment that could activate

new conditions and new situations. Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and Constant

met in Debord’s chambre de bonne on the rue Saint-Martin, drinking tequila

and talking late into the night about the commonalities in “moments” and

“situations,” about a new postwar architecture and urbanism. They would

be devices for radical thinking, for fracturing urban space, for a celebratory

urban theater of provocation. For both Lefebvre and the situationists, the

dérive (drift) revealed the growing fragmentation of the city. In his interview

with Kristin Ross, Lefebvre recounted his view of Paris as a once-powerful

organic unity that was fragmenting into a puzzle of places, each with its own

physiognomy.

It is the street that acts as the fundamental and original ele-

ment of modern urban life. It is the medium of meeting and exchange, of

real relations and practical everyday life. This actualizing disorderly space

is where a consciousness of life in movement, its reality and its unfulﬁlled

possibilities, can be attained. The trivial was magic.

Urban Planning and Humanist Discourse

Although far less well-known, the urban theorists working in Paris during and

after the war echoed this same intellectual vision of the decentered metropolis.

Beginning with Marcel Poëte and continuing with Auzelle, Gaston Bardet,

and Pierre Lavedan, the work of the urbanists forms the basis of the following

discussion. Among the most prominent thinkers about the urban experience,

they constructed the language and texture of a distinctively French humanist

perspective on the city and were instrumental in articulating a vernacular

spatial topography in Paris. And the challenges seemed overwhelming. The

capital was awash in intractable problems that went from the immediate needs

of reconstruction to the tragic housing crisis, the never-ending nightmare of

vast slum districts in the city, and the suburban anarchy engulﬁng the sur-

rounding region. The spatiality and built environment of the capital formed

among the most signiﬁcant public debates of the entire period from the 1930s

through the 1960s. Three different conferences on the future of Paris were

180 | chapter four

held in 1942 and 1943 alone. Its redevelopment was under intense scrutiny in

René Mestais’s 1943 plan for the “transformation of Paris,” André Thirion’s

1951 and then Bernard Lafay’s 1954 planning reports, and Jean Gravier’s

1947 Paris et le désert français (see chapter 7). The debate played itself out in

a mass of government documentation and propaganda among proponents on

one side or another. In the process, a generation of engineers and technicians

working for the city of Paris, the departments of the Seine and the Seine-et-

Oise, and the French state were trained in professional urban planning and

design techniques. They provided a remarkable coherency to the understand-

ing of French urbanisme at midcentury, from the 1930s through the 1950s

and beyond. But in 1945 architects and planners spun their dreamscapes in

a staggering atmosphere. The war acted as a purge, an opportunity to ﬁnally

realize the urban designs that had once been only fantasies. The impossible

could suddenly be accomplished.

Within the city of Paris itself, the most pressing issue was the severe

disrepair of the built environment that was behind both the housing crisis

and the vast slum districts. Everyone agreed that Paris needed renovation.

Exactly what kind was guided by a shared humanist point of focus. The

approach produced a kind of ameliorated haussmannisation that took into

account a far more nuanced sense of the richness of the capital’s urban life

and the authenticity of its neighborhood-village qualities. This concept was

developed by the ﬁrst generation of urban professionals working between

the two world wars, many of them in reaction to the damage done by the

Second Empire’s authoritarian vision of the City of Light. For Marcel Poëte,

professor at the Institut d’histoire, de géographie et d’économie urbaine

housed at the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris (where he taught

the ﬁrst courses on the history of Paris), the capital had developed accord-

ing to an organic logic that had to be respected: the beaux quartiers were in

the west, the working-class districts in the east, and the industrial suburbs in

the north; the Right Bank was the city’s business center, and the Left Bank

its intellectual center. The historic heart of Paris was on the Île-de-la-Cité,

its extremities, the railroad lines that stretched into France. It was a living

entity, a multicellular organism with an historic form that set the pattern

for the future. The functional mold of the core would simply spread out

to the periphery. The historian Evelyne Cohen, among others, points out

that Poëte’s vision of Paris was an application of the Bergsonian principle

of élan vital.

