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

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236 | chapter five

Sweet children of Aubervilliers

Sweet children of the proletariat

Sweet children of misery

Sweet children the world over

Sweet children of Aubervilliers

Aubervilliers was just one of four Prévert ﬁlms playing in theaters in 1946,

among them Les Enfants du paradis. Montero regularly gave Prévert song re-

citals in Paris at the war’s end, often accompanied by Kosma on the piano.

In other words, Aubervilliers came in on the coattails of Prévert’s extraordi-

nary popular success. Commissioned by the communist minister of aviation,

Charles Tillon, who was also mayor of the industrial town of Aubervilliers,

the ﬁlm’s political purpose was to wholly disgrace the town’s previous mayor,

Pierre Laval, who had been condemned to death and executed by ﬁring

squad in October 1945. One of the most hated collaborators in France, he

was blamed for the appalling conditions in Paris’s proletarian suburbs. The

ﬁlm’s premiere, which took place in a local movie house in Aubervilliers in

March 1946, was presided over by Tillon himself. We are visually introduced

to the squalor along the northern margins of the City of Light. Children

dive into a heavily polluted canal. Dead animals and garbage ﬂoat by while

factories spew their toxic waste into the watercourse. We meet a Portuguese

laborer named Joseph, a living embodiment of Juju, who hangs his bread

from the ceiling of his crumbling shed to protect it from rats. Pathetic old

couples live in squalid lean-tos amid the war’s debris. The portraits sink to

the bottom of heartbreak. The shots and lighting focus on their cheerless,

worn faces. An interview with an old woman living in degradation reveals she

was once the recipient of the “French Family Medal” and had won ﬁrst prize

in a baby competition—both honors signed by the president of France, she

wistfully recounts. As a young man, her “baby” had been lost in the war and

her family home bombed, leaving her only its ruins for shelter. A respectable

working-class family with six children lives in penury in the bombed out re-

mains of a decrepit building. Their brood will become the cigarette-smoking

adolescents captured going bad, setting ﬁres along the banks of the Seine.

The ﬁlm is proof positive of Prévert’s poetic humanist vision. Part politi-

cal propaganda, part a classic Dickensian portrait of squalor and suffering,

the visual spectacle magniﬁed his sense of tragedy and fatalism. Audiences

reacted with tears and applause to Aubervilliers, so much so that it was only

paris as cinematic space | 237

shown during the week so as not to offend sensibilities during the weekend

fare of light cinematic entertainment.

Film as an analytic tool of urban discourse, in this case about disabused,

threatening spatial residues, is also clear from Jean Dewever’s La Crise du

logement (1956),

which received the Prix Lumière in the year it opened. It

offers a very different visual reading of the capital from Lotar and Prévert’s

Aubervilliers. In a swipe at Lotar’s ﬁlm, Dewever argued that he refused to

“aestheticize” misery and instead insisted on an exacting, documented por-

trayal of misery. The camera takes viewers through the worst badlands of the

1st and 4th arrondissements in the center of Paris. The ﬁlm was actually shot

in 1953, when the degradation was palpable. Tumble-down condemned build-

ings still in use line the rue de Louvre and the rue de la Grande-Truanderie.

A family of four lives in a twenty-square-foot room in a pathetic boarding-

house. Disgusting alleyways ﬁlled with trash and rats depict a dystopian city

of dread and decay. Despite his emphasis on objective documentation, Dew-

ever played on emotions by panning the dingy streets’ new commemorative

plaques honoring the death of a neighborhood résistant in the Liberation of

Paris and the republic’s motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The conditions along

