Wakeman Rosemary. The Heroic City: Paris, 1945-1958
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196 | chapter four
the snapshots that reveal the disjointed patches or “unities” of atmosphere
the situationists were searching for.
The situationist mapping of their detective-style drifts through The Na-
ked City was taken from the diagrams rendered by the CNRS researcher
Louis Couvreur for Chombart’s Paris et l’agglomération parisienne. Debord
was dependent on the social geography of Chombart and on the humanist
townscaping prevalent among urbanists. For Chombart and the situation-
ists alike, the quartier is the basic unit of urban structure. It possesses a
distinct character and is the site of social life. Writing on their drift through
Les Halles, for example, fellow-traveler Abdelhafid Khatib mapped out the
area in emulation of Chombart’s spatial-sociological techniques.
57
The nu-
ances of space and atmosphere—or the ambiance, as Khatib put it—must be
discovered by the observer in the social practices, the behaviors and speech,
and the social rites of the community. The evolving situationist conception
was of a transfigured urban space with the maximum degree of communal-
ity and interchange, free dialog and play. Human interaction was conceived
as space filling. In the October 1955 issue of Potlatch, the lettrists presented
this solution to the problem of urbanism in Paris: the city’s squares, rooftops,
Métro, renovated footbridges, and passageways should all be opened at night
as new spaces for play and social participation.
58
These would be the mecha-
nisms for a breakthrough into self-actualization and authentic existence.
The aesthetics that represented these “unities of atmosphere,” or îlots, in
the urbanist vocabulary, were the eclectic blend of historic, pedestrian, and
expressive structures that had grown up over time. Much of this language
and discourse was intrinsic to the universe of French sociology and urban-
ism. Chevalier, Chombart, Bardet, and Auzelle all shared this narrative and
visual imagery. Public space was filled with an abundance of temporalities
and visual expressions. It was organic, perpetually changing, brimming with
possibilities and situations, and revolutionary in content.
This approach to Paris was shared by Malet, whose urban narration and
character depictions are deeply humanist. Nestor Burma is a breed of sleuth
who relies on his intuitive awareness of the human condition and his populist
links. Malet humanizes faceless city dwellers and restores the experience of
place. In the 13th arrondissement, the Lettrist International championed
the preservation of derelict streets such as the rue Sauvage behind the gare
d’Austerlitz as an example of authentic, quotidian Paris untouched by the
mesmerizing spectacle of the modern city. It was located in the dingy slum
figure 21. The rue du Château-des-Rentiers, October 28, 1961. © coll. pavillon de
l’arsenal, clich duvp
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of La Gare with the remains of its cité Jeanne d’Arc—otherwise known as
îlot insalubre 4. In drifts through the district, the lettrist René Crevel renamed
the miserable rue du Château-des-Rentiers the rue du Taudis-des-Chomeurs
(the slum of unemployed) in an unearthing of the “what took place there.”
His fellow drifter Ralph Rumney remembered sleeping at a shelter “in the
neighborhood of Léo Malet’s youth.”
59
It would have been easy for them to
bump into Chombart’s young research team poring over the area, collecting
data for their sociological study.
Burma, as Malet’s alter ego, wanders through La Gare in what is con-
sidered one of the best novels of the series, the 1956 Brouillard au Pont de
Tolbiac.
60
The action takes place in an interminable, penetrating fog “that
took possession of the neighborhood” and signified the cast-out, forlorn
atmosphere of the locale. The irony of its despair and poverty is caught
in the street names that Burma recites, and then inverts: “The 13th ar-
rondissement is full of streets with charming, picturesque names, generally
deceiving. The rue des Cinq Diamants, there are no diamonds; the rue du
Château-des-Rentiers, there is mainly the Nicolas Flamel shelter; the rue
des Terres au Curé, where I’ve seen no priest.” In this linguistic détourne-
ment, Malet fractures the mystique and decomposes the space. He is there
to investigate the death of his old anarchist friend Albert Lenantais, who,
having barely survived a German concentration camp, had descended into
the morass of ragpicking on the passage des Hautes Formes on the edge
of La Gare’s cité Jeanne d’Arc. It is a pitiful alleyway; the neighborhood is
grimy and cheerless. “Too much misery, crap, misfortune,” Burma sadly
remarks. But he falls for the exotic gypsy Bélita Moralés, a poor flower seller
who lives on the passage by her wits and any other means. When he loses
her, he searches the streets: “It’s been said that we walk the streets in search
of something, a piece of bread, a shelter, a little love.” He merges into the
neighborhood and dives into a local café to escape the cold and fog and to
find solace: “The typical noise at the bar: the brouhaha of conversation, the
clink of glasses and the racket of the pinball machine manhandled by a guy
who has no intention of losing and throws himself into it despite the ring-
ing tilt bells. A jukebox begins to play and the voice of Georges Brassens
singing ‘Gare au gorille’ suddenly overpowers the uproar.” It is miserable
and poor, but Burma has found the quartier’s sociability, its passion. He
discovers the soul and the sometimes cruel, sometimes kind urban condi-
tion. It is a poetic noir story that echoes the melancholy and heartbreak of
spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 199
Carné’s Les Portes de la nuit. It is also a search for authentic urban life in
the forgotten places of Paris; the expressive, fragmented spatial topography
whose ordinariness was the antonym of the capital’s glamour and spectacle.