To rediscover the city’s urban heritage, the particularity of its

spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 181

neighborhoods, and its vernacular spaces and architecture was to rediscover

the essential qualities of Frenchness. As chief librarian at the Bibliothèque

historique, Poëte had purchased over three thousand of the photographer

Eugène Atget’s turn-of-the-century architectural and topographical views of

“Old Paris” as an inventory of the city’s vernacular landscape. Based on this

data, the study of the city’s sites, and sociological investigation, Paris could

be made modern without sacriﬁcing its distinctiveness.

It would be difﬁcult to overestimate the inﬂuence of Poëte on the develop-

ment of French urban theory and on the city of Paris. He was the equivalent

of Louis Mumford in the United States and Patrick Geddes in Britain. Poëte’s

vision stimulated lively discussion among the French intelligentsia about how

the history and memory of the city is invented and sustained and, from this,

how the city becomes a complex, living entity. Poëte’s perspective on urban

history was continued by his students at the École des hautes études urbaines

(which he founded with Henri Sellier in 1919), most of whom went on to play

key roles in the formulation of what the French called art urbain and the devel-

opment of Paris. Among them were the historian and urbanist Pierre Lavedan

and Gaston Bardet. Lavedan’s publications on urban planning—beginning

in 1926 with Qu’est-ce que l’urbanisme?, his imposing Histoire de l’urbanisme

(the ﬁrst volume published in 1941), and the 1952 La ville contemporaine—

became the standard texts for a growing cadre of professional urbanists. His

introduction to Qu’est-ce que l’urbanisme? evoked Poëte’s conception of the

city as a complex “living organism” and referred to Mauss’s understanding

of social morphology as enveloping “everything that serves the functioning of

collective life.” This same concept, according to Lavedan, could be used as the

basis of urban planning.

The work of Raymond Unwin in England on gar-

den cities and Unwin’s notion of the variations and individuality of city form

were also essential to Lavedan’s intellectual repertoire. His interpretations

of the city’s planning heritage would have particular signiﬁcance during the

1950s. As editor of La Vie urbaine (founded by Marcel Poëte in 1919), direc-

tor of the Institut d’urbanisme de l’Université de Paris from 1942 until 1964,

professor of architectural history at the École des beaux-arts, and member

of the Commission du vieux Paris, Lavedan wielded enormous inﬂuence in

planning circles and played an increasing role in the decisions made by both

the municipality and the state about the future of the capital. He disapproved

of Haussmann’s work as excessively concerned with aesthetics and power,

as “political, we can even say policier” (italics added).

Lavedan opposed Le

182 | chapter four

Corbusier’s utopian conceptions as well. The genius of French rationalism,

of which he remained an ardent enthusiast, was in its suppleness. Like his

contemporaries, Lavedan believed that geography determined urban place,

and his points of reference were rooted in spatial topography and the natural

elements of site. A city’s evolution could be translated through its physical

form and the durability of its plan and street layout. He argued that planning

should be based on scientiﬁc diagnostics and thorough knowledge of a city’s

history. Along with Chevalier and Chombart, Lavedan shared the belief that

these strategies would illuminate the particularities of place and social mor-

phology that had evolved in the ancient villages of the capital. In a narrative

imagery matching that of Chevalier, he concluded that “the inhabitant of

Montmartre is something other than a citizen of the 18th arrondissement,

while the man of Batignolles, of Belleville, or of Auteuil is no less attached

to his quartier though it may not have any noble artistic titles.”

Lavedan’s contemporary Bardet was among the most well-known urban-

ists writing at midcentury. Because of his Catholic spiritualism and close as-

sociation with Vichy, his career in France faltered by the early 1950s. Much

like Chombart’s, Bardet’s work was progressively discredited and ignored

by the modernist wave sweeping the trente glorieuses. However, Jean-Louis

Cohen has described Bardet as a major ﬁgure in twentieth century French

urbanism. His work has recently been rediscovered as an essential inﬂuence

on the pattern of French urban thought. Following in the footsteps of Poëte

(both his mentor and father-in-law), Bardet accumulated a vast knowledge

of urban history and art urbain and was one of the French theorists best

schooled in contemporary Anglo-Saxon and German approaches to urban

planning. Mumford’s The Culture of Cities and Geddes’ Civic Survey had a

profound impact on his intellectual development.