the margins of the city, in the bidonville of Noisy-le-Grand, where some of the

scenes were shot in the face of local hostility, are even worse. The outskirts

are chilling, lethal, made up of makeshift shacks and wagons, with lines of

corrugated metal shelters along mud alleyways. The purpose of Dewever’s

twenty-ﬁve-minute elaboration of spatial dystopia was to mobilize public

opinion about the dreadful housing crisis that gripped everyday life in the

capital’s îlots insalubres and urban edges (although RTF deemed it too of-

fensive and refused to show it on television). They are spatial gaps, temporal

voids—hidden, sordid scraps that defame the landscape. Ofﬁcial statistics

on their deﬁciencies blaze across the screen: the absence of electricity, water,

gas, plumbing. Repeating the traditional discourse inherited from the urban

hygienics movement, the squalor causes psychological problems, disease, tu-

berculosis, alcoholism, divorce, and revolt. People walk the dreary streets like

automatons. Rather than tragic, as in the poetic humanist imaginary, these

images are repulsive. Paris is an antisocial, immoral city where abnormality

and alienation reign. Dewever’s ﬁlm presents the solution to this terrifying

problem as annihilation, wiping these districts off the map. The city would

be made normal through modernist redevelopment schemes and a rational

plan of aménagement du territoire. Although admitting its importance, critics

238 | chapter five

panned the ﬁlm’s conventional revelations, which by 1956 had already been

exposed by Abbé Pierre’s campaign.

But La Crise du logement was just one

in a parade of documentary ﬁlms that visually laid out the French govern-

ment’s stance with respect to Paris’s intractable slums. Roger Leenhardt and

Sydney Jezequiel produced Paris et le désert français in 1956, and Dewever

ﬁlmed a second documentary entitled Des logis et des hommes in 1958.

The minister of construction and urbanism himself, Pierre Sudreau,

jumped into the fray with an ORTF television series broadcast in November

and December 1958 and entitled Problèmes de la construction (see also chapter

7). Each episode was dedicated to a speciﬁc aspect of housing and urban

planning. The broadcasts expanded on ofﬁcial discourse and on Dewever’s

imagery and indeed used some of the footage from his ﬁlms. In the Novem-

ber 6 “Interview with Monsieur Pierre Sudreau,” the slums are portrayed as

catastrophic,

shapeless pockets of chaos and disorder. The shots of Glacière

in the 13th arrondissement broadcast to television viewers show hundred-

year-old buildings, “without water or sanitation, without social services or

schools, without gardens or social equipment,” being summarily demolished.

The violence of the act is blatant. Of the thirteen hundred people living in

Glacière, one thousand were being evacuated. There is no social sympathy in

these presentations for what has been lost. Although the rue du Moulin de

la Pointe captured in Chombart’s television documentary is not far away, in

these later broadcasts there is no poignant humanism, no encounter with fate

to be found along the mean streets. At Ménilmontant, viewers see “some of

the worst conditions in Paris” and then watch as ancient buildings are burned

down under the watchful eyes of ﬁreﬁghters. Any possibility of renovation

or step-by-step evolution toward basic comforts was viewed with complete

pessimism and pushed aside by arguments for modern standards of living.

The government stood by a scorched-earth policy to completely raze the

malevolent, ﬁlthy blight that had infected Paris for too long. In its place, the

ﬁlm displays a utopian world of modern housing estates that will welcome

the erstwhile inhabitants of the city’s shattered slums. The new quartiers will

have work, services, commerce, a market three times a week, schools, and

youth and cultural centers.

All these ﬁlms—whether television documentaries, theatrical short ﬁlms,

or full-length commercial entertainment—were haunting visual dramas.

Together they demonstrate ﬁlm’s deep engagement with urban space and

its fundamental and very speciﬁc role in the discourse about the city. The

paris as cinematic space | 239

medium produced a series of visual codes and ﬁctional spatial forms that

stood for populist, working-class Paris. A decomposed spatiality, the ruins and

festering places hidden away from the spectacle of modern urbanity, saturate

the screen. Clair and Lotar both used the camera’s lens to construct these

marginalized wastelands along the edges of the capital as a moral, human-

istic landscape. Dewever and Sudreau visually denounced slum districts as

open drains of malefaction, disease, and social anarchy. In stark contrast to

either of these imaginaries, Jacques Tati’s classic ﬁlm Mon oncle also reached

movie houses in 1958.