In the last scene Burma finds Bélita on the pont de Tolbiac, only to have
her die in this arms—killed by the murderer he has been searching for. “If
you want to avenge something,” Burma says to the police inspector, “you
should avenge this gypsy, a girl forgotten by everyone.”
Much like Malet, the flâneur Calet was mesmerized by what he imagined
as the city’s populist, poetic landscape. Calet dominated the urban litera-
ture on Paris during the 1950s. His career spanned a variety of media, from
newspapers to novels, radio, and television. He grew up in a Paris of misery
and narrowly escaped being imprisoned for theft. Calet was an outsider,
a nonconformist. But mostly he was an itinerant urban traveler, someone
who lived “a walking life” exploring the streets of the city and discovering
its ordinary people. After the war and months in German captivity, Calet
returned to Paris, where he wrote most frequently for Combat and worked
on a book he conceived on the twenty arrondissements of Paris. It was
published by Gallimard in 1948 as Le Tout sur le tout to immediate acclaim,
followed in 1951 by Les Grandes largeurs. Calet’s writing about the city is
passionate and autobiographical. With the war behind him, he wanders a
landscape of melancholy and tenderness, of sentimentality and love, and of
memory.
I know this city in depth; I take her apart stone by stone and rebuild her
somewhere else. That’s what I do when I’m away from her.
Paris twelve months of the year, Paris changing, Paris during the
four seasons, Paris in miniature, Paris every day, Paris in a bird’s flight,
Paris in a windowpane, Paris in the morning, Paris in the evening, Paris in
the moon, Paris in song, Paris in a rainbow, Paris in a hundred thousand
pipes, Paris frosted blue, Paris rosy, Paris translucent, Paris sweating,
Paris in snow, Paris in a bride’s veil, Paris in the evening toilette, Paris
adorned with its stars, Paris in everyday dress, Paris wrapped in scarves
of mist, Paris poor, abandoned, uninhabitable, bombarded, Paris rich,
Paris shirttails in the wind—
I am suited to this city, it’s perfect, it’s my size. I see it in all manners.
It’s an intimacy devoid of secrets. Paris in its nightgown, Paris naked. . . .
It is life and death between us (life for her, death for me).
61
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His language play is a form of eroticism. His words evoke the color of voices,
the textures of out-of-the-way places, the fluidity and rhythm of the city. The
language he uses is commonplace and populist in tone—spoken prose. Rather
than just banal, this speech is emotional and central to writing as a flâneur,
digressing, wandering here and there, rapidly creating scenes and vignettes.
Calet watched for the gesture, the local slang, the insult or shout that leveled
with life and revealed the truth. It provoked the deepest inherited recollec-
tions and familiarity of the peuple. Going back to his old neighborhood in the
14th arrondissement, on the rue Marthe—which had been rechristened the
rue Georges-Pitard, after a victim of Nazi atrocities—Calet runs into his old
coal deliveryman on the street. They immediately recognize each other and
begin chatting about their lives in the space of the commons. It is the stuff
of spontaneous sociability and bonhomie.
Like Malet and Debord, Calet is an archaeologist of spatial meaning,
digging though the layers of perception and revealing the multiplicity of
perspectives to embellish a sense of place. The writing stays on ground level
and embraces the daily drama of the capital. Calet loses himself in his dérives
through the city, digressing and splintering his stories as he comes upon
chance encounters and finds the diminutive, unseen urban world. Michel
Schmitt argues that Calet’s notes for the 7th arrondissement (which would
eventually find their way into many of his books) are written in the form of a
fragmented psychogeography or speech act, in the vein of situationism. Each
page is a constructed situation that blends space, time, and observation.
62
In
the early 1950s Calet used a variety of media to illuminate his own psycho-
geography of the everyday. A 1952 weekly radio show produced by him and
directed by Jean Kerchbron, Huit quartiers de roture, illuminated life in the
common working-class neighborhoods of La Villette, Amérique, Combat,
pont de Flandre, Saint-Fargeau, Belleville, Père Lachaise, and Charonne.
The same year the two produced a television film entitled Quelques quartiers
de Paris that explored Bercy, Grenelle, and La Villette. They were one among
many visual lenses turned upon the city.