Teaching at the Institut

d’urbanisme de l’Université de Paris, Bardet’s purpose was to formulate a

“New Urbanism” through meticulous research on the social topography of

Paris. Pedagogically, his approach led to the creation of the Atelier supérieur

d’urbanisme appliqué (applied urban planning studio), in which students such

as Auzelle and Jean de Maisonseul began the design analysis of the Marais

that proved crucial to that district’s ultimate renovation (see chapter 7). The

workshop also participated in projects with Lebret’s Économie et Humanisme

movement, which advocated the practical study of urban conditions in order

to determine the needs of the population and implement more humanistic

forms of development.

spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 183

Bardet approached the city from the Bergsonian perspective of élan vital

or as an organic entity in continuous evolution. The purpose of urban life

was not to facilitate trafﬁc or commerce, but to multiply the possibilities for

individual self-realization and association between people. His masterwork,

written in 1943–44 and published as Le Nouvel urbanisme in 1948, created a

spatial hierarchy of the capital’s life, from the metropolitan scale of 500,000

to 1,500,000 families down to the “patriarchal” scale of 50 to 150 families.

The urban landscape was broken up into discrete microzones. Given the

intensity and alienation of the modern metropolis, the level of neighbor-

hood or quartier offered the best chance for the ﬂowering of communal

sociability and civic life. It balanced the relationship between the individual

and the community. Although theorists of the garden city, such as Ebenezer

Howard in England and Clarence Perry of the Russell Sage Foundation in

the United States, had approached this understanding, Bardet argued that

their knowledge was largely theoretical. Instead, in the same vein as that of

the French sociologists, his research on Paris was applied and interactive. It

attempted to provide scrupulously detailed evidence of neighborhood space

as a living, feeling phenomenon that could be used by urban planners to

solve the problems of the modern city. Bardet deﬁned the parish or quartier

as about a thousand families grouped around their public space and public

institutions—school, church, markets, and shops. It contained all the ele-

ments necessary for collective life. The larger city around the neighborhood

offered sites of work and pleasure, but like Chombart, Bardet argued that

it was only at the village scale that a sane and happy social life could blos-

som.

By imagining the metropolis as a federation of neighborhood cells

and providing them with their collective needs, urban life would take on its

authentic “organic” and “spiritual” form.

Here again the inﬂuence of prewar social Catholicism was clear. Catho-

lic values attributed the utmost fulﬁllment of individuals to their life in the

community. Even if Catholic intellectuals did not wholeheartedly endorse

the politics of the Vichy Regime, they could ﬁnd sympathy for its ideal of

moral order and its accent on family and community. Conservative elements

within the church saw the German victory as punishment for the sins of the

selﬁsh, secular Third Republic. This consensual rhetoric on morality, social

order, and spiritual community meant that Catholic thinkers could be found

guilty of tacit support for Vichy’s National Revolution. The marginalization

of Bardet himself is clear evidence of this view. After the Liberation, Bardet

184 | chapter four

was shunned by the MRU and by the Institut d’urbanisme, and by 1947 he

had left France altogether. The core of his teachings continued, however,

to inspire his students, who began their professional work in Paris just after

the war. In fact, by the early postwar years this type of progressive Catholic

social reformism, including Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist movement,

built around the journal Esprit, had clearly swung into the camp of the Left.

It had become part of the mainstream and found willing listeners among the

technocrats ﬁlling the ranks of the state bureaucracy and the professional

cadre carrying out the reconstruction of France’s cities. Writing in Esprit in

August 1945, when the Liberation was about to offer utopian prospects to

the urbanists, Bardet argued that the real, authentic public life of the city

could be found at the level of the quartier, where the puzzle of houses and

ordinary small shops and the network of streets created a living entity with

its own unique character. The center of this physionomie sociale was the pub-

lic monument, which “creates the quartier” and provides it not only with

a spatial structure, but with a neighborhood spirit. The purpose of the new

urbanism was to create this kind of material and social form.