The ﬁlm was released during the collapse of the

Fourth Republic in mid-May, and by then French ﬁlmmaking was march-

ing decidedly toward other genres, whether in comedy or the nouvelle vague.

Tati’s ﬁlms displayed a humor and exteriority in their presentation of space

and landscape that was far from the drama of poetic realism. First of all,

Mon oncle was Tati’s ﬁrst color ﬁlm. Secondly, his ﬁlms were less emotional

and without dramatic dialogue. Rather, they were a militant satire on the

transformation of the trente glorieuses, featuring explorations of its spatial

dynamics and a clownish resistance against modern urban utopia.

The dramatic upheavals in the urban landscape captured in Mon oncle

were ﬁlmed at three different locations between September 1956 and Febru-

ary 1957: buildings designed by the architect Henri Vicariot that were under

construction at Paris’s new airport at Orly, the HLM apartment blocks rising

up at Créteil at Pierre Sudreau’s behest, and La Victorine studios in Nice.

Tati despised Sudreau’s destruction of Paris. In a 1958 interview on the mak-

ing of Mon oncle, he pointed “to the intelligence of the German general who,

despite Hitler, saved Paris from destruction, and now we are in the process of

destroying it. . . . We are systematically knocking down everything that gives

it charm and personality.”

The ﬁlm’s scenario is built around the radical

contrasts between two different forms of urban life: modern suburbia and the

shabby old neighborhood of traditional existence. “What I am defending,”

Tati explained in a 1958 interview with L’Humanité, “is the petit quartier, the

tranquil corner against roads, highways, aerodromes, all the uniform organiza-

tion of the modern city.”

In Mon oncle the pittoresque petit quartier populaire

invented by humanist discourse is still visible. But the stage set that was built

into the place d’Armes of suburban Saint-Maur to depict the sympathique îlot

was no longer heroic. Rather, it was a sentimental myth about to disappear.

The pulverizing forces of modernization and urban renewal were well under

way. In place of the myth is the vast system of consumer objects, the sterile

240 | chapter five

homogenization and abstraction of modern architecture that become Tati’s

cinematic subjects. Paris would be liquidated altogether in Tati’s later ﬁlm

Playtime (1967), replaced by an entirely prefabricated world. Everything looks

like everything else. In the inverse of Dewever’s visual reading of space, it is

this modernist utopia that produces disorientation, alienation, and unfeeling

automatons dedicated to the capitalist machine.

Tati’s defense of particularity and place echoed the intellectual and avant-

garde visions of the city through the 1950s. It was a counternarrative to the

urbanistic eradication spearheaded by modernists such as Bernard Lafay

and Raymond Lopez, and ultimately to the plans of Pierre Sudreau. Tati’s

visual mapping of neighborhood geography and the ways in which his central

character, Monsieur Hulot, interacts with the two spatial worlds in Mon oncle

are close to the situationist deﬁnition of détournement, a sort of impish fun

or grown-up stunt. A number of ﬁlm critics have pointed to this association

between Tati’s ﬁlms and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and it is no

surprise that Debord himself was an admirer of Tati’s work.

Hulot (played

by Tati himself) is a comic everyman, just another nobody in the populist

tradition. He bumbles about in an ancient, ramshackle tenement building.

Motley packs of stray dogs, mischievous schoolboys, chattering neighbors,

and bicycles and carts weaving in and out among street vendors’ stands mark

the public domain that passes under Hulot’s attic window. It is spontaneous,

convivial, entirely irrational, and inefﬁcient. The distracted street sweeper

does everything but sweep. The chain of images is constructed as a set of

interruptions and coincidences. The local bistro, Chez Margot, is the center

of social life. Private lives spill out in full view in the squares and streets. Ev-

eryday life is ﬁlled with emotional, human potential. It is the visual depiction

of the îlot, the social unité imagined by the humanist intellectual tradition.