In May and June 1953 Calet published a special investigative report in
Le Parisien libéré on the people of modest circumstances in Paris and its
suburbs. The set of articles was published in 1954 by Gallimard as Les Deux
bouts. Calet’s approach was nearly ethnoanthropological. The daily life and
personal habits of his interviewees and their construction of a Paris utilitaire
are described in the analytical pointillism of social research. In one vignette
spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 201
Calet follows Paul Roy, who lives with his wife, Geneviève, on the rue d’Assas
in the 6th arrondissement and works at the Halle aux Vins along the Seine
at Jussieu in the 5th arrondissement. The daily itinerary and activities of this
archetypal Parisian worker are captured in exquisite detail, revealing his life as
genuine, if not heroic, and indisputably linked to the urban landscape. Each
morning at 7:50 a.m., he bikes up the avenue de l’Observatoire, the boulevard
Saint-Michel, and the rue des Écoles to the Halle aux Vins. At 10:00 he starts
his job filling bottles with wine, apéritifs, and digéstifs. At noon, he lunches at
the museum in the Jardin des Plantes with a clientele that is half wine-market
employees and half students, and then takes a promenade around the gardens
or along the quays of the Seine.
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The mundane, taken-for-granted routine
is made into poetic narrative. Calet planned to plunge even further into the
everyday spaces in a report for Le Parisien in which he would explore the city
“arrondissement by arrondissement.” Much as was the case with Chombart,
each of his creative media allowed him to discover the city’s spatial imaginary.
He is both an investigative reporter and novelist, inventing a “fiction of the
everyday” that stitches together the little stories, the fabric, of spatial history
and the setting of time and place.
64
He illuminates the lives of “all those who
form this mass we find at the Métro entrances, on the stairs of the railroad
stations, in the markets and sports fields, in the squares, at the entrance to
factories, on the bus platforms, on the suburban trains.”
65
Not all these intellectuals and urban observers shared the same perspec-
tive or strategies. The architectural historian Simon Sadler has pointed out
that the situationists actually had little real sympathy for the underprivileged
residents of the rue Sauvage or along the canals of Aubervilliers that they used
as revolutionary sites of future power. The lettrist wanderings through the
streets in a drunken stupor did not make for empathy. And they certainly did
not share in the sentimentality of poetic realism. Yet a humanistic “fiction of
the everyday” was invented as a foundational imaginary among a wide variety
of les intellos and the avant-garde. They were the inventors of a fractured urban
landscape, of the slums and forgotten corners of the city. In their passionate
wanderings, their attempt to demystify modern urban spectacle by looking
in the cracks and crevices for signs of authentic life, in their valorization of
the everyday populist world, the situationists shared with sociologists, urban
planners, and urban observers a subjective, humanist perspective specific to
the 1950s. It was vernacular and political. The drift is the street reclaimed.
The practice of space is active sociological and psychological observation,
202 | chapter four
where the essential nature of urban existence can be rediscovered. In this
Rousseauian universe, the ordinary people of Paris are good. They have rea-
son and emotion, and they are moral. The peuple are a living force and the
ordinary spaces they inhabit are the source of radical change. Paris is made
heroic in the invented discourse of social humanism.
Ironically, intellectuals discovered the quotidian world of these forgot-
ten districts just as they were about to disappear. By the mid-1950s urban
space seemed to be increasingly in flux and was undergoing seismic shifts.
Demolition rained down on La Gare in the massive slum clearance projects
that transformed the 13th arrondissement. Interiorized small-scale neighbor-
hoods and îlots would no longer be tolerated. The rue Sauvage disappeared
altogether. Léo Malet’s rue du Château-des-Rentiers and the rest of the
sordid cité Jeanne d’Arc were destroyed. The crumbling Ivry gas works was
cleared away. The old courtyards and alleyways and the decrepit housing were
replaced with a cité moderne in the sardonically named Château-des-Rentiers
and Deux-Moulins redevelopment projects. New schools, playgrounds, su-
permarkets, and commercial centers, and a modern police station, graced
figure 22. The rue du Château-des-Rentiers and the “Deux Moulins” redevelopment proj-
ect, June 12, 1969. © coll. pavillon de l’arsenal, clich duvp
spatial imagination and the avant-garde | 203
the district. Modern high-rise residential towers designed by the architects
Marc Leboucher and Albert Magot appeared on the boulevard Masséna, at
Les Olympiades, and on the rue Nationale. Public space was transmuted into
“open space” and pleasant landscaping in the interior of residential complex-
es. The transformation of the quartier was recorded by Chombart’s student
Henri Coing, who carried out his well-known sociological investigation of
La Gare or îlot insalubre 4 in the early 1960s.
66
The makeover of La Gare and
the rue Nationale were then recounted in Norma Evenson’s Paris: A Century
of Change (1979) to become the archetypal case study of the city’s destruc-
tion at the hands of modern urban planning.