It could be

done by focusing on a complex, organic neighborhood fabric centered on

its public space rather than on rationalist zoning formulas.

Bardet’s conceptions were a clear indication of how far urbanists had come

from Haussmann’s grand-scale monumentalizing of the capital. A patchwork

of imagined spaces—quartier, îlot, cité satellite—replaced the brutal topog-

raphy of Haussmann’s boulevards. They became the essential elements in

imagining urban transformation, operational categories for sociological study

and urban planning. Chombart argued that the îlot was the only geographi-

cal category in which the multiple elements of social life could be precisely

studied and mapped.

It was a compact space nearly invisible to the city

around it, and its public life was oriented around an internal maze of streets,

courtyards, and public space. This was not a voyage into nostalgic preserva-

tionism. In fact, the “regressive, narrow-minded” cultural vision of the prewar

years that had given the preservationists such power over the Paris munici-

pal council was renounced. The policy of privileging the capital’s “beauty”

and its “picturesque” historic central districts while ignoring the spreading

cancer of the slums was judged an ill-fated blunder. Even the Ligue urbaine

et rurale, one of the city’s most powerful lobbying groups, begun by Raoul

Dautry and Jean Giraudoux in 1926, refused to “defend the past in such a

jealous, egotistical, and sterile manner.” Writing on behalf of the organiza-

spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 185

tion in 1945, the architect Marcel Raval deﬁned a “new French humanism”

to be accomplished by creating modernized neighborhood places that took

into account the rich temporality and spatiality that made Paris so distinct

and enviable as a city: “Only the winds of renovation can transﬁgure these

sites, houses, hotels, châteaux that are too often nothing more than struc-

tures without souls, sordid and transparent shells.”

The mental mapping

by residents was accomplished through a familiarity and informal sociability

born of everyday life. The rhythms, activities, and exchanges within the îlot’s

public space were essentially an extension of the self. Multiplied across the

neighborhood, they created a collective reading of space that was subjective,

intuitive, and humanistic.

This humanist discourse around the îlot was carried through from the

1930s to the mid-1950s by architects such as Auzelle, Michel Roux-Spitz, and

Georges Sébille. Auzelle was perhaps the quintessential model of a deeply

humanistic architect-urbanist. He not only carried on scholarship at the Insti-

tut d’urbanisme, but also dedicated himself to an applied urbanism that was

a “conscious organization of space”—a view reﬂected in the title of his 1962

Plaidoyer pour une organisation consciente de l’espace. A student before the war

of both Poëte and Bardet, Auzelle pleaded for a reconsideration of planning

that took into account the particularities of place and its everyday uses. That

did not mean he opposed the modernism of CIAM’s Athens Charter. Auzelle

admired both Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier for their courage in rebelling

against aesthetic custom and offering new theoretical structures. However,

he deplored the bitter, oversimpliﬁed dispute between the proponents of

modernist formalism and the preservationists of the traditional vernacular

cityscape. And he hated what the automobile had done to the street.

Using the language of progressive Catholic circles, both Auzelle and

Sébille sought a third way: the transformation of historical, sociological,

and geographic insights into modern planning techniques. The way for-

ward was to follow the lead of Poëte and Bardet. In the late 1930s and early

1940s, Auzelle and Sébille proposed the îlot as the groundwork for the new

concept of rénovation. In his contribution to the inﬂuential 1943 urban tes-

timonial Destinée de Paris, Auzelle began with the statement that “Paris is

in part built on a fragmented culture.” He argued that it was the “built îlot

that currently predominated in Paris.”

Quoting Sébille, he deﬁned it as “a

complex element, the intermediary between the house and the city.” It was

delimited by public streets. Neighborhood public life was organized around