But despite Tati’s comic defense of this perceived world, and perhaps his

situationist proclivities, the vision had faded into a rose-colored nostalgia by

the late 1950s. Canaries sing, and the street is perpetually ﬁlled with music.

In reviewing the ﬁlm, La Vie ouvrière argued that the dilapidation and clum-

siness of the old neighborhood portrayed in Mon oncle was “an element of

decor, of folklore. It is never catastrophic. . . . In fact, the quartier is not as

nice as that. The old buildings won’t resolve the housing crisis. The moral

and physical health of young kids playing freely isn’t always what Tati thinks

it to be.”

The humanist imaginary had disintegrated.

241

The left Bank

In August 1946 the communist UJRF organized a “March

for the Future” dedicated to the young people of France. It mobilized some

200,000 Parisians in a long, cheerful caravan from the place de la République

to the Palais de Chaillot. They were led by a banner emblazoned with the

slogan “Struggle and Reconstruct for a Better Future” and escorted by a sea

of tricolor ﬂags, and the newspaper L’Humanité reported that the “magniﬁcent

spectacle was an image of strength and hope.” Miners, construction workers,

carpenters, midinettes, and métallos joined in the march with “thousands of

young” campers, athletes, skiers, basketball players, mountaineers, folklore

groups, and marching bands to celebrate the future. “Those who write that

the young are corrupt, those who ﬁnd their evidence in bars frequented by

degenerates,” the article goes on to admonish, “should come to look at these

genuine representatives of ‘young French elites.’”

Probably no subject re-

ceived more passionate attention during the reconstruction years than the

question of France’s young people. And probably no group was more visible

in the public spaces of Paris, especially on the Left Bank. The programs of

the Liberation and the early Fourth Republic promoted education and youth

organizations as essential to the work of national renewal. A Direction des

mouvements de jeunesse et d’éducation populaire was created at the Mi-

nistère de l’éducation nationale. Improving popular taste and appealing to

young people as the future of France were the impetus behind the creation

of such highly successful groups such as the Ciné-Clubs. The Paris municipal

council endlessly debated the need for more schools, sports facilities, parks,

and recreation centers for the city’s young people. The future seemed a battle

242 | chapter six

for the hearts and minds of the generation reaching adulthood during the

1950s and for their younger brothers and sisters of the baby boom, grow-

ing up behind them. The quandary over whether France was really ready

to accept these ﬁrst postwar adolescents was dramatically played out in the

public spaces of the city.

This chapter takes up the question of this young generation, their presence

in the public domain, and their inﬂuence on perceptions of urban spatiality.

It argues that the visibility of young people in Paris produced new spatial

and temporal forms associated with “youth” both by habitual use and by

metaphor. Youth was a psychological landscape. It was a style of avant-garde

public performance. The Left Bank enjoyed a prodigious heritage as the city’s

cultural and intellectual incubator, and it had always been the heart of bohe-

mian student life. It was divided into two distinct worlds: the Latin Quarter,

with its celebrated university institutions, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with

its celebrated café and nightlife. What is interesting about the Left Bank in

the late 1940s and 1950s, however, is that both Saint-Germain-des-Prés and

the Latin Quarter became renewed sites of resistance, a new frontier of cul-

tural production for a generational identity somewhere between childhood

and adulthood. This youthful category, its fashion and music, its politics, its

range of public practices, invented a topos or place that complicated and

overlapped older discourses about class. It was locally based, territorially

deﬁned. Like social class, youth formed a counterpublic and a counterspace

that challenged optimistic perceptions about reconstruction and the future

of France. Youth as a spatial itinerary was also imagined as disorder, as a

threat that heightened anxieties about urban decomposition and fed into

the political unrest of the time. The power and complexity of this cultural

concoction of “teenager,” “youth,” and “student” were extraordinary. These

identities were exercised in a multiplicity of ways in the spaces of the Left

Bank as avant-gardist and highly politicized public theater.