67
The particularist, decentered
world that Chombart, Bardet, Debord, Malet, and Calet had each discovered
was ravaged, its geography merged into a monumental, unified vision of the
modern city in the “reconquest of Paris.” But from the reconstruction years
through the 1950s these spaces were imagined as decidedly vernacular and
working class. The militant and potentially threatening proletariat was ini-
tially absorbed into the French national fold not as members of a modern
middle class or broad middle stratum, but as authentic representatives of
the peuple living in the time-honored puzzle of villages and everyday spaces
that made up the capital. The seamless new structures of modern identity
and the social homogenization around privatized values did not take place
as rapidly or as effortlessly as is often described. In the middle years of the
century, the spaces of the city remained fractured, deeply humanistic, and
subversive in the intellectual imagination.
204
Paris as cinematic space
5 There are many reasons the cinematic presentation of Paris is
so important to the analysis of public space. First, the years after the Second
World War are considered part of the golden age of French cinema. The indus-
try produced an abundance of both high-quality and popular Saturday-night
films. The French flocked to the “seventh art” as one of the most important
forms of entertainment and information. Some 2.5 million Parisians went to
the movies each year. According to a 1953 survey, on average they saw three
films each month.
1
Paris had almost four hundred first-run, second-run, art,
and experimental movie houses spread throughout the city, and this num-
ber remained more or less stable over the decade. Beyond the great movie
palaces on the Champs-Élysées and along the boulevard des Capucines and
boulevard des Italiens, going to the movies was also a populist amusement.
In a cartography that reiterated urban decentering, the exterior boulevards
from the place Clichy to the Barbès Métro station—that is, the streets in
the northern and eastern working-class districts—were packed with movie
theaters: thirty-one in the 18th arrondissement, eighteen in the 19th, and
twenty-six in the 20th.
2
The depictions of Paris in the visual arts and photography were already
voluminous by the early twentieth century. Because its reputation as the
bustling city of enchantment was so well established, it became a virtual
geography on the silver screen almost immediately. Some fifty film titles
alone referred to Paris and its pleasures, especially those of the night: Paris
est toujours Paris, Paris canaille, Paris music-hall, Paris palace hôtel, Adieu Paris,
C’est arrivé à Paris, C’est la vie parisienne, Mademoiselle de Paris, Rires de Paris,
paris as cinematic space | 205
Plaisirs de Paris, Femmes de Paris, Boum sur Paris, Moineaux de Paris, Gamins
de Paris, Rencontre à Paris, Soirs de Paris, Nuits de Paris, Paris coquin, Quatre
jours à Paris, Paris chante toujours.
3
Film spectators were placed squarely in
a Paris that was visible and effortlessly knowable. The diversion these fan-
tasies provided from the grim reality of daily life explains their popularity,
and French film companies were only too happy to produce them. Yet at the
same time, the seventh art lurched into what were invisible, enigmatic places
in the metropolis and provided a visual legibility to the poetic humanism
and populism of the age. These were urban mysteries, crime and gangster
films, from classics such as Quai des Orfèvres, La Traversée de Paris, Paris nous
appartient, Casque d’Or, and Le Silence est d’Or to Jacques Becker’s adapta-
tion of Albert Simonin’s novel Touchez pas au Grisbi, the suspense thriller Du
Rififi chez les hommes, Voici le temps des assassins, and Bob le flambeur. The list
is endless. Paris was depicted and delivered from the screen to the audience
over and over again. The visions invented were a crucial factor in the way
people conceptualized the city’s spatiality. There were a multitude of poetic
realist films that portrayed the social landscape such as Sous le ciel de Paris,
Antoine et Antoinette, Le Café du cadran, L’Air de Paris, and Lettre ouverte.
They juxtaposed human crises and emotions with social interaction and
bridged the gap between everyday life and the built environment—all from
a centripetal point of view. This visual narrative was a means of generating
new spatial knowledge and was essential to how urban life was imagined and
how urban territory was negotiated. Movies are an integral constituent of the
urban environment.
4
By the mid-twentieth century a vast accumulation of
bodies, gestures, urban surfaces, and types of movement were being filmed
across the capital. Film cameras caught a kaleidoscope of crowds and pro-
cessions; cars, buses, and trucks rushing by on the boulevards; monumental
architecture; and pleasure spots. It recorded speed, noise, and the fluidity of
the city, cutting back and forth across space and time.
The new medium of television, which was just being introduced in France
in the late 1940s and 1950s, reiterated and deepened this cinematic vision.
The Allied forces took control of the television transmitter on the Eiffel Tower
during the Liberation in August 1944. It was handed over to government-
controlled Radiodiffusion nationale in October 1945, which then worked to
inaugurate programming over the next few years to become Radiodiffusion
télévision française in 1947. Over the course of the 1950s, a second transmitter
on the Eiffel Tower (one of which was eventually destroyed in a January 1955