The Left Bank was already a site of furious ideological controversy dur-

ing the interwar years. In the political storms of the 1930s, rival left- and

right-wing factions distributed tracts, delivered speeches, demonstrated, and

fought pitched battles with police along the boulevard Saint-Michel. The

bistros of Montparnasse were a combat zone of surrealists, communists, and

fascists, partisans on all sides of the Spanish Civil War. As the black years of

occupation settled over the city, the mood on the Left Bank grew somber

and bleak. But student opposition was unrelenting. On October 30, 1940,

the left bank | 243

students gathered before the Collège de France to protest the arrest of the

physician Paul Langevin, and a year later they gathered at the Sorbonne in

a vigil for hostages executed by the Nazis. Responding to a tract entitled

“Étudiants de France,” on November 11, 1940 (the anniversary of France’s

victory over Germany in the First World War), thousands of lycée and college

students deﬁed the ban on public assembly and marched in protest down the

Champs-Élysées to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Germans acted

swiftly to quell this dissent. A number of protesters were killed and wounded,

and 123 were immediately arrested and sent off to concentration camps. In

fact, the organized Resistance, which also began in the fall of 1940, was to a

real degree a “youth movement”—some of the most serious ﬁghting during

the Liberation took place in the Latin Quarter and along the Boul’ Mich’. A

number of student organizations were born in the murky, clandestine world

of the underground.

The Bataillons de la jeunesse, or Young Communists,

and the Jewish Communists were among the ﬁrst to organize Resistance ac-

tivities; both organizations were led by teenagers. The Défense de la France

was a college student movement that published a clandestine newspaper

from the basement of the Sorbonne, while the Volontaires de la liberté was

organized by lycée students in April 1941. The Forces unies de la jeunesse

patriotique (united forces of patriotic youth, or FUJP) attempted to unify

these isolated resistance cells and attach them to the CNR, and even wrote

a “youth charter” of reforms to be promulgated at Liberation. Those carry-

ing out actual acts of sabotage and violence paid a heavy price. In the spring

of 1942 thirty-four young Parisians were rounded up by the French police

and put through two highly publicized show trials. One doomed woman was

sent to the guillotine, and twenty-three men were executed by ﬁring squad.

In June 1944, before the Gestapo abandoned Paris, they executed thirty-ﬁve

Parisians whose average age was seventeen. Another forty-two young people

were shot in August in the Bois de Boulogne, many of them members of the

underground Organisation civile et militaire de la jeunesse and the Jeunesses

ouvrières chrétiennes de l’Île-de-France. Their courage and their deaths at

the hands of the Gestapo were recounted before the municipal council by

a citizen’s committee of the 16th arrondissement in December 1945 in an

effort to memorialize their sacriﬁce with a monument at the site where they

were killed.

Alongside these overt acts of organized resistance, surreptitious public

activities carried on by young people in Paris were abundant in number and

244 | chapter six

invention; laying wreaths for fallen comrades; dropping tracts and pamphlets

in Métro stations, on buses and in stores; destroying German street signage;

heckling of German ofﬁcials; writing grafﬁti; and ﬂaunting symbols of French

patriotism. Many of the people arrested for these infractions were teenagers.

Daring public performances and engaging in activities aimed at “shocking

respectability” were unrelenting forms of opposition that were especially as-

sociated with the Latin Quarter, which refused, according to occupation of-

ﬁcials, to be “won back from Jewish inﬂuence and Gaullist trickery.”

After the

June 1, 1942 decree compelling Jews to identify themselves with yellow stars,

students and young people paraded along the boulevard Saint-Germain-des-

Prés sporting the infamous badges decorated with personalized inscriptions.

In June 1943 students ended their exams with a traditional monôme du bac,

processing through the streets of the Latin Quarter and singing traditional

student songs laced with political lampooning. They then staged a sit-down

demonstration at the Panthéon until the police arrived. In the general scufﬂe

that followed, oppositional political tracts spontaneously appeared throughout

the neighborhood.

Clandestine surboums (surprise or impromptu dance parties), covert

swing dancing, and listening to Radio London music broadcasts were also

youthful acts of rebellion. Swing was adopted as political parody to become

the countermusic to ofﬁcial military marches and folkloric hymns. The craze

was most closely identiﬁed with the rebellious and very public zazous. Zazou

style deﬁed accepted fashion norms. Young men swaggered through Paris

sporting pompadour hairdos and garish zoot-suit jackets. Young women

strutted along beside them in tight-ﬁtting turtleneck sweaters, short pleated

skirts, and ﬂowing long hair. Dark glasses, umbrellas, striped socks, wartime

wooden-soled shoes, and a slang peppered with English were all essential to

this rebellious masquerade. Their contemptuous attitude mocked the New

Order. The historian Paul Yonnet likens the zazou movement to the Paris

Commune. It was a cultural reformulation and a preview of things to come,

a youth movement based on clothes and music, a lifestyle that battled cus-

tom and collective constraints. The movement was a challenge to the older

generation (in this case, that of pétainistes) and ultimately an afﬁrmation of

urbanity and civic life.

Their hangouts were the Champs-Élysées and the

Latin Quarter. They paraded the Boul’ Mich’ and the boulevard Saint-Ger-

main-des-Prés ﬂaunting conspicuous yellow stars on their chests emblazoned

with the words “swing,” “zazous,” or “J3s,” as they were often called, after

the left bank | 245

the name of the ration category for thirteen- to twenty-one-year-olds.

Their

idols were the singer Johnny Hess, whose hits included “Je suis swing” and

“Ils sont zazous,” and the singer-actress Irène de Trébert, with “Elle était

swing” and “Mademoiselle Swing.” They were played on BBC radio in a

direct slap at Nazi-controlled Radio-Paris. Hess ridiculed the moralists of

the New Order and their absorption with racism: “Black music and hot jazz

/ Are not our thing / Now to be hip / You have to swing / Za zou, za zou, za

zou ze.”

In the aftermath of the war and Liberation, young people dominated the

public spaces of Paris, ﬂooding into the streets in an explosion of freedom.

Public festivities were rites of inversion in which the ridiculous, the unseemly,

and the wild negated the trapped sense bred by living in wartime. A new

generational dissonance fed into the complexities of traditional social and

class divisions. The Liberation changed everything for the zazous. Ameri-

can merchandise, American swing, and American ﬁlms became the rage.

The zazous rummaged through the ﬂea market at Saint-Ouen for American

clothes sent by relief agencies and sold for almost nothing. The J3s sported

crew cuts and khaki pants in emulation of the kaks. American military-issue

Ray-Ban sunglasses became a fashion craze. Once the curfews were lifted,

young people savored the freedom of the streets at night, even if it meant freez-

ing on street corners outside jazz clubs in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Hélène

Brunschwig was in the Latin Quarter in late August 1944, “where on every

street corner there was dancing. It was incredible to see all of Paris dancing

the tango, the waltz . . . the bebop, the rumba.”

Public space became a zone

of spontaneous mood and invention. Taking to the street in jam sessions and

general free-for-all dancing was a mechanism of public empowerment that

expressed a right to the city. Musicians set up shop in the young crowds’

favorite haunts, particularly the Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain-de-Prés, and

around the place de la Bastille, where dancing went on spontaneously in the

streets and around Métro stations. The bals publics thrived as spaces of youth-

ful energy and sexuality. They were open-ended and unpredictable, a ridicule

of ofﬁcialdom and hierarchy, a violation of decorum and proportion. More

than just a pressure valve allowing young people to let off steam, all of these

acts of youthful rebellion were liminal phenomena, a continuous projection

of the Liberation. They were a ritual performance, a subversive clowning that

sets in motion a freeing up, making possible novel conﬁgurations of ideas

and social relations.